Emil Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical Sources 9781487529666

Citation preview

EMIL FACKENHEIM’S POST-HOLOCAUST THOUGHT AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction kenneth hart green and martin d. yaffe

Emil Ludwig Fackenheim (1916–2003) has long been recognized as one of the leading philosophers and Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, whose work has distinguished itself by its boldness, originality, and profundity. One of the most definitive aspects of Fackenheim’s thought is his unwavering contention that the Holocaust has brought about a radical shift in human history, a shift so monumental and unprecedented that nothing can ever be the same again. It has shattered or ruptured all ways of approaching the world – our traditions – by which human beings have hitherto been guided. Indeed, this claim eventually became the focus of his post-1967 thought, leading him to issue a call that this historical event must be honestly confronted – theologically, politically, and philosophically – if humanity is ever again going to have the chance of healing itself by mending those traditions through which we have approached God, man, and the world.1 He believed that the world must come to terms not only with the methodical murder of six million European Jews during World War II by Hitler’s Nazi Germany, but also with the attempted murder of the entire Jewish people which had as its ultimate aim the annihilation of the very last Jewish man, woman, and child, and whose very rationale or motive is difficult if not impossible to fathom or penetrate. Through his radical claim about the enormity of this rupture that he henceforth made his principal focus, Fackenheim issued a challenge to every form of contemporary thought – but especially the philosophical and the religious – to face unflinchingly what had happened, and also to think deeply through what it would seem to imply for all human beings in the present and for humanity in the future. Since Fackenheim viewed this rupture as not immediately visible to everyone, he regarded it as the specific duty of thinkers and scholars, who are able to perceive what is not always generally perceptible, to probe this historical event

4  Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe

for its impact on the human future and to make evident its still predominantly hidden but immense ramifications. As we might so put it on behalf of the editors and the contributors of this volume: whatever different results we may reach in our thinking, reflected in these disparate pieces, we have all heard Fackenheim’s call and are responding to it in one way or another. This duty – at least as enunciated by Fackenheim – of every serious contemporary thinker to respond to the challenge of the Holocaust remains the case, we believe, whether or not one is in accord with Fackenheim’s own thought or follows his teaching about the Shoah. This alone might be said to justify the present volume, dedicated as it is to searching for the philosophic and literary sources of Fackenheim’s thought, for no doubt he based that call and its imperative character in a certain measure on what he had been taught by those very sources. The power and originality of Fackenheim’s thought may have been generally recognized, but his call to thinkers and scholars has not been widely accepted, and we would suggest that this is due to two predominant factors: thought-lag and natural resistance. We mean by “thought-lag” that it often requires some effort and time for other thinkers or scholars to absorb, recognize, and confront a thought that is both novel and deep (not to mention unconventional), as well as an event that is transformative, especially one as radical and fundamental as he claims the Holocaust is. And then there is “natural resistance”: it arises because the place his thought is determined to occupy is not, among his fellow thinkers (whether philosophers or theologians), a popular position. Indeed, this is a position that other thinkers either do not seem to want to hear (and hence tend to dismiss, repress, or refuse its challenge) or reject prima facie as some sort of passionate obsession that led Fackenheim astray, if it did not drive him slightly mad. They are happy to proceed as they had always done, not disturbing their previous course of thought. Fackenheim disallows, both explicitly and implicitly, such a course of action for both philosophy and religion – i.e., the conviction that nothing essential has changed – as lacking in honesty and courage. Those who prima facie repudiate or even mock his thought do so on a number of grounds. They tend to disqualify him as too parochial, but also too vast in his claims; as too theologically determined, but also too politically committed; as too fixated on historical events, but also too metaphysical; as too impressed by the poetics and rhetoric of writers and survivors, but also too willing to assume the stance and voice of the prophet; as too philosophical, but also too much in the camp of a specific religion; as too unwilling to bind himself by the revealed law in its full sense, but also too willing to legislate a novel, virtually revealed



Introduction 5

law. The contradictory nature of these charges – although not all laid by the same critics at the same moment, and not applied to the same elements in his thought – should at least cause us to pause and to reconsider the thinker at which they have been levelled. In the face of those multifarious and often one-sided criticisms, the need for a reconsideration of the state of modern Western thought at the present moment, for which Fackenheim unconditionally called, is one of the starting points of this volume. Not all thinkers or scholars respond in the same way to the same challenge (e.g., some do so in public, and some in the privacy of their own thinking); but the contributors to this volume all recognize the validity of Fackenheim’s challenge to contemporary thought, whether or not we move in his direction in responding to this challenge. Aware as we are of his integrity as a thinker, we have attempted to make sense of Fackenheim himself by dealing with those thinkers with whom he began and with whom he continued to argue. According to him, some of these in their thought were better able than others to withstand the confrontation with the Holocaust, but all played a significant role in his own thought at one point or another. Yet even so, Fackenheim was undoubtedly dismayed at the unwillingness of most contemporary professional philosophers in academic life to face the Holocaust as an unprecedented, if not also a world-altering, historical event. The “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, a much-debated term, strikes most people as a highly plausible claim on a commonsense basis, and has also been put to scholarly and historical tests. But it is not the validity of the claim of uniqueness or of its scholarly tests that deter most contemporary philosophers, or religious and political thinkers, from confronting the Holocaust in their thought. To Fackenheim, it has mostly to do with modern habits of thought, as well as modern hopes, which make thinkers impervious to such a fundamental challenge, however open-minded they may claim to be. We shall refrain for the moment from clarifying what we believe Fackenheim meant to say by claiming that the Holocaust was unprecedented (the term he preferred to “unique”) as well as world altering. Instead, we want to stress something with which we began this Introduction that helps to illuminate why we believe our volume is distinctive. We have set our minds to thinking about the specifically philosophical side of Fackenheim’s work. Fackenheim was, of course, a professor of philosophy, but we take it that he gave himself to philosophy heart and soul, and not just as a professional duty. To be sure, the “professor” side of that phrase should not be belittled; as some of us who have contributed to this volume can attest from personal experience, he was an inspiring teacher in the classroom on matters pertaining to philosophy, with a rare talent

6  Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe

for exciting his students about ideas and with a remarkable ability to clarify and simplify abstruse metaphysical issues, revealing powers of instruction that were often quite astounding. But this is not our emphasis here. Rather, we have gathered together in the present volume some old hands and some new faces in the study of Fackenheim’s thought. And we have attempted to trace the genealogy of his thought to most of the major philosophers, thinkers, or writers who we believe made the greatest impact on his thinking, and to track or locate in their thought those elements that seemed to him either most true and hence worth following, or most erroneous and hence most in need of correction or rejection. Last but not least, once we have done these things, we have also made our own positions known, controverting him as we judged requisite, and trying to articulate how and why we may have diverged from him. We consider him a formidable thinker for whom we have enormous respect, and our effort to think and debate seriously with him is something he eminently merits. Our volume is distinctive in its emphasis on Fackenheim’s chief philosophic sources, on how he arrived at the major positions he adopted in response to those philosophers and thinkers with whom he most vigorously contended, and on how we as readers of his thought may have been compelled to diverge from him. Of course, we also acknowledge that a growing literature on Fackenheim has been produced, much of which we find worthwhile and have utilized as fully as we could.2 True, as we have suggested in our previous remarks, Fackenheim in his post-1967 thought seemed to assume a prophetic stance (as with his “614th commandment”), but we may now say he did so in the spirit of a Maimonidean prophet, i.e., as a philosopher-statesman who never forgot the human and historical situation from which his prophetic stance and statements emerged, and to which he directly related them. We have arranged our chapters on Fackenheim’s confrontations with his main philosophical sources by and large in a historical sequence. Benjamin Lorch points out that Fackenheim, who regards Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) as “the greatest Jewish thinker” and “this wisest of Jewish philosophers,” devotes the first part of his philosophical career to the study of medieval Jewish and Islamic thought. At the same time, Lorch notes, Fackenheim also believes that Maimonides lacks an adequate response to the dilemmas facing modern Judaism, and his To Mend the World (1982) opens with a rejection of Maimonides: “there is one great difference between the medievals and the moderns – and we cannot return to the Middle Ages.” Lorch considers these two contrary



Introduction 7

sides of Fackenheim’s relation to Maimonides. He first examines Fackenheim’s positive assessment of Maimonides in his studies of medieval philosophy and especially his major study of Maimonides, “The Possibility of the Universe in al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Maimonides,” which analyses Maimonides’s defense of Judaism against the challenge of Aristotelian philosophy. Afterwards he examines Fackenheim’s negative judgment against Maimonides in To Mend the World, by asking: what is the decisive difference between medieval and modern philosophy that renders “the wisest of Jewish philosophers” incapable of responding to the challenges of modernity? Martin D. Yaffe observes that Fackenheim measures the shortcomings of his pre-1967, pre-Six-Day-War attempts to understand the Holocaust by its focus on “the demonic” and “radical evil,” terms Fackenheim puts in quotation marks so as to recall their source in Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), whom he calls the revolutionary founder of all subsequent metaphysics for basing it not on abstract speculation but on our concrete moral consciousness. Yaffe exposes the Kantian thread connecting Fackenheim’s pre- and post-1967 remarks on the question of evil. He contrasts Fackenheim’s 1954 essay “Kant and Radical Evil” with the critique of Kant in To Mend the World, where Fackenheim’s strictly philosophical reflection makes way for, or gives way to, theological reflection, with a view to shedding light on the crossover point where To Mend the World’s theological argument about evil emerges from Kant’s philosophical one. Fackenheim’s argument, Yaffe shows, is a Jewish correction of Kant’s quasi-Christian eschatology. According to Kant, Christian ethics depicts the difference between good and evil not as the difference between heaven and earth but as the unbridgeable difference between heaven and hell – a difference, he adds, that is philosophically correct in delineating clearly and with no shadings whether someone belongs in the one place rather than in the other. Kant also says that there is a “good principle” at work invisibly in history, which is “steadily progressing” towards “erect[ing] for itself” in the human race “a power and a realm that claims victory over evil and secures an eternal peace under its mastery of the World.” Fackenheim’s ongoing indebtedness to Kant shows up when he speaks of a “rupture” in history, since he is thinking of a breach in the historical progress towards overcoming evil and establishing peace more or less as Kant describes that progress, i.e., eschatologically. So too in speaking of evil as something existing on its own so as to be able to cause or constitute the rupture in question, Fackenheim thinks of evil as Kant describes it, as unbridgeably separated from good. (That this view of evil is controversial both philosophically and theologically, Yaffe notes in passing by

8  Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe

referring to G.E. Lessing’s “Leibniz on Eternal Punishments.”) As for the eschatology that Fackenheim adopts (and corrects) from Kant, Yaffe characterizes it as quasi-Christian to call attention to its dilution, if not absorption, by the Kantian dualism that Fackenheim sketches (and corrects) as its theological framework. According to Paul Wilford, the problem of evil is the central philosophical question of the twentieth century. It not only threatens belief in God but casts a shadow over reason itself. Wilford explores the problem of evil as it intersects with the philosophy of history, on the premise that the question of the intelligibility of history – whether as a rational process unfolding in time or as the workings of a beneficent deity – is of concern to both modern philosophy and modern theology. Fackenheim’s engagement with G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), says Wilford, provides a pre-eminent way into considering this question and wrestling with both the philosophical and the theological implications of actual history. Wilford explores the theoretical basis of each thinker’s account of history, before turning to an investigation of the Holocaust as a historical calamity without parallel in either Jewish or Christian history. How, he asks, do the theories of history advanced by Hegel, on the one hand, and by the Jewish tradition, on the other, stand in the light of radical evil? Wilford concludes by analysing Fackenheim’s recovery of a “fragmented middle” that remains indebted to Hegel even as it tries to move beyond Hegel by returning to the thought and practices that have nourished the Jewish tradition. Martin Kavka remarks that Fackenheim is often, and rightly, taken to be an exemplar of good Hegelian Jewish thinking, inasmuch as his Jewish and non-Jewish writings are, like Hegel’s, calls to leave mere abstraction behind – for thought to go to school with life, as Fackenheim puts it. On one occasion in his corpus, namely his 1964 essay “Samuel Hirsch and Hegel,” Fackenheim indicates what this does not mean, by showing Hirsch (1815–89) to be an example of bad Jewish thinking. Kavka wonders how successful Fackenheim’s argument is here. He finds Fackenheim persuasive in demonstrating that Hirsch cannot figure out how God could be both transcendent (as performer of miracles, as the object of prophetic intuition) and immanent, as Hirsch supposes any appropriation of Hegel for Judaism requires. For Fackenheim, it would seem, any attempted naturalizing of God is illegitimate, and any Hegelian-Jewish thinking must keep divine otherness inviolable. Yet Kavka demurs, on the grounds that Fackenheim’s “­theocentrism” – and the “fideism” to which it leads – is not the only way to escape Hirsch’s contradiction. Appealing briefly to Hirsch’s The Religious Philosophy of the Jews (1842), Kavka turns to Fackenheim’s



Introduction 9

“Elijah and the Empiricists” (1969), which makes what Kavka sees as an unarticulated naturalist move in placing the community and its power to commit itself to (and critique) its norms over and above the idea of a commanding transcendent God. According to Jeffrey Bernstein, the central question motivating Fackenheim’s thought from his early work on medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, through his writings on German Idealism, and culminating in his treatment of Jewish theology and the Shoah, is: how does the God of the philosophers connect with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Without this connection, Bernstein explains, philosophy remains alienated from historical existence, i.e., from actual life-experience, and religion in turn remains an arational (or, worse, irrational) set of beliefs based in subjective experiences that are merely idiosyncratic. While this opposition finds expression in Fackenheim’s treatment of Franz Rosenzweig’s distinction between “old” and “new” thinking, as well as in Fackenheim’s own eventual distinction between conceptual and “narrating” thinking, Bernstein adds that Fackenheim is attentive to its earlier philosophical expression as it occurs in F.W.J. Schelling’s (1775–1854) conception of “negative” and “positive” philosophy: “negative” philosophy for Schelling means attempting to deduce rationally the universal God-idea by way of a conceptual ascent from more particular inquiries; “positive” philosophy, in contrast, means attempting to explicate the movement and process of concrete historical existence by starting with the presupposition that God is the absolutely existent origin of life. Bernstein tracks Fackenheim’s close reading of Schelling’s conception of positive philosophy, which shows step by step how the negative and positive philosophies are meant to reconcile. According to Fackenheim, Schelling’s conclusion that the negative (old/conceptual) cannot be reconciled with the positive (new/narrating) – save by a leap of faith – makes manifest both the failure of systematic philosophy as such and the deeper question of whether philosophy can ever transcend the limits of rational thought without becoming theology. Almost from the first, says Kenneth Hart Green, Fackenheim considers himself a disciple of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). He follows Rosenzweig in defending the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob against His atheist deniers and rationalist reducers. Fackenheim recognizes that this requires a defence of revelation (considered refuted by most modern philosophy), which amounts to clarifying how it is still possible for God to communicate directly with human beings, and adopts Rosenzweig’s existentialist framework, which defends revelation through the notion of “presence” apprehended in a personal encounter whereby one also comprehends something transcendent and irreducible to a rational

10  Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe

category. But Fackenheim also sees that this notion of revelation would be empty of content except that it continues to depend on tradition (in using language about a God who “addresses” and “commands” man, thereby implying “speech”), and tradition depends in turn on history. But Fackenheim’s turn to history as essential for defending revelation proves fateful for him, since it makes Heidegger’s thought a deeper progenitor of revelation than Rosenzweig’s. Rejecting Heidegger’s atheism and acknowledging the grave difficulties with Heidegger’s position, though, Fackenheim also perceives its advantages regarding revelation in particular. Since a specific historical event, the Holocaust, has presented a fundamental challenge to the very survival of the Jews, whose being is as the bearer of revelation, Fackenheim concludes that it is requisite to let history define the very possibility of revelation in our era. Steven Kepnes focuses on Fackenheim’s use of Martin Buber’s (1878– 1965) writings on revelation, more exactly on Fackenheim’s essay “Buber’s Concept of Revelation” (1967) and his use of Buber’s book Moses (1946) in his small but important book God’s Presence in History. Kepnes first reviews the important steps in Buber’s essay where Fackenheim shows how Buber has an important answer to Kant’s challenge to traditional Western religious notions of revelation. Afterwards Kepnes argues that in addition to Hegel, who helped push Fackenheim towards a re-evaluation of history in Jewish philosophy, Buber also gives Fackenheim the resources to “return philosophy to history” and particularly to the historical event of the Holocaust. Kepnes ends with a critique of aspects of Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust theology that prevent constructive movement beyond the aporias of Jewish thought that he may be said to leave his readers with. Waller Newell wonders why Fackenheim is captivated with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) all along, despite his early formal refutation of Heidegger’s historicism (a refutation he came in 1967 to see as unsatisfactory) and despite his revulsion at Heidegger’s embrace of (and subsequent “inauthentic” withdrawal from) National Socialism. Newell’s answer is that Fackenheim is drawn to Heidegger’s attempt to “Judaize” the history of Western philosophy: Heidegger’s grounding the priority given there to “seeing” (and hence to theorizing) in “hearing” as the pre-theoretical, quasi-religious basis of all thinking seemed to Fackenheim to open up the attractive possibility of a radical renewal of Jewish theology in modern times. Newell traces Fackenheim’s confrontations with Heidegger through three key writings. Fackenheim’s “The History and Transcendence of Philosophical Truth” (1967) is seen to argue that Heidegger’s historicism is not exactly self-contradictory



Introduction 11

but preserves the possibility of timeless truth after all. Fackenheim’s Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (1973) is shown to characterize the religiosity underwritten by Heidegger as “pagan” rather than biblical, however, because of its failure to take into account the possibility of ranking religious orthodoxies – hence its failure to take into account Judaism, which stands or falls by the possibility of ranking any and all orthodoxies. Finally, Fackenheim’s To Mend the World is said to call attention to the overall liability of Heidegger’s thinking for, in effect, identifying authenticity with radical decisionism in an ethical void – with the practical result that his commitment to the German people’s “fateful decision” for Hitler was his only ontic (experiential) decision in the realm of historical affairs. Besides tracing the main steps of Fackenheim’s intricate and subtle argument in each of the aforementioned writings, Newell also considers where they may be controversial. Even so, he concludes that Fackenheim’s demonstration of the historical and experiential poverty of Heidegger’s silence about the Holocaust is deeply convincing and may point the way to a more general and solid basis for refuting the latter’s entire approach to the Question of Being. Kenneth C. Blanchard assesses Fackenheim’s argument that the diabolical evil of the Holocaust constituted a unique rupture in the historical continuity of human life and thought. Accordingly, Fackenheim considers previous philosophical approaches to the problem of evil inadequate to respond to it. Blanchard’s chapter explores Fackenheim’s critique of Hegelian, historicist, and Platonic thought in light of that event, and includes a defence of Platonic thought in the work of Leo Strauss. Blanchard finds Fackenheim correct to say that the Holocaust cannot be understood in the way that Strauss, following Plato, understands ordinary criminality. The Nazi regime was not motivated by vulgar passions; it pursued murder and annihilation as high ideals. Contrary to Fackenheim’s critique of Strauss, however, the latter’s Platonic approach can account for the radical evil of the Holocaust. It is a case of the worst human passions, moderated neither by wisdom nor by any natural limits, in pursuit of an ideal inspired by modern philosophy. Finally, Sharon Portnoff recalls how after the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel (1898–2016) and Fackenheim became friends – a friendship that would last their lifetimes. Through close readings of Wiesel’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Story” and Fackenheim’s “Abraham and the Kantians,” Portnoff compares and contrasts how each addresses the challenge to post-Holocaust Jewry. Grounding their respective articles in a discussion of the Akeda, or the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22),

12  Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe

Fackenheim and Wiesel are in agreement that the preservation of Jews and Judaism needs to begin in reaffirming the relationships between and among human beings and God; and both agree that this reaffirmation requires a moment of stepping outside these relationships to explain why it is so vital. Fackenheim, writing as a philosopher-theologian, emphasizes the need to suspend self-sacrifice; partially embracing historicism, he understands the Holocaust as imparting a new kind of commandment to Jews; and, most simply, his immediate concern is their survival. Wiesel, writing as a Midrashist-memoirist, invites his readers to recall the Akeda as a means of reaffirming the Presence of God in their lives. Two issues remain to be discussed. First, we must address the issue of Fackenheim as a philosopher and whether his thought, even his Jewish thought, is to be judged as philosophy. We may begin by considering those he deemed to be the most serious philosophers during his own life: Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss. We must keep in mind, however, that although he considered Heidegger and Strauss to be the deepest thinkers of his era, he faulted each of them for certain deficiencies. Proceeding from this fact will help us to clarify his own conception of what constitutes philosophy. Ironically, Fackenheim faulted Heidegger for not being enough of a Heideggerian. Certainly he credited him as a philosopher for his ability to radically think through the problems of human historicity, and hence for his fitting assessment that an Ereignis can occur in history, i.e., the possibility exists of a historical transformation and dispensation of Being itself occurring through human action concentrated in a historical event. But since Fackenheim saw this possibility in light of actual history – and that is what Heidegger asserted must be done – he concluded that Heidegger himself missed, or refused to perceive, the very Ereignis that was happening around him: the unprecedented mass murder of the Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Hence, Heidegger had to be judged wanting as an ultimate model of philosophic rectitude or profundity. This was a grave and even fatal blind spot for someone who had made the ontological truth depend on actual history. For Fackenheim, a philosopher is someone who sees with his own eyes and thinks with his own mind – better than most human beings and even better than most thinkers. This is to say, he is acutely aware of what is actually occurring historically through man in the world around him, and thus he assesses these things deeply in terms of the unfolding of Being. Following from this conception, Heidegger thought and talked



Introduction 13

a great deal about Being, but he denied, or refused to look at, what was actually occurring historically in his own immediate visual horizon (which Fackenheim would judge, much beyond Heidegger, as a rupture in Being). For Fackenheim, this showed that Heidegger as a philosopher did not fully appreciate, and perhaps did not properly grasp, his own original insight into historical experience. If Fackenheim had lived long enough to learn about Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, he might have been able to attribute this philosophical blindness to something of an irrational prejudice, i.e., his unconditional hostility to the Jews, and to something of an irrational preference, i.e., his unconditional bias in favor of Germany. In other words, for Fackenheim, philosophers – even great philosophers – are not always able to truly attain the promise of philosophy; or rather, they may need to possess a self-awareness beyond what philosophy can provide in order to be a philosopher in full. According to Fackenheim, philosophy for all its greatness may depend on non-philosophy. Heidegger actually accepted that, but for him this non-philosophic element on which philosophy depends is poetry, which he considered to be a higher form of thinking. However, the “poem” that deeply shaped Heidegger’s thinking was a modern ideology conveying a hatred or dislike of the Jews. This ideology was poetically merged with his ontological thought, which at its most forsaken point – in the name of an atheistic historicism – blames the Jews for the original sin of modernity: the modern forgetfulness of Being. Strauss too recognized the truth that philosophy for all its greatness may depend on non-philosophy, but he conceived of this non-philosophy on which philosophy depends as primarily political. But this did not satisfy Fackenheim; he believed that the non-philosophy on which philosophy depends is as much theology as politics. However, he credited Strauss with recovering the notion of the presence of the eternal in history, a notion close to theology yet manifest to philosophers as nature. Strauss saw that what is natural is also eternal, both in the world and in man, and to him this was especially perceived in light of man’s permanent and irreducible political contours. Strauss was helped to rediscover the eternal beyond the historical by his effort to confront the same unchanged questions which occurred to the greatest minds in every era, provoked by the naturally recurring facts of the political. This rediscovery enabled him to recognize that man’s thinking is not limited by history. Through studying the classical texts of the Western tradition which grappled with these questions with profundity, Strauss could no longer regard history as ultimate. He concluded that because these great thinkers and their books have challenged human beings

14  Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe

through history by addressing the same fundamental human problems, their thought was not simply determined by history. Fackenheim was indeed nourished by the depth and originality of Strauss’s thinking, which helped to recover the truth that what is of genuinely philosophic significance is that which is contained ultimately in the universal only. Notwithstanding this substantial debt owed to Strauss, Fackenheim – here proceeding instead from biblically grounded faith and theology as well as from philosophy – faulted Strauss for not being willing to judge the particular (in the sense of the historical facts or details) as also a potential source of ultimate truth. This critique, of course, shows the sort of conception of philosophy that Fackenheim held in contrast with Strauss: although Fackenheim called himself a “post-Hegelian Hegelian,” we should not let this word “post” mislead us about the abiding centrality of the “Hegelian.” For Fackenheim, the thought concealed beneath Hegel’s logic still shows us how best to mediate between the two truest sources of Western thought that are in perennial historical conflict: philosophy and religion, Athens and Jerusalem. This remains the case even if Fackenheim was also convinced that no culminating synthesis, and hence no end of history, had occurred. In other words, Fackenheim followed a primarily Hegelian conception of philosophy insofar as it takes history philosophically seriously, and insofar as it gives theology a fundamental and even definitive role to play in the complete conception of philosophy as the search for truth and the love of wisdom. Fackenheim faulted Strauss for being unable to appreciate history as an autonomous source of truth, because he did not seem to regard theology as an autonomous source of truth. For Fackenheim, this is a limitation that characterizes all non-Hegelian philosophy. Thus, although Fackenheim is known, and liked to be known, as a “Jewish philosopher” (something his teacher Leo Strauss seems to have considered a contradiction in terms), we should neither dismiss nor deride the “philosopher” element in his fairly consistent self-characterization: the philosopher is someone who meditates on both history and eternity, and on both Jerusalem and Athens, because both are potential sources of truth knowable by man. If most contemporary scholars and philosophers continue to regard Fackenheim as chiefly a “Jewish thinker” (which he no doubt also was), this for them is more or less a polite term – in an era of secularism – for a “Jewish theologian.” And this is a category of thinker that, for them as philosophers, would not be deemed worthy of being taken with full philosophic seriousness. As a result, Fackenheim is often not given his philosophic due by those



Introduction 15

who identify themselves with contemporary philosophy, since from the start they refuse to accept his characterization of his own activity. Nevertheless, against this refusal Fackenheim maintained that it was philosophically legitimate to refer to the activity of thought in which he was engaged as “Jewish philosophy.” Hence his reflections, whether about revelation or about the Holocaust, were scarcely meant only for Jews, or only for Jews and Christians, or only for religious people: his message was directed as much to the secular modern person, and even to the contemporary atheist, as it was to the philosophers as a class of human beings. If for this reason alone, it is our premise as authors reflecting on Fackenheim’s thought in this book that, in order to do justice to Fackenheim’s legacy, we must always proceed with a (conditional) acceptance of his conception of his own thought as philosophy, a premise which certainly validates our effort to probe the “philosophic genealogy” of his thinking. Second, we must address the challenge of whether Fackenheim’s thought, and especially Fackenheim as a thinker about the Holocaust, is still philosophically and religiously relevant in our historical situation. Was his thought merely the product of the immediate post-Holocaust era? Now that it is seventy-five years since the end of World War II, have the results of his thinking become obsolete, pedestrian, or conventional in the twenty-first century? Has the historical situation changed dramatically, such that one may tentatively conclude that most people have absorbed the lessons of the Holocaust (at least roughly as Fackenheim conceived of them)? If so, then there is no longer a powerful need to reiterate Fackenheim’s thought as an exhortation to face a historical caesura, since this is already fully recognized and heeded. In such a circumstance, we would certainly acknowledge the role played by Fackenheim in compelling thinkers to fully confront this world-­transforming event, but his would be an instruction no longer needed. Why call for a changed awareness and an altered approach in philosophy and theology, as well as in religious, political, and historical thought, if the changes have already been made, if the awareness is ubiquitous, and if the approach has been adopted far and wide? In fact, we do not believe this to be the case. True, public attitudes in the West towards the remembrance of and education about the Holocaust have changed in recent years. A much greater openness to its history is a praiseworthy achievement. But we are not so sure that this has permeated private attitudes, which is the only way in which remembrance and education will be maintained for the duration. Nor do we believe that the content of such attitudes (public and private) has been

16  Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe

correctly constituted in a way that renders the issues settled and makes the philosophy of Fackenheim a redundant spur to thought. Such changes on the individual level (whatever significance this may currently carry on the collective level) may require further consideration of what such remembrance and education is trying to achieve. Indeed, we believe that there is an even greater need for Fackenheim’s thought for the very reason that, although it might seem that awareness of the Holocaust has reached a certain critical mass in both the contemporary political life and the cultural consciousness of the West, this awareness also seems to be misleading us in several different directions. To what, then, are we referring? We observe mounting tendencies to misappropriate the memory of Holocaust for diverse political causes, on the one hand, and to trivialize the Holocaust in popular culture on the other hand. We also note tendencies to deny its uniqueness, and to assimilate it to other horrors of modern history, however worthy they may also be of remembrance in their own right. These are issues to which Fackenheim responded and thought through in a cleareyed and far-sighted way, which makes his writings of even greater relevance today. In terms of comprehending the enduring significance of what actually happened during the Holocaust, and of reflecting on the impact it should make on our historical consciousness, Fackenheim still has much to teach us. And people are still in need of his teaching: the unceasing preoccupation with the historical facts and with telling and hearing stories about the Holocaust cannot be explained merely because of people’s grim fascination with horrors, but rather because this is a historical event which most people cannot make intelligible to themselves, and which they need to make some sense of. We believe Fackenheim can still be of great help to us in trying to deal with the distressing and even tormenting perplexity which the Holocaust continues (consciously or unconsciously) to arouse in most people. One of the chief evident facts which might seem to advance our thought towards his way of approaching and comprehending the ­Holocaust – but actually reverses or subverts it – is the tendency to universalize the Holocaust, rendering it a generalized metaphor for atrocity or even for evil in general. This tendency is especially evident in our contemporary world, but Fackenheim would likely have taught us that this is a way of denying the facts rather than affirming them. What we need to be conscious of is the specific form of evil it took, which alone gives us access to the truth about its unprecedented nature. Further, one of the points which Fackenheim frequently reiterated is that dealing with this terrible event in thought is all-too-often avoided rather than confronted because of what he termed “the scandal of particularity”: the fact that



Introduction 17

this murderous scheme was directed at the Jews was not an accident of fate but the condition of its very possibility. In other words, the Holocaust can only be properly comprehended as a specific historical and moral product of the persistent hatred of Jews (“antisemitism”) which has been allowed to permeate the secular culture and politics of the West and the East, as well as the religious traditions which formed them: Christianity and Islam. This is a fact that cannot be obscured if the true nature of its radical evil, and of its singularity, is to be comprehended. What such things as “the scandal of particularity” and the tendency to universalize the Holocaust may both reflect – together with other attempts to evade our duty to the truth – is that our minds still recoil from and remain closed at a deeper level to facing this historical event according to its actual facts. If the horror is to be properly recognized and confronted, and a future repetition or even augmentation of such a catastrophe is to be prevented, it will require thinking through honestly and completely the unique facts as their singularity and distinctiveness necessitate. Similarly, it requires full and deep reflection on why the still-horrifying event occurred as it did, paying careful attention not just to actual historical yet significant details, but also to those vicious forces (spiritual and material) that continue to operate in our civilization. For all of these reasons, we believe Fackenheim’s thought is absolutely essential not only for the present but also for the foreseeable future. If we are to restore hope for the future, we must discover a way to heal from the rupture which the Holocaust brought about, as this shattering event continues to reverberate and shake the ground beneath the surface of our life and our thought. NOTES The editors would like to acknowledge the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto and its director Anna Sternshis for the generous subvention from the Kenneth Michael Tanenbaum Fund. At University of Toronto Press, we would like to thank Len Husband for his great assistance in the first phases of publication; Terry Teskey for her exemplary and intelligent copy-editing; and Robin Studniberg for her care, skill, and helpfulness in the publication process. Last but not least, we would also like to make honourable mention of the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, who made several most useful suggestions, which substantially contributed to the improvement of the final form of the book. 1 Gendered language has been employed in these pages because the source literature generally uses such language.

18  Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe 2 Among the most useful works that have so far appeared in print, although in no sense a complete list, we would especially like to mention Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, ed. Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust, ed. Michael L. Morgan and Benjamin Pollock (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); David Patterson, Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew, ed. Sharon Portnoff, James A. Diamond, and Martin D. Yaffe (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Sharon Portnoff, Reason and Revelation before Historicism: Strauss and Fackenheim (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Michael L. Morgan, Fackenheim’s Jewish Philosophy: An Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Kenneth Hart Green, The Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim: From Revelation to the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

1 Emil Fackenheim on Moses Maimonides and the “One Great Difference between the Medievals and the Moderns” benjamin lorch

Our tradition can be of real value to us only if we understand its true nature and especially the way in which it differs from our modern outlook. – Emil Fackenheim1

Emil Fackenheim regards Maimonides as the “greatest”2 and “wisest of Jewish philosophers”3 and he devotes the first part of his philosophical career to the study of medieval Jewish and Islamic thought. However, Fackenheim wrote only one major study of Maimonides, and in his mature work medieval Jewish philosophy is eclipsed by modern philosophy and especially Hegel, on one hand, and by the rabbinic Midrash, on the other hand. Indeed, Fackenheim’s magnum opus To Mend the World opens with an explicit rejection of medieval philosophy: “there is one great difference between the medievals and the moderns – and we cannot return to the Middle Ages.”4 Fackenheim’s engagement with Maimonides thus sheds light on two of the central themes in his thought: his early work presents Maimonides as a model of the encounter between Judaism and philosophy, and his later rejection of medieval thought reflects his view of the unique situation of modern Judaism. The following study considers these two aspects of Fackenheim’s engagement with Maimonides. I first examine Fackenheim’s positive assessment of Maimonides in his major study, “The Possibility of the Universe in al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Maimonides,” which analyses Maimonides’s defence of Judaism against the challenge of Aristotelian philosophy.5 I then explore Fackenheim’s critical assessment of Maimonides, as expressed in To Mend the World and related writings, in light of his deepened reflection on the situation of Judaism after the Nazi Holocaust.

20  Benjamin Lorch

Fackenheim’s study of Maimonides examines the most fundamental issue in the Guide of the Perplexed: the conflict between the biblical teaching of creatio ex nihilo and the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world. The study compares Maimonides’s approach to this conflict with that of the Islamic falasifa Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna).6 Fackenheim argues that the falasifa seek to reconcile theology with philosophy and “harmonize … the doctrines of the philosophers with those of [the Islamic theologians] the Mutakallimun,” by giving an account of the origin of the world that agrees with both perspectives.7 On the other hand, Maimonides views theology and philosophy as irreconcilably opposed, and he rejects the philosophical view of the origin of the world and defends creatio ex nihilo. Fackenheim’s analysis of the falasifa focuses on the concept of possibility. This is a central concept in the conflict between medieval philosophy and theology: according to philosophy, “the world exists in virtue of necessity, no nature changes at all, and the customary course of events cannot be modified with regard to anything”;8 according to theology the world exists by virtue of God’s miraculous creation, and its existence is not necessary but merely possible. The falasifa follow traditional theology and teach that the world is merely possible and depends for its existence on God, and only God exists necessarily. However, they deviate from traditional theology by drawing a distinction between two categories of possible things: “the sublunary temporal beings” (beings composed of matter and form) and “the eternal and immaterial beings.”9 The immaterial beings occupy an intermediate position between God and the material world. Like the material world, the immaterial beings are possible in the sense that they depend on God for their existence; but unlike the material world, the immaterial beings are necessary in the sense that they exist eternally as a direct consequence of the existence of God; they are partly possible and partly necessary, “possible per se” and “necessary ab alio.”10 Fackenheim considers what led Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina to this novel conception of possibility, and he argues that their intention was to reconcile philosophy with theology. On one hand, the falasifa accept the philosophical doctrine of the eternity of the world, and their presentation of this doctrine follows Neoplatonic philosophy: [The immaterial universe] wholly derives from the Absolute One – ­sharing this derivative character with the material changing world. But this “emanation” is eternal and necessary both in its “that” and its “what.” The intelligible world emanated from the One can neither “not-be” nor be other than it is: it is as necessary as the One itself.11



Emil Fackenheim on Moses Maimonides  21

Like Neoplatonic philosophy, the falasifa teach that the immaterial world depends on God but exists necessarily as a result of God, and that the world is eternal. However, they also seek to reconcile this view with the traditional belief in creation and in “the radical division of reality into Creator and the created world.”12 To do this, they divide reality into necessary and possible beings, and classify as possible everything other than God, including the immaterial beings: even though these beings are eternal, they are possible rather than necessary because they depend for their existence on God, and “existence is not implied in [their] essence.”13 These two positions are opposites: Neoplatonic philosophy teaches that the immaterial world is “as necessary as the One itself,” and Islamic theology teaches that “God could have abstained from creating the world.”14 Yet the doctrine of the immaterial beings combines elements of both views, and Fackenheim argues that its purpose is to reconcile the two views: This, then, is their harmonization of theology and philosophy: existence stems from God: hence the primacy of the distinction between the necessary per se (God) and the possible per se (all caused reality); yet it emanates from Him necessarily; hence the equally fundamental distinction between the necessary, per se or ab alio (God and all other immaterial and eternal beings), and all being which is simply possible (the material and temporal world).15

Fackenheim observes that the doctrine of the falasifa entails unacceptable consequences for the belief in creation. If the world is a necessary consequence of the existence of God, then God lacks the power to refrain from creating the world or to alter its nature, and creation risks being reduced to “merely logical significance.”16 However, owing to the difficulty of interpreting the esoteric writings of Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, Fackenheim also expresses uncertainty about whether this interpretation is correct and the falasifa truly believe that the eternity of the world can be reconciled with creation.17 If the doctrine of the immaterial beings is exoteric then its purpose may be, not to reconcile theology with philosophy, but to indicate the difficulty of finding such a reconciliation. Turning to Maimonides, Fackenheim argues that he rejects the synthesis between philosophy and theology. Like the falasifa, Maimonides is a rationalist who believes that any defence of creatio ex nihilo must be a “philosophically competent defense,” and any belief that philosophy demonstrates to be impossible must be abandoned.18 But Maimonides denies that the eternity of the world is demonstrated: “he accepts from

22  Benjamin Lorch

the philosophers the necessary causes by which the universe functions; but he rejects their ultimate derivation of the universe itself from a Cause connected with [it] in a timeless and necessary relation.”19 Whereas the falasifa accept the eternity of the world and seek to reconcile this view with the belief in creation, Maimonides presents a philosophical critique of the Aristotelian arguments in favour of the eternity of the world, and he rejects these arguments and defends creation “without falling victim to anti-philosophical irrationalism.”20 The arguments in favour of the eternity of the world are based on natural science: “the philosopher … contends: ‘reality is my evidence; by its guidance I examine whether a thing is necessary, possible or impossible.’”21 For example, one argument is based on the nature of motion: everything that moves after having been at rest is set in motion by another moving thing, and if all things were simultaneously at rest then no motion could ever arise. Consequently, there cannot be a first beginning of motion that is preceded by a state of absolute rest, and creatio ex nihilo is impossible; instead, motion has always existed, and there is a permanent being whose motion is eternal and which is the ultimate cause of every other motion.22 Maimonides criticizes this argument on the ground that “the proof of the philosophers presupposes its point instead of proving it.”23 Philosophy rejects creatio ex nihilo because it violates the natural order, in which every motion has a cause and is preceded by another motion. But this argument does not undermine the belief in creation, because Judaism grants that creation violates the natural order. The laws of motion do not govern God’s creation of the world; rather, God creates the entire natural order, including the laws of causality to which philosophy appeals: We, the followers of Moses our Teacher and of Abraham our Father, believe that the universe … has been created in a certain order. The Aristotelians oppose us, and found their objections on the properties which the things possess when in actual existence and fully developed. We admit the existence of these properties, but hold that they are by no means the same as those which the things possessed in the moment of their production; and we hold that these properties themselves have come into existence from absolute non-existence.24

In order to refute the belief in creation, it is not enough to show that creation violates the natural order; philosophy must go further and refute the view of Judaism that nature is created by God, and it must demonstrate that nature is eternal and that even God’s original act of creation must conform to the laws of nature. But the philosophical argument merely assumes that the natural order is eternal without demonstrating



Emil Fackenheim on Moses Maimonides  23

this. Indeed, Maimonides argues that Aristotle himself recognized this shortcoming of this argument. 25 Precisely if we accept the methods and results of natural science, we must acknowledge the shortcomings of the arguments in favour of the eternity of the world, and we are free to believe in creatio ex nihilo without abandoning science: “There is natural necessity in the universe … but the universe as a whole is in a profounder sense possible.”26 Fackenheim draws the conclusion that Maimonides is superior to the falasifa as both a theologian and a philosopher. As a theologian, Maimonides takes revelation more seriously than Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina: the falasifa accept the philosophical doctrine of the eternity of the world, and they teach creation “merely exoterically” as a rhetorical device whose purpose is to protect them from the antagonism of the religious societies in which they live,27 whereas Maimonides undertakes sincerely to defend the belief in the creation of the world, and he combines “philosophical exactitude with a genuine loyalty to religious doctrine.” As a philosopher, Maimonides performs the “lasting service to philosophy” of exposing the limitations of Aristotelian metaphysics: philosophy cannot demonstrate its assertions about the origin of the world, and it cannot refute creatio ex nihilo.28 However, Maimonides does not demonstrate that the world is created: “the philosophical position and his own are equally incapable of being proved.”29 Maimonides defends Judaism by showing that Aristotelian philosophy cannot refute the biblical account of creation, but he cannot demonstrate that the biblical account is correct and the philosophical account of the origin of the world is incorrect. This leads Fackenheim to ask, in the concluding section of the study: why does Maimonides accept the biblical account of creation, and why does he view it as essential to defend creatio ex nihilo? In other cases where philosophy contradicts the Bible, Maimonides reinterprets biblical verses to make them conform to philosophy, most prominently in the case of verses whose literal meaning implies that God is a corporeal being; why does he not do the same thing in the case of creation? The answer is that creation is “a fundamental principle of the Law,” and the belief in creation is vital for the acceptance of the Law. For the Law is a miracle, and only if the world is created are miracles possible, “including the crucial miracle of supernatural revelation.”30 Maimonides defends Judaism out of a commitment to Jewish law: his belief in creation is partly theoretical, resting on the critique of Aristotelian philosophy, and partly moral, resting on the acceptance of the Law. To Maimonides, the “roots of the Law” are an autonomous starting point even in relation to philosophy. His Guide of the Perplexed is a Kalam rather

24  Benjamin Lorch than a philosophical treatise: its arguments are from the outset devoted to the defense of the Law, and it is philosophical only in that this defense must be philosophically impeccable.31

Fackenheim argues that Maimonides’s defence of Judaism relies ultimately on his acceptance of the authority of the Jewish Law.32 As we will see, this reliance on authority proves to be a source of Fackenheim’s dissatisfaction with Maimonides in his mature work. We have seen that Fackenheim regards Maimonides as the greatest Jewish philosopher and a model of the serious engagement between Judaism and philosophy. Yet he also believes that “we cannot return to the Middle Ages,” and that Maimonides does not offer adequate guidance to Judaism in our time. The remainder of this essay will consider the grounds for this judgment. My analysis takes its bearings from Fackenheim’s two critiques of medieval Jewish thought in the first chapter of To Mend the World. First, pre-modern Jewish philosophy is based on “dogmas accepted on authority,” and it falls short “by the standards of a critical, open-minded, antiauthoritarian modernity.”33 Second, “rabbinic Judaism, its normativeness included, is itself historically situated,” and it lacks a response to the “epoch-making events” of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.34 We have seen that Maimonides’s defence of Judaism rests ultimately on authority, and that he ultimately rejects the eternity of the world and accepts creatio ex nihilo because he accepts the authority of the Mosaic Law. According to Fackenheim, this defence of Judaism succeeds as a response to Aristotelian philosophy, but it is not adequate as a response to modern philosophy, because Judaism faces “a modern challenge to faith for which there is no premodern precedent”: No premodern precedent exists because faith in the premodern world could seek refuge, when challenged, in authoritarianism. The divine Presence could then be asserted on the authority of Scripture without. It could be asserted also on the authority of experience within – an experience which, essentially private, was infallible for belief and inaccessible to the criticism of unbelief. However, the modern believer cannot accept the divine Presence on the authority of Scripture; he can at most accept any authority of Scripture because of a divine Presence manifest in it … These public experiences are therefore not immune to modern, scientifically inspired, secularist criticism.35

Pre-modern philosophy attacked the biblical miracles by means of a competing, scientific account of the world, but it could not demonstrate



Emil Fackenheim on Moses Maimonides  25

the validity of the scientific account and refute the Bible, and so Jewish faith could endure based on the authority of the prophets and the authoritative testimony of one’s own religious faith. Modern philosophy, Fackenheim argues, goes further: it attacks not only the reality of the biblical miracles, but also the inner experience of religious faith. “Empiricism” argues that faith is “at most [the feeling] of a divine Presence, not the Presence itself,” and modern psychology can explain this feeling without resorting to the implausible supposition that a divine Presence actually exists;36 Kantian moral philosophy undermines the authority of the biblical law by making human reason the tribunal for judging the law, rejecting any “externally compelling or cajoling law” as “heteronomous or impure,” and undermining “the receptivity to God”;37 above all, Hegel, “the only non-Jewish modern philosopher of first rank to take Judaism in its own right seriously,” poses “the deepest modern philosophical challenge to Jewish religious existence to this day” with his argument that Judaism has been superseded by the “secularreligious union” of Protestant Christianity and the modern state.38 Faced with these new challenges, Judaism requires a new response. Maimonides defends the possibility of revelation as an objective historical event that occurred in the past, but modern Jewish philosophy must also defend the psychological experience of faith in the revelation, understood as “the event of divine Presence” and “the incursion in the human world of a divine Other.” In turn, this defence requires a new understanding of revelation, one focused on the encounter of the individual believer with the divine: medieval philosophy views revelation as a past event consisting in the transmission of a body of “propositions or laws backed by divine sanction,” and it asserts “the completeness of the Jewish revelation”; but modern Jewish philosophy must view revelation as an event that can occur in the life of every Jew, and so it must conceive of revelation as “open-ended or in any case inexhaustible.”39 Fackenheim’s second reservation about medieval philosophy stems from what he calls “the greatest doctrinal change in my whole career … [namely,] the view that Jewish faith is, after all, not absolutely immune to all empirical events.”40 Judaism is not immune to history: the Holocaust “called into question all things – God, man, the ancient revelation and the modern secular self-confidence, philosophic thought and indeed any kind of thought.”41 The search for a response to the Holocaust leads Fackenheim to a second, more radical break with the premodern outlook: “rabbinic Judaism … is itself historically situated,” and the normative framework that guided Judaism for thousands of years may no longer be valid after the Holocaust.

26  Benjamin Lorch

For rabbinic Judaism interprets history in terms of “Sinai and the Messianic Days.”42 All events in the life of the Jewish people are understood in terms of the giving of the law at Mount Sinai and the categories of obedience and transgression, reward and punishment, on one hand, and the anticipation of the Messianic era and preparation for the future redemption, on the other hand. Fackenheim views this historical framework as vital to the survival of Judaism during millennia of exile, because “[a] people cannot last in a disastrous exile unless it can view that exile as meaningful, and unless it has an abiding hope.”43 But the Holocaust cannot be understood as a punishment for sin or a preparation for redemption: not as a punishment, because the Jewish victims of the Nazis were murdered for no other reason than because of their ancestry, that is, because of the decision of their Jewish greatgrandparents to have children; not as a preparation for future redemption, for how can we trust any longer in the promise of redemption? Accordingly, the traditional rabbinic framework cannot give meaning to Jewish existence in the modern world, and it is necessary to move beyond the tradition and seek a new framework for Jewish life through a “direct encounter with the naked biblical text.”44 One may wonder whether Fackenheim’s critique of rabbinic Judaism truly applies to Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed. True, Maimonides views the justice of God as a “fundamental principle of the Law,”45 and he devotes extensive attention to the subject of providence. But the Guide presents a sober teaching about providence, which seeks to temper the hopes of its readers and reconcile them to the apparent indifference of nature to human happiness. On one hand, Maimonides rejects any attempt to rationalize events in terms of “Sinai and the Messianic days” and discover the divine plan for human life; instead, he emphasizes the disparity between human wisdom and divine wisdom and our inability to comprehend the unfathomable ways of God. On the other hand, Maimonides teaches that providence is “consequent on the intellect”:46 providence does not watch equally over all human beings, or over the entire Jewish people, but only over each individual according to his or her intellectual perfection, and the happiness promised by God to the righteous is the happiness of the philosopher when he is engaged in the contemplation of God: This is the object of the Book of Job as a whole: I refer to the establishing of this foundation for belief and the drawing attention to the inference to be drawn from natural matters, so that you should not fall into error and seek to affirm in your imagination that His knowledge is like our knowledge or that His purpose and His providence and His governance are like our



Emil Fackenheim on Moses Maimonides  27 purpose and our providence and our governance. If man knows this, every misfortune will be borne lightly by him.47

The Guide of the Perplexed seeks to discourage Messianic expectations and teach its students to hope for no other happiness besides that of understanding the world as it truly is. Why does Fackenheim view the Holocaust as a challenge to this teaching? We may understand Fackenheim’s judgment better by considering his analysis of the one “ahistorical” philosopher whom he discusses in To Mend the World: Baruch Spinoza, who “considered history to be indiscriminately meaningless – irrelevant to philosophical truth.”48 At the end of a wide-ranging critique of Spinoza, encompassing both Spinoza’s theoretical critique of religion and his practical hopes for Jewish existence in the secular modern world, Fackenheim turns to “the foundation of [Spinoza’s] secularism”: this is the life devoted to philosophy, to “an antithetical love for an antithetical God.”49 Fackenheim argues that the philosophic life is the ultimate ground for Spinoza’s rejection of Judaism and embrace of secular modernity. That ground is not the critique of revelation, because Spinoza himself does not view his critique of revelation as adequate, and he “rejects revelation without claiming to have refuted it”;50 instead, Spinoza rejects Judaism “in behalf of a claim rivaling it in magnitude,” namely, the philosophic life described in the Ethics;51 and the main proof of the superiority of the philosophic life is not the “mathematical demonstrations” provided in the Ethics, but rather lies “beyond the ‘system’ – in the life lived by the wise man.”52 Spinoza’s philosophy is ultimately political philosophy, a teaching about the right way to live, and it stands or falls by the validity of this teaching. Fackenheim criticizes Spinoza’s teaching about the philosophic life on the ground that Spinoza does not reflect sufficiently on the conditions of this life. Spinoza’s philosopher attains enlightenment through his own free efforts, by liberating himself from the debilitating grip of emotion and religious superstition through philosophical reflection: he is the “most genuine citizen” of the liberal state, “the enlightened, modern, ‘free’ man.”53 To this, Fackenheim objects that the happiness of the philosopher depends not only on his own efforts but also on his fellow men, and on the political situation in which he lives: there must be limits to “bad government,” to the depravity and degradation of which human nature is capable. But “‘human nature’ after the Holocaust is not what it was before,” and those who know of the Muselmänner of Auschwitz cannot share Spinoza’s confidence in his fellow men, or his conviction that solitary reflection can guarantee the “eternal blessedness” of the philosopher.54 Spinoza fails to comprehend

28  Benjamin Lorch

the phenomenon of evil, as this phenomenon has become manifest in the twentieth century. As a result, his rejection of Judaism and embrace of philosophy fail on both practical and theoretical grounds: his hopes for the promise of secular modernity are disappointed, and his philosophy suffers from a failure to comprehend human nature that calls into doubt whether it is truly philosophical. Fackenheim rejects Spinoza’s teaching about the philosophic life because it fails to comprehend evil. And while there are vast differences between Spinoza’s view of the philosophic life and the view of Maimonides,55 I believe that this criticism of Spinoza is also meant to apply to Maimonides, and indeed to all ahistorical philosophy: as Fackenheim writes in his discussion of the thought of Leo Strauss, “I think Plato – and maybe I should say both Jerusalem and Athens – is not adequate when it comes to confronting the diabolical evil that is the Holocaust.”56 “Jerusalem” cannot comprehend evil because it holds fast to the belief that God is just and the world is fundamentally good. “Athens” rejects the comforting vision of a miraculous remedy to evil, but its own comprehension is dulled by the conviction that human beings are essentially rational and the world is intelligible, and that what we view as evil is merely the error of people who do not know their own good or the indifference of the natural order to human wants. And these beliefs are refuted by an evil that defies all attempts to justify or understand it. The mention of Leo Strauss suffices to indicate that not all modern Jewish philosophers shared Fackenheim’s judgment about Maimonides. But Fackenheim offers a powerful account of the obstacles to the recovery of medieval philosophy, obstacles that scholars must take into account if our thought is not to lapse into a sterile academic exercise or “flight from reality.”57 This, in my opinion, is Fackenheim’s most valuable contribution to our understanding of Maimonides. NOTES I thank Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe for their helpful suggestions and comments.   1 Emil L. Fackenheim, “Review of The Legacy of Maimonides by Ben Zion Bokser,” Commentary 12 (1 January 1951), 106.   2 Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 81.   3 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 97.



Emil Fackenheim on Moses Maimonides  29

  4 Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1982; rev. ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 5.   5 Fackenheim, “The Possibility of the Universe in al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Maimonides,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 16 (1946–47): 39–70.   6 In his autobiography, Fackenheim explains that he chose to study Islamic as well as Jewish philosophy because “I was determined to become a Jewish philosopher, not, however, a parochial one” (An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007], 112).   7 Fackenheim, “Possibility,” 42.   8 Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed II.25, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 328, page 55a in the edition edited by Salomon Munk and Issachar Joel (Jerusalem: Junovitch, 1929).   9 On the immaterial beings in medieval philosophy see Fackenheim, “The Concept of Substance in the Philosophy of the Ikhwan as-Safa’ (Brethren of Purity),” Mediaeval Studies 5 (1943): 115–22; and Leo Strauss, “Farabi’s Plato,” in Louis Ginzburg Jubilee Volume (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), 357–93, esp. 389–92. 10 Fackenheim, “Possibility,” 39–40. 11 “Possibility,” 44. 12 “Possibility,” 49. 13 “Possibility,” 51. 14 “Possibility,” 44, 49. 15 “Possibility,” 52. 16 “Possibility,” 53. 17 “Possibility,” 42. 18 “Possibility,” 57. 19 “Possibility,” 59. 20 “Possibility,” 64. 21 Maimonides, Guide I.73, quoted by Fackenheim in “Possibility,” 60, from the edition of the Guide translated by Michael Friedlander (New York: Dover, 1956), 131; the quotation appears on page 211 of the Pines translation and page 115b of the Munk edition. 22 Maimonides, Guide II.14, Pines 286, Munk 30a. More precisely, Maimonides writes that Aristotle considers two alternatives: either there is a first motion that is the ultimate cause of every motion, and there is a permanent being that moves with an eternal and uniform motion; or else every motion is finite and has a beginning and end, and there is an infinite series of finite motions. The second alternative is incompatible with the eternity of the world, because if every motion is finite then eventually all

30  Benjamin Lorch of the finite motions would stop at the same time, and the world would be destroyed. However, “the existence of causes and effects of which the number is infinite is impossible” (Guide II. Introduction, third premise, Pines 235, Munk 2a), and therefore the ultimate cause of motion cannot be an infinite series of finite motions but only an eternal first cause. See the discussion of this argument in Herbert Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, Creation, and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 17–24; and Kenneth Seeskin, Maimonides on the Origin of the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 63–70. 23 Fackenheim,“Possibility,” 61. 24 Guide II.17, quoted in “Possibility,” 63 from Friedlander 179–180, Pines 296, Munk 35b–36a. The emphasis is Fackenheim’s. 25 Maimonides, Guide II.15 and II.19, Pines 289–93 and 306–7, Munk 32a–33b and 41b–42b. 26 Fackenheim, “Possibility,” 64. 27 “Possibility,” 70. 28 “Possibility,” 63–4. 29 “Possibility,” 65. 30 “Possibility,” 69. 31 “Possibility,” 70. 32 In my opinion, this is the main point where Fackenheim’s interpretation of Maimonides diverges from that of Leo Strauss, whom Fackenheim consulted while working on his study of Maimonides, and whom he later identified as his “mentor” (“Possibility,” 49n30a; To Mend the World, x; Fackenheim, “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” in Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 97–105, 100–1). Like Fackenheim, Strauss views Maimonides’s defense of Judaism as resting on the authority of the Law: “Maimonides starts from the acceptance of the Torah. A Jew may make use of philosophy and Maimonides makes the most ample use of it; but as a Jew he gives his assent where as a philosopher he would suspend his assent” (Strauss, “How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed,” in Guide, trans. Pines, xiv; see also Strauss, Philosophy and Law, trans. Eve Adler [Albany: SUNY Press, 1995], 91–2). However, Maimonides is not satisfied to rely on the authority of the Law, and asks “how non-prophetic men can be certain of the supra-rational teaching of the prophets, i.e., of its truth.” Fackenheim and Strauss disagree about Maimonides’s answer to this question. As we will see, Fackenheim views the acceptance of the Law in premodern Judaism as resting on the religious experience of an encounter with a “divine Presence” that confirms the authority of the Jewish tradition. On the other hand, Strauss writes that “according to Maimonides, there is



Emil Fackenheim on Moses Maimonides  31

no religious experience, i.e., specifically religious cognition: all cognition or true belief stems from the human intellect, sense perception, opinion, or tradition,” and that Maimonides therefore views the acceptance of revealed authority as a problem, indeed as “the difficulty of the Law” (“How to Begin,” xxxvii–xxxviii, emphasis added). 33 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 4–5. 34 To Mend the World, 16. 35 Fackenheim, Presence, 42. 36 Fackenheim, Encounters, 13; Fackenheim, Presence 41–3; Fackenheim, “On the Eclipse of God,” in Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 235–6. 37 Fackenheim, Encounters, 39–40; Fackenheim, “The Dilemma of Liberal Judaism,” in Quest for Past and Future, 139. 38 Fackenheim, Encounters, 86, 123. 39 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 4–6. 40 To Mend the World, 13. 41 To Mend the World, 9. 42 To Mend the World, 16. 43 To Mend the World, 17. 44 To Mend the World, 18. 45 Maimonides, Guide III.17, Pines 469, Munk 34b. 46 Guide III.18, Pines 475, Munk 38a. 47 Guide III.23, Pines 497, Munk 51a; see also Guide III.51, Pines, 624–5, Munk 127b–128a. 48 To Mend the World, 63. 49 To Mend the World, 97–8. 50 To Mend the World, 49–50. 51 To Mend the World, 50. 52 To Mend the World, 54. 53 To Mend the World, 55. 54 To Mend the World, 98–9. 55 Maimonides teaches that intellectual perfection is attained through obedience to the commandments, and he presents his teaching about the happiness of the philosophic life in his discussion of divine providence, whereas Spinoza teaches that intellectual perfection is attained by liberating oneself from religious authority and superstition. For two recent examinations of the relation between Maimonides and Spinoza see Joshua Parens, Maimonides and Spinoza: Their Conflicting Views of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Kenneth Hart Green, Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chap. 6 and 7. 56 Fackenheim, “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” 104. 57 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 52.

2 Emil Fackenheim’s Jewish Correction of Kant’s Quasi-Christian Eschatology martin d. yaffe

It is a peculiarity of Christian ethics to represent moral goodness as differing from moral evil not as heaven from earth but as heaven from hell – a representation that, while figurative and as such disturbing, is nonetheless philosophically correct in its meaning. – Namely, it serves to prevent good and evil, the realm of light and the realm of darkness, from being thought of as bordering on each other and losing themselves in each other by gradual steps (of greater and lesser brightness), instead of being represented as separated from each other by an immense gulf. The total incomparability of the basic principles by which someone can be a subject of one or the other of these two realms, and at the same time the danger that is bound up with the imagination of a close relationship of the traits that qualify someone for one or the other, justify this mode of representation, which despite the horror it contains in itself is at the same time very sublime. – Immanuel Kant1 It is … the working of the good principle, unnoticed to human eyes but steadily progressing, to erect for itself in the human race as a common essence, in accord with the laws of virtue, a power and a realm that claims victory over evil and secures an eternal peace under its mastery of the world. – Immanuel Kant2

Emil Fackenheim recalls how the argument of To Mend the World, his magnum opus of 1982, emerged from his earlier thought. He says in the book’s introduction: The events set in train in 1933 … seemed dealt with adequately … by categories that involved a critique of modernity itself. Nazism and all its works was a case of “the demonic” or “radical evil,” and nothing more. The possibility that the Holocaust might be a unique and unprecedented



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  33 evil in Jewish and indeed all history I did not consider seriously until more than two decades after the demise of the Third Reich. … But what if the Holocaust is unique? I first faced this question when, yielding to moral pressure to participate in a symposium on the subject in the spring of 1967, I had no other choice … As it happened, but a short time later the Jewish people collectively shared this perception when, faced with the threat of a second Holocaust in the weeks preceding the Six-Day War, they were, after a long period of repression, forced to confront the fact of the first.3

Here Fackenheim measures the shortcomings of his pre-1967 attempts to understand the Nazi Holocaust by the shortcomings of his pre-1967, pre-Six-Day-War focus on “the demonic”4 and “radical evil,”5 terms he puts in quotation marks as if to recall their source in Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793).6 Up to and through the moment in 1967 when he began to consider the Holocaust as possibly “a unique and unprecedented evil in Jewish and indeed all history,” then, Fackenheim took his bearings – though not exclusively or unqualifiedly – by Kant, whom he elsewhere describes as the revolutionary founder of all subsequent metaphysics for basing it not on abstract speculation but on our concrete moral consciousness.7 In what follows, I look at the Kantian thread connecting Fackenheim’s pre- and post-1967 remarks on the question of evil, by comparing his 1954 article “Kant and Radical Evil”8 (alongside his other pre-1967 writings on Kant)9 with his post-1967 remarks on Kant in To Mend the World (and those leading up to them).10 The overall connection I have in mind has been ably traced by Sharon Portnoff in her book on Fackenheim and Leo Strauss.11 What I have to add concerns the crossover point, concomitant with his enduring debt to Kant, where Fackenheim’s strictly philosophical reflection makes way for, or gives way to, theological reflection. It is at this point that the subject announced in my chapter title comes into view: Fackenheim’s Jewish correction – pre- and then post-1967 – of Kant’s quasi-Christian eschatology. The Radical Probity and Radical Incoherence of Kant on Radical Evil Fackenheim’s 1954 article brings out what may be called both the radical probity and the radical incoherence of Kant’s doctrine of radical evil. The article argues in four main steps.

34  Martin D. Yaffe

1. Kant’s ethical doctrine locates us in two worlds.12 As animals, we belong to the world of sense and are subject to our natural or selfseeking inclinations, which in turn are subject to the laws of nature. As rational beings, however, we are also subject to a universal moral law that enables, indeed requires us to distinguish between “I want” and “I ought” so as to act from duty for its own sake. Here Kant appeals to our moral consciousness on its own terms, which supposes that in discerning and following our moral obligations we can be free, or can in principle free ourselves, from our merely selfseeking inclinations. But are we really free of them, Fackenheim asks on Kant’s behalf?13 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Fackenheim replies, shows the possibility of human freedom by arguing that the laws of nature apply not to things in themselves but merely to their appearances, or phenomena. Although freedom is not in itself a phenomenon and therefore cannot be proved by the laws of nature, for the same reason it cannot be refuted by them either. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason thereby shows the actuality of human freedom as a presupposition of our experience of moral obligation. That we are conscious of moral duties imposed on us by universally binding principles in the form of a “categorical imperative” implies that we are free to act in accord with those principles. “Thou oughtst, hence thou canst.”14 2. Yet Kant himself, Fackenheim goes on to say,15 finds the foregoing rubric insufficient to account for moral evil. Within that rubric, evil shows up as no more than weakness of will. Weak-willed persons recognize that our self-seeking inclinations may well sway us from doing what we know we ought to. In such moments we realize that we are not angels, holy beings whose will is unimpeded by bodies and the laws of nature governing them. Nor, on the other hand, are we simply animals governed by bodily instincts or inclinations and, accordingly, innocent. Yet at this point, Fackenheim observes, how humans could ever perform evil actions becomes inexplicable: “free will [in Kant’s account] threatens to disappear into two necessities: a pure will which, qua will, is necessarily good; and the inclinations which are subject to a necessary law of nature, and hence morally indifferent. The possibility of evil has disappeared between divine holiness and animal innocence.”16 3. Kant’s essay on radical evil addresses this difficulty, or tries to, by showing how we are able to choose, in Fackenheim’s words, “not between willing the good and not willing at all, but between good and evil,” i.e., “to choose … against the moral law.”17 Retaining the doctrine that we live in two worlds, Kant now speaks of



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  35

evil as a perversion of the original relation between those two worlds. Instead of subordinating our self-seeking inclinations to the moral law, we subordinate our moral consciousness – more exactly, the “maxim” or general rule to which we appeal in justifying to ourselves our impending action – to our self-seeking inclinations. Otherwise put, evil is now said to consist in our deliberately choosing to deviate from the moral law whenever we are so inclined, and rationalizing that choice to ourselves, in what amounts to an unauthorized or never-authorized moral holiday. Even so, Fackenheim finds Kant’s new formulation “startling” for two reasons. First, depending on whether we always follow the moral law unstintingly or instead give ourselves the morally illegitimate but practically inevitable option of occasionally departing from it, we are either radically good or radically evil. Second, however, empirically speaking each of us turns out to be radically evil, although or because we bring the evil on ourselves given our inherent tendency, split as we are between two worlds, to subordinate duty to inclination. It follows that none of us can prevent our moral character from becoming evil except by (in Fackenheim’s word) a “commitment” – “a radical decision, freely made, between good and evil.”18 And yet, Fackenheim adds, “[t]he empirical life lived by us all is of such a nature as to presuppose a decision for evil.” 4. Fackenheim concludes his 1954 article by differentiating Kant’s doctrine of radical evil from Christianity’s doctrine of original sin. In Fackenheim’s terse formulation, both doctrines “assert a radical perversion” in human beings that is brought about by human beings themselves.19 The perversion in both cases being radical, it cannot be removed by any gradual reform. Its removal would require “a total act of conversion, an act of redemption, the creation of a new man.” The difference between Kantian and Christian doctrine here has to do with whether or not human beings can redeem themselves on their own: whereas Christian doctrine asserts that only God can redeem fallen human beings, Kant asserts that human beings can redeem themselves. But Fackenheim finds Kant’s assertion “utterly unintelligible.”20 Given Kant’s way of dividing us exhaustively between two worlds, any maxim that could serve to direct our will to redeem our moral character from the evil taint it has acquired from our past decision or decisions to subordinate moral duty to self-seeking inclination would involve our decided inclination to return to a morally pristine status quo ante – and yet, Fackenheim observes, returning to such a status on

36  Martin D. Yaffe

our own is inherently impossible on strictly Kantian terms, since deciding to do so as a putatively moral act while being motivated by our self-seeking inclination, however penitent we may be in so deciding, is the very same perversion by which radical evil has come to taint our moral character in the first place! Accordingly, Fackenheim’s pre-1967 combined deference to and critique of Kant led him philosophically to the conclusion that, pace Kant, evil cannot be properly understood “within the limits of reason alone.” A 1965 article titled “Kant and Judaism” (which Fackenheim recycled twice into longer writings post-1967)21 corroborates this conclusion theologically. The article incorporates and corrects Kant as regards how revealed Jewish law may be said to be both commanded by God and, at the same time, freely obeyed as one’s moral duty. The question prompting Fackenheim here is whether God’s commanding a mitzvah invalidates its moral claim by motivating adherents to obey out of a self-seeking inclination, namely, in the noblest case, love of God (though perhaps, in a less noble case, fear of divine displeasure). Fackenheim’s answer is that Judaism’s experience of moral laws as divinely commanded is morally vindicated in that God is no mere “external sanction” behind those commands but enters into a threeway r­ elationship – involving God, human individuals, and their fellow humans – by commanding lovingly that we treat our fellow humans justly and mercifully so as to “walk humbly” with God (as Micah 6:8 puts it).22 The loving character of God’s command, Fackenheim argues, implies that what God is commanding is neither morally impossible nor morally indifferent, since the command has been lovingly proportioned to our human ability both to follow it and to see for ourselves, i.e. freely, that the action has been commanded because it conforms to the moral law as such. The main difference between Kant and Judaism here is said to be that the three-way relationship would not be possible if God were a mere Idea, as in Kant’s (strictly philosophical) doctrine. It becomes possible if and only if God is an actually existing God – by which Fackenheim turns out to mean historically manifest, as testified to at any rate by human beings and their corresponding actions in the historical record such as it is (biblical, etc.).23 We may say that Fackenheim’s pre-1967 argument for the historically manifest existence of God, correcting Kant as it does, prepares for his post-1967 argument concerning the historically manifest existence (i.e., not just, pace Kant, the inward intrapersonal existence)24 of the “unique and unprecedented evil” of the Holocaust.



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  37

Adolph Eichmann’s Appeal to Kant Compared with Karl Huber’s Appeal to Kant Kant shows up in To Mend the World in two separate yet mutually mirroring incidents. Fackenheim analyses them side by side to help clarify the evil historically manifest overwhelmingly, if for that reason not altogether intelligibly, in the Holocaust.25 As it happened, two morally contrary historical individuals, Adolf Eichmann and Kurt Huber, each appealed in retrospect to Kant’s ethical doctrine in order to justify in criminal court their public actions during the Holocaust – in Eichmann’s case the morally execrable actions of a mass murderer (who was captured, convicted, and executed by the State of Israel fifteen-plus years after the war), in Huber’s case the morally exemplary actions of a philosophically motivated German patriot (who was arrested, convicted, and executed for his anti-Nazi pamphleteering in wartime Munich). Fackenheim probes Eichmann’s and Huber’s respective appeals to Kant with a view to illuminating, on the one hand, the manifest perversity of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, and on the other hand, the exemplary nobility of its resisters. During his highly publicized trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Eichmann in his defence cited Kant surprisingly articulately and putatively sincerely, though appallingly perversely.26 Fackenheim frames Eichmann’s perverse Kantianism as follows. On the one hand, he notes Eichmann’s claim to have been a dutiful Nazi for motives that were idealistic rather than self-seeking – motives to that extent (only!) consistent with Kantian morality. On the other hand, he summarizes Kant’s ethical doctrine succinctly in three principles, by which he is then able to assesses Eichmann’s putatively sincere (if morally perverse) appeal to Kant. Accordingly, in the first place, Kant asserts that it is morally necessary to do one’s duty for duty’s sake – a principle, says Fackenheim, to which Eichmann’s actions manifestly conformed. Eichmann “was a dutiful, idealistic mass-murderer, not merely a sadistic or opportunistic one”27 – although or because, horrifically misguided as he was, he considered his duty to be above all to his Führer. In the second place, Kant asserts that it is morally necessary to act so that the maxim could become a universal law – a principle to which Eichmann’s actions also conformed, except of course that his maxim was the manifestly un-Kantian one of aiming to make not his own but the Führer’s will into a universal law, i.e., of imposing Hitler’s horrendous will everywhere and forever, including by means of mass murder. Last but not least, Kant asserts that it is morally necessary to treat humanity, whether in oneself or in

38  Martin D. Yaffe

another, never merely as a means but always also as an end in itself – a principle that, in Fackenheim’s words, “was defied by Eichmann and his like not only at Auschwitz, but throughout the length and breadth of the Third Reich.”28 The Third Reich’s horrifyingly blatant and thoroughgoing departure from Kant’s unwavering insistence on the inherent dignity of each human being – what Kant is seen to call the Idea of Man (or of Humanity)29 – prompts Fackenheim’s further reflection. How, asks Fackenheim in so many words, could putatively sincere and intellectually sophisticated Germans like Eichmann invoke Kant’s moral doctrine while remaining oblivious to the Idea of Humanity indispensable to it? If I may anticipate and abbreviate Fackenheim’s fuller elaboration, his answer is this: there must have been an unprecedented breach, or “rupture,” in the historical process – more exactly, in the assumed progress of moral enlightenment – by which Germans and others were to be increasingly guided in their moral behaviour by the Idea of Humanity, especially given the support of enlightened Christian theologians and preachers attracted to the promise of what I have called, in my chapter title, Kant’s quasi-Christian eschatology.30 Let me return to this last point after noting what Fackenheim says about Kurt Huber and, subsequently, what two thoughtful commentators say about the Kantian provenance of Fackenheim’s Huber-inspired argument concerning how that rupture is to be faced and possibly mended. Fackenheim admires Huber not for his intellectual brilliance – he is described as a fair-to-middling philosophy professor espousing a nolonger-fashionable Kantianism – but for his outspoken critique of his fellow Germans for being oblivious to the Idea of Humanity as spelled out by Kant (and Kant’s disciple J.G. Fichte).31 Huber was defending himself in Munich’s notorious Volksgericht (People’s Court) as mentor to the so-called White Rose, a handful of student resisters to the Nazi regime, who in 1943 distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets despite their near-certainty that their action would be politically futile and punished by death – as in fact it was. “There was no purer resistance to the Nazi regime,” remarks Fackenheim.32 “The import of Huber,” he explains, “lies in his deed more than his thought; in his thought insofar as it first motivated and then articulated the deed; … he gave strength to the Idea [of Humanity] even as, in turn, he was given strength by it.”33 The larger implication Fackenheim draws is this: given that the suppression of the Idea of Humanity from the officially imposed and ruthlessly enforced moral consciousness under Nazism was (or was part of) an unprecedented historical rupture, Huber’s own historically unprecedented and distinctively philosophical attempt to restore that Idea to Germany’s moral consciousness, however futile in the immediate



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  39

historical setting, constituted a small but significant “mending” of that rupture34 – in quasi-Kabbalistic terms, a “tikkun.”35 Similar mendings by others during the Holocaust, Fackenheim adds, while historically unique, especially given the horrifyingly “unique and unprecedented” historical details that prompted them, are, even so, exemplary inspirations for guiding post-Holocaust thought and life. A Controversy over Fackenheim’s Residual Kantianism How or how far Kant penetrates and illuminates the overall argument of To Mend the World is a matter of some controversy. Laurie McRobert and Reinier Munk each address this question in a larger volume of essays devoted to Fackenheim’s thought by appreciative colleagues, former students, and academic acquaintances, to whom Fackenheim then replies graciously though with pointed criticisms as he sees fit. Whereas McRobert calls To Mend the World’s departure from Kant “substantial,”36 Munk contests Fackenheim’s assertion that Kant’s role there has diminished.37 Fackenheim’s replies to each elucidate somewhat further what we might call To Mend the World’s residually Kantian dimension. McRobert spells out the contrast she finds between To Mend the World and Kant. The main thread of her argument is as follows. Kant, she reports, speaks of evil as a “propensity … woven into human nature”38 to which each individual is drawn, as she says, “automatically,” i.e., instinctively or innately, although each nevertheless remains free in principle to choose between good and evil by adopting a maxim that in effect resists that propensity and instead obeys the moral law. In To Mend the World, however, Fackenheim is forced to leave Kant’s merely “subjective” plane in order to confront a particular evil, the Holocaust, that is historical and real rather than simply rooted in individuals’ consciousness. On the more-than-subjective “ontological” plane of To Mend the World, moreover, any evil experienced by the individual is always particular; hence the choice between good and evil is never adequately open to abstract thought either beforehand or afterward.39 Does Fackenheim’s construing the choice between good and evil ontologically in terms of tikkun thereby shift the burden of providing moral guidance from Kant to Judaism’s traditional morality as understood on its own, divinely revealed terms, we may ask? Not exactly, as McRobert points out. Among other considerations,40 for Fackenheim the rupture signaled by the Holocaust amounts theologically to an unprecedented interruption of God’s availability during the catastrophe and its ongoing aftermath; and in any event the exemplary resistance to evil by

40  Martin D. Yaffe

Huber and others implies that tikkun “based solely on the decisions of men” is possible and necessary on the part of non-Jews and nonbelievers as well, including of course secular Jews.41 Fackenheim thus transforms Kantian morality by importing it into the ontologically construed framework of tikkun and adding, as an “ontological imperative,” the “ontological category of resistance” against real evil – an addition he meanwhile identifies with what traditional Judaism calls teshuvah, a “turning” from evil together with a “returning” to God. This identification becomes possible by way of his philosophical adaptation of the Kabbalistic doctrine that God intentionally withdraws from the world He has created so as to leave it incomplete, or fragmented, for humans to mend on their own initiative while gradually, if fragmentarily, discovering and implementing His overall plan for completing it, even if their doing so is generally unbeknown to themselves.42 Accordingly, McRobert can say that morality (as tikkun with teshuvah) is now “situated not just alongside … but within God.”43 She concludes that while Kantian concepts of radical evil, autonomous morality, etc., are superseded in To Mend the World, “they have acted as catalysts.”44 In his reply to McRobert, Fackenheim uses a recognizably Kantian expression (unfootnoted as such)45 to indicate his delight that she and others in the volume have occasionally “understood me better than … I understood myself.”46 He admits in passing to some misgivings about her essay in detail, though he does not see a need to go into these here; but he singles out for praise her extended treatment, beyond what he himself had said in summarizing Kant’s ethical doctrine in his 1954 article, concerning the pivotal and irreducible role of choice (Willkür in Kant’s German) in each individual’s arriving at a maxim to justify a good rather than an evil action or vice versa.47 Being thus “instructed” by McRobert’s treatment of Kant concerning the individual’s ever-­present freedom to choose among maxims, Fackenheim goes on to apply it to the reported case of SS Officer Flacke, whom he had mentioned in passing in To Mend the World as having been in charge of an Auschwitz subcamp that, according to the testimony of survivors, was an island of peace and serenity with clean food and surroundings – despite Flacke’s being, in Fackenheim’s words here, “subject to the same pressures and tempted by the same excuses that led others and their ‘maxims’ ever closer to hell.”48 “Yes,” Fackenheim concludes on reflection after reading McRobert, “Kant on radical evil … is still … in [To Mend the World]” albeit, he adds, only for thinking about “the great choice between good and evil” that remained for individuals as individuals in the “world” of the Holocaust but not about that world itself, a “world of evil” that was greater than the sum of its parts.



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  41

Munk’s essay, which examines Fackenheim’s conceptions of revelation and resistance, takes issue in due course with two disclaimers that To Mend the World is seen to make against Kant.49 The first disclaimer is that Kant’s faith in (the Idea of) Humanity may have been warranted in his own day, but no longer after the Holocaust. The second disclaimer is that Kant’s doctrine that we are always free, morally speaking, to do what we ought to do is at odds with life in the camps, where it was not possible to do what ought to have been done. Munk objects that these two disclaimers are inconsistent with To Mend the World’s argument as a whole.50 First, although Fackenheim says there that the historical rupture caused by the Holocaust implies a rupture in the continuity of the philosophical tradition that includes Kant, nevertheless he supposes that enough continuity remains for him to be able to engage in philosophical critiques of Kant et al. Second, more than one of those cited by Fackenheim as having offered resistance are said to testify that their motivation was to retain their humanity in the face of the Nazis’ systematic dehumanizing efforts – a motivation, says Munk, that accords with the Kantian “thou oughtst, hence thou canst.”51 Third, Fackenheim while relating at least one witnessed instance of resistance defines it as “the maintenance by the victims of a shred of humanity,” with the implication, in Munk’s words, “that the witness of the maintenance of humanity is given preference over, or is considered to be more decisive than, the witness of the rupture of the idea of humanity.”52 Finally, articulate survivors including Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Manès Sperber, and Elie Wiesel, who “play a central role in Fackenheim’s thought” and who each say that the rupture with God is irreparable, are “overruled” both theologically, by To Mend the World’s ongoing appeal to “the concept of revelation,” and philosophically, by its appeal to Kant’s principle that humans are to be treated never simply as means but always at the same time as ends in themselves.53 Fackenheim forgoes answering Munk’s list of objections point by point.54 He limits himself to reiterating and elaborating briefly To Mend the World’s central argument about revelation and resistance, with attention to how it vindicates the two disclaimers against Kant to which Munk has objected. As regards these objections, Fackenheim points out that in general they rely on statements of his that he has clearly (if gradually) abandoned between 1967 and To Mend the World.55 As for why he has abandoned the Kantian “thou oughtst, hence thou canst” in particular, he mentions as a telling example the practice at times by SS officers at Auschwitz of offering fathers of families two work permits instead of one.56 Since work permits were “the difference between (temporary) life and (immediate) death,” a father then

42  Martin D. Yaffe

had to choose which family member to save for the time being; and if he refused, both permits would be revoked! Either way, says Fackenheim, the father could not help “violating both the mitzvot of Judaism and Kant’s moral imperative.” That is why, he admonishes, To Mend the World argues in philosophical support of Wiesel’s theological judgment that at Auschwitz “not only Man died, but the Idea of Humanity died as well.” Fackenheim traces his philosophical change of mind here (as he did more generally at the beginning of To Mend the World) to the “three dread weeks preceding the Six Day War,” which put “the Jewish community, worldwide, … in fear of a second Holocaust.”57 Those dread weeks, he adds, also prompted his realization that he may have stayed too long, theologically speaking, with the primacy of revelation. Instead, he concludes poignantly, they opened his ears “to the desperate words of the poet Jacob Glatstein: ‘On Sinai we received the Torah, and in Lublin we gave it back.’” Fackenheim’s Corrective of Kantian Eschatology With McRobert’s and Munk’s help, and of course Fackenheim’s (and Portnoff’s), I have aimed to shed light on the crossover point where To Mend the World’s theological argument about evil emerges from Kant’s philosophical one. Why I have called that argument a Jewish correction of Kant’s quasi-Christian eschatology has to do with the two paragraphs I have excerpted from his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone in the two epigraphs to this chapter.58 In my first epigraph, Kant says that Christian ethics depicts the difference between good and evil not as the difference between heaven and earth but as the unbridgeable difference between heaven and hell – a difference, he adds, that is philosophically correct in delineating clearly and with no shadings whether someone belongs in one place rather than the other.59 In my second epigraph, Kant says that there is a “good principle” at work invisibly in history, which is “steadily progressing” towards “erect[ing] for itself” in the human race “a power and a realm that claims victory over evil and secures an eternal peace under its mastery of the world.”60 Fackenheim’s ongoing indebtedness to Kant shows up in these two epigraphs. When he speaks of a “rupture” in history, he is thinking of a breach in the historical progress towards overcoming evil and establishing peace in the world much as Kant describes that progress theologically in the second epigraph, namely, eschatologically. And when he speaks of evil as something existing on its own so as to be able to cause or constitute the historical rupture in question, he is thinking of evil as Kant describes it theologically in the first epigraph, namely, as unbridgeably



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  43

separated from good as heaven is said to be from hell. As for the putatively Christian eschatology that Fackenheim adopts (and corrects) from Kant – together with the view of evil as existing on its own which is integral to it61 – I have characterized it as quasi-Christian so as to call attention to its dilution, if not absorption, by the Kantian dualism that Fackenheim sketches (and corrects) as its theological framework. His Jewish correction of that framework to accommodate the historical evil manifest in the Holocaust for the purpose of addressing and mending it continues to incorporate that framework. NOTES   1 Immanuel Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, Werke, Akademie-Textausgabe (10 vols.; unaltered photomechanical reprint of Prussian Academy edition of 1902 ff.; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), vol. VI (henceforth Ak VI), 60n, translation mine, emphases in the original; cf. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Henry H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960) (henceforth G&H), 53n. In his footnote references to Kant’s Religion, Fackenheim cites G&H alongside Ak VI. Here and in his Religion citations replicated in the notes to follow, I have included both Ak VI and G&H, without adding or substituting page references to the more recent translation by Alan W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which postdates Fackenheim’s Kant writings and in any case includes Ak VI’s pagination for handy cross reference as needed.   2 Kant, Religion, Ak VI 124, translation mine; cf. G&H 114.   3 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1982; rev. ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 9–10, emphasis in the original.   4 Cf. Kant, Religion, Ak VI 86–7 and context; G&H 81–2 and context.   5 Cf. Kant, Religion, Ak VI 17–53 passim, especially 37, 38, 72; G&H 15–49 passim, especially 32, 33f., 66.   6 Also in F.W.J. Schelling, whom Fackenheim calls “the solitary figure in modern philosophy to brood and write [i.e., thematically] about ‘radical’ or ‘demonic’ evil” (To Mend the World, 234). Cf. Fackenheim, The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 95–9. Also, Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, ed. Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 260: “My ‘Kant and Radical Evil’ … was inspired by Schelling … [who] praised Kant as his own sole worthy predecessor” – for the article

44  Martin D. Yaffe Fackenheim is referring to, see note 8 below. For the pertinent Schelling passage, see the latter’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 53: “the passions themselves do not constitute evil, nor do we have to struggle just with flesh and blood but with an evil in and outside of us that is spirit. Only this evil, contracted through our own act but from birth, can on that account [daher] be called radical evil; and it is remarkable how Kant, who had not raised himself in theory to a transcendental act that determines all human Being, was led in his later investigations, merely by faithful observation of the phenomena of moral judgment, to the recognition of, as he expressed it, a subjective ground of human actions preceding every act apparent to the senses but that itself must be nonetheless an actus of human freedom. Whereas Fichte, who had grasped speculatively the concept of such an act, fell prey once again to the philanthropism [Philanthropismus] prevalent in his moral theory and wanted to find this evil that precedes all empirical action in the lethargy of human nature” (bracketed interpolations are the translators’). On Fichte, cf. note 32, below.   7 Fackenheim, The God Within, 9, 53f., 149, 153–6, 160.   8 Fackenheim, “Kant and Radical Evil,” University of Toronto Quarterly 23 (1954): 339–53 (reprinted in The God Within, 20–33).   9 Fackenheim, “Kant’s Concept of History,” Kantstudien 48 (1957): 381–98 (reprinted in The God Within, 34–49); Fackenheim, “Kant and Judaism,” Commentary 36 (1963): 460–7 (expanded version in Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Thought [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968], 204–28; subsequently incorporated into Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought [New York: Basic Books, 1973], 37–53). Also, Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1961) (reprinted in The God Within, 122–47 – see 124, 145f., 223n33, 225n38, 231n51; Fackenheim, “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophical Truth,” Proceedings of the 7th Inter-American Congress of Philosophy (Laval, Quebec: 1967) I, 77–92 (reprinted in The God Within, 148–63 – see 149, 155–7 passim, 160, 233n1 and n3, 234n14, 235n24). 10 Fackenheim, Encounters, 31–77; Hermann Cohen – After Fifty Years, Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, 12 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1969) (reprinted in Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 41–56 – see 44, 45, 46–9, 251n26); Fackenheim, “Kant’s Philosophy of Religion,” in Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, ed. Ninian Smart, Patrick Sherry, Steven T. Katz, and John Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 1, 17–40 (reprinted in The God Within, 1–19).



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  45

11 Sharon Portnoff, Reason and Revelation before Historicism: Strauss and Fackenheim (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 82, 84–91, 232. See also Laurie McRobert, “Kant and Radical Evil,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, 18–42, with Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics,” 259–61; Reinier Munk, “Revelation and Resistance: A Reflection on the Thought of Emil L. Fackenheim,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, 224–47, especially 233, 240–2, with Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics,” 268–72. On McRobert and Munk, see below, section titled “A Controversy over Fackenheim’s Residual Kantianism.”   Fackenheim dedicates To Mend the World to the memory of Leo Strauss (1899–1973). Cf. Kenneth Hart Green, “Leo Strauss’s Challenge to Emil Fackenheim: Heidegger, Radical Historicism, and Diabolical Evil,” in Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew, ed. Sharon Portnoff, James A. Diamond, and Martin D. Yaffe (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 125–60. 12 Fackenheim, The God Within, 21–4. Fackenheim’s summary of Kant here is unfootnoted. Cf. idem, 5–7, 12–16, 36–8; To Mend the World, 156–8. 13 The God Within, 23f. 14 The God Within, 24. Fackenheim renders (unfootnoted) Friedrich Schiller’s words “du kannst, denn du sollst!”; see Schiller’s poem Die Philosophen (the philosophers). 15 The God Within, 24–6. 16 The God Within, 26. 17 The God Within, with 26–31; emphasis in the original. 18 The God Within, 30. 19 The God Within, 32, with 31–3. 20 The God Within, 32f. 21 See note 9 above. 22 Cf. Fackenheim, Encounters, 49, 56, 64, 69. In this context, Fackenheim faces as follows the difficulty occasioned by the Akeda – Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, conceived as commanded by God (Genesis 22). If Kant is correct, the command cannot have come from God, since God’s commands are ipso facto moral, whereas slaughtering Isaac or treating him as subhuman is ipso facto immoral; hence the command must be a “religious illusion” grounded in a fanciful but immoral desire to be pleasing to God, i.e., in false or idolatrous worship of God (Encounters, 62, citing G&H 158). If, on the other hand, Søren Kierkegaard is correct, God’s command must be governed by an irrational suspension of the ethical for Abraham and, Fackenheim adds, “for every knight of faith after Abraham”; but this solution “would rob us of the Torah, which forbids child sacrifice” (Encounters, 63, citing Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie [New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954], 80 and context). Fackenheim resolves this difficulty by absorbing the Akeda into subsequent Jewish

46  Martin D. Yaffe tradition, more exactly into the Rosh Ha-Shanah synagogue Torah reading – where Jewish worshippers re-experience it as an annual ritual yet thereby know in advance that Abraham’s knife stroke will be stayed, and Isaac’s life saved, by God’s otherwise unanticipated intervention. The three-way relationship adumbrated by Micah, Fackenheim concludes, must thus include human openness to “radical surprise” coming from God (Encounters, 70).   Robert D. Sacks takes issue with Kierkegaard (and implicitly with Kant) differently, by noting that the Hebrew text of God’s addressing Abraham in Genesis 22:1 includes the particle na’ (please), so as to imply a request rather than a command (Commentary on the Book of Genesis [Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990], 164):   The word please in Hebrew is a short word and is often ignored by translators, but when it appears in the words of God spoken to a human being it certainly cannot be overlooked. God uses the word in four other places, but in all of them it is used in the sense of inviting someone to accept a gift (Gen. 13:14, 15:5, and 31:12). To no other person aside from Abraham does God say please in the whole of the Bible.   God and Abraham had made a Covenant. God would give Abraham a son and make his name great if Abraham were willing to devote that seed to the establishment of the New Way [sc., the way of life under written law that is being set forth in the Torah]. He asked Abraham whether he would be willing to give up that seed and the Covenant. The question is whether Abraham would be willing to relinquish the seed while remaining perfect in the sense discussed at the beginning of [Genesis 17].   God’s request was dangerous on both sides. But suppose Abraham had refused? Killing Abraham would have been of little help, and yet how could the two of them ever face each other again? Could God have nullified the Covenant? Perhaps, but then God’s word would be meaningless, and what man could ever trust Him again?   So long as there was no command there was no contradiction, and Kierkegaard, in his sacrifice of reason, became more like the followers of Moloch than like Abraham.

23 Cf. Portnoff, Reason and Revelation, 86, with Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophy, 47f., and The God Within, 54–7 passim. 24 In his 1957 article “Kant’s Concept of History” (see note 9 above), Fackenheim arrives at a similar judgment concerning Kant’s implicit need for a supra-personal, supra-historical link between nature and morality to show that history has both purpose and value, though Kant’s strictly philosophical argument is unable to supply it. William A. Galston comments perceptively: “at the same time we must constantly be aware that in large part ‘history’ [for Kant] comes into being as an attempt to



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  47 avoid the conclusion that mind (or moral purpose) is impotent to affect bodily action and that the manifold of human affairs is devoid of any purpose, which conclusion unavoidably implies that being human is comical or absurd and eventuates in nihilism” (Kant and the Problem of History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975], 23). In a footnote ad loc., Galston suggests the sole critique that might be made of Fackenheim’s excellent article … [is that he] does not sufficiently emphasize that it is the nonappearance and impotence of morality as Kant strictly defines it that drives him to look for some external ground of moral efficacy. The failure to render morality “historical” – i.e., visible and active – leads to a situation characterized by Nietzsche in the following terms: “There is a famous danger in their [i.e., German] ‘inwardness’: the internal substance cannot be seen from the outside, and so may one day take the opportunity of vanishing, and no one will notice its absence any more than its presence before.”

Galston is quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 26, Galston’s interpolation. 25 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 266–77. 26 On Eichmann’s putative sincerity here, Fackenheim seems in agreement with Hannah Arendt, who speaks of Eichmann’s perversion of Kant’s moral precepts as an “unconscious distortion” (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [rev. ed.; New York: Viking, 1965], 136). Bettina Stangneth counters, on the basis of Eichmann’s lengthy essays on philosophical topics found among his Argentina papers, which Arendt did not or could not consult:



What Arendt did correctly observe was that Eichmann was deliberately posturing as a student of philosophy. She just drew the wrong conclusion, imagining that the main reason for this pose was foppish vanity and a lack of rhetorical skill and philosophical knowledge … Eichmann was familiar with philosophical ideas that were by no means part of a general education: in addition to Kant, Nietzsche and Plato, he also mentioned Schopenhauer and – in all seriousness – Spinoza … [E]verything he said in Israel was an attempt to disguise his own systematic thinking … [I]n Israel he took pains to paint himself as precisely the type of benevolent humanist and admirer of philosophy that he had sought to destroy while the Nazis were in power. He just hadn’t had much of a chance to practice this role. (Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. Ruth Martin [New York: Knopf, 2014], 220)

Thanks to Alan Udoff for alerting me to Stangneth. 27 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 270; also Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics,” 271f.

48  Martin D. Yaffe 28 To Mend the World, 272. 29 To Mend the World, 273–7. Cf. Kant, Religion, Ak VI 28, 66 and context; G&H 23, 60 and context. 30 Cf. Kant, Religion, Ak VI 122f., G&H 113f., with note 2 above. 31 To Mend the World, 267–9. See the following note. 32 To Mend the World, 267. Fackenheim quotes and translates the second quatrain of Albert Matthai’s eight-line poem “Fichte an jeden Deutschen” (Fichte to every German), with which Huber concluded his statement in court: “And act thou shalt as though / The destiny of all things German / Depended on you and your lonely acting, / And the responsibility were yours.” 33 To Mend the World, 268, 275, emphases in the original. 34 “Huber’s trial,” says Fackenheim, was, in the circumstances, “the most significant trial for philosophy since that of Socrates” (To Mend the World, 275). 35 To Mend the World, 253n*, cites Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1965), 27, 260ff., 232ff., and passim. 36 McRobert, “Kant and Radical Evil,” 34, with 29–38. 37 Munk, “Revelation and Resistance,” 240–2, with 233; To Mend the World, 300n*. 38 “Kant and Radical Evil,” 33, is quoting G&H 25. 39 “Kant and Radical Evil,” 35: “The only possible reflection on the evil that happened at Auschwitz must come through the mediation of the victims’ experience of it.” Cf. To Mend the World, 247. 40 These considerations include Fackenheim’s endorsement of Kant’s rejection of “theological morality” in favour of “moral theology.” Paraphrasing Fackenheim’s own summary at Encounters, 59, McRobert, “Kant and Radical Evil,” 26, formulates the difference as follows: “In Kant’s view, a subject cannot accept a law as moral because he perceives it as God’s law imposed on him. Rather, the subject must appropriate a law as moral because he intrinsically understands the validity of its autonomous quality.” Cf. Fackenheim, Encounters, 40–52, with notes 8 and 21 above. 41 McRobert, “Kant and Radical Evil,” 32. 42 Cf. note 35 above. 43 “Kant and Radical Evil,” 36, emphasis in the original. Cf. Portnoff, Reason and Revelation, 90. 44 “Kant and Radical Evil,” 38. 45 Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A314/B370 and context. 46 Fackenheim, “A Reply to my Critics,” 260, 261, 279ff. Elsewhere Fackenheim supports his stated need to “advance the dubious claim of understanding the two philosophies [Spinoza’s and Franz Rosenzweig’s] better than they understand themselves” (To Mend the World, 63f., my



Fackenheim’s Correction of Kant’s Eschatology  49

interpolation) by quoting Rosenzweig: “The other [i.e., the reader], if for no other reason than that he is other, will always be permitted to attempt, in Kant’s bold words which are not all that bold, to understand Plato better than he understood himself. I for one do not wish to deprive any reader of mine of this hope” (64n*, Fackenheim’s interpolation). Fackenheim seems to be responding implicitly to Leo Strauss (see note 11 above), who presumably has both the Kantian and the Rosenzweigian statements in mind when alerting readers to “the danger that one tries to understand Spinoza better than he understood himself before one has understood him as he understood himself … that one understands, not Spinoza, but a figment of the imagination” (Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing [Glencoe: Free Press, 1952], 159, with 143, 146, 148). Strauss dedicated his Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1930; English translation, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion [New York: Schocken, 1965]) to Rosenzweig’s memory. 47 See McRobert, “Kant and Radical Evil,” 22f. 48 Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics,” 260f., with Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 242n‡. 49 Munk, “Revelation and Resistance,” 233. Cf. To Mend the World, 273, 300. 50 “Revelation and Resistance,” 240ff. 51 “Revelation and Resistance,” 241, with To Mend the World, 217f., 254. See note 14 above. 52 “Revelation and Resistance,” 241, with To Mend the World, 225. 53 “Revelation and Resistance,” 242. 54 See Munk’s longer list, “Revelation and Resistance,” 234ff. 55 Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics,” 268ff. 56 “A Reply to My Critics,” 271f. 57 “A Reply to My Critics,” 272. See note 3 above. 58 See notes 1 and 2 above. 59 To say, as Kant does, that the unbridgeable separation between heaven and hell (see Luke 16:22–31) implies that good and evil are likewise unbridgeably separated in conformity with the two post mortem locations, however, is not uncontroversial theologically. Contrast G.E. Lessing: “if it is true that the best human being still has much evil and the worst is not without any good, then the consequences of evil must also follow the former into heaven, and the consequences of good must also accompany the latter right into hell; each one must find his hell even in heaven, and his heaven even in hell … Scripture itself means nothing else when it talks of the stages of hell and of heaven.” Lessing is arguing in defence of G.W. Leibniz’s view that hell, or more exactly the threat of eternal punishments in hell, is an (exoteric) “image” and that “[i]f … a higher wisdom has even held such an extraordinary threat to be necessary, then it has recognized

50  Martin D. Yaffe that it was just as conducive to express itself about it entirely according to our present sensibilities.” See Lessing, “Leibniz von den ewigen Strafen,” in Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann, rev. Franz Muncker (23 vols.; Stuttgart: G.J. Göschen, 1895), XI, 483, 480, translations mine; cf. “Leibniz on Eternal Punishment,” in Lessing, Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57, 54; Lessing ends his defence of Leibniz by quoting and commenting on Socrates’s image of corrective (as well as retributive) punishments post mortem in Plato, Gorgias 525b–c (Lachmann-Muncker 486; cf. Nisbet 59f.). Cf. Kant, Religion, Ak VI 64ff.n*, G&H 63ff.n*. 60 Cf. note 24 above. 61 Cf. also Schelling, Human Freedom, 24, 41, 73.

3 The Meaning of History: Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim paul t. wilford

I form light and create darkness I make weal and create woe I the Lord do all these things. – Isaiah 45:71 The wounds of Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind. – Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit2 Ever since the Nazi Holocaust it is Western Civilization that is on trial. – Emil L. Fackenheim3

In the first objection to the third article of the second question of the Summa Theologica, concerning the existence of God, Thomas Aquinas gives the most powerful, challenging, and disturbing argument for God’s non-existence. The great stumbling block for rational faith – a belief that aspires to be internally consistent, logically coherent, and able to respond to the sceptic’s objections – proves to be the existence of evil.4 It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the name God means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.5

The theoretical riposte to faith rests on a common-sense moral observation – the manifest presence of evil.6 The consequences of ­ this moral observation, however, extend beyond the moral domain,

52  Paul T. Wilford

seeming to undermine theory as well as praxis. If “in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and God was the word,” then the intelligibility of the world seems similarly threatened by evil.7 What purchase can reflective understanding have in a world beset by evil? If reason rules or governs the world but permits the irrational, then the reality of God and the rationality of creation both seem suspect. Lacking an account of or way of comprehending evil, we must wonder whether reality is rational or the rational is ever truly real. But can such counterarguments ever really dislodge faith itself? Is not the teaching of Job the possibility of resolute faithfulness in the teeth of calamity? For Job maintains that he is just and so is God. Job avoids the counsel of his friends (or perhaps would-be blasphemers) that he must have sinned unknowingly, which appears to be the only plausible explanation for his suffering. But Job is a righteous man, steadfast in his righteousness; he neither curses God nor the day he was born. He rejects the temptation to think he can fathom creation. For all Job’s suffering, however, and despite the incomprehensibility of God’s reply from out the whirlwind, he “never wholly loses his sense of the presence of God.”8 He may abhor himself and repent in dust and ashes, but he has seen the Lord – what he had only heard of before, and so may have doubted, his own eyes now have confirmed. In contrast, the Psalmist, who laments that God has “hidden his face,” has not even seen the Lord. He inhabits a world of uncertainty, of doubt, of bereavement. He is without guidance amidst his calamity. Though Israel suffers, the Psalmist does not ask for evil simply to be vanquished. All the Psalmist asks is that God be present to him as He was before, while he endures the trials of this valley of shadows. Though he cries out, “It is for your sake that we are slain all day long, that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered” and asks, “Why do You hide Your face, ignoring our affliction and distress?” the Psalmist does not lose faith; rather, he holds resolutely to the Covenant, to what he has heard from his fathers, saying, “I will sing of the Lord’s steadfast love forever.”9 Even when God seems absent and his people suffer, the Psalmist expects God will again show himself. But can this always be the case? Can faith always remain hopeful, waiting patiently for God’s return to history? Though Job and the Psalmist avoid the temptation, evil tempts one to flee the world, to turn one’s back on human misery, to retreat to a realm free from suffering, degeneration, corruption, and decay. Subject to despair over the human lot, one may find oneself in a mood of anxiety, where the world itself seems shoddy – so full of meaningless contingency one might become nauseous at the realization of having being thrown into such an indifferent universe. In reaction, one is



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  53

prompted to take flight, perhaps to a world of hyperuranian beings, or to an other-worldly beyond, or into a religious mysticism that tends towards gnostic Manicheanism. Evil seems to sunder the cosmos, or at least our relation to it, compelling us to ask: What kind of whole do we inhabit? What kind of home is possible amidst such disorder? In such melancholic resignation, we may conclude that history is simply devoid of meaning. How can we face evil, and yet stay with this world, stay with a God of history? For Emil L. Fackenheim, an adequate response to such questions cannot neglect the historicity of the human condition. We are peculiarly historically situated beings and aware of ourselves as such.10 We do not ask such questions in a vacuum; they arise in response to particularly harrowing events and we search for answers in necessarily parochial historical circumstances. According to Fackenheim, modernity as a whole presents a challenge for the Jewish thinker that makes his position sufficiently different from past theoretical circumstances as to require a novel approach, or at least a new inflection of an old method when addressing the deepest of theological questions. Comparing Maimonides and Rosenzweig, Fackenheim writes: The medieval Jewish thinker must confront Greek (i.e., pagan) philosophy only insofar as it conflicts with his Judaism. His modern counterpart must be more radical. Modern philosophy is not obviously pagan and indeed claims absolute universality; and in its profoundest (i.e., Hegelian) form this claim becomes one of comprehensiveness. The Jewish thinker can confront this challenge only by exposing his own Judaism to it wholly and without remainder; and he can achieve its uncompromising recovery only after so total a self-exposure.11

This reflection on Rosenzweig could stand as a statement of Fackenheim’s own self-understanding and the task he set himself as a Jewish philosopher situated in a unique historical epoch.12 But Fackenheim’s position is historically determined not only by modern philosophy’s universalism and Constantinianism (of which Hegel is the culminating exemplar),13 but also and more immediately because he writes in the wake of the Shoah – a Jewish catastrophe without parallel. In The Jewish Return into History, Fackenheim writes: “Philosophical and religious thought widely take themselves to be immune and indeed indifferent to the ‘accidents’ of ‘mere’ history. The conscious repudiation of this view, first in abstracto and subsequently in relation to the events of our age, is the major change in my thinking.”14 According to Fackenheim, thought must make itself vulnerable to the

54  Paul T. Wilford

historical domain, but this does not imply following mere trivial fads or fashions. Philosophical evaluation of the significance of the particular remains.15 Just as the dialectician seeks out the interlocutor that poses the sharpest challenge to his arguments, in order to refine, deepen, and further his understanding, so too must both philosophic reflection and religious doctrine be exposed to the “stern challenge of epoch-making events.” But this openness should not be understood as a conclusion drawn from new historicist thinking, whether of the radical or the more moderate sort.16 According to Fackenheim such openness was present from “the beginning of Jewish history.”17 If Judaism had hitherto been tempted to distance itself from history, from the real world of conflict and strife, of flesh-and-blood human suffering and striving, then this was an understandable mistake, an oversight. But, in our time, such an oversight is no longer possible. There can be no fundamentalist retreat from the world, whether in self-conscious isolation from one’s present or diachronically in the impulse to remove what’s essential from the vagaries of the temporal and the seemingly contingent realm of history. The philosophic ascent to necessity that wishes to transcend the historical risks being the theoretical equivalent of the ostrich sticking its head in the sand. Two events in particular compel the philosopher to return to the ostensible (or perhaps potential) cave of the historical: “the Holocaust and the rise of a Jewish state after two thousand years of Jewish statelessness.”18 Both the theologian and the philosopher must seek wisdom and insight in that messy realm of shadows, where, even in the best cases, only partial, indirect, mediated illumination may be available.19 Fackenheim’s dialectical engagement with Hegel is accordingly governed by two concerns: the problem of evil and the possibility of finding meaning – both metaphysical and moral – in history. His criticism of and attempt to surpass Hegel turns on a three-part movement of thought: facing squarely the historical reality of radical evil, asking whether Hegel’s systematic philosophic-theology can comprehend such evil, and ultimately judging it insufficient, concluding that modern philosophic reflection itself, which reaches its apogee in Hegel, runs aground and is found wanting. It cannot provide guidance as to how one ought to respond to history’s catastrophes. It cannot be the final word on wisdom, because it doesn’t help us live our lives in the present. The direction we seek lies beyond the compass of Hegel’s system. Yet this does not mean we can simply leave Hegel behind, consigning him to the dustbin of history. Fackenheim is in deep agreement with Rosenzweig: any new form of thought that will move beyond Hegel must do so by first addressing Hegel – if not by sublating him into a



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  55

new synthesis, then by wrestling with him and being marked by the encounter. My examination of Fackenheim’s wrestling with Hegel will develop in six sections. First, I explore the case for Hegel, focusing on his attempt to synthesize reason and revelation. Second, I interpret Fackenheim’s God’s Presence in History from a Hegelian perspective with the aim of developing a Jewish theory of history as a counterpoint to Hegel’s philosophy of history. Third, I consider the implications of the Shoah as a radical novum for both theories of man’s historicity. Fourth, I adumbrate Fackenheim’s building on Rosenzweig’s “New Thinking” as an attempt to formulate an authentically Jewish response. Fifth, I treat Fackenheim’s defence but ultimate critique of Hegel’s famous dictum “The Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual.” I conclude by describing in the broadest outline Fackenheim’s fragmented middle and his dialogic, philosophical, neo-Midrashic theology. The Case for Hegel: The True Is the Whole Hegel must be approached along two convergent axes: the historical and the religious. The grandeur of the systematic philosophic synthesis consists in its capacity to encompass what is traditionally understood as opposed to philosophy. Hegel attempts to conceptualize the particular, comprehending the elusively momentary temporal event, and to rationalize the revealed, transfiguring the mysterious individualized experience of the believer. The two dimensions converge both as the condition of Hegel’s speculative philosophy – the ripeness or fullness of time makes his activity possible insofar as there exists the requisite material to be transfigured – and as the telos of Hegel’s speculative philosophy. The whole labour of reason is to grasp these two dimensions, to see them as aspects of the self-differentiating movement of one substance, and in absolute knowing to come to an understanding of them that, in doing justice to them, justifies philosophy itself.20 Hegel’s philosophy, in other words, must be all encompassing. For Hegel, there is nothing entirely extraneous, merely wrong, or simply false in human history – in the various forms of past political life, religious practice, and philosophic reflection.21 One might say that Hegel takes Terence’s dictum Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (I am human, nothing human is alien to me) with the utmost seriousness. It provides a criterion by which to judge his philosophic achievement. If the true is the whole, then nothing can be set aside or ignored. There might be contingency in the historical world but there can be no remainder in the realm of thought.

56  Paul T. Wilford

For the purpose of understanding Fackenheim’s engagement with Hegel, we will foreground the religious dimension of this grand synthesis, but we must keep the historicity of Hegel continually in mind. Only in this way can we bring into focus why a Jewish philosopher is so profoundly interested in “the greatest modern Christian philosopher.”22 We can take as our orienting principle Rosenzweig’s judgment on Hegel, which stands as an epigraph for Fackenheim’s The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought: Philosophy is seen [by Hegel] as the consummator … of what was promised in revelation. Nor does philosophy exercise this office only sporadically or at the height of its career; but in every moment, with every breath it draws, it automatically confirms the truth predicated by revelation. Thus the old quarrel seems to have been composed, heaven and earth reconciled.23

To reconcile philosophy and religion cannot mean sharply distinguishing the domains in which each might freely operate or the attainment of an equitable irenic truce by demarcating the bounds of each discipline. To establish the limits of knowledge in order to make room for faith is to make reason sovereign; for Kant it is philosophic legislation that arbitrates between combatants, and the peace attained is only superficial. Religion within the boundaries of mere reason ultimately means a religion based on philosophy, a religion purged of all symbolic expressions save those that can spur rather than inspire moral action, which remains grounded on the universal dictates of a priori reason. In contrast, Hegel takes up the task of understanding religious existence as it understands itself and seeing this clearly, accurately, and precisely, “before undertaking such tasks as demythologizing and remythologizing as may be philosophically necessary.”24 The transcending of religion for Hegel is concomitantly the integration and synthesis of religious traditions. Hegel’s apparent hubris is concomitantly his humility. His system is not the product of self-sufficient, atemporal pure reason, but the final flowering of Spirit. Religion is the condition for Hegel’s philosophy of Geist. Even more than Newton, Hegel understands himself to stand on the shoulders of giants. His consummation is therefore also a dependence. Hegelianism combines a breathtaking claim for completeness with an awareness of dependence on religion, philosophy, and political life. It helps to approach Hegel’s synthesis by observing the exaggerations, abstractions, and one-sided interpretations of post-Hegelians. By highlighting the narrow path Hegel must travel if his system is to



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  57

achieve its aim of bringing philosophy closer to the standpoint where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing,”25 one can see more clearly how the radically innovative ambition is simultaneously deeply conservative. Seeking “a middle between right- and left-wing extremes, of which one would destroy the actual world and the other, philosophical thought,”26 Hegel’s consummation attempts to unite transcendence and immanence, the divine and the human realms.27 Hegel attempts to be this-worldly without being relentlessly atheistic; Hegel’s criticism therefore is also affirmative. In contrast, “the first element of common doctrine among all the left-wing Hegelians [is] an inseparable connection between the negation of all past and possible gods, and an affirmation of a future Man whose unprecedented ‘freedom’ will be the positive counterpart of his self-produced godlessness.”28 So adamant are left-wing Hegelians on remaining with the worldly, they are compelled to negate any ascent to divinity. The rejection of the humandivine synthesis of Hegel’s systematic philosophy in the direction of a this-worldly, political orientation results in a deification of man and the state.29 Man is the highest being, as Feuerbach, Ruge, and Marx never tire of reminding their audiences. The Kingdom of Spirit that Hegel aspires to – the idea of which, if not its actuality, is already present – must be realized through negation of the mediating otherness of the two other moments of the trinity. On the other hand, in rejecting the “left-wing reduction of Idea and Spirit to worldly finitude,” right-wing Hegelians tend to the “dissipation of the actual world into the logical realm.”30 At their most extreme, right-wing Hegelians commit the fatal error of fleeing from the world, of retreating into a quasi-Neoplatonic mysticism, which attempts to ascend to an unchanging absolute. Opposed to both of these is the Hegelian middle that, according to Fackenheim, ultimately turns on the successful transfiguration of Christianity. That transfiguration, however, requires bridging the eternal and the historical. Hegel must not only demonstrate that religion is rational – i.e., that as a human activity it is infused with the unique human capacity for reflection and, since it is essentially geistig, illustrates the infinity of self-consciousness – but also that there is not an unbridgeable divide between truths of reason and truths of fact, between the universal and the particular.31 Only by giving a rational account of history (uncovering reason at work in history) can he account for his own philosophy which, in the words of James Doull, “has the form of a timeless, comprehensive system and yet is, in his view, the product of his time.”32 In other words, Hegel’s concern with demonstrating that “history falls inside the realm of verities” is bound up with his interpretation of Christianity, for it is Christianity that ultimately makes this possible.33

58  Paul T. Wilford

But to repeat, this is only possible if Hegel can “bring about a final ‘peace’ between the final religion and the final philosophy. It would appear that unless he can achieve this peace, his whole philosophy falls into fragments.”34 Thus, both the resolution of the old quarrel between reason and revelation and the sublation of past historical epochs into a system that Fackenheim describes as “an infinite, self-explicating Thought-activity that mediates all things, divine as well as human,”35 depends on the possibility of a Hegelian middle that recognizes both “the contingency which permeates human life and the necessity achieved in philosophic thought.”36 Finding “the Absolute not beyond but present in the world, the world in which men suffer and labor, despair and hope, destroy and create, die and believe,” requires at the most general logical or conceptual level demonstrating the rationality of the threefold mediation of the components of Hegel’s philosophical science, namely, Nature, the Logical Idea, and Spirit.37 This Fackenheim undertakes through a careful exegesis of Enzyklopädie, §187 Zusatz.38 While the argument cannot be reconstructed here, the crucial upshot of the threefold mediation is that it “combines a pluralistic openness as hospitable to the varieties of contingent experience as any empiricism with a monistic comprehensiveness more radical in its claims than any other speculative rationalism.”39 But even if we grant the conceptual mediation, Fackenheim raises the question of how we are to confirm that this threefold mediation is not just a mediation in thought, a theoretical construct without relation to the world. How is it not just a “thought which stands over against the total reality which is not thought and in this stance merely asserts its over-reaching power?”40 If it were, it would be merely “a philosophic assertion over against a nonphilosophic life, itself wholly devoid of such identity,” namely, that between an overreaching Spirit and an overreaching Idea.41 Hegel argues, however, that this identity is already present in life before philosophy comes on the scene to “convert it into thought.”42 It exists, so Hegel claims, in Christianity, where “the Infinite and Divine has manifested itself in the finite and human.”43 The modern Christian world “already is doubly overreached, by a creating, preserving, and redeeming God and by a Spirit which, manifest in man, accepts itself as created, preserved, and redeemed, and in the Christian world, there already is a divine-human identity in the midst of persisting discord.”44 Modern philosophy, specifically the Hegelian consummation thereof, surpasses ancient philosophy on the basis of Christianity. “The problem of the Hegelian middle thus turns into the problem of the relation between religious life and philosophic thought.”45



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  59

Hegel’s transfiguration of Christianity is central to the problem that Fackenheim believes is Hegel’s primary preoccupation, namely, “the relation between all of human life and an all-comprehensive philosophical thought.”46 If successful, it constitutes a proof of Hegel’s claim that his philosophical-theology is the culmination of both the philosophical and Christian traditions. It synthesizes the modern tradition of autonomous rationality that knows what it makes with the traditional Christian belief in the receptivity of grace. It sublates all previous forms of thought because it sublates the present historical actuality, the definitive content of which is Lutheran Protestantism. “Only the final modern philosophy – Hegel’s own – can recognize that modern speculative thought presupposes the Christian faith which it was previously bound to oppose, and that the opposition between the two is relative rather than absolute.”47 Philosophical self-knowledge demands recognizing the conditions of speculative reason’s self-sufficiency, which it attempts to do precisely through a speculative transfiguration of Christianity. Thus the goal of Hegel’s philosophy, a comprehensive allencompassing, all-mediating thought, “is attainable only if it is somehow already actual in historical life.”48 In order to preserve this truth, Hegel’s speculative transfiguration of Christianity must maintain the distinction between the human and divine even while sublating it in an ascent to the absolute; the difference must be preserved in the uncovered identity. Hegel’s resolution must avoid two extremes: “a speculative pantheism which would dissipate the human into the Divine” and “an atheistic humanism which would reduce the Divine to the human.”49 The magnitude of the challenge is clear if one views the two activities independent of their content; from such a perspective, religion and philosophy seem ineluctably opposed. “Religion exists in the form of representation, in which the Divine that is represented remains other than the human who does the representing; free philosophy exists in the form of speculative thought which has denied this otherness and has risen to oneness with Divinity.”50 Moreover, the incompatibility of religion and philosophy seems confirmed by Hegel’s review of the history of philosophy. Greek philosophy appears as the destruction of Greek religion; medieval philosophy subordinates itself to ecclesiastical authority and loses its freedom; “and pre-Hegelian modern philosophy can reconquer the lost freedom only by waging total war upon faith.”51 Yet the challenge is superable in light of Christianity’s central mystery. The essential meaning of the incarnation for Hegel’s attempt to transfigure Christianity (without denying the validity of Christian representation) is that it unites in a double activity the otherness of the

60  Paul T. Wilford

commanding Lord of Judaism and the freedom of Greek worship. Christianity, thus, remains free in its reception of grace. As a consequence of Christianity’s central mystery “the divine-human relation – in all other religious representation composed of two activities, respectively divine and human – is in Christian representation one double activity.”52 Christian worship of Christ is also worship in Christ, a relation to a past event and a present appropriation. Nevertheless, representing this double activity proves difficult for Christianity; how can it balance freedom and grace without limiting them? How does it avoid dissipating one into the other?53 If both are to be real, representation seems limited to presenting an antinomy.54 But as with Kantian antinomies, Hegel thinks this is a limitation of the understanding (Verstand). Conceptual comprehension or speculative reason (Vernunft) conceives of the apparent passivity of the reception of grace as the activity of the divine in the human; the moments of the whole can be grasped by the concept (Begriff ) without denying the reality of either element of the divine-human pole.55 As Hegel remarks, “Grace enlightens the heart of man, it is the Spirit of God in man, so that man may be represented as passive in its activity, i.e., it is not his own activity. In the Concept, however, this double activity is to be grasped as single.”56 Hegel believes this philosophic reformulation of the relation only makes explicit what is already implicit in Christian teaching. The elevation of what is an sich sein to für sich sein requires a new form but the essential content of Christianity remains the same. The Incarnation is the heart of both Christianity and Hegel’s philosophy: “the Divine in the extreme of its infinity enters into the human in the extreme of its finitude and, what is more, into one contingent human in a contingent time and place. Yet this incursion into the finite redeems the finite: and it occurs when all history is ripe for it.”57 While Christian faith remains “with received paradoxical fact” and must remain at the level of representation (Vorstellung) and therefore is bound to the oppositional structure of the understanding (Verstand), philosophical comprehension transfigures that fact “into speculative necessity.”58 Philosophy achieves this by ascending to the divine pole of the divine-human relation and re-enacting in thought the divine activity: “The pre-worldly Trinity – that divine play in which Son separates from Father only to become one with Him in Spirit – emerges as the absolute Notion of religion: it is that divine-human unity which is in various degrees explicated in every existing religion.”59 The unique historical moment thus becomes not just a historical fact; it is also a truth of reason. The incarnation is the world-historical event par excellence, for it changes the temporality of the finite; it changes the very basis on



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  61

which the distinction between the contingent realm of fact and the necessary realm of reason is grounded. From the perspective of philosophy, therefore, the singular historical moment is the realization of the logical – the conceptual made actual. Accordingly, “the worldly incursion of that Trinity emerges as the total self-explication of the Notion [Begriff] of religion.”60 For such comprehending conceptual knowing (begreifende Wissen), the human element of the divine-human pole is “a divine selfothering; the diremption between the Divine and the human, a divine self-diremption; and the divine reconciliation with the human, a divine self-reconciliation.”61 There is a one that is a three; the Christian Trinity is a reflection of the same threefold mediating structure that unites Nature, the Logical Idea, and Spirit! The complete explication of the concept of religion requires the elaboration and relation between the kingdoms of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This final kingdom is the “divine self-­ reconciliation in the Christian community manifest in a worship which is both in and of Christ.”62 This is the achievement of history, which both makes Hegel’s philosophy possible and is fully intelligible (and therefore recognized for the achievement that it truly is) only in light of that philosophy. This philosophic comprehension of the truth of Christianity exists in tandem with the claims Hegel makes about its realization in the actual existing world and its institutions. The ethical life (Sittlichkeit) of modernity reconciles “religion with actuality, with worldliness.”63 The achievement of modernity, as expressed in the Philosophy of Right, is the reconciliation of the mundane realm with the realm of religious truth, which no longer exists in an other-worldly beyond.64 “Actuality as such is reconciled with Spirit, and the state with religious consciousness.”65 The rationality inherent in life, achieved in the modern state with its mutual and reciprocal recognition of individuals as rights-bearing agents, makes possible a reconciliation between life and speculative philosophy.66 There is no longer a disjunction as in Kant between thought and life, or the “ought” and the “is.” Hegel’s philosophic consummation overcomes all such forms of bad infinity.67 In sum, philosophy transfigures its own grounds, and it comes to see as its own what once was foreign, understanding itself as the consummation of religion and retrospectively seeing religion as implicitly itself. Since religion is the principal expression of Spirit in its volksgeistig historical determinations, in reconciling itself to religion, philosophy finds itself at home in history.68 On Fackenheim’s reading, the core of Hegel’s philosophy of history is his philosophy of religion. The key to Hegel’s theodicy therefore is the prior reconciliation achieved in Christianity. On the one hand, from the perspective of religion, this is

62  Paul T. Wilford

a reconciliation of the divine and human, and from a logical perspective, the infinite and the finite, but it can also be understood historically.69 Philosophic thought confirms the Christian presumption that Jewish and Greek-Roman religions are partial anticipations of the truth and that they “are necessary for, and absorbed in, the development of Christianity”70 – a development that culminates in Hegel’s conceptual comprehension of that very development. Reading God’s Presence in History: Towards a Jewish Philosophy of History Reflecting on the turbulent, variegated, and morphing history of the Jews, Gershom Scholem argued that Judaism cannot be defined according to its essence, since it has no essence. Judaism cannot therefore be regarded as a closed historical phenomenon whose development and essence came into focus by a finite sequence of historical, philosophical, doctrinal, or dogmatic judgments and statements. Judaism is rather a living entity which for some reason has survived as the religion of a chosen people.71

The continuity of Judaism amidst such change is the remarkable fact with which one must begin. Discontinuity, adaptations, and innovations only appear as such over and against an enduring substantiality that maintains its identity through various permutations. Yet so great are the continual metamorphoses of Judaism that Scholem argues against any simple or straightforward essentialism, reminding one of Nietzsche’s quip that “only that which has no history can be defined.”72 Nevertheless, there is this extraordinary continuity, this “phenomenal fact” of a people existing for three thousand years. This is the primary “enigma” in need of explanation.73 Jews around the world still celebrate the deliverance of their ancestors from Egypt and the revelation of the Torah at Sinai.74 Understanding how Judaism can in fact have an essential structure but remain open to history or how there can be continuity over thousands of years without strict uniformity is the task of Fackenheim’s 1970 monograph God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections. To this end, Fackenheim attempts a philosophic reconstruction of what is implicit in Jewish religious practice and theology, raising to philosophical self-consciousness what is implicit in the fabric of Judaism through an investigation of the most important moments of revelation, which he calls root experiences, and their relation to



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  63

epoch-making events that threaten Jewish identity. He thereby elaborates a Jewish philosophy of history – one intended as an adequate response to all Jewish experience.75 If Hegel seeks a mediation of eternity and history, Fackenheim seeks an understanding of the intersections of eternity and history, or how human history itself can be sacred history. For both thinkers, understanding the human condition requires an understanding of the ontological dimension of history. As Fackenheim repeatedly underscores, the heart of Judaism is a commitment to the God not merely of, but also in, history.76 Fackenheim’s short work has a complex, dialectical structure, developing its argument in three moments, each of which follows a distinct methodology. Here, we will focus on the first part, “The Structure of Jewish Experience,” which combines phenomenological and historical elements as it pursues “a structured essence and not sheer historical fact.” Fackenheim develops an account of Judaism that is decisively shaped by its vulnerability “to epoch-making events.”77 That is, if Judaism is defined by belief in the God of history, a God who acts and commands in history as experienced by geographically and temporally situated finite beings, Judaism must be open to history – not incidentally, but necessarily so. Understanding how the root experiences in which Judaism originates necessitate an openness to epoch-making events – how taking one’s bearings from past historical events requires being open to present historical events – is the first step towards grasping Fackenheim’s philosophical-theological approach to history. We must begin with the distinction between “epoch-making events” and “root experiences,” which form a dialectical pair. On the one hand, although “epoch-making events,” such as “the end of prophecy and the destruction of the first Temple, the Maccabean revolt, the destruction of the second Temple, and the expulsion from Spain,”78 make new claims on the Jewish faith and require new efforts and innovative responses, they do not produce a new faith; rather, in such moments the old faith is tested by new experiences, the past is confronted by the present. “Root experiences” on the other hand are constitutive of the faith itself. They set the parameters of the faith, laying the ground for all future innovation. They lie at the origin of belief and, being first temporally, also act first logically. Fackenheim identifies three facets of root experiences: (1) they are past historical moments that make a claim on the present; (2) they are public historical moments; (3) they must in some way be accessible to the present.79 These three conditions are presupposed in the ritual activity of the pious Jew who re-enacts the first great root experience in every Passover seder and in such devotion has some access to “a divine Presence [which is] manifest in and through

64  Paul T. Wilford

a natural-historical event.”80 But how to understand such access? We must return to the “song at the sea,” for this event not only “allowed Jewish history to begin” but also serves “as a paradigm of all subsequent Jewish history.”81 To explore the possible meaning of the re-presencing of the past, Fackenheim quotes at length a passage from Buber’s Moses that attempts to describe the subjective dimension of the miraculous – that is, revelation not from an incorporeal, bird’s-eye third-person perspective,82 but from the perspective of those experiencing the event, the first-person perspective of the “I” or “We.”83 The parting of the Red Sea, the salvation of the Israelites, was immediately comprehended as a miracle, not in the sense that the Israelites interpreted a natural-historical event “as a miracle, but that they experienced it as such.”84 Contrary to the standard Enlightenment definition of a miracle as a moment that contravenes the natural order, the focus on experience takes the disposition, comportment, or mood of the religious person as decisive. “Abiding astonishment” is the condition of the religious person, and he remains ensconced in that wonder: “No knowledge, no cognition, can weaken his astonishment. Any causal explanation only deepens the wonder for him.”85 According to Buber, “the great turning-points in religious history” consist in people or individuals holding fast to this wonder, this abiding astonishment – the original experience that is constituted by a peculiar subject-object interaction.86 A miracle therefore “is not something ‘supernatural or ‘superhistorical,’ but an incident, an event which can be fully included in the objective, scientific nexus of nature and history; the vital meaning of which, however, for the person to whom it occurs, destroys the security of the whole nexus of knowledge for him, and explodes the fixity of the fields of experience named ‘Nature’ and ‘History.’”87 A miracle is the revelation of God’s presence in the naturalhistorical world of human experience.88 Such an understanding of revelation makes the miracle accessible in the present, as abiding astonishment can be recovered by the pious Jew: In reenacting the natural-historical event, he reenacts the abiding astonishment as well, and makes it his own. Hence the ‘sole Power’ present then is present still. Hence memory turns into faith and hope. Hence the event at the Red Sea is recalled now and will continue to be recalled even in the Messianic days. Thus the reenacted past legislates to present and future. Thus, in Judaism, it is a root experience.89

Fackenheim pairs the salvific revelation of Exodus with the commanding Divine Presence of Sinai. Deliverance is incomplete until the



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  65

Deuteronomic legislation for future generations is heeded. Here too astonishment abides as “Divinity is present in the commandment.” As a commanding presence, though, the astonishment “turns into deadly terror.”90 One stands before the legislating God in fear and trembling. And yet legislation implies freedom – “ought” implies “can” – and the awesome power is seen to be gracious. Pious astonishment is transformed into joy “at a Grace which restores and exalts human freedom by its commanding Presence.”91 The Covenant makes the gravest demands and thus asserts the nobility of the human. The twofold realization is the double movement of Terror and Joy. Such revelatory experience is perennially available to the pious.92 According to tradition “all generations of Israel were present at Sinai, and the Torah is given whenever a man receives it.”93 In the genuine experience of the commanding presence, past and present collapse – Mt. Sinai is a moment of eternity in history.94 The temporal stance of the believer, however, is threatened by philosophy, when the immediacy of experience is confronted by the mediation of reflective thought.95 That is, immediacy makes possible an identification of past and present; the community of believers is brought into being in the ritual re-enactment. The cultic act cannot be simply a remembering of the past, an exercise in self-knowledge, or a moment of ancestral gratitude. Philosophic reflection, in contrast, entails an activity on the part of the thinking subject that overcomes a distance between the knowing subject and the object to be known. Rather than identity there is difference. One cannot immediately identify with an object of reflection. Fackenheim is keenly aware of this difficulty, as the categories of immediacy and reflection are crucial to Hegel’s whole philosophic enterprise but of particular importance in the constitution of community.96 However, Fackenheim sees in Midrashic thinking an alternative mode of reflection, which as thought is distanced but which does not destroy the root experiences as philosophical thought is wont to do.97 It manages both to reflect upon the past and yet remain “immediately at the Red Sea and before Sinai.” The question is whether such a mode of thinking is not only paradoxical but impossible, or if there is a mode of thought that is doubled – a dialectic that is not only a Hegelian both/ and, but also an either/or. The yoking of identity and difference or the union of union and non-union must surpass Hegel by refusing the necessary Aufhebung of dialectical opposites. It dwells with the unresolvable mystery of the claims of Jewish root experience, while anticipating an ultimate resolution – that the world will ultimately be made morally whole and theoretically intelligible. “Midrashic thought, therefore, is both fragmentary and whole.”98 It seeks to express the paradoxical

66  Paul T. Wilford

contradictions “between divine transcendence and divine involvement and between divine Power and human freedom”99 and to hold “fast to the truth of these contradictory affirmations even as it expresses their contradictoriness.”100 Rabbinic thought, moreover, does not offer an alternative perspective that resolves the contradictions: a view of what’s really at work in history from the perspective of God that is simply obscure to us.101 Such a perspective would require there to be two histories: an actual history and a spiritual history, in which case actual history would be an illusion and the sufferings of men rendered insignificant. Rather, rabbinic thought holds fast to the reality of human history, insisting that obedience and disobedience to the law make “a real, ultimate difference.”102 The test of such thinking is catastrophe, and tradition provides evidence of the resources of rabbinic thought to remain with historical realities and even great tragedies such as the destruction of the Temple by Titus in 70 CE, and Hadrian’s attempt, in the wake of the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, to purge Jerusalem of Judaism (150 CE). The rabbis faced disasters “with unyielding realism and held fast to the root experiences of Judaism with unyielding stubbornness.”103 The rabbinic response enables Judaism to remain true “to the catastrophic historical present, even as they remained faithful to the saving and commanding past.” In so doing, the Jews “remained stubborn witnesses to the nations that all history both stands in need of redemption and is destined to receive it.”104 Thus, the root experiences of Judaism require that “the divine Presence occurs within history, not as its consummation or transfiguration.”105 There cannot be a flight from history for Judaism; its forms of mysticism must remain within the world, seeking “salvation in and commandments for history.” But seeking God in history as somehow the sole power behind the causal nexus of all history must nevertheless not overwhelm history, “allowing no room for either freedom or evil” – such a God would amount to Fate.106 Either a flight from history or a flight from history as a product of man’s freedom for good or evil would amount to “retroactively destroying the events at the Red Sea and Sinai.”107 That is, a Jew’s stance towards God’s presence in history is his stance to the root experiences of Judaism and therewith to Judaism as such. Inhabiting such a position entails an orientation to the present in which evil is a real possibility and at the same time an orientation to the future in which evil is overcome. Orientation towards a Messianic future, where divine power and human freedom are reconciled, is the corollary of the orientation to root experiences, or those past events that are present in ritual re-enactment.108



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  67

Revelation so understood changes the ontological status of the particular and thereby the meaning of history. Some historical episodes are not merely truths of fact (events in the past that can be recalled in the present), but events that in being re-enacted are present again. The meaning of the double giving of the Torah – at a particular moment and whenever a man receives it – is an attempt to express the paradoxical temporality of revelation, or, more precisely, of God’s presence in history and man’s receptivity to that presence. The possible re-presencing of the past in ritual is a testament to the belief of the double character of root experiences, which shape the individual Jew’s existence. The drama of his particular existence occurs within the framework of the whole of time and eternity. As Fackenheim writes in “An Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology”: Creation establishes time and history, whereas redemption consummates and redeems them. Revelation is an incursion of God into time and history; eternity here breaks into time without dissolving time’s particularity. Creation and redemption establish the significance of time and history in general. Revelation establishes the significance of the here and now as unique; it is the religious category of existentiality as such … A history in which revelation is possible is one in which every event, no matter how insignificant, may in its stark particularity acquire unique meaning.109

To see Fackenheim’s claim clearly it helps to recall that from the classical perspective, stark particularity is meaningless. It is incomprehensible, for it eludes being subsumed under a universal. Similarly, although Hegel is committed to a view of the ontological significance of history, the particular nevertheless only takes on meaning as an expression of the universal; even individual human agents are only world-historical figures because they are expressions of the logic of Spirit. Although Hegel may be thoroughly historical, he is not existentially so.110 Fackenheim’s philosophy of history asks how a Jew can remain “not only in history but also somehow of it.”111 He might elect to keep himself separate from it, from all the challenges and vicissitudes of worldly history; relegating these vagaries to insignificance, he might assume the posture that nothing of any significance between Sinai and messianic days can occur. He thus can remain indifferent to the Greek-Roman, the medieval Catholic, the Islamic, and the secular-Protestant worlds and all their works. However, to do so comes at a great price: such a person “cuts off his own history from world history, reduces himself to a worldless monk, and confines the present effectiveness of the God of all history to Jewish history, all of which is contrary to central Jewish

68  Paul T. Wilford

religious commitments.”112 Alternatively, he can insist on being of history, but this requires being open to epoch-making events. He must risk self-exposure and therefore change while holding fast to the anchor of his root experiences, lest he be swept away by history’s unfolding. Only thus can he maintain his identity without forsaking the world.113 Radical Evil and Rupture: A Historical novum As we have seen, both Hegelian philosophy and Judaism require a relation between the historical and the divine, the temporal and the transcendent. Each is defined by its attempt to understand a relation between two seemingly opposed dimensions of the human condition. But what if an event on the historical side of the ledger cannot be balanced, mediated, or comprehended? What if a moment in time, in the world of flux and change, is entirely unique? What if that same moment is universally recognized as a terrible horror and, being without precedent, seems to call all former certainties into doubt? How should we understand that kind of eruption onto the stage of world history? Can a particular such as this be understood as the manifestation of Spirit or the revelation of the divine? Or is it relegated to the contingent, to the realm of accident, and therefore without essential meaning? Is it a moment when the divine has turned away? When deus absconditus has left man to his own devices – however wicked they may be – or when Weltgeschichte is no longer animated by Weltgeist? The Holocaust compels us to confront such questions head on, without shirking or looking away. Doing so, Fackenheim argues, leads us to grapple with the paradoxical possibility that, in the words of Elie Wiesel, “the Event remains unique, unlike any other product of history, it transcends history.”114 It is this apparent inversion of the eternaltemporal relation that lies at the basis of Fackenheim’s claim that the Holocaust constitutes a novum in world-history – that it differs from all past events in both Jewish and gentile history.115 Its magnitude, its terror, and its depth surpass previous Jewish catastrophes. Worse than the tyrannies of Pharaoh, of Hadrian, of Titus, worse than the expulsions from England under Edward I in 1290, or from Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, worse than the persecution of the Inquisition, the Holocaust outstrips all previous epoch-making tragedies. The suffering is senseless – without purpose – for, unlike Torquemada, who “destroyed bodies in order to save souls, Eichmann sought to destroy souls before he destroyed bodies.”116 Judaism was capable of a response to all these previous calamities; its adaptability and the invention and creativity of its people allowed it to endure. But how might it respond



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  69

to a travesty of a different order? Can it remain open to history as it did following Hadrian’s attempted purge of Jerusalem? Isn’t the temptation to flee history all the greater – to retreat into the past or to transcend suffering in mystic self-forgetting? To explore the meaning of this novum of history, I will begin by focusing on three interrelated aspects of the “Event.” The first is the criterion used by the Nazis to single out Jews according to race and generational continuity – the perverse application of sin being visited unto the third and fourth generation – rather than belief.117 Second, we must face what Fackenheim calls the characteristic product of Auschwitz, the Muselmann, which Fackenheim argues is a new ontological possibility. Third, we will consider the ramifications of the Shoah from the perspective of Jewish-Christian relations, and the possibility of reading the Tanakh or Old Testament in light of such a world-historical event. According to Fackenheim, the only consistent element of Nazi ideology – the central feature of their Weltanschauung – was the opposition to the Jew.118 The Aryan was negatively determined, meaning above all not Jew (hence Semites such as the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Asians such as the Japanese could be counted as Aryans).119 The Jew in turn was defined by the faith of their great-grandparents. One of the great glories of Judaism, the emphasis on the family, is heinously employed as the criterion to identify the object of Nazi terror. Thus, Jews were murdered because their great-grandparents had, if only in a limited way, kept the Covenant. Had these great-grandparents abandoned their Jewish faith, and failed to bring up Jewish children, then their fourth-generation descendants might have been among the Nazi executioners, but not among their Jewish victims. Like Abraham of old, European Jews sometime in the mid-nineteenth century offered a human sacrifice, by the mere minimal commitment to the Jewish faith of bringing up Jewish children. But unlike Abraham they did not know what they were doing, and there was no reprieve. This is the brute fact which makes all comparisons odious or irrelevant. This is the scandal of the particularity of Auschwitz which, once faced by the Jewish believer, threatens total despair.120

This principle of selection appears to make martyrdom impossible. When apostasy isn’t an option, one cannot “choose death al kiddush haShem, ‘for the sanctification of the divine Name.’”121 Deprived of choice, of human agency, individuals were condemned not only to death but to a death without the possibility of self-conscious self-sacrifice. In defiance of Hadrian, Rabbi Akiba could die with Sh’ma Yisrael on his lips,

70  Paul T. Wilford

but martyrdom was denied the victims of Auschwitz. “The new Jewish crime was not an act – the practice of mitzvot, the study of Torah, the ordination of new rabbis – but birth.”122 The Nazis, however, were not content with depriving their victims of agency, and mere murder alone was insufficient. Instead, their evil was perversely inventive or, at the risk of blaspheming, creative. In the figure of the walking dead Muselmann, Fackenheim sees the Nazi’s “most characteristic, most original product.”123 Primo Levi’s description of the zombie-like creature – what Fackenheim calls a “new way of being in human history”124 – evokes the horrors of the inverted world where evil reigned: The Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.125

As Fackenheim emphasizes, the Nazis created a hitherto inconceivable way of being. As a wholly new possibility – not merely the actualization of a possibility that was latent (or in potency) – the Muselmann is ontologically decisive. For in light of the brute fact of their existence, das bloß Existieren, “philosophers must face a novum within a question as old as Socrates: what does it mean to be human?”126 The brute facticity, the sheer existence (Dasein) of such beings requires rethinking what is human.127 To clarify, the existence of an instance can be understood to reveal or disclose something of a being’s essence (something hitherto obscure), but, according to Fackenheim, this traditional logical language is not strong enough. It fails not only on a moral plane, but metaphysically as well, for the Muselmann did not simply reveal something hitherto obscure but brought that possibility into being.128 At its most profound, Fackenheim understands the novum as compelling us to rethink the relation between essence and existence. Old thinking will not suffice. We have no choice but to recognize traditional ontological distinctions as shattered by historical facticity. With the Muselmänner we begin to see what Fackenheim means by radical evil, an evil that has a terrifying ontological positivity to it. Evil as traditionally understood, i.e., as negation or privation of the good, is insufficient given its power to create such horrific works as the Muselmann.129 In sum, the Muselmann expresses Hans Jonas’s metaphysically paradoxical judgment that in the Holocaust “much more was



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  71

real than is possible”130 and confirms the testimony of Wiesel that “not only man died, but also the idea of man.”131 The Holocaust challenges not only Jews but also Christians, as well as the relation between them. Fackenheim’s writings approach the rift from a number of perspectives. Most profoundly, though, the Holocaust seems to threaten the basis of their shared identity, attacking the root of the connecting hyphen in the very idea of Judeo-Christian civilization. In The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust, Fackenheim raises this disturbing question by considering how Nazi terror, predicated on a categorical distinction, created an existential abyss – one that too few Christians amidst the nightmare of the Shoah attempted to close.132 The “Aryan”/“non-Aryan” abyss was a novum in history. The novum was a caesura in the history of Judaism, Christianity, and the relation between them. “Non-Aryan” Jews were singled out for defamation, persecution and eventual murder: the novum for them was to be subjected to a process that limited and in the end destroyed all choice. For “Aryan” Christians, in contrast, the novum was the gift of a choice; they could accept or reject their “Aryan” designation. In acquiescing and accepting, they willynilly endorsed the “Aryan”/”Non-Aryan” abyss, nay, willy-nilly widened it. A closure would have come to pass had Christian ­multitudes – led by pastors, priests, bishops, theologians, all recognizing a kairos that was theirs – brought down the “Aryan”-Christian/“non-Aryan”-Jew ­distinction – brought down the Third Reich! – with the Onward-ChristianSoldiers-Battle-Cry “Now we are Jews!” This, however, did not happen: neither the churchmen and theologians nor the multitudes recognized the hour of their visitation. And since the many acquiesced in their “Aryan” designation, the abyss created by their acquiescence could not be closed by the few who rejected it. Identifying with “non-Aryan” Jews, helping them in word and deed, in extremis trying to save Jewish lives at the risk of their own, they could not close the abyss but only, as it were, leap across it, revealing in the act what it was: if Christians succeeded in saving a Jew’s life they were Christian heroes, while the saved Jew was only a survivor; and if they failed they were Christian martyrs, while the murdered Jew only a victim.133

In contrast to the degraded condition of the Jews, Christians still had the choice of martyrdom.134 The Nazi distinction was successful insofar as it created a rift between Jew and Gentile in reality, and although one might believe the rift existed only for twelve years, Fackenheim compels us to face its legacy. Approaching the novum from the question of JewishChristian relations brings into sharp relief the continued ramifications of the event. It forces us to confront the question of the relation between our

72  Paul T. Wilford

present post-Auschwitz condition and the common origins, the shared root, the textual basis of possible Jewish-Gentile relations. In light of the Shoah one must ask whether Jews and Christians can turn to their shared text and find common ground for communion and dialogue. In hermeneutical terms, it raises the question: can a historical event change our condition sufficiently to cut us off from the roots of our past? Can a historical calamity change our epistemic condition? Can we become sufficiently unmoored from our traditions, from the source of our identity, as to make our origins not only obscure but inaccessible? Or, if not quite cutting us off completely, might one disastrous event make the spiritual act of reading openly and with an eye to wisdom profoundly more difficult?135 If the Holocaust was a historical caesura, what then are the new conditions for reading and receiving the words of God?136 Revelation, understood on the basis of Buber’s I-Thou model, which Fackenheim appropriates, is a relation between eternity and time, made possible by the fact that “the God who speaks into this here and now speaks into every here and now: because He – He alone – is the ‘eternal Thou.’”137 But can God be thought to speak into the here and now of Auschwitz? Reflecting on the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s, Buber writes of the Eclipse of God, the eclipse of the light of heaven. God seems silent; the connection between the eternal Thou and the human is muted. And yet, is this formulation – the eclipse of God – sufficient? Is not the testimony of Elie Wiesel a more profound articulation of the problem? Witnessing a hanging in Auschwitz, Wiesel writes: Three victims in chains – and one of them, the little servant, the sad-eyed angel. The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him … The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over … And from within me, I heard a voice answer …: “Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging on this gallows.”138

We are forced to ask, can the Eternal die in such temporal horror? Might it be a caesura in human history because the transcendent dimension of



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  73

the human being was destroyed? Ultimately, the Holocaust is a novum in human history because it negates the divine. Never before “have men anywhere had such a dreadful, such a horrifying, reason for turning their backs on the God of history.”139 Yet intellectual probity requires us to ask: is the Holocaust really a novum? Is not evil coeval with human history? Jeremiah laments the injustice of the prosperity of the wicked and Job’s sufferings are far from ever being adequately explained. When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, “the rabbis could see no meaning in the event.”140 Could it be our proximity to this calamity that makes it appear unique? Such a possibility would in a peculiar sense be comforting, for in all past sufferings, Jewish faith found a way to endure. Jews did not despair of God. They did not turn their backs on Him, did not escape into “mysticism or other-worldliness.”141 They tenaciously stuck with Him and with history and with the belief that He was, is, and will be the God of history. In the wake of the Shoah, however, such a posture seems beyond our grasp. Could the question of such suffering “be answered in any sense whatever in case the eclipse of God were ended and He appeared to us?”142 That is, although Job does not ever grasp the purpose of his suffering or the meaning of his trials, he nevertheless receives some response from out of the whirlwind that constitutes a reconciliation between the human and the divine. Could any epiphanic moment constitute a response to the question of Auschwitz? Fackenheim appears to answer in the negative: “the question of Auschwitz will not be answered by a saving divine presence.”143 If, then, Nazi evil is unique, “How can a Jew begin to seek a response? Looking for precedents, he finds none either in Jewish or in non-Jewish religious history.”144 The people that were kept by keeping the Sabbath must ask new and “unprecedented questions.”145 And what of Hegel’s synthesis? Does his system fare any better when confronted with the Holocaust? What sort of response to the calamity might Hegelian philosophy provide? Hegel acknowledges that “history is a slaughter-bench,” that historical change entails destruction and violence, and that the clash of civilizations and the inauguration of new modes and orders is always violent.146 As Hegel makes clear, the happy ages of man are the blank pages of history – nothing of significance happens when man is content.147 But can a novum such as the Holocaust be understood in the same category? Is it the product of a clash of civilizations like the military struggles between the Persian empire and the Greek poleis, or of competing grounds of morality like the waning of the Greek world, or of disintegrating social forms like the bloody transition from the Roman Republic to the imperial state?

74  Paul T. Wilford

It appears to be something of a different order – without rhyme or reason. Der List der Vernünft used human passions to achieve its ends; world-historical actors pursuing their own local interests served the aims of Spirit. Individual passion and the logical idea (die Idee) constitute the warp and woof of Weltgeschichte, but how can the Holocaust be seen to advance the aims of the Idea? If it serves no purpose, then it must be merely contingent, and Hegel’s philosophy does leave room for contingency, for vagaries, for corruption, and even for spiritual decay. But it cannot countenance what Fackenheim terms “radical anti-Spirit.” If it is neither contingent nor comprehensible, the Holocaust threatens Hegel’s claim to wholeness, to universal mediation. From a Hegelian perspective, however, one must first ask: what animated Nazi Germany? All cultures, civilizations, and peoples are animated and unified by an idea, a view of the world, an account of what’s essential and substantial. Moreover, hitherto all world-­historical peoples are manifestations of Spirit, expressions of some underlying ground that gives rise to multiplicity. Could the Nazi regime be so understood? This seems intolerable – what purpose could be working itself out in such senseless malevolence? If we reject the possibility of mediation, then the only category remaining is the contingent. But is the Holocaust really to be understood as merely a contingent aberration without ramifications for the claims of the Hegelian system? Or is it evidence of something else entirely? Fackenheim answers: “At work was an all-too-spiritual anti-Spirit that affirmed the modern identity of the divine nature and the human in an unprecedented, enthusiastic, self-sacrificing celebration of hatred, degradation, and murder.” The kingdom of Spirit was replaced by the Holocaust Kingdom.148 The Nazis are the most complete inversion of the identity of the human and the divine celebrated by Hegel – there cannot be a more radical challenge to the optimism that proclaims Spirit can be at home with itself (bei sich sein). Nazism cannot be understood as a contingent “accidental taint of an essence, it had a demonic essence of its own, which would surely have destroyed the Europe Hegel believed in but for an accidental event – Hitler’s loss of the war. Hegel did not anticipate any such essence; indeed, its possibility remains unaccounted for in his philosophy. For while he accounts for evil he fails to account for demonic evil.”149 Such evil surpasses what appears to be Hegel’s final verdict that evil is “the conscious separation of the reflective will from the universality of spirit.”150 This view amounts to evil as autarchy, which can be understood as the modification of the old theological doctrine of moral evil as disobedience, thereby absolving God, since the necessary corollary



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  75

of freedom is the possibility of sin. But as Wiesel’s account suggests, absolving God is inadequate if He too died in Auschwitz. Moreover, Hegel’s view of evil seems to apply to the individual agent within a sittliche framework. If for Hegel evil is “separation from the universal, which latter is the rational, laws, the determinations of spirit,” then it occurs against the backdrop of some positive order.151 In Nazi Germany, however, evil had become “the universal, the ‘rational,’ the ‘laws,’ the ‘determinations of spirit.’”152 Evil as the separation of the individual from the universal (as the rejection of the universal as constituting the individual’s substantiality) proves inadequate when confronting the Holocaust. If evil is rooted “in the intrinsic tendency of subjective freedom towards autarchy,” why the wholesale subordination of a population to the universal of the regime? Wouldn’t a Hegelian analysis compel one to follow Fackenheim and conclude that in Nazi Germany the ethical substance, within which individuals locate themselves and by which they orient their subjectivity, was itself evil? It is as though a whole nation gave into the most extreme autarchy and willed nothing but itself and its own strength and power. But this formulation too is inadequate. For the primary object of Nazi will (or the universal willed by the regime) was the destruction of the Jews.153 The regime’s guiding principle was the final solution to the Jewish question; for this aim everything was sacrificed.154 Hegel can comprehend evil as tragic, and the history of Spirit often takes the form of tragic conflict (e.g., the execution of Socrates), but does the idea of tragedy apply to the Shoah? “Auschwitz is a unique descent into hell. It is an unprecedented celebration of evil. It is evil for evil’s sake.”155 This raises a further question: does Hegel fail to comprehend radical evil because it is impossible to think a particular qua particular? That is, can one grasp a particular that is not a member of a class (as one might try to grasp an individual’s peculiar, idiosyncratic personality)? Hegel seems to respond to the problem of the intelligibility of the particular with his philosophy of history, for such a theoretical endeavour is precisely the attempt to make what is singular or individual intelligible in light of larger whole. But if the Holocaust is genuinely unique, it is beyond both contextualization and classification.156 If it is beyond classification, then it is beyond intelligibility. If this is the case, then it is no wonder that “[m]en shun the scandal of the particularity of Auschwitz.”157 For with Auschwitz we confront the limits of human reason. Perhaps Hegel’s failure is the failure of all rational explanation. But if Hegelianism is threatened “with intellectual fragmentation, Judaism is threatened with existential despair.”158 How then can Jewish

76  Paul T. Wilford

theology respond? After Auschwitz, what does Judaism have to say?159 How can Fackenheim avoid “the conclusion that history is simply meaningless”?160 Jewish Existentialism and the Possibility of Teshuvah For all Fackenheim’s innovation, for all his engagement with twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Rosenzweig, Buber, and Strauss, as well as his appropriation of Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Schelling – not to mention his wrestling with Heidegger’s theory of historicity and human finitude – he affirms the essential continuity of Judaism, remaining within the structured essence defined by Jewish root experiences. Before turning to the question governing To Mend the World, namely how we are “to confront the Holocaust in its scandalous particularity,”161 we need to consider a preliminary conclusion of Fackenheim’s dialectical exposure of Judaism to Hegelianism: What if some distinctions – between God and man, and between the one true God and all the false – were in fact as absolute as they are held to be by the Jewish religious self-understanding? Or, to put it more cautiously, what if the Jewish religious self-understanding has been able to hold fast to these distinctions in response to three thousand years of world-historical change rather than at the price of withdrawal from it?162

In this question, we see the core of Judaism and the possibility of an authentically Jewish response to the Holocaust – one that rests on these two completely non-negotiable principles. To reiterate, Fackenheim contends that Judaism is a unified (if not uniform) continuous tradition and yet remains open – holding fast to these tenets amid self-exposure to the developments of world-spirit, whether political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic. From the Hegelian perspective, Judaism presents a paradox: all other forms of religious life are tied to a specific Zeitgeist; they are coextensive with specific political, economic, technological, and philosophic developments – with highly specific, correlated determinations (Bestimmungen) of absolute essence (absolute Wesen) and subjectivity. Yet Judaism endures. For Hegel, Judaism must indeed remain a riddle, for it appears unlike all other world-historical phenomena: although anachronistic, it persists. If Judaism does contain the resources to respond to the terror of the Shoah, it is precisely because it is such a riddle – self-same, even as self-exposed. Such self-exposure, however, is not without great risk. As we have seen, being open to history entails being open to epoch-making events,



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  77

and “an event is epoch-making only if it threatens the root experiences, and the threat is removed only if a response is found.”163 The Holocaust constitutes such an epoch-making event, rivaling in significance and surpassing in tragedy the expulsion from Jerusalem; it is “a threat without precedent, mortal unless and until a truly adequate response is found.”164 In the wake of such an historical rupture, without precedents to guide him, in a new epoch beyond modernity, beyond post Hegel mortuum, and facing the possibility that all forms of thought and faith are obviated by the all-encompassing nihilism of the Nazis, Fackenheim attempts to formulate an adequate response and thereby lay the foundations for post-Holocaust Jewish thought. Elaborating what I will call a “Jewish existentialism” relevant to both the religious and the secular, Fackenheim discovers in heroic deeds of resistance to Nazi terror an Archimedean point, “an Ultimate” from which to begin again.165 In the impossible deeds of the victims of the Unwelt, Fackenheim spies a new dimension of the human being, a new ontological possibility that makes hope imaginable when despair alone seems reasonable.166 Thus, although no religious meaning can be found in the horrors of Auschwitz, there is yet the possibility of a religious response, and it is Fackenheim’s contention that the fate of Judaism and the Jewish people depends on finding it.167 Rather than a Hegelian transcending, what is needed “is the Jewish idea of Teshuvah.”168 But how, in the face of such an historical novum, can one turn towards God? Fackenheim’s answer is constructed on the basis of the possibility of three modes of human activity that exceed, surpass, or otherwise elude Hegelian conceptual comprehension: surprise, resistance, and command. As we have seen, Fackenheim understands revelation as the possibility of an experience whereby something erupts into the world and disturbs our average, everyday understanding of the natural-cum-­ historical order. Revelation is necessarily unexpected and unanticipated. As “the incursion of a higher content into an unworthy vessel,” it is necessarily “a stumbling block” for all paganism, ancient as well as modern. It is the paradigmatic instance of surprise.169 Whereas for Spinoza (who is representative of modern philosophy) “surprise is only a subjective feeling,” the product of ignorance, for Rosenzweig “surprise is an ontological category.”170 It is a moment of realization that can dispel “delusions of a misdirected reason.’”171 As a “shock of recognition which can communicate reality when perhaps nothing else can,” surprise has “an objectively revelatory, ontological status.”172 To generalize, we can say that being genuinely open to history requires “vulnerability

78  Paul T. Wilford

to radical surprise.”173 Such an existential orientation to the world is the condition for first recognizing resistance as a metaphysical Ultimate and then for hearing the commanding voice of Auschwitz. For us as readers, historians, philosophers, or theologians, surprise is the fitting comportment to the acts of resistance that Fackenheim uncovers in his search for an ultimate ground – a ground from which one can come to grips with, if not ever understand, the Holocaust. Justice to the phenomena requires such vulnerability on the part of the subject. Not just a subjective emotional state, “radical surprise” is the only disposition that can be open to the objective depth of the horror and the objective greatness of those who resisted it. Only in this midnight of dark despair does post-Holocaust thought come upon a shining light. The Nazi logic of destruction was irresistible: it was, nevertheless, being resisted. This logic is a novum in human history, the source of an unprecedented, abiding horror: but resistance to it on the part of the most radically exposed, too, is a novum in human history, and it is the source of an unprecedented, abiding wonder.174

While the radical evil of Nazism constitutes a novum that seems to deny the very possibility of a response, Fackenheim uncovers five cases of resistance in actuality: (1) mothers in Auschwitz who gave birth to children knowing their newborn would be drowned in front of them upon birth or thrown into the crematorium upon subsequent discovery; (2) the case of Pelagia Lewinski, who in recognizing clearly the desecration at the heart of Auschwitz “felt under orders to live”; (3) the Hasidim in Buchenwald, who traded a few meagre rations of bread for tefillin and who, confronting the inexplicable, recognizing that understanding was impossible, nevertheless prayed with a unique ecstasy; (4) the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which recovered Jewish self-respect in self-assertion against hopeless odds; (5) a group of Lublin Hasidim who, having been ordered to dance and sing by a Nazi officer and in the midst of pandemonium of threats, gunfire, intimidation, and barking dogs, began to sing “Mir welen sei iberleben, Ovinu she-ba-Shomayim” – We will outlive them, Our Father in Heaven.175 Although in each of these cases, the torturers continued their suppression of the victims, each act of resistance also constituted a “moment of truth” that they could not destroy.176 Whether we consider the mothers in Auschwitz or the Buchenwald Hasidim and mitzvah of tefillin, each deed constitutes an act of resistance that eludes concepts of nature and will. Although each act seems irrational, madness in an Unwelt is sanity.177 Commenting on Pelagia Lewinska’s memory of the moment she



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  79

grasped the motivating principle of Auschwitz and with that recognition “felt under orders to live,”178 Fackenheim pronounces: The evil of the Holocaust world (which is radical and far removed from banality) is philosophically intelligible after Auschwitz only in the exact sense in which it was already understood in Auschwitz … by the resisting victims themselves … No deeper or more ultimate grasp is possible for philosophical thought that comes, or ever will come, after the event. This grasp – theirs no less than ours – is epistemologically ultimate.179

The existential response by a single individual in a crisis situation of the utmost horror must be the basis of philosophic comprehension. Thought must begin with and follow the lead of those who found a posture that opposed the radical evil of Auschwitz and therein enabled them to retain their humanity. Past resistance is thus the ground for a contemporary response – one that is likewise moral and passionate rather than theoretical and disinterested, one that recognizes that the human soul as a whole must meet the challenge of radical evil. From out of the resistance comes a voice issuing a command – not a universal categorical imperative derived from the formalism of reason’s structure but rather a specific, particular, positive command, given at a historically differentiated moment that is nevertheless binding on all posterity. In the resistance of such witnesses to humanity, Fackenheim hears the 614th commandment: “Jews are commanded to survive as Jews.” The ontic fact of resistance proves ultimate, revealing an ontological possibility that, when understood, becomes a deontological imperative.180 Like the injunctions of old, this is not merely a Gesetz but a Gebot: “for post-Holocaust Judaism it would be as binding as if it had been revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai.”181 Although the commanded imperative is directed to posterity, it also recovers the possibility of martyrdom for the past. What the Nazis tried to deny is thereby restored to the victims – the dignity of self-sacrifice. Perhaps their martyrdom is unlike that of Rabbi Akiba before Hadrian, but martyrdom it is nonetheless: what other designation could possibly apply? As Fackenheim states, “in an Unwelt whose sole ultimate selfexpression is a system of humiliation, torture, and murder, the maintenance by the victims of a shred of humanity is not merely the basis of resistance but already part of it. In such a world … life does not need to be sanctified: it is already holy.”182 As Rabbi Yitzak Nissenbaum proclaimed amidst the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, “this is a time for kiddush ha-hayyim, the sanctification of life, and not for kiddush ha-Shem, the holiness of martyrdom.”183

80  Paul T. Wilford

If evil eludes theoretical comprehension, what response is available?184 Fackenheim ultimately answers: “a surprised acceptance and a horrified resistance.”185 The epistemic impasse enjoins a moral-practical rejoinder. The shock startles us out of complacency as we face the Holocaust’s incomprehensibility and prepares our souls for a profound moral receptivity. When we listen attentively, we hear from Auschwitz a commanding voice proclaiming: Jews are not permitted to hand Hitler posthumous victories. Jews are commanded to survive as Jews, lest their people perish. They are commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz, lest their memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of God, lest Judaism perish. They are forbidden to despair of the world as the domain of God, lest the world be handed over to the forces of Auschwitz. For a Jew to break this commandment would be to do the unthinkable – to respond to Hitler by doing his work.186

The moral example of the victims proves to be binding on posterity. We cannot give in to despair in the face of evil, because they did not, and their reasons for doing so, for crumbling under the weight of the world, were far greater than any we may face. Jews hear in the commanding voice of Auschwitz a counterpart to the commanding voice heard at Sinai. If religious, it “bids him witness to the one true God;” if secular, it “bids him testify that some gods are false. No Jew can be and remain a Jew without ipso facto testifying that idolatry is real in the modern world.”187 That is, even the agnostic must confront the commandment as a commandment; if authentic, he cannot hear the mitzvah as “the product of self-sufficient human reason”; rather, “the 614th commandment must be, to him, an abrupt and absolute given, revealed in the midst of total catastrophe.”188 If not a moment of revelation, the injunction nevertheless remains something more than human-all-too-human.189 The 614th commandment, thus, reveals the priority of the practical for an orientation to the future that does not simply forget the past. “Only by holding fast at once to the ‘is’ and ‘ought not’ can thought achieve an authentic survival. Thought, that is, must take the form of resistance.”190 Life in its immediacy makes a non-negotiable claim on us that prioritizes morality and that ultimately makes any theorizing possible. This insight is the basis for Fackenheim’s own post-Hegelian “new thinking.”191 His distinct form of Jewish existentialism draws on Kierkegaard’s notion of “immediacy after reflection” – a standpoint that emerges from the failure of the Hegelian attempt to transform faith into speculative philosophy. Having recognized the impossibility of the dialectic ascent from Vorstellung to Vernunft (from grasping the content in



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  81

a religious form of representation to a philosophical form of conceptual comprehending), the philosopher is thrown back on the activity of the understanding, but this faculty can only critically demythologize religious representation. The philosopher’s intellectual probity leads him to acknowledge the limits of his ratiocinative activity. In seeing these limitations clearly and seeing that something transcends them – namely that which he tried to comprehend in speculative reason but which ultimately exceeded his grasp – he is driven to a post-speculative position.192 Rather than transfigure religious content, the philosopher must “adhere to the content in the form in which it is given.”193 Such a post-reflective perspective is supported by Buber’s critique of “I-It knowledge,” which likewise exposes the limits of detached objectivity, pointing beyond itself to a committed form of being that requires the individual to open himself to what lies beyond conceptualization.194 For Buber, the limits of conceptual knowing point to the I-Thou standpoint.195 Philosophy at its highest becomes aware of its own limitations and the possibility of something beyond objective conceptual ratiocination.196 This openness makes possible a fresh reconsideration of revelation – one that emphasizes dialogue, commitment, and the situated historicity of the individual.197 The I-Thou dialogical relation is not about communicating specific, finite facts but is one in which the interlocutors communicate themselves. Such genuine communion requires openness to the other, to attend to otherness in a particular time and place. The specificity of the personal encounter is irreducible. “Hence both the I and the Thou of every genuine dialogue are irreplaceable. Every dialogue is unique.”198 Such a relation reveals the incompleteness, the lack of self-sufficiency of the I. The I can only be truly an I in an engaged, committed relation to a Thou. If the I were complete and whole in itself, then the I would relate to the other only as an “It.” A subject would stand over and against an object to which it is ultimately indifferent.199 But this is clearly a degraded form of relating – a one-sided affair in which the I presumes to a self-sufficient independence that it does not really possess. In Hegel’s idiom, a “self-consciousness only exists for a self-­consciousness,” i.e., all subjects are necessarily intersubjective – perhaps even God.200 The I-Thou theology of Buber therefore teaches that “the meeting of the Divine and the human occurs, if it occurs at all, not in a separate sphere cut off from the world. It occurs in the world in which men meet each other,” i.e., the historical world of stress and strife.201 Although Buber may seem innovative, even “antinomian” at times, with regard to orthodoxy,202 the core of his thought insists on the central claim of the tradition, namely, an immediate “relation between a

82  Paul T. Wilford

divine ‘Thou’ who is ‘eternal,’ and a human ‘I’ who remains particular, finite and human.”203 One might respond that this perspective is not objective, that the engaged commitment of the I distorts the reality of the world. Knowledge depends on objectivity and objectivity is disinterested. Buber would grant that modern science is necessarily I-It knowledge. But he responds that this is not the only form of knowing; something is evident in an I-Thou relation that cannot be otherwise disclosed and is obscured in the ostensibly objective standpoint that seeks to place objects under laws externally determining their actions. In other words, one might observe a Thou as an It – as the objective political scientist or clinical psychologist might – and describe the It from that perspective, but in doing so one conceals the most distinctive feature of a subject, namely, that it can be addressed by the second-person singular pronoun and that it responds to the call of a first-person subject.204 In other words, the most profound philosophical mistake according to Buber is “the epistemological reduction of I-Thou to I-It knowledge, and the metaphysical reduction of Thou to It.”205 Buber’s concept of revelation is a specification and application of this I and Thou doctrine. While a thorough examination of Fackenheim’s concept of revelation would take us too far afield, what Fackenheim appropriates from both Kierkegaard and Buber is that a fully human life requires a mode of being in the world that is beyond “objective knowledge” – a committed, passionate openness to life in all its irreducible facticity, especially the claim that the other makes on us across all temporal dimensions.206 Our historicity entails a consciousness of the past and a concern for the future. Teshuvah becomes possible through a surprise that allows us to hear in the resistance of the past a legislating voice enjoining us to work towards the redemption of the future.207 But such passionate commitment is not for the religious alone. The commanding voice of Auschwitz bids Jews to leap into existence, into life itself, which is an act of faith, a salto mortale all its own.208 Nowhere is this more in evidence than in Israel. In the founding of the Jewish state, Fackenheim spies the same resistance, the same will to live, the same commitment to the sanctity of life. In the actions, efforts, and aspirations of the amcha – the flesh-and-blood Jewish people – Fackenheim sees a way forward.209 Where thought is paralysed and rendered mute, life is active and creative. From this massive fact, Fackenheim concludes that Jewish thought must “go to school with life.”210 Fackenheim’s Jewish existentialism is therefore not simply or solely religious. It emphasizes that a passionate commitment is necessary for life, which must be future directed, concerned with bringing the not-yet



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  83

into being. This commitment can be no more nor less than a great hope. In the case of responding to the Holocaust, hope must forerun inquiry. Life makes its own demands and cannot wait for the conclusions of dispassionate reasoning. Detachment is all well and good for the philosopher, but the flesh-and-blood man cannot live on conceptual bread alone.211 He hears the commanding voice and acts. In Israel, he gives evidence of having heard, and Israel the nation “becomes collectively what the survivor is individually.”212 In a world that seems Godforsaken, Israel is a testament to secular self-reliance, but as the achievement of the miraculous, it is no less the product “of a radical ‘religious’ memory and hope.”213 As “an ontological near-impossibility,” Israel is “nothing less than an orienting reality for all Jewish and indeed all post-Holocaust thought.”214 For Fackenheim, Israel is the Jewish existentialist response most in accord with the tension at the heart of the Messianic tradition, which insists on “a dialectical togetherness of working and waiting, of action and prayer.”215 The creation of Israel is perhaps the beginning of a Tikkun for the Jewish people.216 Something terribly broken by a radical anti-spirit begins to be mended. “Jewish life is in advance of Jewish thought … [it] is in the grip of, and responding to, epoch-making events.”217 Israel is the human deed below that calls for a divine response from above. It is hope resurrected and prayer in action. It is the actuality that exceeds rationality. Would Hegel Be a Hegelian Today? Hegel’s whole philosophic enterprise can be expressed in the epigram Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig (What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational). In a short essay published in 1969 soon after the publication of The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought, Fackenheim subjects this enigmatic dictum to a probing interpretation that avoids the Scylla of “sheer tautology” and the Charybdis of “scandalous absurdity.”218 Given its prominent appearance in the Philosophy of Right, the remark is most commonly associated with Hegel’s political philosophy and is understood as a judgment on the prevailing sociopolitical conditions. But Hegel returns to the dictum in the third edition of his Encyclopedia nine years later, where he offers a logical-metaphysical explanatory elaboration.219 With this elaboration in mind, Fackenheim brings out the theological conditions of Hegel’s assertion, focusing our attention once again on the religious or, more specifically, the Christian dimension of Hegel’s philosophy.220

84  Paul T. Wilford

Following Rosenzweig’s lead, Fackenheim emphasizes the order of the clauses – the first half contains the essential claim while the second half acts as the necessary consequence of the first half’s revolutionary core.221 He reformulates the dictum to bring out its historicity: “For Hegel the actuality of the Rational is a specific historical condition; and only if and when that condition exists is the recognition of the Rational in the Actual a philosophic possibility.”222 This illuminates three interrelated features of Fackenheim’s interpretation: (1) the relation between praxis and theory; (2) the belief that Hegel gives to Christianity’s “true content” its “true form”; and (3) the suggestion that this relation between actuality and rationality is a historical achievement. First, in keeping with the retrospective character of philosophy, the structure of Hegel’s dictum implies the priority of an existing condition to reflection on that condition – “the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.”223 Although this may appear trivial from a certain perspective (i.e., there must be an existent before one can theorize about it), it is in fact profoundly significant; for it highlights that the dictum is not merely about political life, social institutions, or economic structures, but more fundamentally about the conditions of the possibility of philosophic activity as such.224 That is, although philosophy precedes the advent of Christianity (and Hegel holds Plato and Aristotle in highest esteem), Hegel is committed to the propositions that the key idealist insight that “reason is all reality” is a historically conditioned thesis and that the “pre-philosophic form of historical existence” that makes such a statement possible has “an indispensable religious dimension.”225 Second, the Hegelian dictum not only depends on a historical-­ religious condition but, according to Fackenheim, is in essence a philosophic conceptualization of an originally Christian thought – perhaps the central Christian thought – that “God’s Providence governs the world, and the world is the place where His Providence may be recognized.”226 To observe God’s presence in the world is only possible if God is already at work in the world. If we translate this theological doctrine back into Hegelian language (employing Rosenzweig’s formulation), we can see the connection between the priority of the practical and Hegel’s transfiguration of Christian dogma: “Only because the Rational has become actual – principle of action! – is the Actual rational – principle of cognition!” Giving philosophic form to religious content is not the imposition of an external order onto something foreign but the transfiguration of the terms of that content. Borrowing from Rosenzweig, Fackenheim states clearly the limitations of religious representation that must “resort to a symbolism in which ‘God,’ ‘man’ and ‘world’ have the ‘form’ of mere side-by-sideness.”227 Hegel’s



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  85

transfiguration consists in grasping the relation between these terms dialectically, sublating them into moments of “a single, self-explicating, spiritual self-activity.”228 Third, Christianity marks the beginning of the realization of the indwelling of Spirit as what is essential. Secular sociopolitical development complements this with an externalized “this-worldly” expression of this truth: the implicit unity of the human and the divine in a single activity becomes explicit.229 These achievements are the conditions of Hegel’s own philosophic reflection on a modernity that, having passed through the Reformation and the French Revolution, reveals the essential contours of what counts as rational, thereby enabling him to distinguish between what is truly actual (wirklich) and mere existence (Dasein).230 Having argued for the logical coherence of Hegel’s dictum, Fackenheim concludes his essay with an objection that returns us to the problem of evil and the relation of thought to being: Can the historical conditions producing the actuality of the Rational (and hence the rationality of the Actual) pass away? … Hegel’s actuality of the Rational leaves room only for world-historically insignificant evils to be disposed of as relapses into tribalism or barbarism. In their postEnlightenment optimism all but a few modern philosophers have ignored or denied the demonic. Hegel’s philosophy – which unites Christian religious with modern secular optimism – is the most radical and hence most serious expression of this modern tendency.231

By Hegel’s own lights, his self-understanding is a conceptualization of a reconciliation already achieved by Spirit. Fackenheim does not here question the coherence of that conceptualization but only whether that reconciliation is still, in fact, actual in the world. Any evaluation of Hegel’s “idealistic claim to comprehensiveness” must bear in mind that his system aims at a “realistic self-exposure to the contingencies of the actual world.”232 Thus the question of a particular historical evil raises the question of the relation of rationality to actuality and therewith Hegel’s mediation of those dichotomies that the philosophic tradition prior to Hegel found stubbornly resistant to mediation: life and thought, history and reason, man and God. Moreover, the scandalous particularity of this actuality goes to the logical heart of the Hegelian system. If there exists a particular that cannot be sublated, does it reveal the inadequacy of Hegel’s treatment of all historical particulars? Hegel’s own theory dictates that his philosophy is an all-or-nothing proposition, justified by its capacity to give an

86  Paul T. Wilford

account of the whole without remainder. Nothing essential can lie outside the Hegelian system.233 If Fackenheim is correct that the Holocaust is “the event that cannot be overcome,” then Hegel’s all-­mediating thought founders on the rock of Auschwitz.234 Even if Hegel’s theodicy is not a justification of evils but only a rational reconciliation to them – “the rose in the cross of the present” – it is nevertheless the case in Fackenheim’s judgment that Auschwitz constitutes “an assault on both God and man, extreme enough to cause his ‘theodicy’ to lie in shambles.”235 That is, the conditions of Hegel’s thought have been shattered, and shattered by an event that itself cannot be thought. But lest the question of theodicy be shrugged off as a relic of an age foolish enough to believe in grand narratives, as a merely scholastic exercise, or the holdover of Hegel’s onto-theology that can be neatly excised, we must recall all Hegel represents. With only some exaggeration, Hegel stands for modernity and its highest achievements; he is the epitome of the Protestant principle or “independently existing thought freed from authority.”236 He takes the possibility of autonomous rationality to its limits. He attempts to ground reason in nothing but reason itself. In Fackenheim’s estimation, all of Hegel’s nineteenth-century epigones are less comprehensive, less rigorous, less concrete, more abstract, one sided, and partial. Hegel is not just a philosophic flight of fancy that can be dismissed; he is, rather, the most coherent expression of modernity’s self-understanding. A critique of Hegel is a critique of the modern project, in both its theoretical pretensions and its practical ambitions. In other words, in confronting Hegel we confront the sociopolitical project of bourgeois modernity.237 In his exchange with James Doull, Fackenheim reiterates and clarifies his objections to Hegel, reducing them to two essential questions. First, if the Phenomenology is the ladder by which natural consciousness ascends to Wissenschaft, how does one “get into Hegel’s philosophy?” That is, is the condition of the ascent to Wissenschaft not the existence of “a form of non-philosophic human life?” Second, “Could any occurrence whatever in the ‘actual world’ force me out of it [i.e., Hegel’s philosophy]?”238 Regarding the first, Fackenheim asks about Hegel’s Christian presuppositions and his interpretation of other religious ­traditions – especially Judaism (but also other possibilities). As argued in “Moses and Hegelians,” although Hegel is pre-eminent among modern philosophers in the justice he metes out to Judaism,239 Fackenheim nevertheless demonstrates that the decisive distortions of his account (especially in his understanding of the relation between the Covenant and Messianic hopes) are not errant aberrations but necessary features of his commitment to Christianity as the absolute religion.240 Regarding



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  87

the second objection, Fackenheim restates clearly his belief that Hegel cannot remain with his all-mediating system and comprehend radical or demonic evil. Consequently, Hegel would no longer be a Hegelian after the Holocaust because his sense of history, of real, flesh-and-blood history, is too strong, which would lead him to “abandon all claims to systematic finality and god-like self-confidence.”241 In the face of “the grim revelation of demonic evil,” philosophic activity would understand itself as fragmented, even as it seeks what “comprehensiveness and transcending wisdom as remain within its grasp.”242 Doull’s rejoinder consists in the proposition that Hegel can in fact comprehend evil, but he would understand it as an extreme abuse of the capacity for freedom that is realized in the modern world. The evil unleashed by Nazism is an instance of the destructive potential of purely negatively conceived freedom, criticized by Hegel in several places, e.g., in his analysis of revolutionary consciousness in “Absolute Freedom and Terror.”243 Thus, to defend Hegel, Doull has to argue that the Holocaust is not a novum in the strict sense; even if it is uniquely horrific, it is evidence of a capacity inherent in modern autonomy – not the revelation of an altogether new potentiality.244 Let us ask the same question one more time from another perspective: What if the twentieth century saw the return of idols? Does Hegel have the conceptual resources to denounce idolatry, or is the very category anachronistic? If idolatry reappeared in the modern world of autonomous human rationality, is this not an indication that the prephilosophic conditions of thought have undergone a profound change? According to Fackenheim, Europe witnessed “the ancient demons of the earth resurrected,” demons such as “blood, soil, race, and the capitalized Unconscious,” and although they were given scientific veneer, the biblical believer clearly recognizes “the ancient idols underneath their modern guises.”245 But could Hegel recognize them as such? Hegel would seem to have to argue that it is more scientific to speak of ideology rather than idolatry. And, moreover, we have seen such ideological terror before and since – men motivated by the certainty that they possess an ultimate truth and who on that basis justify horrific political actions. If this is accurate, if it is true to the object of investigation, then Hegel has perfectly adequate conceptual resources. The terror of the French Revolution understood through Hegel’s conceptual analysis adequately accounts for modern totalitarian movements.246 But what if such a formulation is a flight from the scandalous particularity of Nazism?247 What if idolatry is the more precise name for the phenomenon? Again, Fackenheim challenges the philosopher to consider the possibility that when trying to comprehend a certain object,

88  Paul T. Wilford

one must move to another register and think in another idiom. To grasp radical evil requires theological language: for Hegel to wrestle with the Holocaust, he would be forced to return from his transfiguration of Christianity to the representational language of good and evil, grace and sin, the true God and the false idols.248 If, as that other famous Hegelian dictum has it, “the true is the whole,” then Hegel must take up all essential reality into his comprehensive account; only thus is the ascent to the divine not a flight from the world, only thus is reconciliation of actuality and rationality possible, only thus can Hegel claim in contrast to the Spinozistic sive to overcome the “either/or concerning the God of revelation – no either/or could be more ultimate! – by means of an all-mediating, all-reconciling ‘both/and.’”249 Hegel is left with two options: either dismiss the Holocaust as an instance of contingent evil inherent in subjective freedom and Nazism as one more modern ideology among many others, or face the fact that “our metaphysical capacity is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.”250 Conclusion: Inhabiting the Fragmented Middle According to Fackenheim, “Hegel’s philosophy does not allow either for the particular facts of the idolatry of Auschwitz or a Jewish Jerusalem reborn.”251 In other words, Hegel’s philosophy cannot mediate scandalous particularity; it cannot remain open to the possibility of a historical novum; it cannot countenance genuine surprise. It has no room for abiding wonder or a revelation that passeth all understanding. For Fackenheim, the one thing needful is a form of Judaism adequate to those two facts, open to epoch-making events, and therefore vulnerable and self-exposed, but also as a consequence open to the possibility of the incursion of God into history. In two rather early essays from the 1950s, Fackenheim develops clearly the problem of meaning in history. History is born of man’s dual nature, of his being half-brute and half-angel.252 If mere brute, man would realize no meaning beyond what is already inherent in his essence. His history would be but quantitative variation, in other words, not history at all. If, on the other hand, man were an unfinished angel, all that is evil and unmeaning in history would be mere temporary accident. History would be necessary progress, and man would be wholly competent to bring about its moral perfection. In truth, history is a domain of meaning,



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  89 but of a meaning forever partially thwarted. Moral progress is exposed to tragic frustration. Man can mitigate the tragic and evil in history but cannot eliminate it: history, like man, is in need of redemption.253

For both Hegel and Fackenheim, history is not “a mere extension of nature.”254 It is a product of the geistig animal, the animal aware of ideals, of an absolute that makes a claim on his being. Or to put it otherwise, only “the animal is innocent;” man is free and responsible.255 His freedom and responsibility are evident in the moral “ought” set over and against the finite “is.”256 To be self-conscious is to be aware of good and evil.257 History is thus distinct from nature because it is the product of the uniquely self-conscious being, which wills that the ideal enter into, direct, and rule history. “History is constituted by the fact that the ideal enters into it.”258 Thus far, Fackenheim and Hegel agree. Where they differ is on the status of this ideal and its efficacy in the world. For Fackenheim, the discrepancy between “is” and “ought” remains too great to believe in history as a “self-redemptive process.”259 And in the wake of the Shoah, the mythological dogmas of the liberal commitment to progress are glaringly obvious. The idea of progress, once so predominant, is now at best a noble lie, a useful “public fiction.”260 What then remains? If viewed solely as the product of man, history is a ceaseless “dialectic of human accomplishment and tragic failure,” but “in the light of faith, it is a dialectic of the doing of man and the doing of God.”261 Opposed to the Hegelian identity of the divine and the human, Fackenheim returns to the Covenant and the Messiah. The Jewish concept of the Messiah expresses a dialectic of both man and God, or it expresses two truths that in their togetherness are beyond mere “finite understanding: that man is free and morally responsible; and that he is dependent on the redemptive act of God.”262 The Messiah is represented as coming only when the world has been sufficiently perfected by the work of man and as coming only when the world is so mired in evil that it most needs the Messiah to redeem it. “He will come when history has become good enough to make his coming possible; or evil enough to make it necessary. The condition of history could be described no more profoundly; nor what is needed if its meaning is to be fulfilled.”263 Thus, to the problem of the meaning of history, religion answers with Messianic hopes. But why is this not simply arbitrary? Why is faith not a flight from reality, from the very history that forces us to face the problem of evil? What saves faith from being arbitrary is the fact that it corresponds to meaningful questions, and that these questions are inescapable. One of

90  Paul T. Wilford these is meaning in history. This question leaves us with but two alternatives. We may accept as ultimate the tragic, the thwarted meaning, the persistent contradiction between what ought to be and what is. Or we may commit ourselves to a God of History, through whom the tragic is redeemed, all contradictions reconciled, and nothing is lost.264

In the wake of Fackenheim’s wrestling with Hegel, we face an existential either/or. If Hegel’s system lies shattered, there are only two alternatives: tertium non datur. We thus return to the problem of reason and revelation, philosophy and religion. But the inquiry does not return to the status quo ante. Having worked through Hegel, Fackenheim believes he has shown the limits of philosophy. The peak of reason cannot grasp evil. Philosophy cannot do justice to this phenomenon: rather than explain this experience, philosophy explains it away.265 Yet we cannot simply abandon Hegel and return to the premodern formulation of this conflict, for (1) “historicity, whether a curse, a blessing, or something of both, has become inescapable for Jewish thought,”266 and Hegel remains the deepest theorist of the historical,267 and (2) “the failure of Hegel’s enterprise might be a ‘process’ with dialectical ‘results,’” and Hegel’s dialectical mode of reasoning provides important conceptual tools.268 Where then does this leave Fackenheim and Judaism? It leaves them in search of a form of theological inquiry adequate to our fragmented existential situation, one cognizant of our theoretical limitations, historically inflected and informed, neither fideistic nor rigidly orthodox, continuous with the tradition and yet innovative, creative but true to Judaism’s root experiences. It must, above all, do justice to the paradoxical communion at the heart of Jewish faith, which on the one hand holds to “the incommensurability within Judaism of a divine Presence that is and remains infinite and universal to a humanity that remains unyieldingly finite and particular,” and on the other to “a divine-human moving-toward-each-other.”269 To reiterate, the fragmented middle that Fackenheim posits contra Hegelian mediation is predicated on the doubleness of the divinehuman relation as originally expressed in the Covenant and as complemented by Messianic hopes. The Covenant itself should be understood as “shot through with a fragmentation in which ‘redemption’ is not attained and ‘reconciliation’ forever alternates with alienation and sin.”270 Within this dual matrix, redemption requires both God and man. If dependent on God alone, the mutuality of the Covenant would be undermined (the grace of the commanding voice that implies freedom would be lost). On the other hand, if redemption were “unilaterally



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  91

dependent on the Jewish family, it would shatter on the rock of human sin.”271 The Messianic future is required, and the Messianic expectation must be understood as “a dialectical togetherness of working and waiting, of action and prayer.”272 Fackenheim finds in the Midrashic tradition a mode of reflection adequate to both Jewish historicity and the double activity at the heart of Judaism. For Fackenheim, “Midrash is the profoundest theology ever developed in Judaism, the more so because it is not ‘theology’ – the logos of God offered, as it were, from the standpoint of God – but parables, stories and the like, given from the standpoint of man and hence often mutually contradictory.”273 But Fackenheim does not simply abandon discursive rationality in favour of poetic mythologizing. In fact, he is bold enough to claim that “a Hegelian way of philosophic thought supplies the means … for the first time in the history of philosophy – of doing conceptual justice to the inner logic of Judaism.”274 Fackenheim’s philosophical theology reaches its apogee in an attempt to employ Hegelian dialectics to articulate the simultaneous “togetherness of divine Grace and human freedom” and the radical incommensurable difference between the human and the divine.275 But this is not an ultimate synthesis, a final resolution, or the last word on the relation of philosophy and theology. Fackenheim’s thought remains open, responsive, and vulnerable: open to surprise, responsive to dialogue, and vulnerable to epoch-making events. NOTES I thank the editors of this volume, Kenneth Hart Green and Martin Yaffe, for their patience and encouragement, and Alan Rubenstein, whose friendship and generosity made this essay possible.   1 Isaiah, 45:7, Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).   2 G.W.F. Hegel, “Die Wunden des Geistes heilen, ohne daß Narben bleiben,” in Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), 3.492 (hereafter cited as Werke).   3 Emil L. Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5. Cf. “After … Auschwitz, everything is shaken, nothing is safe” (“Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” in Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History [New York: Schocken Books, 1982], 26).   4 By rational faith, I do not mean rational, universal, or natural religion, but the aim of intellectus fidei. Cf. Fackenheim’s formulation: “The function of

92  Paul T. Wilford theology is to save religious faith from obscurantism and arbitrariness. And it can fulfill this function only by giving a consistent account of faith, consistent both in itself and in relation to everything else asserted as true” (“An Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology,” in Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future [Boston: Beacon, 1968], 98).   5 Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1946), 21. Thomas answers the question with his famous five proofs for the existence of God. To the problem of evil, in particular, he replies with an appeal to the authority of Augustine: “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.” Thomas underscores the central logic of this response: “This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good” (23). Fackenheim will reject this argument. When confronting the greatest of evils, it proves woefully inadequate to absolve God by arguing that evil is but the necessary means for some good end. Better to doubt his agency than assign such awful responsibility. He will likewise reject Thomas’s distinct though similar argument set forth in Summa Contra Gentiles LXXI, That the Divine Providence does not Entirely Exclude Evil from Things, that “the good of the whole is of more account than the good of the part” and so judging evil requires evaluating whether local evil is a necessary component of the perfection of the cosmos (Basic Writings of Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2, ed. Anton C. Pegis [New York: Random House, 1946], 130–3).   6 Note the threshold of proof entailed by Aquinas’s objection. Not the preponderance of evil over good, but any evil existing at all calls God’s existence into question. Thus one cannot justify God by appealing to a preponderance of human happiness over misery; a merely quantitative calculus is ruled out by the premises of the argument (Cf. Hume, “Fragment on Evil,” in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Dorothy Coleman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 109–12).   7 Though this view may appear to depend on a theological presupposition, Errol E. Harris argues that evil is as much an obstacle to the philosopher’s endeavour to make our experience intelligible as “it is to the theologian’s belief in God. In fact, it becomes clear that the problem is really the same for both, when one realizes (with Augustine) that God and the ultimate standard of intelligibility are one and the same” (Harris, The Problem of Evil, Aquinas Lecture, 1977 [Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1977], 13).   8 Fackenheim, “On the Eclipse of God,” in Quest for Past and Future, 230.   9 Psalm 44:23, 25; Psalm 89:2–3. 10 Whether this is always and everywhere the case, I cannot address here. Hegel answers that peoples only have history to the extent that they



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  93

are conscious of themselves as so having (see his discussion of the relation between res gestae and historiam rerum gestarum, Werke, 12.83). Fackenheim’s account of Judaism is that it is thoroughly historical both in its biblical roots and in the elaboration of the oral Torah in the rabbinic tradition. But opposed to Hegel’s view, see Karl Löwith, “The Quest for the Meaning of History,” in Nature, History, and Existentialism, ed. Arnold Levison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 131–44. 11 Fackenheim, Encounters, 132–3. Fackenheim argues that whereas medieval Judaism developed an authentic response to the world around it, it is not until the twentieth century that one encounters any “self-exposed, selfmediating, yet normatively Jewish response” to the modern world (126). 12 At the risk of oversimplifying, the difference between Fackenheim and Rosenzweig turns on how Judaism is to understand its relation to history. Contra Rosenzweig’s thought that whereas Christianity is “of history while Judaism is merely in it,” Fackenheim thinks Judaism is both and must be both if it is to respond to the crisis facing Judaism after the Holocaust. 13 Fackenheim defines Constantinianism as “the theopolitical praxis of two beliefs: that the Christian revealed truth is the complete revealed truth; and that truth itself is not divided into ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ but rather is one and indivisible” (To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought [New York: Schocken Books, 1982], 127). Sharon Portnoff helpfully distinguishes the two crucial elements of Constantinianism: supersessionism and triumphalism (Reason and Revelation before Historicism: Strauss and Fackenheim [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011], 103). 14 Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, xi. 15 See Fackenheim’s remarks in his review of Buber’s Israel and Palestine: “On the one hand, the history is determined by the philosophy. Refusing to report indiscriminately the profound and the trite, the living and the dead, Buber tries to fix attention on the essential. And what is essential depends on the standards provided by the philosophy. Yet, on the other hand, the philosophy is determined by the history” (The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim: A Reader, ed. Michael L. Morgan [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987], 65–6). Cf. Fackenheim’s criticism of Toynbee: “For all its supposedly deep immersion in historical realities, a work such as A. J. Toynbee’s A Study in History criticizes Jewish ‘parochialism’ in the light of empty, unhistorical, syncretistic abstractions, and his criticism amounts to little more than the liberalistic platitude that men should rise from the stepping stones of their particularistic selves to higher, more universal things. No religious Jew, however extreme in his parochialism, would recognize his religion in Toynbee’s caricatures. (Nor would any religious man exchange his concrete, religious reality for Toynbee’s lifeless abstractions)” (Encounters, 82–3).

94  Paul T. Wilford 16 See Fackenheim’s “Metaphysics and Historicity” in The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), for an account of the varieties of historical understanding. Note, however, his later evaluation of this work in To Mend the World, where he admits that he had not adequately addressed Heidegger’s thought. On the difference between historicism and radical historicism see Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 9–34. For a discussion of Fackenheim’s “quasi-historicism” in relation to Strauss’s critique of historicism see Sharon Portnoff, “The Problem of Historicism,” in Reason and Revelation, 153–203. 17 Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, xii. 18 Jewish Return into History, xii. The return to confront the historical does not deny transcendent philosophic truth. See Fackenheim’s concluding remarks following his treatment of Heidegger’s account of the historicity of being (“The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth,” in The God Within, 162–3). Cf. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 242. 19 Fackenheim’s critique of any reactionary neo-orthodox theology (or “theological positivism”) that ignores the challenges of modernity and “takes its stand on premodern sacred authorities as if these latter were not, in the modern world, radically questionable” is developed in several places (e.g., Religious Dimension, 237). For the purpose of this essay, the relevant point is that Fackenheim thinks there cannot be a simple return to previous practices for faith or modes of reasoning. Crucially, in contrast to Leo Strauss, Fackenheim does not think that the only authentic religious alternative to philosophy is strict orthodox Judaism, i.e., holding all 613 laws as equally binding. Rather, he suggests the possibility of situating “rabbinic Judaism historically – as an epoch-making response to an historic challenge” (To Mend the World, 17; on Strauss and Rosenzweig on “old” vs. “new” thinking see 89 note). 20 Cf. Hegel’s account of the history of the relation of philosophy and religion from the Middle Ages, in which philosophy was subordinate, accepting Christian dogma and presuppositions, to the modern world, in which “philosophy rises to the sun like a young eagle, a bird of prey which strikes religion down. But it is the last development of speculative thought to do justice to faith and make peace with religion” (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Einleitung: System und Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister [Leipzig: Meiner, 1944], 190 ff., quoted in Religious Dimension, xiv). 21 On falsehood and negation in Hegel’s conception of truth see, inter alia, the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Werke, 3.39–43. Consider Hegel’s critique of mathematical truth and the propositional form of truth that



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  95

distorts its dialectical character. Nothing in history (of any significance) is simply false or simply dispensed with; immanent critique reveals partiality: the confusion of a part for a whole, an aspect or dimension for a comprehensive account. How the speculative proposition that expresses dialectical truth is related to historical dialectic is a complicated question in Hegel, but for the present purposes it suffices to say that from one perspective the latter is the condition of the former – the historical process is the condition of Hegel’s insight – and from another perspective it is the other way around – Hegel’s dialectical method is the vantage point that makes a philosophy of history possible. 22 Fackenheim, Encounters, 81. 23 Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlosung (Frankfurt: Kauffman, 1921), p. 12, quoted in Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, xiv. 24 Fackenheim, “Demythologizing and Remythologizing in Jewish Experience: Reflections Inspired by Hegel’s Philosophy,” in Jewish Return into History, 115. 25 Hegel, Werke, 3.15. 26 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 165. On left-wing Hegelianism see Fackenheim, Encounters, 134–53. The left-wing distortion of Judaism begins with Feuerbach’s “reduction of Hegel’s Jewish renunciation of renunciation to a one-dimensional Jewish egoism” (Encounters, 141). Fackenheim expresses the difficulty, using his preferred summary formulation of Hegel’s philosophy, namely, the Union of Union and Nonunion, thus: “Right- and left-wing Hegelians never allowed their minds to be boggled, the first making light of ‘nonunion,’ the second, of ‘union’. But in my own work in philosophical scholarship, no harder, time-consuming, patiencedemanding task was ever mine than to lay hold of, not let go of, not to lose, Hegel’s own middle. The ‘left’ discord, struggle, historicity, earth-bound secularity of ‘nonunion’ is to be acknowledged: Hegel is no less concerned with liberating still-existing slaves than Marx. To be acknowledged too is the ‘right’ harmony, eternity, heavenly-religious ‘union’: Hegel is no less a Christian than Kierkegaard. But the whole power of Hegel’s unique, mind-boggling thinking is concentrated on the ‘middle’ that is the union of both” (Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 221). 27 Cf. Hegel, Werke, 16.219: “Ich soll mich dem gemäß machen, daß der Geist in mir wohne, daß ich geistig sei. Dies ist meine, die menschliche Arbeit; dieselbe ist Gottes von seiner Seite. Er bewegt sich zu dem Menschen und ist in ihm durch Aufhebung des Menschen. Was als mein Tun erscheint, ist als dann Gottes Tun, und ebenso auch umgekehrt.” Fackenheim discusses this passage in several places; see “Demythologizing and Remythologizing,” in Jewish Return into History, 114–15; “The Rational Is Actual,” in The God Within, 168–9; Religious Dimension, 190.

96  Paul T. Wilford 28 Fackenheim, Encounters, 137. 29 This is clearest in Feuerbach’s bold statement that “[t]he true state is unlimited, infinite, true, complete divine Man. Only the state is Man. The state is self-determined, self-related, absolute Man” (quoted in Encounters, 137). Note the application of Spinozistic one-substance language to the state: the state alone is sui-generis. 30 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 205. Cf. page 76: “the Hegelian system seems faced with the choice between saving the claims of an absolute and therefore all-comprehensive philosophic thought, but at the price of loss of any actual world besides it, and saving the contingent world of human experience at the price of reducing philosophic thought itself to finiteness. However, the central claim of Hegelian thought is to repudiate the need for choice between these right- and left-wing alternatives.” Hegel also runs the gauntlet between pantheism and atheistic humanism; see Encyclopedia, §573, Werke, 10.379–94. 31 Cf. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1: Introduction and the Concept of Religion, ed. and trans. P.C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): “only human being has religion essentially … by means of thought human being distinguishes itself from the animal and therefore has religion” (209). 32 James Doull, “Review of Emil Fackenheim’s The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought,” Dialogue 7.3 (1968): 483, https://doi.org/10.1017% 2FS0012217300031309. 33 Fackenheim, “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” in Jewish Philosophers, 102. Cf. “For Hegel, in contrast [to Platonists, for whom the ascent from the cave is in principle always possible], access to Truth is inseparable from history, as is, indeed, Truth itself” (Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust: A Rereading [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990], 4). 34 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 163. 35 Fackenheim, Encounters, 99. Cf. The heart of Hegel’s philosophy of religion is “a mediating thought-activity that transforms all absolute into relative religious conflicts, thus aiming at an absolute, all comprehensive Truth in which all partial truths are both preserved and superseded” (83). 36 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 76 note. As twentieth-century examples of right-wing and left-wing alternatives, Fackenheim contrasts Iwan Iljin’s Die Philosophie Hegels als Kontemplative Gotteslehre and Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction À La Lecture de Hegel. 37 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 79. 38 Religious Dimension, 84. 39 Religious Dimension, 106. 40 Religious Dimension, 110. 41 Religious Dimension, 110. The overreaching power of Spirit and the logical Idea is crucial to Fackenheim’s interpretation of Hegel. He draws on



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  97

numerous passages where Hegel employs the term übergreifen or its variants (see Religious Dimension, 256, 35 note). Especially important is Hegel’s employment of the term in his discussion of the “idea” in the Encyclopedia: “in der negativen Einheit der Idee greift das Unendliche über das Endliche hinüber, das Denken über das Sein, die Subjektivität über die Objektivität” (Werke, 8.372–3). 42 Religious Dimension, 111. 43 Religious Dimension, 111. 44 Religious Dimension, 111. 45 Religious Dimension, 111. 46 Religious Dimension, 22. This transfiguration, according to Fackenheim, is the heart of Hegel’s philosophy of religion (if not his philosophy tout court) and discloses that his “project is not, so far as religious existence is concerned, a demythologizing but rather a transmythologizing” (“Demythologizing and Remythologizing,” in Jewish Return into History, 118). 47 Religious Dimension, 166. Cf. note 20 above. 48 Fackenheim, Encounters, 83. This interpretation of Hegel requires some qualification, as Hegel also suggests that thought attains self-sufficiency through its own autonomous activity. See William Maker, Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Thus one might say that the historical condition is something that can be transcended – a ladder to be thrown away – but this downplays Hegel’s self-conscious presentation as the fulfilment of and reflection of a historical moment. For Fackenheim, the actual historicity of Christianity is the essential condition for Hegel’s own attempt to think the unity of the finite and infinite. 49 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 164. 50 Religious Dimension, 185. I cannot here elaborate on the Neoplatonic tone of this account of philosophy. For Fackenheim’s account of Neoplatonism in Hegel see Religious Dimension, 168–73. 51 Religious Dimension, 185. 52 Religious Dimension, 188. 53 One need only consider Augustine’s great attempt at critiquing the Pelagian heresy without succumbing to a fatalism that would deny human responsibility for sin to see that this problem is indeed decisive for Christianity. 54 “It is precisely this double activity of Christian representational existence which enables the final modern philosophy, like the Greek, to achieve oneness of thought with Divinity and yet, unlike the Greek, to recognize, preserve, and comprehend rather than destroy the religion which has made this achievement possible” (Religious Dimension, 189). 55 Religious Dimension, 191: “What for Christian faith is free reception of the Divine by the human is for speculative thought divine activity in the human.”

98  Paul T. Wilford 56 Hegel, Werke, 17.117. Quoted in Fackenheim, “Demythologizing and Remythologizing,” in Jewish Return into History, 117, translation modified: “Die Gnade erleuchtet das Herz des Menschen, sie ist der Geist Gottes im Menschen, so daß der Mensch bei ihrem Wirken als passiv vorgestellt werden kann, so daß es nicht seine eigene Tätigkeit ist. Im Begriff ist aber diese gedoppelte Tätigkeit als eine zu fassen.” 57 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 202. Cf. Werke, 16.219. 58 Religious Dimension, 202. The connection between Vorstellung and the oppositional structure of consciousness is clearest in the final stage of Die offenbare Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenology, §748–787 (Werke, 3.545–74). 59 Religious Dimension, 203. 60 Religious Dimension, 203. 61 Religious Dimension, 203. 62 Religious Dimension, 203. 63 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, quoted in Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 207. 64 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §360, quoted in Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 207. 65 Hegel, Encyclopedia, §552, quoted in Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 207 (Werke, 10.364). 66 Cf. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 137–8. 67 Although philosophy begins in diremption, the purpose is to overcome that state (see Hegel, Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, Werke, 2:20–5. Cf. the criticism of the moral standpoint of Kant and Fichte, Werke, 16.219. 68 Cf. Hegel, “Die Religion ist der Ort, wo ein Volk sich die Definition dessen gibt, was es für das Wahre halt,” Werke, 12.70. 69 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, vol. 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and The Lectures of 1822–3, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson with the assistance of William G. Geuss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 447–56. 70 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 197. Christianity sublates “the Jewish representation that God is essentially for thought only and the sensuality of the Greek beautiful shape” (Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, quoted in Religious Dimension, 198–9 note). Cf. “For Christian faith, the ripeness of time for Christ, brought about by the meeting of Jewish East and GreekRoman West, is a contingent fact. For speculative thought, it is an inner, self-developing necessity” (Religious Dimension, 200–1). The unity of Athens and Jerusalem is crucial for Hegel. One might even say that on the coherence of this synthesis hangs Christianity and Hegel. From without the Hegelian system, one wonders: is it the historicism that makes the synthesis plausible or is it the plausibility of the synthesis that justifies



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  99

the historicism? From within the system, the two possibilities are one: the concept of religion requires development in time, the achievement of which is the synthesis of the partial and abstract former forms of religious consciousness into a final absolute religion that can, in turn, be comprehended philosophically. 71 Gershom Scholem, “Judaism,” in 20th Century Jewish Religious Thought, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2009), 505. 72 Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, II.13: “definirbar ist nur Das, was keine Geschichte hat,” Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 5:317. 73 Suggesting, as Scholem puts it, “that the Jews have in fact been chosen by someone for something” (“Judaism,” 505). 74 This line of thought draws on ideas and arguments developed by Jaroslav Pelikan in The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). I am indebted to a seminar led by Yuval Levin in which I first read the text. 75 Hegel suggests that Judaism in David’s Psalms and the Hebrew prophets contains a weltgeschichtlich dimension (Fackenheim, “Hegel and ‘The Jewish Problem,’” in The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust, ed. Michael L. Morgan and Benjamin Pollock [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008], 20). 76 However, this affirmation of the God of History is not without ambiguity or awareness of the complexity. In fact, several Midrashim attest to the “strange, extraordinary, or even paradoxical” claim that God, though infinitely beyond man, nevertheless “acts in human history – and He was unmistakably present to a whole people at least once” (Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections [New York: New York University Press, 1970], 4). One possible way to understand the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens is that the former entails a strong conception of history, whereas for the latter history is the realm of the accidental and contingent. If in the former the question is how God relates to and is present in history, for the latter it is how custom relates to nature. God-History versus Nature-Custom are the two fundamental structuring polarities that Hegel attempts to synthesize. His threefold mediation of Logical Idea, Nature, and Spirit can be seen as the sublation of the two opposed structuring polarities into a mutually mediated and mediating triad (Logical Idea = God; Spirit = History/ Custom). See Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 75–115. 77 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, v. This first part of the essay will occupy us here as it provides an understanding of history that forms a Jewish counterpart to that of Hegel. The second part of the essay, “The

100  Paul T. Wilford Challenge of Modern Secularity,” investigates a philosophical-theological encounter that does not address Hegel. Fackenheim explores several challenges to the account of revelation and divine presence developed in the first section: God-hypothesis, subjective reductionism, death of God, secularized messianism. In responding to these theories (whether epistemic, ontological, political, or ethical) Fackenheim develops a core aspect of his Jewish existentialism, namely, “Faith as Immediacy After Reflection” (see section titled “Jewish Existentialism and the Possibility of Teshuvah,” below). The final part of the essay, “The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz,” addresses the particular historical event that compels such inquiry into first principles, and begins to develop a mode of reflection adequate to it. Although the work concludes with the development of a neo-Midrashic theology, the work is not straightforwardly linear; for the final part is intended to enable the reader to return to the root experiences discussed in the opening pages and understand them anew. Fackenheim employs a quasi-Hegelian method of presentation – a form of argument that reflects the dialectical logic connecting the content and that moves from historical to philosophic to theological (analogous to the movement from particular to universal to individual). The fact that the highest form of discourse is theological rather than philosophic/conceptual is, of course, the decisive difference. 78 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 8–9. 79 God’s Presence in History, 8–11. The Midrash cited Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, ed. J.Z. Lauterbach (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America [1933], 1949), 2.24 ff. 80 God’s Presence in History, 11, my italics. 81 Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible, 27. 82 In this case, the subjective language is not Fackenheim’s. I employ it here in the sense Kierkegaard intends when he speaks of a subjective truth and the believer requiring a subjective truth. This is in accord with Fackenheim’s interest in what he terms, following Rosenzweig, “new thinking.” This existentialist critique of Hegel is integral to Fackenheim’s exploration of the possibility of a theological meaning to history that moves beyond Hegel. 83 On this crucial difference, namely, that subjects have a view on the world and as subjects cannot be understood as objects in the world, see Roger Scruton, On Human Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 84 Buber, quoted in Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 12, my italics. 85 Buber, quoted in God’s Presence in History, 12. 86 Fackenheim’s deep reading of German Idealism makes him acutely attuned to the fraught epistemological questions underlying this relation. For now, I only want to underscore that the object is not simply given, but



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  101

that its very givenness – the mode in which the world shows up for the self-conscious being – is conditioned by the deep structure and existential possibilities of the subject. This formulation is intended to encompass a range of possibilities, from the transcendental structures of cognition à la Kant to the historical forms of Spirit or modes of intersubjective relations in Hegel. 87 Buber, quoted in God’s Presence in History, 12. 88 See also the definition of revelation as “the reception of the wholly new” (Fackenheim, “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” in Jewish Philosophers, 67, emphasis added.) Cf. “[Revelation is] the incursion of an Absolute Other into history” (Portnoff, Reason and Revelation, 82). 89 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 14. Cf. Fackenheim’s account of the temporality of religious belief as expressed in Midrashic thought: “If creation, and the ‘decree’ made at creation, were of the past only, they would be of no religious significance: creation is a religious reality, affirmed by faith, only because it is a present reality also, forever reaccepted and appropriated” (“Man and His World in the Perspective of Judaism,” in Jewish Return into History, 11). 90 God’s Presence in History, 15, my emphasis. 91 God’s Presence in History, 16. Cf. Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future, 216–28. 92 This doubleness of the root experience of receiving the Torah, which is also the dynamic heart of Jewish morality, is a togetherness of what appears from a Kantian perspective as seemingly opposed demands: “a divine commanding Presence that never dissipates itself into irrelevance, and a human response that freely appropriates what it receives” (Fackenheim, Encounters, 44). The dialectic of fear and joy reflects the conversational, dialogic relation between two that is the heart of the Covenant. Jewish morality can be both free and commanded because it is in this dual relation to itself and to something other and beyond itself. 93 God’s Presence in History, 16. Cf. “The Torah was given at Sinai, yet it is given whenever a man receives it, and a man must often hear the old commandments in new ways. There are times in history when evil can be explained as deserved punishment, others when no such explanation is possible – when divine Power is, ‘as it were,’ suspended, and God Himself suffers in exile. Such openness is necessary if history is to be serious” (Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 17). 94 Cf. Fackenheim’s discussion of the biblical believer, regardless of temporal locality, who dwells in a “holy insecurity” that is nevertheless “the joy of the Torah” ( Jewish Return into History, 14). 95 Consider Aristotle’s suggestion that in contrast to the abiding astonishment of the believer, philosophy seeks to dispel the wondrous (Metaphysics, 982B).

102  Paul T. Wilford   96 Consider, inter alia, Hegel, Phenomenology, §§436–7 (Werke, 3.321–3). For Hegel, reflective identification is possible, but this entails mediation or the movement from identity to difference to difference in identity. Although the modern state achieves reflective identification, that status is precisely not the same as immediate (unreflective) identification or Kierkegaard’s “immediacy after reflection.”   97 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 20.   98 God’s Presence in History, 20, italics in original.   99 God’s Presence in History, 23. 100 God’s Presence in History, 24. 101 A caricature of this view is sometimes ascribed to Hegel: what appeared evil to the inhabitants of a particular civilization, namely its destruction, was in fact good from the perspective of the development of and realization of Weltgeist, and the consummation of history allows us to judge such ills as the necessary means for a greater subsequent good, as though the tragedies of world history are the growing pains of Spirit. 102 God’s Presence in History, 24. 103 God’s Presence in History, 26. 104 God’s Presence in History, 29–30. 105 God’s Presence in History, 18. What is the alternative that Fackenheim has in mind here? One possibility is that the two alternatives are interwoven in Christianity: history is transfigured in the incarnation and will be consummated with the second coming. A second possibility is that in Hegel’s appropriation of Christianity history’s consummation is the full realization of the capacities inherent in the self-conscious being for free self-comprehension, which amounts to a transfiguration of religious belief into philosophic reasoning. 106 God’s Presence in History, 19. Cf. Hegel’s remarks on the Greeks’ lack of knowledge of providence and the role of fate in their theological-historical understanding (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 1.397–9). 107 God’s Presence in History, 19. Jewish history is real, concrete, tangible history, or it is nothing. There is no separation between secular history and salvation history, no division between the Geschichte der Mensch and Heilgeschichte (see Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible, 57–60). 108 God’s Presence in History, 19. 109 Fackenheim, “An Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology,” in Quest for Past and Future, 107–8. 110 Such an existential form of historicism is closer to Heidegger’s. For Fackenheim’s treatment of Heidegger’s historicism see “Metaphysics and Historicity” and “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth” in The God Within, and To Mend the World, 149–90. 111 Fackenheim, Encounters, 87. 112 Encounters, 88.



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  103

113 The “God of Israel speaks into the historical here-and-now, and hence, potentially, into any here-and-now. Hence Jewish theological thought, however firmly rooted in past revelatory events, has always remained open to present and future, and this openness includes vulnerability to radical surprise” (Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 16). On the theme of surprise, see Fackenheim’s interpretation of how for Rosenzweig “surprise is an ontological category” in To Mend the World, 97. Cf. also Fackenheim’s discussion of radical surprise as the existential state of an individual whenever reception of the Torah occurs and its connection to the reciprocal relation between God’s descent and Moses’s ascent in “Man and His World in the Perspective of Judaism,” in Jewish Return into History, 14. Note that radical surprise and new beginning are interwoven. 114 Cited in Christopher Shea, “Debating the Uniqueness of the Holocaust,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 May 1996, A7. 115 “We cannot disguise the uniqueness of [Hitler’s] evil under a comfortable generality, such as persecution-in-general, tyranny-in-general, or even the demonic-in-general” (Fackenheim, “614th Commandment,” in Jewish Return into History, 23). 116 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 74. Cf. “The Nazi state had no higher aim than to murder souls while bodies were still alive” (Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 100); Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” in Jewish Return into History, 27. 117 Fackenheim’s description of Nazi ideology often identifies perverse inversions of Judaism or Jewish doctrine as its animating core. For example: “Never was a more exalted view of man conceived than that of the divine image, and never one more radically antiracist . . . It was therefore grimly logical – if to be sure uniquely horrifying – that the most radical racists of all time decreed a unique fate for the Jewish people” (Fackenheim, What Is Judaism?: An Interpretation for the Present Age [New York: Summit Books, 1987], 109). 118 “The Holocaust was the climax of the sole firm commitment – the ‘removal’ of the Jews – in what was otherwise a revolution of nihilism” (Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 245). See Fackenheim, “Holocaust and Weltanschauung: Philosophical Reflections on Why They Did It,” in The God Within. Cf. Graeme Nicholson, “The Passing of Hegel’s Germany,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, ed. Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 58–62; Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 3. 119 Additionally, the Jews were not “a species of the genus ‘inferior race,’ but rather the prototype by which ‘inferior race’ was defined” (Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” in Jewish Return into History, 28).

104  Paul T. Wilford 120 Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 19. 121 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, xlii. 122 To Mend the World, xviii. Fackenheim elaborates that the martyrdom of Akiba and the rest of the ten martyrs in facing Hadrian can be remembered on Yom Kippur, “for it has renewed the Jewish faith – and administered Hadrian a posthumous defeat,” but he asks whether one can one recall the victims of Hitler in the same manner (xviii; cf. xxi). While not diminishing this claim, Fackenheim will argue that the victims resisted and in resisting were martyrs of a different sort, ultimately making possible a post-Holocaust Jewish response (see section titled “Jewish Existentialism and the Possibility of Teshuvah,” below). 123 To Mend the World, 100. 124 Fackenheim, “On the Life, Death, and Transfiguration of Martyrdom,” in Jewish Return into History, 246. 125 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987), 96. Consider also the Sonderkommandos who were “deprived even of the solace of innocence” and were “National Socialism’s most demonic crime” (Levi, The Drowned and the Saved [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017], 41). 126 Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and Philosophy,” in Jewish Philosophers, 133. 127 Cf. Fackenheim’s judgment that in light of the Nazi regime “Spinoza’s science of ‘human nature,’ though Machiavellian, is not Machiavellian enough” (To Mend the World, 98). 128 The Muselmann “is the most notable, if indeed not the sole, truly original contribution of the Third Reich to civilization. He is the true novum of the New Order” (To Mend the World, 215). 129 For the classic account of evil as privation see Augustine, Confessions, VII, xi–xii. Cf. Enchiridion, XII, XIII. On evil as privation see also Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 48, a. 1. For a twentieth-century version of this argument, see Harris, The Problem of Evil. For Harris, evil is what restricts or hinders the true fulfilment of a being; “incident upon finiteness,” it has the characteristic of the partial and inadequate, or, as we naturally say, it is “defect” at a cosmic level, encompassing those beings that strive towards self-maintenance and wholeness; “evil is restriction, the badge and insignia of the finite” and “moral evil is the failure to order and rationalize our natural impulses, again an incident of finitude, consequent upon restriction to a lower grade in nature than our rational capacity implies” (30–1). Evil on this view is nothing substantial “but is merely the negative aspect of what in its positive being is good” (32). “The conclusion, therefore, remains valid that evil is the incident of finiteness” (36). Note that this lecture, delivered in 1977, is silent on National Socialism.



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  105

130 Quoted in Fackenheim, “In Memory of Leo Baeck and Other Jewish Thinkers in ‘Dark Times’: Once More, ‘After Auschwitz, Jerusalem’” in Philosopher as Witness, 5. Fackenheim elaborates the meaning of the claim: “if the evil-more-than-possible is radical, and if to explain radical evil is ipso facto to diminish it, that is, make it less than radical, must not philosophy, the more self-critical it is, be the more ruthless in facing the Holocaust as being both real-and-impossible’?” (5). Cf. “at least for twelve years, the conceptually impossible had been empirically factual” (To Mend the World, 281 note). 131 Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 190. Cf. Gershom Scholem’s judgment on Eichmann: “Eichmann was an excellent example of the systematic destruction of the image of God in man, the ‘dehumanization’ the Nazi movement preached by all possible means and practiced as far as possible” (“Eichmann,” in Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser [New York: Schocken Books, 1976], 299). Not only in the victims but also in the perpetrators themselves the divine was negated. 132 The King of Denmark is the notable exception; Fackenheim argues that had more Christians taken such a stand no rift would exist today and Christianity would be much stronger in the world. 133 Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible, 18f. Cf. Fackenheim’s treatment of this distinction from the Heideggerian perspective of an ontic-ontological distinction (To Mend the World, 169). 134 Cf. “A Jew at Auschwitz was murdered because he was a Jew; a Christian was murdered only if he was a saint” (Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 24). 135 In plain terms, the philosopher seeks “a bridge between the Book, then and there, and its reader, here and now” (Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible, 31). 136 See Fackenheim, “Historicity, Hermeneutics, and Tikkun Olam after the Holocaust,” in To Mend the World, 256–62. 137 Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible, 26. 138 Elie Wiesel, Night, quoted in Fackenheim, “Demythologizing and Remythologizing,” in Jewish Return into History, 125. For Fackenheim, Elie Wiesel articulates “an authentic Jewish enduring of the contradictions of present Jewish existence,” one that is engaged in a listening, “an interrogating of God which, born of faith, may itself bespeak a Presence while as yet no voice is heard” (“On the Self-Exposure of Faith to the Modern-Secular World,” in Quest for Past and Future, 303). 139 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 6. 140 God’s Presence in History, 7. 141 God’s Presence in History, 7.

106  Paul T. Wilford 142 Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” in Jewish Return into History, 40. 143 “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” 40. 144 Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 19. 145 Fackenheim, “The Human Condition after Auschwitz,” in Jewish Return into History, 96. 146 Consider Hegel’s somber reflection on world history: When we contemplate this display of passions, and consider the historical consequence of their violence and of the irrationality which is associated with them (and even more so with good intentions and worthy aims); when we see the evil, the wickedness, and the downfall of the most flourishing empires the human spirit has created; and when we are moved to profound pity for the untold miseries of individual human beings – we can only end with a feeling of sadness at the transience of everything. And since all this destruction is not the work of mere nature but of the will of man, our sadness takes on a moral quality, for the good of spirit in us (if we are at all susceptible to it) eventually revolts at such a spectacle. Without rhetorical exaggeration, we need only compile an accurate account of the misfortunes which have overtaken the finest manifestations of national and political life, and of personal virtues or innocence, to see a most terrifying picture take shape before our eyes. Its effect is to intensify our feelings to an extreme pitch of hopeless sorrow with no redeeming circumstances to counterbalance it … But even as we look upon history as an altar on which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are slaughtered, our thoughts inevitably impel us to ask: to whom, or to what ultimate end have these monstrous sacrifices been made? (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H.B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 68–9; Werke, 12.34–5)

147 “Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr; denn sie sind die Perioden der Zusammenstimmung, des fehlenden Gegensatzes” (Hegel, Werke, 12.42). 148 Fackenheim, Encounters, 157. The term “Holocaust Kingdom” is taken from the title of Alexander Donat’s memoir. 149 “The Doull Fackenheim Debate: Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?” in Philosophy and Freedom: The Legacy of James Doull, ed. David G. Peddle and Neil G. Robertson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 333. 150 Ludwig Siep, “Was heißt ‘Aufehebung der Moralität in Sittlichkeit’ in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie?” 226, quoted in Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 108. 151 Hegel, Werke, 16.242, quoted in “The Doull Fackenheim Debate,” 333. 152 “The Doull Fackenheim Debate,” 333.



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  107

153 Fackenheim, “Holocaust and Weltanschauung: Philosophic Reflections on Why They Did It,” in The God Within, 172–85. 154 Evidence abounds for this claim, but one only needs to reflect on the fact that supplies desperately needed at the war front were redirected and used to continue the extermination. One might think that such a disregard for self-preservation (i.e., fighting off the immediate threat of the Red Army) is a kind of madness or insanity, but Fackenheim rejects that possibility. One must understand its positivity; in doing so one confronts radical evil. 155 Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” in Jewish Return into History, 27. 156 Cf. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 10–12, 20. 157 Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 17. 158 Fackenheim, Encounters, 166. 159 At the beginning of What Is Judaism?, Fackenheim recounts the story of being a twenty-two-year-old rabbinical student in a prison cell in Halle, Germany, following Kristallnacht and being asked by an elderly gentleman: “You, Fackenheim! You are a student of Judaism. You know more about it than the rest of us here. You tell us what Judaism has to say to us now!” (13). Fackenheim’s life’s work is the attempt to respond. 160 Fackenheim, “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” in Quest for Past and Future, 87. 161 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 192. 162 Fackenheim, Encounters, 88. 163 Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy, 270. 164 “A Reply to My Critics,” 270. 165 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 217–23. 166 For the term Unwelt, see To Mend the World, 285: “The Holocaust was a world of evil – an Unwelt or antiworld – that was previously unthought and unthinkable.” 167 Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 18. 168 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 141. 169 To Mend the World, 61–2. Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1937), 357, 285. Note Fackenheim’s repeated use of this formulation of revelation as the incursion of a higher (or divine) content into an unworthy vessel (see, inter alia, The Jewish Bible, 9). 170 To Mend the World, 97. 171 To Mend the World, 97. Cf. Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, 14. 172 To Mend the World, 36. 173 Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 16. The limitation of Hegelian speculative conceptual mediation and the requisite return to existence is at the heart of what Rosenzweig terms

108  Paul T. Wilford “new-thinking,” which “differs from the ‘old’ in that in it the person of the philosopher is essential to his philosophy. After Hegel, he asserts, such a ‘personal’ philosophy is the only one still possible, and he points to such men as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to illustrate his contention” (“Franz Rosenzweig and the New Thinking,” in The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim, 60). For all Rosenzweig’s insight, however, “Jewish death at Auschwitz and rebirth at Jerusalem have made both thinkers [Cohen and Rosenzweig] more dated in certain respects than premodern, rabbinic Judaism” (Encounters, 133). The crucial disagreement with Rosenzweig lies in their respective understanding of history. For Rosenzweig nothing of essential import happens between Sinai and the Messianic days (Encounters, 133). 174 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 25. 175 To Mend the World, 216–25. 176 To Mend the World, 225. 177 To Mend the World, 224. 178 Pelagia Lewinska, Twenty Months at Auschwitz, 150, quoted in Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 217. 179 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 248. 180 Michael L. Morgan, “Philosophy, History, and the Jewish Thinker,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy, 153–6. 181 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, xix–xx. 182 To Mend the World, 225. 183 To Mend the World, 223. Cf. Fackenheim, “On the Life, Death, and Transfiguration of Martyrdom,” in Jewish Return into History. 184 “For in truth there is no possibility of comprehending what has happened – incomprehensibility is of its essence – no possibility of understanding it perfectly and thus of incorporating it into our consciousness” (Gershom Scholem, “Jews and Germans,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 91). 185 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 247. 186 Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 20. 187 Fackenheim, Encounters, 167. Cf. “To be a Jew after Auschwitz is to confront the demons of Auschwitz, and to bear witness against them in all their guises” (“These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 19). 188 Fackenheim, “614th Commandment,” in Jewish Return into History, 23. Cf. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 84–93. 189 In this commandment there is also the possibility of Jews serving again as a witness to a law that is meant not only for them – a particular people with a universal mission. Although Fackenheim does not say this explicitly, this seems tacitly implied. See, for example, Fackenheim, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 25. Cf. God’s Presence in History, 8, 53, 93–5.



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  109

190 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 239. 191 Cf. “the ‘old’ thinking, having carried the mind above time and existence, causes it to dwell in eternity, whereas the ‘new,’ having carried the mind to things eternal, perceives these latter to be empty abstractions, and is plunged by this perception back into existential limitations, now known to be untranscendable” (Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 63). According to Rosenzweig, the old form of thinking reached its peak in Hegel: there is no greater attempt to mediate God-Man-World. Hegel exhausts the possibilities of systematic thought, and its failure is the failure of all such efforts of unification, depending as they must on an abstraction from the “richness of contingent actuality” (64–5). Consider the connection between “absolute empiricism” and Rosenzweig’s existentialism. The insistence on the absolute irreducibility of experience is not arbitrary but is taken to be the result of the failure of all past philosophic efforts at reductionism that either “dissipated man and God into world (ancient period), man and world into God (medieval period), [or] God and world into man (modern period)” (64). 192 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 121–2. For all Fackenheim’s indebtedness to Kierkegaard, he cannot countenance his stance to history: “Kierkegaard’s circle of faith and revelation, first, seeks immunity from external assaults, and finds it by moving into a fideistic extreme that is indifferent to history” (122). Cf. Fackenheim’s criticism of Rosenzweig: “to make Judaism absolutely immune to all future events except Messianic ones is a priori to dismiss the challenge of contemporary events, rather than risk self-exposure. Also, it would be a relapse into a fideistic one-sidedness which, for my part, I was already in the process of rejecting” (16). 193 Quoted in Fackenheim, “Demythologizing and Remythologizing,” in Jewish Return into History, 119. 194 The “principal tenet of this school [is] that faith constitutes a unique form of commitment” (Fackenheim, “An Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology,” in Quest for Past and Future, 97). 195 Fackenheim, “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” in Jewish Philosophers, 73. 196 Fackenheim cites Schelling’s distinction between negative and positive philosophy. Positive philosophy is committed; negative philosophy is the dialectical argument for the need for such commitment. This style of argument is also characteristic of Kierkegaard, whose argument for faith is an argument for the limits of reason and the inadequacy of that position. Cf. Fackenheim, “Schelling’s Conception of Positive Philosophy,” in The God Within. 197 Whereas classical Jewish theology could begin with the assumption of the actuality of divine revelation, modern theology must “show, by an analysis of the human condition, that man’s existence, properly

110  Paul T. Wilford understood, forces him to raise the question of the Supernatural, and the existential problem of the ‘leap into faith’” (“An Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology,” in Quest for Past and Future, 101). Cf. Fackenheim’s claim that “[i]n medieval thought the belief in Revelation is typically based on sacred authority. Beginning with Kierkegaard, religious existentialism is best understood as putting an admittedly subjective ‘commitment’ into the place left vacant by the modern-critical destruction of intellectual authorities, sacred ones included” (The Jewish Bible, 107n3). 198 Fackenheim, “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” in Jewish Philosophers, 62. 199 The origin of this distinction between two ways of comporting oneself to the world can be traced back to Kant; each mode of viewing the world discloses the world in a particular way. When viewed from a third-person perspective the world appears as composed of objects governed by lawful, regular causes (Kant’s phenomenal world), but, as Fackenheim states, “reality ceases to be an object if we cease to view it as an object; that is, if instead of viewing it in detachment we become engaged with it in personal commitment. In such a personal commitment there is knowing access to the transphenomenal, an access which consists not in the discovery of laws or causes, but in a direct encounter. And the most important fact that can be encountered is divine revelation” (“Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” in Jewish Philosophers, 59). As should be evident, there is a great distance from Kant to Schelling, let alone to Jewish existentialism; nevertheless Buber is appropriating and adapting something essential from Kant’s critical philosophy, drawing on the possibility of understanding the world under two different aspects. For a contemporary account of the importance of these two possible ways of viewing and therefore of relating to the world for theology, see Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) and The Face of God (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 200 Hegel, Werke, 3.143–5. 201 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 241. Recovery should be emphasized. Revelation is threatened from multiple directions in modernity, and Teshuvah requires the possibility of the divine speaking once again into the here and now (Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 95–8). 202 For Fackenheim, revelation is not primarily “propositions or laws backed by divine sanction, but rather, at least primordially, the event of divine Presence” (To Mend the World, 6). 203 Fackenheim, Encounters, 96. On this issue, Fackenheim’s treatment of the difference between Buber and Hegel is especially important. In Fackenheim’s judgment, Buber arrives at the same representational antinomy of the Divine-Human relation that Hegel believes characterizes



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  111

the reception of Christian Grace prior to his conceptual transfiguration. Like Hegel, Buber believes this dichotomy and rigid distinction is inadequate, ultimately unspiritual, and must be overcome. Consider: “I know that ‘I am given over for disposal’ and know at the same time that ‘It depends on myself’ … I am compelled to take both to myself to be lived together, and in being lived together they are one” (Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970], 96); and “Certainly in my answering I am given into the power of His Grace, but I cannot measure Heaven’s share in it” (Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1947], 69). But unlike in Hegel the transcendence cannot be in thought alone; it must be lived, and the lived experience eludes conceptual comprehension. This difference and Fackenheim’s ultimate siding with Buber are a part of his existentialist position, which arises from the limits of the intelligibility of the human condition (Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 189 note). 204 The mistake described by Buber is similar to the problem in the fact-value distinction (see Strauss, Natural Right and History, 35–80). 205 Fackenheim, “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” in Jewish Philosophers, 63. 206 That is, an intersubjective encounter occurs not only in the present but with respect to the past (as inheritors of a tradition) and the future (as stewards for posterity). For further reflection on this theme of openness to the other, see Michael L. Morgan, “Fackenheim and Levinas: Living and Thinking after Auschwitz,” in Philosopher as Witness, 61–74. 207 “Revelation, as an objective event of communication, is hearable only to those already listening; and the listening is a listening in faith” (“Revealed Morality of Judaism,” in Quest for Past and Future, 207). 208 Fackenheim gives a definition of faith sufficiently universal to encompass secular Jewish affirmations: “Faith may be defined as the positive answer, given by way of personal commitment, to existential questions of ultimate significance, which reason can still raise but no longer answer” (“Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology,” in Quest for Past and Future, 104). He arrives at this conclusion through a brief exploration of the perennial tension between “is” and “ought” and the infinite demand that the “ought” places on the human, who must confront his sinfulness and inability to live up to it in the face of the finite “is.” Fackenheim contrasts the positive answer of faith (the redemption offered by God) with the negative answer that existence is tragic – “to a way of life lived in the conviction that existence is in its core paradoxical” (103). 209 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 8. “[O]n the Holocaust and Israel, more than on any other subjects, it is with amcha that my Jewish thought

112  Paul T. Wilford has gone to school” (“Reply to My Critics,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy, 287). 210 To Mend the World, 15. 211 “Jewish religious thinking vis-à-vis revelation” is “committed thinking, which stands in dialogical relation to the God of Israel.” Philosophical thinking, however, “must be from beginning to end detached thinking.” (Fackenheim, “Revealed Morality of Judaism and Modern Thought,” in Quest for Past and Future, 207). 212 Fackenheim, Encounters, 167. Fackenheim makes the striking claim that Hegel “would be far more open to this commingling of religious and secular realities than any contemporary philosopher” (167). 213 Fackenheim, Encounters, 167. Cf. “The Nazi holocaust was a crime at once religious and secular, aimed at both the death of the Jewish faith and the death of Jews regardless of faith or lack of faith. The Zion that has arisen from the ashes is both ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ and a witness against that dichotomy” (Encounters, 133). 214 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 14. 215 Fackenheim, Encounters, 165. 216 The Tikkun required applies not only to Jews but also to the Germans themselves. Appealing to Germany’s greatest poet and juxtaposing Goethe’s Wanderers Nachtlied with Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, Fackenheim states: “Goethe’s poem can be recovered only if, its tranquility having been ruptured, there can be a Tikkun of it – both a recognition of the rupture and a mending of it” (To Mend the World, 261). 217 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 14. 218 Fackenheim, “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational and the Rationality of the Actual,” in The God Within, 164–5. Fackenheim’s interpretation is usefully compared to M.W. Jackson’s “Hegel: The Real and the Rational” and Yirmiahu Yovel’s “Hegel’s Dictum that the Rational Is Actual and the Actual Is Rational: Its Ontological Content and Its Function in Discourse,” both in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1996), 19–25 and 26–41. 219 Hegel, Encyclopedia, §6 (Werke, 8.47–9). On the relation between actuality and existence see also Philosophy of Right Zusatz §270 (Werke, 7.248–9), especially “die wahrhafte Wirklichkeit ist Notwendigkeit: was wirklich ist, ist in sich notwendig.” 220 To see Hegel’s argument correctly requires first recalling Hegel’s respect for religion as a form of absolute Spirit and, second, recalling that he inhabited the “kind of philosophic ‘culture’ which includes ‘knowledge of God’” (Fackenheim, “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” in The God Within, 164). Of this philosophical culture, Hegel “tells us that it must know ‘not only that God is actual, the most actual, indeed, alone truly



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  113

actual, but also … that existence in general is partly appearance and only partly actual.’” (170). Hegel takes for granted that “the philosophically cultured recognize that appearance is not unreality or illusion but brute, existent fact – that for his philosophical ‘thought’ the distinction between existence and actuality remains as vital and indispensable as the corresponding distinction in ‘religious representation’” (170). 221 Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, quoted in “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” in The God Within, 165–6. 222 Fackenheim, “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” 166. 223 In Rosenzweig’s formulation the “principle of action” (or the moral injunction to realize the kingdom of God as a standard for judging existing institutions) is prior to the “principle of cognition” (or “the task of examining Actuality … with a view to discovering how Reason has been actual in it”) (Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat, quoted in Fackenheim, “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” 165–6). 224 Although it is indeed about political philosophy insofar as the dictum is the basis for Hegel’s judgment of Plato’s “city in speech,” which raises the question whether there is a best regime by nature. 225 Fackenheim, “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” 167. For the connection between Idealism and the thesis that “Reason is all reality” see, inter alia, Hegel, Phenomenology, §§231–5. 226 “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” 167. 227 “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” 165, 168. Expressed in terms of Hegel’s synthesis of the history of philosophy: “‘the Rational’ cannot be exclusively a God external to man and world if Hegel is any kind of Kantian; and ‘the Actual’ cannot be exclusively a natural and/or human ‘world’ (or a divine manifestation in that world) if Hegel is any sort of Spinozist” (168). 228 “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” 168. Again, as we saw above, everything turns on whether this is coherent or whether one apex of the triangle collapses and the figure is really a flat line. If the difference between God and World is annulled when transfigured into Rational and Actual, then Rudolph Haym’s original charge that the dictum is either “scandalous or senseless” seems justified. Fackenheim cites Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (photomechanical reprint of 1857 edition; Hildesheim: Olms, 1962), adding “See in particular 367–8.” 229 The identification of God and man in Hegel that is predicated on the internalization of the divine, whereby “Divinity comes to dwell, as it were, in the same inner space as the human self,” avoids lapsing into idolatry, for the identity occurs in the realm of thought alone; “existentially man and God remain apart” (Fackenheim, Encounters, 191). The continuity of this principle with modernity’s animating theological

114  Paul T. Wilford beliefs is central to the debate between Kant-Hegel and SchellingKierkegaard that forms the core of Fackenheim’s The God Within. In Fackenheim’s judgment this debate “overshadows all subsequent dismissals of revealed religion by such as Marx and Nietzsche, and is more profound than the deepest of Heidegger’s thought” (The God Within, xii). 230 Hegel, Encyclopedia, §6; for Hegel “existence [Dasein] in general is partly appearance and only partly actuality” and “a contingent concrete existence [eine zufällige Existenz] will not be deemed to deserve the emphatic designation of being actual [eines Wirklichen]” (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 33; Werke, 8.47–8). 231 Fackenheim, “Hegel on the Actuality of the Rational,” in The God Within, 171. Cf. “Hegel’s thought can arise only from a ‘modern world’ composed of an unconquerable Christian faith and a boundless secular selfconfidence; and only such a world can it wish to reinstate” (To Mend the World, 119). 232 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 230. 233 Cf. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 238: “For Hegel, however, to grasp a whole in a circular thought is to comprehend it, to transcend it, and from a higher standpoint, perceive the meaning of the whole by placing it into a perspective. On our part, in contrast, we confront in the Holocaust world a whole of horror. We cannot comprehend it but only comprehend its incomprehensibility. We cannot transcend it but only be struck by the brutal truth that it cannot be transcended.” 234 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 130–6. Fackenheim concludes: “where the Holocaust is there is no overcoming; and where there is an overcoming the Holocaust is not.” Cf. “Auschwitz is the scandal of evil for evil’s sake, and Jews were the singled-out victims. This is the rock on which in all eternity all rational explanations – whatever their value and legitimacy – will break apart” (“These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 18); and the formulation given in “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust”: “the scandal of evil for evil’s sake, an eruption of demonism without analogy; and the singling-out of Jews, ultimately, is an unparalleled expression of what the rabbis call groundless hate. This is the rock on which throughout eternity all rational explanations will crash and break apart” ( Jewish Return into History, 29). 235 Fackenheim, “Hegel and ‘The Jewish Problem,’” in Philosopher as Witness, 21. 236 Tom Rockmore, German Idealism as Constructivism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), 59.



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  115

237 Steven Smith provides a brief and lucid account of what it means to call Hegel the philosopher of the “Bourgeois-Christian World” (Modernity and Its Discontents [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016], 154–72). The phenomenon of Nazism if confronted honestly refutes the liberal hope of perpetual, necessary progress (Fackenheim, “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” in Quest for Past and Future, 86). 238 “The Doull Fackenheim Debate,” 331–2. 239 Hegel surpasses all his epigones not only in “religious profundity” but “vis-à-vis Judaism, in integrity as well” (Fackenheim, Encounters, 153). 240 Fackenheim, Encounters, 153. This commitment, however, is grounded in logical-metaphysical reasons; thus Fackenheim also says that “the Notion is the ultimate source of Hegel’s injustice to Judaism” (161). 241 “The Doull Fackenheim Debate,” 334. Fackenheim stresses the radical self-exposure of Hegel’s philosophy to actual flesh-and-blood history (e.g., see the judgment that both Judaism and Hegelianism “are radically self-exposed to history” [Encounters, 153]). Cf. To Mend the World, xxiv–xxv. 242 “The Doull Fackenheim Debate,” 334. 243 Hegel, Phenomenology, §§582–95 (Werke, 3.431–41). Cf. Doull’s account of Nazism as well as his comparison of Hegel and Schelling on evil (“The Doull Fackenheim Debate,” 334–5 and 338–9). For a defense of Hegel as possessing conceptual resources superior to any subsequent thinker for understanding the sociopolitical and spiritual crises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Doull, “Hegel’s Phenomenology and Post-Modern Thought,” in Philosophy and Freedom, 281–301. 244 Cf. Peter Dews, “Hegel: A Wry Theodicy,” in The Idea of Evil, 99–103. Note especially his judgment that “Hegel is deeply aware that, as the scope of subjective freedom grows, the potential for devastating outbreaks of evildoing grows also … For Hegel, then, the unleashing of subjectivity in the modern world brings a new depth of freedom, but also unprecedented dangers” (102f.). 245 Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, 15. Testifying against idolatry is also a critique of Hegel: there are some gods that are simply false that cannot be mediated in a grander conception or totality. That is, the Hegelian claim that nothing is simply false or simply negated, but always partially false and in need of sublation in a higher truth, is categorically rejected. Hegel is caught between reducing the Holocaust to triviality or to elevating it into something positive and therefore partially good. Fackenheim argues that neither response is adequate. The Holocaust lies beyond Hegel’s Begriff. 246 See Kenneth Kierens, “Commentary: Two Interpretations of Freedom and Evil: Hegel’s Theory of Modernity Revisited,” in Philosophy and Freedom, 334–45.

116  Paul T. Wilford 247 Cf. Fackenheim’s discussion of “the scandalous particularity of modern idolatry,” which receives its utmost expression in Nazism “as the modern idolatry because, being unsurpassable, it reveals all that idolatry can be in the modern world” (Encounters, 177, 193). 248 “I call philosophy ‘insufficient’ because a philosophy that truly faces the Holocaust does not need to be told: it knows its own insufficiency itself. Philosophy is rational, and reason explains; but is not explaining radical evil ipso facto making it less-than-radical? It would seem that historians can show radical evil, but cannot explain it” (Fackenheim, “In Memory of Leo Baeck and Other Jewish Thinkers in ‘Dark Times’: Once More, ‘After Auschwitz, Jerusalem,’” in The Philosopher as Witness, 5). 249 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 105. Cf. “There is no greater attempt than the Hegelian to unite the God of the philosophers with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 240). 250 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Theodor Wiesengrund (New York: Seabury, 1973; reprint, New York: Continuum, 2007), 362. Adorno goes so far as to say: “If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims” (365). In a reversal of the Kantian idealist claim that the world conforms to the conceptual structure of our cognition, Adorno argues that thought must face a reality that eludes conceptuality. 251 Fackenheim, Encounters, 133. 252 Fackenheim, “Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology,” in Quest for Past and Future, 102. Cf. the opening paragraphs of Immanuel Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” Werke: Akademie Textausgabe, 9 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 8:17–18. 253 Fackenheim, “Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology,” in Quest for Past and Future, 102–3. 254 Fackenheim, “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” in Quest for Past and Future, 87. 255 “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” 88. Cf. Hegel: “Dies ist das Siegel der absoluten hohen Bestimmung des Menschen, daß er wisse, was gut ist und was böse ist, und daß eben sie das Wollen sei, entweder des Guten oder des Bösen, - mit einem Wort, daß er Schuld haben kann, Schuld nicht nur am Bösen, sondern auch am Guten, und Schuld nicht bloß an diesem, jenem und allem, sondern Schuld an dem seiner individuellen Freiheit angehörigen Guten und Bösen. Nur das Tier allein ist wahrhaft unschuldig” (Werke, 12.50–1). 256 Cf. Fackenheim, “Outline of a Modern Jewish Theology,” in Quest for Past and Future, 103.



Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  117

257 See Hegel’s interpretation of the Fall in Genesis (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 1.455–6). Cf. his description of Socrates, where he equates “subjective freedom” with “the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – self-knowing reason” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–6, vol. 2: Greek Philosophy, ed. Robert F. Brown, trans. Robert F. Brown et al. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 127). 258 Fackenheim, “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” in Quest for Past and Future, 88. 259 “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” 89. 260 “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” 95. 261 “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” 90. 262 “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” 90. The description “finite understanding” is Fackenheim’s use of Hegelian terminology: finite understanding as opposed to infinite reasoning preserves distinctions as either/or dichotomies rather than mediating them in an identity of difference relation. 263 “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” 90. 264 “Judaism and the Idea of Progress,” 90–1. 265 Fackenheim, “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” in Jewish Philosophers, 103–4. 266 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 94. 267 On Hegel’s superiority to Heidegger in facing “flesh-and-blood history before transcending it” see To Mend the World, xxiv–xxv. 268 To Mend the World, 106. 269 To Mend the World, 139. 270 Fackenheim, Encounters, 165. 271 Encounters, 165. 272 Encounters, 165. 273 Fackenheim, The Jewish Bible, 107n1. Fackenheim repeats his judgment in several places. Cf., inter alia, “These Twenty Years,” in Quest for Past and Future, 16: “the greatest theology ever produced within Judaism – the Midrash of the Talmudic rabbis. Midrash is dialectical, and it is a whole, and it is an open whole.” 274 Fackenheim, Encounters, 162. 275 Encounters, 162.

4 Strategies of Jewish Hegelianism: Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch martin kavka

Why should Jewish philosophy be Hegelian? Answering this question must start with the acknowledgment that the great tension of Jewish philosophy is that while it purports to have nothing to say about its practitioners – it speaks about what Judaism factually is – the story of Jewish philosophy over the century is a story about what its practitioners have wanted. Many of the first scholars in the field in North America published for motives similar to those that Harry A. Wolfson gave for his scholarship in 1921: to use reason as a “common ground” on which Jews could meet with Christians.1 But the field of Jewish philosophy does not simply describe what monotheists have in common with each other. At times it describes what non-Jewish monotheists need, and what Judaism already has – often an elevated account of law, ethics, or piety. Claims that the West needs Judaism for the West’s betterment were part of the apologetic aims of Moses Mendelssohn in Jerusalem (1783) and Hermann Cohen in Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919). Such claims were at stake in the dual-covenant theology that Franz Rosenzweig offered in The Star of Redemption (1921), popularized by Nahum Glatzer and others beginning in the 1950s, in which Judaism’s purpose is in part to remind Christians that redemption has not yet come.2 They were at stake in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1950s pietism.3 They were at stake in Emmanuel Levinas’s description of Judaism as an anti-totalitarian ethic in several works and collections of essays.4 They remain at stake today when bioethics commissions/ councils in the United States need Jewish “representation” for determining the right course of action with respect to a hot-button cultural issue (e.g., stem-cell research). But we are too historically sophisticated today to think that Mendelssohn or Heschel or Levinas had, or David Novak or Leon Kass5 has,



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  119

uncovered Judaism in its pristine and timelessly true form. Much of the credit here goes to scholars working in medieval and modern Jewish intellectual history. Today, wrestling with historicism is seen as one of the most productive aspects of the Jewish philosophical canon, whether in Amos Funkenstein’s treatment of Maimonides’s proto-Hegelian notion of divine cunning (talattuf fi’allahu), David Myers’s book on German anti-historicism, or Peter Gordon’s book on Rosenzweig and Heidegger.6 The rise of Jewish intellectual history has caused scholars of Jewish philosophy to attend to the causes and purposes of philosophical activity on the parts of notable Jewish philosophers.7 Arguments are no longer taken for granted, as if scholars of Jewish philosophy could remain content with writing commentary, or simply had to write more passionately in order to persuade their audiences of the correctness of the philosopher under discussion. Nonetheless, had the field of Jewish thought/philosophy not shifted in this direction since the turn of the millennium, there would still be good reasons for scholars of Jewish philosophy to endorse historicism. In an open letter on Jewish education and Bildung written in 1920, Franz Rosenzweig reminded his readers that the fact that some people take certain books as repositories of “authentic Judaism” is the result of their free decisions to take such content as authentic. Authenticity is thus the result of a pact made between present and past. The past does not have the last word on what “real Judaism” is; because it is handed over to a present decision, it alters in each moment. No book can contain “real Judaism.” It can only be lived, and lived differently from time to time, community to community, and person to person. For it is a secret, albeit a completely unveiled one, unknown to these times obsessed with Bildung [self-formation] and suffocated by it, that the sole purpose of books is to pass on what has come into being to what is becoming, and that that which stands between what has come into being and what is becoming – the day, today, the present, and life – is not in need of books … For life stands between two times, namely the moment between past and future. The living moment itself is the end of the making of books. But at its edges, two realms of the making of books, two realms of Bildung, sharply border on it. In these there is no end to the making of books. The enquiry into the past knows no end, that enquiry to which the [present] moment is nothing until it too is pierced and displayed in the butterfly case of things past and which may know of the future only that which it can picture for itself according to its likeness with the past. And there is no end to the instruction of the coming ones, which needs the moment merely to unlock with its fire the unawakened souls of those who come into being,

120  Martin Kavka and which tames from the past only that which can be taught – that which finds room in the unlocked souls of the new generation.8

The Jewish person, in the midst of the flux of life, exists outside of the framework of factoids that make up the books by which Jews are supposed to be developed and formed (gebildet), the shelves of knowledge that are passed on from teacher to student. Nevertheless, the person does not exist in a vacuum. Certainly there is a relation between the person’s present moment, the past of the Jewish tradition, and the future. The present moment is responsive to the past. But it need not be beholden to the past.9 Without such response, Rosenzweig went on to say in the sentences following the block quote above, “the past would be invisible.”10 But if the purpose of the present moment were simply to make a future that repeats the past, then the flow of time from moment to moment would not have the dynamism characteristic of life. Instead, human beings would be reduced to curios in a natural history museum, or to specimens in a entomologist’s collection. The past therefore can only delimit the options for future action; it cannot determine them, and the border between illicit and licit actions is not necessarily obvious. Living persons are surely not dead butterflies. Jewish, Christian, Muslim, non-monotheist, or atheist scholars of Jewish philosophy can acknowledge Rosenzweig’s correctness on this matter. But to do this – to acknowledge that Judaism cannot be passed from generation to generation (or from person to person, or from teacher to student) through books, but is a (living) tradition mediated through individuals’ decisions about how to appropriate the Jewish past – entails standing beyond reason, at a distance from all accounts of Judaism and Jewishness that take those two nouns as collections of given and ready-made facts, and alongside accounts that take them as nouns that name a set of interests and desires. To study Jewish philosophy today, then, is to understand that facts only have meaning in the light of the desires of those who make factual claims. It is to endorse something that Heinrich Graetz said near the beginning of “The Structure of Jewish History” (1846), an essay that rests on the assumption that abstract ideas are powerless without the concrete spheres in which they express themselves. As a result, “history is not only the reflection of the idea, but also the test of its power [das Kriterion ihrer Probehaltigkeit]” or the sphere in which an idea’s ability to stand the test and gain approval could be seen.11 Graetz did not say very much in this essay about how this process of approbation works, and most of his essay is unpersuasive as a result. But the idea of Probehaltigkeit remains powerful, for it speaks to the power of persons to



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  121

appropriate an idea. What tests an idea is a person’s, or a community’s, commitment to live out a desire that an idea be true. What tests an idea is that person’s, or those persons’, demand on others to respond to that desire, and license or give reasons for rejecting that desire and/or its legitimacy.12 This distinction between facts and desires – or between thought and life – is one that philosophers know well. It is central to the distinction in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) between Verstand and Vernunft, usually translated in English as “understanding” and “reason” respectively. Verstand names that faculty that seeks to determine the meaning of our concepts in a static way; as Hegel wrote in the preface to the Phenomenology, the understanding “likes to put everything in its own little pigeon-hole” and therefore “knows no more than what is made available through a table of contents.”13 The problem with the understanding is that its formalism leaves behind “the concrete, or actuality [Wirklichkeit] itself, the living movement of the subject matter.”14 Hegel defines Vernunft as a “purposive doing,”15 and at the very least this means that reason is ours, because the purposes of reasoning always belong to the reasoners. The meaning of our concepts is inseparable from an account of the dynamic processes by which we determine – and redetermine, and redetermine – the meaning of those concepts.16 This does not mean that concepts are only ours. Reason is still responsive to its objects, to “facts.” While some might have a concept of a particular metal in terms of its boiling point and others might have a concept of that metal in terms of its possible uses in the fine arts, it remains the case that a metal that does not boil at 2800ºC is neither gold nor nickel, and that a metal that boils at 2800ºC but is not malleable is not gold (but is nickel). Nevertheless, for the Hegelian conception of reason, the content of our concepts only makes sense in terms of the activity by which we fix and refine our concepts; only such attention to us – our interests and desires – as well as to the world can give our ideas life. The opening chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology are an argument as to why we should side with Hegel and Vernunft, against the dogmatists of Verstand. Its first hundred pages are a long exploration of how we might know that we know anything at all. A sheer apprehension of an object, taken apart from our own conceptual labour (what Hegel terms “sense-certainty”), can only be an apprehension of an object’s context (in addition to the object’s sheer being): a here, and a now, in which we apprehend this object before us.17 But, as Willem deVries pointed out in an important article thirty years ago, “a change in context can easily produce a change in reference. ‘The tallest man in the room’ will refer

122  Martin Kavka

to different people in different rooms, and, if the occupants of the room change, it may easily acquire a new reference in the same room.”18 So this is not knowledge at all. If we solve this problem by insisting that we know a particular object by picking out its properties that we perceive, and making predications of that object – “the man in the room is tall, with pale skin and hairy forearms” – Hegel points out that we are unable to articulate how the particular properties of the man (his height, his pallor, his fuzziness) are bound up with the man himself. The single object (the man) is “broken up,” and is only a medium for its various properties, which are “indifferent to each other.”19 We are no longer relating to an individual object in its individuality, and are unable to articulate how this object (this “medium” for particular properties) is different from other objects. And so perception is no way of determining the meaning of an object either; we cannot get outside of our own concepts – our own naming – to reach the object itself. We might then solve this problem by hypothesizing that consciousness, through the powers of its understanding, can know the essence of an object, behind its varying particular manifestations. (Hegel here is responding to other German philosophers’ theories of “force.”) But because the understanding cannot adequately explain how the act of manifestation takes place, this does not work either. Such attempts to explain knowledge have more to do with our needs to have our concepts hit the objects that they try to know than they are about the objects themselves. Our various theories and laws for how knowledge works have a staying power, however, because we are theorizing beings: the reason why “there is so much self-satisfaction in explanation [is] because the consciousness involved in it is, to put it this way, in an immediate conversation with itself, enjoying only itself. While it undeniably seems to be pursuing something else, it is really just consorting with itself.”20 My purpose in giving a whirlwind tour of these pages is to show that the opening of the Phenomenology, through its account of the impossibility of static models of knowledge, sets up a gap between mind (and the concepts that comprise it) and world (and the objects that comprise it). The various models of knowing that Hegel has criticized are ones in which we believe ourselves to have successfully met our epistemological aims. But what Hegel has shown is that we have “a knowledge only of the necessities in the way the understanding works; it seems more to study the way in which we think of things rather than the way in which things really are.”21 To affirm this gap is not to fall into some kind of epistemological nihilism. For if we know that any knowledge is always



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  123

accompanied by an awareness of ourselves, or “self-consciousness,” then it is also the case that we can know at least one object, because selfconsciousness is an object for us. Mind is surely other than the world. Yet because this otherness is something that mind can know, at least one thing about the mind – namely, its way of taking the world – is like the objects of the world, knowable. For this reason, Hegel writes that because self-consciousness can be an object for us, “the whole breadth of the sensuous world is preserved for it.”22 We are not trapped in our own heads.23 Hegel drew two conclusions from this argument. First, mind is not simply equated to thought. Since mind is like world in at least one respect, it is therefore like all those things that are other than abstract thought: it is life.24 Second, this life, in which mind is both like and unlike world, is one that the mind tries to resolve. It is one that the mind wants to resolve, once it knows that knowledge of objects is bound up with self-awareness; it cannot abide the contradiction between its simultaneous likeness and unlikeness with respect to the world. And this drive to resolve the contradiction is bound up with Hegel’s definition of self-consciousness as desire, seeking to comprehend the world, but also never finding an end to that comprehensive drive (because mind just is other than world). This is the “Bacchanalian revel” of the pursuit of truth.25 The Struggle of Fackenheim’s Hegelianism I have gone into such detail about the fraught relationship between life and thought in Hegel because this distinction is important for the figure – despite the criticisms I make of his work in the following pages – who represents the most promising path in Jewish philosophy at present: Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003). As Benjamin Pollock has shown in an important article on possible changes in Fackenheim’s thinking in the last years of his life,26 the leitmotif of Fackenheim’s philosophy was the call for Jewish thought to leave abstraction behind and to open itself up for revision, based on the needs of Jewish life. Thought was to go to school with life, as Fackenheim wrote on several occasions. Fackenheim explicitly saw this call as inspired by Hegel. While most philosophy affirms that the proper contours of life are to be determined by good thinking, Hegel departed from this by arguing that “thought can come only after life, and can only comprehend what already is.” Such an argument, Fackenheim thought, was necessary for Judaism after the Holocaust.27 Fackenheim departed from Hegel in terms of philosophical content – on account of the Christocentrism of Hegel’s systematic

124  Martin Kavka

thinking – and often described himself as a “Hegelian after Hegel” as a result. Yet his method was always and everywhere Hegelian, for it was that method that allowed him to endow life with the authority to determine thought, and to leave abstraction behind. As Pollock noted, it was in a 1992 Festschrift for Fackenheim that Graeme Nicholson argued that the “relationship between life and thought is the central category in Fackenheim’s own thought. It is one reason why he must be called a Hegelian.”28 How does this hierarchy of life over thought show itself in Fackenheim’s writing? The basic argument for which Fackenheim remains best known – that there is a “614th commandment” to Jews not to give Hitler posthumous victories by abandoning their Jewish identity (in either religious or secular modes), a commandment uttered by the “Commanding Voice of Auschwitz” – starts from Fackenheim’s puzzlement at the flourishing of Jewish life in North America in the 1950s and 1960s. Insofar as Jews were affirming their Jewish identity (whether religious or secular), they were doing something that was either irrational or imprudent. The Holocaust had shown, Fackenheim thought, that another Holocaust was possible. Therefore, the prudent thing for Jews to do was to leave Jewish identity behind, and cease all those practices (synagogue attendance, B’nai Brith membership, labor-union activism, doing a Passover seder) in which Jewishness was performed. For Jews to do anything other than this – to be Jewish in public or even in private – was counterintuitive. For Fackenheim, such counterintuitive behaviour could only be explained as a response to a supernatural command. Here, then, thought followed upon life.29 In his response to the essays collected in the 1992 Festschrift, Fackenheim described his mature post-Holocaust thought in To Mend the World (1982) in the following manner: [To Mend the World]’s thought goes itself to school with life, a move arbitrary, perhaps, for others, but not for a Hegelian-after-Hegel; and the life chosen for the schooling is both the “irresistible” assault by the Holocaustworld and the “resistance-despite-irresistibility” by its victims. Once schooled by life, the schooled thought, like Hegel’s own, seeks a transcending, overcoming, comprehension of a whole but, confronted as it is (and Hegel never was) by that whole – a unique whole-of-horror – it can escape being itself overcome (Jean Améry) only … with an unyielding, uncomprehending, but altogether unarbitrary resistance.30

There are two movements in this passage. One affirms the necessity of thought going to school with life. The other affirms the impossibility of



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  125

that schooling ever coming to an end. The comprehension at which thought aims is something that will never come to pass; because the Holocaust has occurred, comprehension always fails, and life and its imperative to resist radical evil will carry the day. Nevertheless, what appears to be a victory of life over thought is no such victory at all, since Fackenheim here does not imagine any end of schooling. The schooled thought seeks comprehension of the whole, and continues to do so in and through its resistance to evil. Fackenheim had already described these movements of necessity and impossibility in his 1967 book on Hegel, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought. Necessity. Fackenheim had introduced the Hegel book by claiming that “the power of Hegel’s philosophy [is] that it speaks as directly to the fragmented world of the present age as do that world’s own fragmented philosophies.”31 Specifically, it spoke to the secularization of the West during the 1960s, and the fragmentation between religion and an increasingly secularized social and political life. Religion could not turn away from public life (on account of its secularity) without becoming “a worldless pietism turned upon itself,” so privatized that it became functionally indistinguishable from secular life. Religion had to remain in the public sphere. On the flipside, the anthropocentrism of public life – its affirmation of “a humanism simply innocent of divinity” – could only appear to proclaim the death of God. Nevertheless, it was Hegel who even in his earliest writings taught that such fragmentation was intolerable: “to philosophize at all – even within the severely drawn limits of an existential here-and-now or a specific mode of linguistic discourse – is inevitably to transcend these self-drawn limits. Part of the human quality of human life, and part of its suffering, is to seek and partially achieve transcendence of fragmentation even while remaining confined to it.”32 Fackenheim had been puzzling over this fragmented account of human life as early as his brilliant little 1961 essay “Metaphysics and Historicity.” As with most titles of the format “X and Y,” the conjunction was the most important word.33 Fackenheim wanted it both ways: both metaphysics and historicity, both thought and life. “Metaphysics and Historicity” ended by suggesting that, as soon as philosophy inquired after the “condition of all human producing” in secular life, it could not avoid affirming both the historicity of human production and the metaphysical account of the God who “situates man humanly.”34 In the 1967 Hegel book, it was Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion that showed a similar way forward. There, the apparent opposition between religious life and speculative philosophy was mediated by

126  Martin Kavka

the realization that “a conflict which in one sense is yet to be resolved by thought is in another already resolved in life.”35 To return to Fackenheim’s argument for the 614th commandment, the efflorescence of Jewish life in the 1960s may not have been, to North American Jews, explicitly or consciously a response to a command not to give Hitler posthumous victories. But that command was already implicit in North American Jews’ lives. Fackenheim did not utter the command; it had already been issued. Fackenheim only brought it to the surface of consciousness, articulating in philosophical-theological language how life had already resolved the conflict between the Holocaust and the classical Jewish affirmation that God acts in history. Impossibility. But Fackenheim’s Hegel book also implied that the movement of comprehension is eternal; it never comes to rest. On the final page of the book, Fackenheim claimed that while he had not wanted to “suggest a revival of the Hegelian philosophy,” he had wanted to “suggest that philosophic thought, however rooted in existential commitments, craves a comprehensiveness that transcends them.” Again, Fackenheim wanted both metaphysics and historicity. The next two sentences, however, are a bit more puzzling: “To be sure, this craving can no longer expect, or even seek, more than fragmentary satisfaction. Yet it is not doomed to total frustration.”36 These sentences are puzzling because “fragmentary satisfaction” can refer to one of two things. “Fragmentary” can have a temporal sense: satisfaction lasts for only a fragment of time. On this sense of “fragmentary,” the metaphysical drive to uncover the timeless truth that governs and explains a historical situation ends up falling prey to critique – or to historical falsification – and continually has to start over again. Or “fragmentary” can refer to a partial satisfaction that nonetheless perdures from moment to moment. Fackenheim’s career showed that he meant the phrase in this latter sense. God’s Presence in History is an argument for the fragmentary nature of post-Holocaust thinking, since Jewish existence is consistently threatened with madness. God cannot be made absent – a 614th commandment has been issued, secularism is no haven for Jews – but God cannot be made into a saving presence either, for then one would have to explain why those who died in the Holocaust were not saved.37 Yet there are parts of the Hegel book that suggest that the first sense of “fragmentary” is more in keeping with Hegel’s thinking. Near the end of its third chapter, Fackenheim was already informing the reader that the drive for comprehension would not succeed neatly. For the drive to understand the world in terms of mental concepts could not turn world into mind, or mind into world. The mind wants to comprehend



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  127

“contingent realities of human existence which are shot through with finitude, conflict, and nonunion,”38 although it could not give an infinite or timeless stamp to contingency without turning that contingency – life – into something other than it was. For Fackenheim, it was this idea that explained the difficulty of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. (You had thought it was the jargon? Naaah.) The book’s “actual movement is tortuous, and is arrested time and again as if Hegel were haunted by the fear that encountered standpoints of life, disposed of too quickly or glibly by a thought which is Notion [i.e., conceptual], will arise to accuse the Notion [i.e., the conceptual realm of thinking] of lifelessness.”39 Hegel had good reason to be afraid of this; after all, objects are not composed of concepts, and mental concepts are not composed of matter. This difference cannot be traversed through thinking. And yet it remains the case that the human person is both mind and matter, invested in both the metaphysical realm and the historical realm, a participant in both the eternal and the contingent. Fackenheim had thought that Hegel expressed this most eloquently not in the 1806 Phenomenology of Spirit, but in the first set of lecture notes (from 1821) to his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Thinking seeks to understand a situation in universal terms, but it cannot ward off contingency once and for all. Yet in all this, the thinking self and the self constrained by the world, and the self who is like others and the self who is impenetrable to others, are all the same self. In thinking, I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self-consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition. Both sides, as well as their relation, exist for me [in] the essential unity of my infinite knowing and my finitude. These two sides seek each other and flee from each other. I am this conflict and this conciliation … I am what intuits, senses, and represents this union and conflict. I am their holding together, the effort put forth in his holding together, the labor of mind and heart to master this opposition … In other words, I am the conflict, for the conflict is precisely this clash … I am not one of the parties caught up in the conflict but am both of the combatants and the conflict itself. I am the fire and water that touch each other, the contact and union of what utterly flies apart.40

In this passage, there is no end to the conflict. For the conflict to be resolved, I would have to stop being me. I would have either to cease thinking, or to cease living amid the flux of history. It may be part of my nature to think through contingent events. It is how I make my way through the world, able to look at a delicata squash and know

128  Martin Kavka

how to prepare it based on past experiences with winter squash (or other root vegetables), able to deal with setbacks in my life (based on either my or others’ similar experiences), able to cope with others with whom I am in conflict (students, department chairs, and even people with no university affiliation), able to get to my bathroom in the dark without walking into a wall. All these things involve conceptual labour: about how a root vegetable changes in consistency when baked at a certain temperature, about the sting of death, about narcissism, about the length of my pace and the dimensions of the rooms in my house. But the next time, I may go wrong. Not all squashes are alike, some deaths are worse than others, some narcissists are more deeply pathological than others, and there may be a pile of clothes in the middle of the floor that will lead me to trip. In other words, it is always possible for my comprehension of the world to be called up short by the actual world. I will have to refine my ways, and that will work for some length of time. But I will never be able to say, at any point in time, that I will no longer have to refine my ways in the future.41 After having quoted part of this passage, Fackenheim wrote that this conflict, “this struggle – and the struggle to resolve the struggle – is in the end of the sole theme of the Phenomenology and, indeed, of the whole Hegelian philosophy.”42 The words between the dashes of that sentence are key, because they suggest that what Hegel thought was impossible – an end to the “Bacchanalian revel” – might merely be difficult. If they are merely difficult, even extremely or exceptionally difficult, then the varying ways in which the twentieth century showed that Enlightenment could become barbaric could simply lead us to a better articulation of Hegelian method, one that leaves behind, for example, the Christocentrism of its approach to religion or the various partisan commitments of Hegel’s immediate philosophical heirs, and continues to try to have it all.43 This is the path that Fackenheim took. But if there is no possible resolution to the struggle, Hegelian method should lead scholars of Jewish philosophy and theology to stop trying to delineate the best philosophical theologies. Instead, it should lead us to aim at delineating simply better philosophical theologies: those that meet the needs of a community at a particular moment, those that are rooted in contemporary life, and not traditionalist accounts of doctrine. In that more humble attitude, it may be that the 614th commandment no longer holds the force to comprehend Jewish life that it once did.44 After all, its argument is odd. Is counterintuitive resistance really only comprehensible as a response to a divine command? If it were, would we not have described the recent rise of Black Lives Matter as a response to a divine command? Would we not have described the die-ins and



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  129

protests of ACT UP in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a response to a divine command? After all, it is prudent, given white supremacy, to perform one’s blackness as little as possible. It would have been prudent, in the 1980s, for a person with AIDS to die in private, sheltered from photographers and journalists and everyone else. What makes the Jewish resistance in the 1950s and 1960s to the possibility of enforced death uniquely theological?45 And could we not say that there are other theologies implicit in contemporary Jewish life, theologies that would rise to the surface if thought were to go to school with Jewish life today? In order to answer this last question, another – more naturalist – Jewish Hegelianism would have to be invoked. But the best of those options was already cast aside, and rightly so, by Emil Fackenheim. The Natural and Supernatural Jewish Hegelians: Samuel Hirsch and Emil Fackenheim In 1964, Fackenheim published his only article about an earlier Jewish Hegelian: Samuel Hirsch.46 In 1842, while Hirsch was the rabbi of Dessau, he published a book with the unwieldy title Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden, oder das Prinzip der jüdischen Religionsanschauung und sein Verhältnis zum Heidenthum, Christenthum und zur absoluten Philosophie. (The length of the title perhaps hints at the length of the book, which is just over nine hundred pages.) Fackenheim’s article is a deft little immanent critique of Hirsch, which shows how not to be a Jewish Hegelian – or, at least, shows the difficulty of maintaining both terms in the identity “Jewish Hegelian.” While Fackenheim’s essay is remarkably empathetic to Hirsch’s attempt at undoing Hegel’s supersessionism while both (a) affirming Hegel’s superiority to all other philosophies and (b) leaving Hegelian apparatus behind when necessary,47 Fackenheim judged Hirsch’s attempt to construct a Jewish response to Hegel to be a failure. The problem was that Hirsch’s account of Jewish philosophy of religion falls into contradiction, for it posits both a philosophically purified notion of God – who therefore cannot be a historical agent – and a God who interacts with history. The former is apparent in the first chapter of Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden, where Hirsch openly states that “one cannot speak at all of a relationship to God,” because to relate to something is to be located in time and space, and God is not limited as spatiotemporal beings are located. Instead, as Hirsch went on to say in the following sentences, “where the person [Mensch] is, there God is also. For God there is no border.”48 To a statement like this, Fackenheim could only snort. “The utterly un-Hegelian nature of this affirmation cannot be overemphasized.”49

130  Martin Kavka

However, I doubt whether Fackenheim was correct in this judgment. He only quoted Hirsch’s line about there being no relationship between God and the human. And if that were all that Hirsch had said – a­ ffirming perhaps a Maimonidean God who exists outside of history – he would have been correct. But Hirsch’s next sentences, about God taking place in the world wherever humans are, make the eminently Hegelian point that God is not fundamentally other than the human. As Hegel wrote in the 1827 version of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (a version that is largely absent of the supersessionism that characterizes the 1824 and 1821 versions),50 “The making or creation of the world is God’s self-manifesting, self-revealing. In a further and later definition we will have this manifestation in the higher form that what God creates God himself is, that in general it does not have the determinateness of an other, that God is manifestation of his own self … the Son of God or human being according to the divine image (Adam Kadmon).”51 Nevertheless, Fackenheim was correct that Hirsch does not maintain this account of God throughout Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden. At certain points in that book, there is indeed a relationship between humans and God, by virtue of the fact that Hirsch posits divine desire with regard to the Jewish people. There are three places in Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden that Fackenheim cites (and more could be added). The first is in the third chapter of Hirsch’s book, dealing with “active religiosity.” This chapter develops into a claim that Abraham’s active religiosity – his freely chosen decision to relate to God – makes him a figure of true religion, who therefore destroys paganism. There, Hirsch claims that “God wants to make us free”; indeed, “in [His] hand the entire earth and everything earthly are only the means for training us in freedom.”52 The second also occurs in this chapter, in Hirsch’s discussion of prophecy. Prophecy is not, for Hirsch, what a naturalist would describe as inner conscience. This is because the Bible is to be taken at its word in what it narrates. But prophecy is also not to be identified with what we call the voice of conscience. If the speech of God can also be called, for example in the case of Cain and others, the voice of conscience by us with respect to its content, so it is always God who speaks, commands, threatens, exhorts, punishes, etc. Therefore, a person knows that he does not create all this from within, but that he hears [vernimmt] it from without.53

The third location comes from Hirsch’s conclusion, where Hirsch sums up his understanding of the Covenant between God and the people of Israel, in which non-Jews serve as the rods of God’s anger for Jews’ not developing their freedom: Israel’s “history must teach it that if it does



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  131

not freely want to fulfill its Israelite vocation, God will force it to do so. The sword of Damocles is still brandished over our head, the hatred of the people [Volkerhaß] is simply slumbering: don’t dare wake it up!”54 Given this collapse of Hirsch’s response to Hegel – and indeed, given the rank offensiveness of the last quotation, which blames Jews for Jewhatred – Fackenheim knew that there was no fixing Hirsch. Fackenheim argued that the better response to Hegel was to double down on God’s otherness with respect to humans. The reason why Hirsch had contradicted himself, according to Fackenheim, was that the naturalizing of God (“where the person is, there God is also”) ended up risking eliminating Judaism, so that a humanistic philosophy would take the place of religion. If one wanted to save religion, one had to do this by affirming divine otherness, even though Hirsch’s intent was to make Judaism palatable in the philosophical context of Hegel’s thought. So why not save Judaism, thought Fackenheim, as it ought to be saved, by claiming that both philosophy and religion had to affirm divine otherness? “What if one asserted, instead, that philosophy too must accept the otherness of God, for the simple reason that God is other than the man with whom He yet enters into relationship and that, for this simple reason, philosophy, instead of rising to absoluteness, must remain human?”55 Fackenheim’s career was a lifelong attempt to develop a philosophical defence of divine otherness and the divine-human relation. The account of the 614th commandment is the most notable example of this. The accounts in To Mend the World of those who resisted the Nazi regime on account of sensing themselves under orders to resist it are another.56 But even in his earliest writings, the insistence on these dimensions of Judaism was clear. His first book was a textbook for Jewish confirmation classes, published in 1960, which concluded with a call to his students to listen for the commanding voice of God, a voice that still spoke (and thus was in relation with humans), and a voice that still commanded (and thus was other than human).57 And in the conclusion of the central chapter of his 1973 book Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, treating possible Jewish responses to and critiques of Hegel, Fackenheim again simply affirmed that the only possible Jewish response to Hegel was to affirm that Judaism was a religion of simultaneous closeness and distance between God and the Jewish people, in accordance with the covenantal model of Judaism in which God both exerted power over and care for Israel. The difficulty of making this affirmation was not to be underestimated: For the Jewish covenantal self-understanding, holding fast to the extremes of divine-human incommensurability and divine-human intimacy, is in a

132  Martin Kavka state of ceaseless tension. Hence it is tempted to flee either into a petrified past shrunk into a mere tribal memory or into an unreal future dissolved into an empty utopia. Only through resolute effort can it resist both these temptations, stay with history, and endure.58

However, Fackenheim’s position, when it is phrased in this manner, comes far closer to fideism than I believe he would have been ready to admit. For him, the Covenant is in force because … well, were the Covenant not in force, everything would fall apart. How is this supposed to be a model in which thought learns from life? Indeed, to demand of one’s students that they listen for the divine voice – as Fackenheim did at the conclusion of his 1960 confirmation textbook – is to demand that life be subservient to thought. For what happens if one does not hear the divine voice when one listens for it? On Fackenheim’s account, one would have to judge that person to be a bad listener. But how would one develop one’s listening skills, according to Fackenheim’s model, in a way that would, at the end of the day, amount to anything more than merely agreeing with the authorities of one’s community? How would this not repeat the worst kind of authoritarianism of the oft-told aggada of B.T. Shabbat 88 – but this time with a philosopher, instead of God, holding Mt. Sinai over the heads of the people? Could one avoid this result by refusing to double down on the supernaturalist Judaism as Fackenheim did, and instead doubling down on the naturalist horn that Hirsch tried, and failed, to affirm? And might it be, of all people, Fackenheim who can show how to do this? Fackenheim as Naturalist? In 2013, the scholar who understands Fackenheim’s thought better than anyone, Michael Morgan, published a book-length commentary on Fackenheim’s thought. There, he reminded his readers that the way in which Fackenheim tried to steer his thinking away from a kind of authoritarian orthodoxy was through his development of the “Midrashic framework.” He had developed some of its elements, so central to his argumentative path in God’s Presence in History, as early as the opening chapter to his 1968 collection of essays Quest for Past and Future. It is in Midrashic texts that the kind of difficulty involved in the simultaneous affirmation of opposites (divine power and divine love, the freedom and unfreedom of Israel’s covenantal existence, God’s goodness and human evil) shows itself to be possible in Jewish life. No philosophical system worth its salt can embrace contradiction – Samuel Hirsch’s Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden might be Exhibit A! – but



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  133

“stories, parables, and metaphors” can indeed do so, with an “openness” to history that is possible for literature and not for philosophy.59 Most of the citations from the classical Jewish tradition found in Fackenheim’s writings are from aggadic Midrashim. But on one brief occasion, in a 1969 article entitled “Elijah and the Empiricists” that later appeared as the first chapter of Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, Fackenheim turned away from Midrashic texts and to a prophetic text in the Tanakh.60 I turn to that essay – reading it against the grain – to show that there might be an easier way (both emotionally and philosophically) to work through these issues. The argument here would be that because the meaning of the divine is always mediated through human structures and language, any talk of divine transcendence or divine otherness falls apart because it necessarily fails to hit its intended object, a God who is other than human language and human concepts. There may be interests and desires behind a community’s talk of divine transcendence – there may be life. But once we start there (as Fackenheim would doubtlessly have wanted!), a different portrait of divinity might emerge. “Elijah and the Empiricists” is an essay that targets much of midtwentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy of religion. Some of the problems are low-hanging fruit, for example the stifling Christocentrism of this literature, particularly A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic from the 1930s as well as the famous “university discussion” on theology and falsification in the 1940s.61 That literature wanted to use the techniques of analytic philosophy – specifically, using the verifiability and falsifiability of statements as tests of their meaningfulness – to assess whether sentences expressing religious belief were anything more than mere gobbledygook. (Spoiler: for Ayer and Antony Flew, they weren’t, because [for Ayer] the states of affairs on which they reported could not be experienced, and [for Flew] because believers refused to articulate falsifying conditions for their statements. Since their sentences were unfalsifiable, Flew argued, they were meaningless. Ayer’s and Flew’s Christian opponents, also analytic philosophers, were weak for reasons that go beyond the limits of this essay.) Fackenheim opposed atheist analytic philosophy’s self-ascribed right to sit in judgment of Jewish belief. Still, Fackenheim admitted that the language of verifiability and falsifiability was to some degree appropriate. A covenantal account of Judaism acknowledges that the Jewish people’s adherence to the Covenant is indexed by their historical situation; see, for example, Jeremiah 7:23 (“Listen to my voice, and I will be your God and you will be my people, and you will go in all the ways that I show you so that it will go well with you.”) As a result,

134  Martin Kavka

history – and specifically a catastrophic end to history – can render Jewish religious existence falsified by showing that it had been pointless for Jews to affirm Jewish peoplehood and/or election.62 Yet while Fackenheim claimed that Jewish religious existence cannot ever be known to be fully verified, it remained in principle verifiable. This distinction between potential verifiability and actual verification combines two strands of Fackenheim’s argument in this essay. First, Fackenheim claims that when analytic philosophers of religion describe religious experience as self-authenticating and infallible, they are speaking Protestant lingo that, at least for Fackenheim, is foreign to Judaism; no Jewish religious experience is self-authenticating, or immediately verified. Second, Fackenheim claims that a religious experience, described in terms of Buber’s language of the I-You encounter, is indeed something that is really possible. The philosopher of religion who would cut off that possible verifiability tout court is already “a mere partisan.”63 Fackenheim’s claim here is structurally similar to Leo Strauss’s argument from 1952 that “all alleged refutations of revelation presuppose unbelief in revelation.”64 As in Strauss, Fackenheim’s claim does not reflect a decision for revelation. Any affirmation of the immediate divine presence in encounter must always be “bound up with the fragmentariness of history.” That “comprehensive”65 moment in history that would mark the fullness of an experience of God cannot be said to have occurred. As a result, Fackenheim sided with atheist analytic philosophers who criticized religion for not acknowledging its inability to verify God’s full manifestation in history. The function of his affirmation of the otherness between humanity and God was to make it impossible to claim that God is fully manifest in history. Nevertheless, Fackenheim also insisted on the possibility of affirming divine otherness. It was simply impossible for him to claim tout court that God is absent from history. This was not simply pouting. In agreeing with atheist analytic philosophers, Fackenheim claimed that it was impossible to develop criteria by which one could tell what words spoken in history belong to God. He made this point in “Elijah and the Empiricists” by a curious and sudden turn to Buber’s discussion of the prophets of Baal near the end of The Prophetic Faith. As Buber described them, they do not speak only in order to please the men who inquire of them, but also to please their own “dream” and “phantom”; they do not simply deceive on purpose, but they themselves are entangled in the delusion of the world of wish. In the language of psychology: the false prophets make



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  135 their subconscious a god, whereas for the true prophets their subconscious is subdued by the God of truth.66

The prophets of Baal meant what they said when they claimed that they spoke divine words. But Fackenheim went on to infer from Buber that even the true prophet “runs the risk of being false.”67 How? The true prophet of Israel knows that the false prophet is not self-consciously faking prophecy, but the true prophet nonetheless cannot develop a criterion by which to distinguish his own true words from the false words of the prophet of Baal. Simply thinking that one is speaking the divine word to a people is not sufficient to prove that one is actually speaking the divine word. But the prophet of Baal and the prophet of YHWH are equal insofar as they both think that they speak the divine word. Fallibility of judgment is what rules the day. The concepts that exist within my mind cannot mirror the reality of a divine-human encounter (or prove its impossibility), and therefore no one – not even a prophet – cannot develop linguistic criteria to distinguish a message that truly expresses that encounter from one that does not. And if the true prophet knows this, then even the true prophet herself will be riven by doubt as to whether her words have gotten it right. In other words, humans are finite. Yet this is not an argument against prophetic discourse. For Fackenheim also claims that this is also what the Bible teaches in and through the prophetic message. Here we arrive, finally, at Fackenheim’s citation of the Tanakh, specifically Jeremiah 17:9, ‘aqov halev mi-kol ve-’anush: “the heart is deceitful above all things and exceedingly weak.” In describing the human heart as ‘aqov, the verse implies that the heart steps outside of its proper boundaries and attacks; think of the story of Jacob and Esau in Genesis 27, where the verb ‘aqav is used to describe Jacob’s stealing Esau’s birthright. The description of the heart as ’anush invokes a medical metaphor. The heart is not simply weak; it is ill, as we know from Jeremiah 30, in which the wound of sin is ’anush, incurable through human means. Fackenheim cites only verse 9 in “Elijah and the Empiricists.” However, the next verse states that while the heart’s ability to judge itself and develop a measure for action is nonexistent, such measures do indeed exist and come from God (“I the Lord examine the heart and prove/test [boh·en] the inner being, to give every man in accordance with his way, in accordance with the fruit of his deeds”). Verse 10 is supposed to relieve the pessimism of verse 9. Humans cannot verify their takes on the world, but God can test people and ensure that the world is ordered insofar as people are judged properly. However, by focusing on verse 9, Fackenheim emphasizes the

136  Martin Kavka

possible falsity of human understandings of God. Because the heart is something that by its very nature overreaches itself and misinterprets – even when the heart belongs to a prophet – any claim to understand God’s standards can be deceitful. Fackenheim’s point is cogent: claims about the criteria by which God verifies a person’s way of life (with blessedness) are still human claims about God, and therefore falsifiable. This is the case as long as the divine presence is not “comprehensive,” as long as redemption is not yet present in its fullness. One way to react to this strange emphasis on Jeremiah 17:9 would be to say that Fackenheim has contradicted himself. He has apparently insisted that the Bible articulates a gap between mind and world (the claim about the weakness of the heart and the potential falsifiability of all prophecy), while ignoring the biblical counterevidence from Jeremiah 17:10 that the mind can indeed know what is outside it (divine standards, truth). To respond to Fackenheim in that manner, however, will not do. For implicit in “Elijah and the Empiricists” is the claim that Fackenheim knows that knowledge of that which is other than the human mind (divine standards, truth) is possible. To deny that would be to insist that Judaism is falsified, to take up the merely partisan point of view that Fackenheim ridicules in the essay. Fackenheim, must, then, be emphasizing human finitude – the weakness of the heart – for a reason. I want to suggest that, in affirming both the weakness of prophetic speech and its possible verifiability, Fackenheim is arguing that Jeremiah 17 is one of the earliest statements of a Hegelian Jewish theology. No account of divine order or standards can be meaningful without the human interpretation that both turns the divine command into something other than it was for God, and makes that command concrete for a community. The heart is very weak. This justifies the possibility of making claims about God as the proper recipient of trust (as the one who orders, as the one who is the true measure of understanding); because the heart is weak, it cannot trust other humans. And it also justifies the possibility of scepticism about those very claims about God; because the heart is weak, it cannot trust other humans, even when they speak about God. If even the prophet’s heart is weak – if the truth of the prophetic message cannot be verified as soon as it is heard, if prophecy is falsifiable all the way down – then the life that responds to the possible verifiability of the prophetic message (taking it up, testing it) is that which does the actual work of verifying the prophetic message. Life, in other words, is the criterion of what Graetz would have described as its Probehaltigkeit. There are two points that I want to make about this claim. First, this lived response is a turning away from the customary



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  137

or sedimented way of the world towards some other order.68 It entails a leap outside of every dogmatic horizon – including that of dogmatic theology, since statements about God are always statements by a weak heart. Second, because there are no signs that the prophet gives of the prophet’s correctness, the prophet’s hearers become that sign in their interpretive response to the prophetic message. Their task is to create a world in which the empirical scene mirrors their understanding of that prophetic message, or in other words is concretized and becomes observable. Indeed, their interest in not having the prophetic message be falsified governs that community’s drive to verify it. This seems to me to be implied in the following statement of Fackenheim’s near the close of “Elijah and the Empiricists”: [I]f even prophetic experiences may be false, a faith permeated with this knowledge will hardy stake all on piecemeal experiences accessible to ordinary individuals. Rather than wait for philosophers to point out “the immense possibilities of misreading the experience,” to cope with at least some of these will be part of its own life, and in so coping it will structure piecemeal experiences and affirmations into a whole.69

This act of structuring cannot be an individual task; that would mark a religious subjectivism that Fackenheim saw as being just as worthy of ridicule as the subjectivism of the empiricist philosopher. The task is to create, as a community, something extraordinary that justifies the community’s sense of itself at the same time that it takes into account the “fragmentariness of history.” When a community takes it upon itself to verify its own claims through various forms of cultural work, it does the work that the text says God is doing. A community tests and probes and attempts to ensure that the way of life it legislates or otherwise values brings about flourishing or blessedness. The word ’anush, which is so important for Fackenheim in Jeremiah 17, appears later in Jeremiah 30:15, where it is frequently translated as “incurable” (“Thus said the Lord: your fracture is ‘anush/incurable, your wound severe … I did these things to you because your iniquity was so great and your sins so many”). Just as Jeremiah 17 follows up the assertion of the heart’s illness with a claim about God’s proper testing, so too does Jeremiah 30 follow up the claim of the terminal condition of Israel with a prophecy of consolation: “But I will bring healing to you and cure you of your wounds” (30:17). The bridge between the description of Israel’s terminal condition and the prophecy of consolation is a simple lakhen (therefore) at the beginning of 30:16. Israel’s wound is incurable; therefore, it will be healed. It is

138  Martin Kavka

easy to say that the lakhen is better translated as “hereafter” or (as the New JPS Translation has it) “assuredly.” But Fackenheim’s dialectical reading of prophecy in this essay suggests that readers take the lakhen seriously. It is the experience of woundedness – of an incompatibility between one’s actual situation and what one expects that situation to be – that leads a community to try to solve its problems in various ways by creating structures that address and mend that incompatibility. That is, in effect, a cure – one that is implicit in acknowledging weakness, and one that does not depend upon a final comprehensive redemption for its occurrence. One might read these verses from Jeremiah 17 and 30 as making simply incompatible claims: the heart is both weak and strong, people are both ignorant and can cognize truth, Israel is incurable and will be healed. Fackenheim showed in “Elijah and the Empiricists” that these claims are not incompatible. The weakness of the heart is expressed through its understanding of the divine will, an understanding that is taken as true at a certain point in time. The prophet will attempt to engender a certain understanding of the divine will in his or her audience, but the prophet’s and the community’s understanding is by nature weak. But insofar as both can recognize their own ­weakness – for this is at stake in the prophet’s calling for another way of life that is possibly better – they bear the strength to suggest new and better understandings of the divine will. The life of a community is self-­correcting. This point of Fackenheim’s is also a Hegelian point. As Hegel wrote in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, “common opinion learns by experience that it means something other than it took itself to have meant, and this correction of its opinion compels knowledge to come back to the proposition and now to grasp it in some other way.”70 This weakness of thought with respect to life is what improves thinking, what leads to better-structured understandings of the whole over the course of history. The prophet who declares both the weakness of the heart and its ability to cognize the ways that lead to blessedness is someone who makes no guarantee for the efficaciousness of his or her words. There is no already-existing standard, or empirically observable scene, by which one could distinguish between the false prophet and the true prophet. In that undecidability, the community must do its own work and verify the claims to which it has committed itself, correcting itself all the while. It lives in excess over any and all teaching, because the weakness of the heart places all discourse, even prophetic discourse, into question. Its members will get things wrong, and the concepts they use in their judgments will show themselves to be in error. Adequacy is a pipe



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  139

dream even in the infinite course of history. A community can only ever become; it cannot have the stasis of being. In acknowledging such error – in acknowledging the weakness of the heart – a community will decide to try something new and traverse the border of its finitude, leaping into ways of life that are not yet known to be true. But it was Samuel Hirsch, and not Fackenheim, who described that borderlessness as divine. It might not be quite right to say, as Hirsch did, that where the person is, there God is also. Yet Fackenheim, in “Elijah and the Empiricists,” implicitly affirms – in opposition to the dominant supernaturalist strand in his writings – that where persons leap, there God is also. NOTES Previous versions of this chapter were discussed at the University of Chicago, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Association for Jewish Studies. My thanks to Asaf Angermann, James Diamond, Robert Erlewine, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Nitzan Lebovic, Lital Levy, Shaul Magid, Paul Nah·me, Bruce Rosenstock, Eli Schonfeld, Daniel Weidner, Steve Weitzman, and many others for their feedback.   1 Harry A. Wolfson, “The Needs of Jewish Scholarship in America,” Menorah Journal 21 (1921): 28–35.   2 See Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).   3 See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God (New York: Scribners, 1954); Martin Kavka, “The Meaning of That Hour: Prophecy, Phenomenology and the Public Sphere in the Early Heschel,” in Religion and Violence in a Secular World: Toward a New Political Theology, ed. Clayton Crockett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 108–36; Shaul Magid, “The Role of the Secular in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Theology: (Re)Reading Heschel after 9/11,” Modern Judaism 29.1 (2009): 138–60.   4 See, most notably, the account of Levinas’s thought found in Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).   5 See David Novak, The Sanctity of Human Life (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009); Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (New York: Free Press, 2003).   6 See Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 143f; David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Peter E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between

140  Martin Kavka Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).   7 See, for example, Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).   8 Franz Rosenzweig, “Bildung und kein Ende (Pred. 12, 12): Wünsche zum jüdischen Bildungsproblem des Augenblicks insbesondere zur Volkshochschulfrage,” in Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold Mayer and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 494; Rosenzweig, “Of Bildung There Is No End (Ecclesiastes 12:12): Wishes Concerning the Bildungsproblem of the Moment, Especially Concerning the Question of Adult Education,” trans. Michael Zank, in Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 231–2. See also the translation by Clement Greenberg (published as “Toward a Renaissance of Jewish Learning”) in On Jewish Learning, ed. N.N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1955), 58–9; for Glatzer’s identification of Greenberg as the translator, see Glatzer, “The Frankfort Lehrhaus,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 1 (1956), 107n2.   9 For a fuller articulation of this point, see Martin Kavka, “What Does It Mean to Receive Tradition?: Jewish Studies in Higher Education,” Cross Currents 56.2 (2006): 180–97. 10 Rosenzweig, “Bildung und kein Ende,” 494; Rosenzweig, “Of Bildung There Is No End,” 232. See also Rosenzweig, “Towards a Renaissance of Jewish Learning,” 59. 11 Heinrich Graetz, Die Konstruktion der jüdischen Geschichte, ed. Nils Römer (Düsseldorf: Parerga, 2000), 12; Graetz, “The Structure of Jewish History,” in The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Ismar Schorsch (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1975), 65. 12 For more on this idea in a different intellectual context, see William James, “The Moral Philosopher and The Moral Life,” in Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin, 2000), 242–63; Stephen S. Bush, William James on Democratic Individuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017), 63–87. 13 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 33 (§53). 14 Hegel, Phenomenology, 33 (§53). 15 Hegel, Phenomenology, 14 (§22). 16 Much of my understanding of the distinction between Verstand and Vernunft in Hegel comes from Robert B. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009), 88–94. See also Brandom, A



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  141

Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge: Belknap, 2019), 84–5, 610–20. 17 Phenomenology, 61–2 (§95). 18 Willem deVries, “Hegel on Reference and Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26.2 (1988): 300. 19 Phenomenology, 72 (§117). 20 Phenomenology, 100 (§163). 21 Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 41. 22 Hegel, Phenomenology, 103 (§167). Here, I’m deeply influenced by Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. 20–34. 23 The question is how we get out of our heads. The answer involves a long story about social relations. See Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness, 54–85; Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 147–79; Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Jeffrey Stout, “On Our Interests in Getting Things Right,” in The New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7–31. 24 Hegel, Phenomenology, 104 (§168). 25 Phenomenology, 29 (§47). 26 Benjamin Pollock, “Thought Going to School with Life?: Fackenheim’s Last Philosophical Testament,” AJS Review 31.1 (2007): 133–59. 27 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken, 1982), 14. 28 Graeme Nicholson, “The Passing of Hegel’s Germany,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, ed. Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 47–8. 29 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in Jewish History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 81: “In fact, however, secularist no less than religious Jews have responded with a reaffirmation of their Jewish existence such as no social scientist would have predicted even if the Holocaust had never occurred.” 30 Fackenheim, “A Reply to My Critics: A Testament of Thought,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, 278–9. 31 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 13. 32 Religious Dimension, 13. 33 I remain grateful to Leora Batnitzky for teaching me this many years ago, in a discussion of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. 34 Fackenheim, “Metaphysics and Historicity,” in The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1996), 144.

142  Martin Kavka 35 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 207. 36 Religious Dimension, 242. 37 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 85–93. 38 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 72. 39 Religious Dimension, 72. 40 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. and trans. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1:212–13. Fackenheim quoted from these sentences (using the 1895 Speirs/Sanderson translation) at Religious Dimension, 73. 41 I use some of these examples to be slightly dramatic and slightly ridiculous – those stances come easy to me. But seriously, in ways large and small, this simultaneous conflict between mind and world and (temporary) resolution of the conflict is just how humans exist. Robert Pippin has phrased this nicely: “we are, just in actively attending to the world, overcoming the indeterminacy, opacity, foreignness, potential confusion, and disconnectedness of what we are presented with by resolving what belongs together with what, tracking objects through changes and so forth” (Hegel on Self-Consciousness, 29). Again, this process of overcoming is life; there is no end to indeterminacy, foreignness, etc. 42 Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 73. 43 Here, I summarize Religious Dimension, 235–41. 44 In other words, even Fackenheim’s own philosophical contributions have a possible expiration date. In a review of Shaul Magid’s American PostJudaism, I have suggested that while that book is methodologically diverse, it is best read as a kind of post-Fackenheimian theology. If Fackenheim was puzzled by the efflorescence of Jewish identity in the 1950s and 1960s, Magid is puzzled by the various ways in which Jewish identity in the 2000s and 2010s is post-ethnic, and hypothesizes that implicit in American Jewish life is a way of thinking that is made explicit in R. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s articulation of Jewish renewal. What makes Magid’s book so exciting to me is its silent leap past all twentieth-century Jewish thought. See Martin Kavka, “American Jews: From Holocaust to New Age Hasidism?,” Religion Dispatches (33 May 2013), http://religiondispatches .org/american-jews-from-holocaust-to-new-age-hasidism/. 45 There are indeed scholars of religion and race who call for black theology to be more theological. See Vincent W. Lloyd, “Introduction: Managing Race, Managing Religion,” in Race and Secularism in America, ed. Jonathon S. Kahn and Vincent W. Lloyd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 1–19; Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). But in Lloyd’s work, theology is called to harness its “disruptive and transformative” power



Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  143

(“Introduction,” 14), without offering a theological story of the ground of that power in God. 46 There are passing remarks about earlier Jewish Hegelians in “Moses and the Hegelians,” in Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 126–9. 47 For (a), see Samuel Hirsch, Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden (Leipzig: Heinrich Hunger, 1842), 814–32. For (b), see the remainder of this section of this essay. 48 Samuel Hirsch, Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden, 25–6, translation mine. For a translation of selected passages from the front matter and the first fifty pages of Hirsch’s text, see Gershon Greenberg, Modern Jewish Thinkers: From Mendelssohn To Rosenzweig (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 176–204. For Fackenheim’s discussion of this point in Hirsch, see “Samuel Hirsch and Hegel,” in Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 29. (Fackenheim’s article was originally published in Studies in Nineteenth Century Jewish Intellectual History, ed. Alexander Altmann [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964], 2:171–201.) 49 Fackenheim, “Samuel Hirsch and Hegel,” 29. 50 In his biography of Hegel, Terry Pinkard hypothesizes that this shift in Hegel’s thinking about Judaism was due to his friendship with Eduard Gans. For this claim, and for an account of the shift in Hegel’s descriptions of Judaism in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, see Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 584–6. 51 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 2:381–82. In a note to the English translation, Peter Hodgson suggests that Hegel would have known the Kabbalistic concept of Adam Kadmon from his reading of Jakob Boehme (1575–1624). But the association of Boehme’s primordial Adam with Adam Kadmon seems to have been made later, and not by Boehme himself; I do not know whether Hegel would have known of this association, or whether he had other sources for his (superficial) knowledge of Kabbalistic motifs. 52 Hirsch, Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden, 455. Fackenheim cites this at “Samuel Hirsch and Hegel,” 35. 53 Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden, 479–80. Fackenheim cites this at “Samuel Hirsch and Hegel,” 246n45; I have added some of the surrounding sentences here. 54 Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden, 880. Fackenheim cites the first sentence of this passage at “Samuel Hirsch and Hegel,” 246n46; I have added the second sentence.

144  Martin Kavka 55 Fackenheim, “Samuel Hirsch and Hegel,” 39–40. 56 See Fackenheim’s account of the Polish woman Pelagia Lewinska at To Mend The World (New York: Schocken, 1982), 217–19. For a critique of Fackenheim for having privileged resistance, and thereby aided in the silencing of the Muselmann, see Susan E. Shapiro, “Hegel’s Ghost: ‘Witness’ and ‘Testimony’ in the Post-Holocaust Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim,” in The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 29–38. (This is a revised and expanded version of her famous review essay on To Mend The World from a 1987 issue of Religious Studies Review.) 57 Fackenheim, Paths to Jewish Belief (New York: Behrman House, 1960), 155–7. 58 Fackenheim, Encounters, 168. 59 See Michael L. Morgan, Fackenheim’s Jewish Philosophy: An Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 228–30. The quoted passages come from Fackenheim, “Twenty Years Later,” in Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 16, 17. 60 Fackenheim, “Elijah and the Empiricists,” in Encounters, 9–29, esp. 26ff. This essay was originally published in The Religious Situation 1969, ed. Donald R. Cutler (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 841–68. 61 See A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949), esp. 114–20; Antony Flew, R.M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, “Theology and Falsification,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 95–105. 62 Fackenheim, Encounters, 21. 63 Encounters, 25. 64 Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 131. 65 Fackenheim, Encounters, 26. 66 Martin Buber, Torat ha-nevi’im (Tel Aviv: Bialik, 1950), 164; Buber, The Prophetic Faith, trans. Carlyle Witton-Davies (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 179; Buber, The Prophetic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 222. 67 Fackenheim, Encounters, 26. 68 In the final paragraphs of “Elijah and the Empiricists,” Fackenheim associates the resistance to subjectivism with a movement that is “both a turning and a being turned” (Encounters, 29). 69 Fackenheim, Encounters, 26. The passage in quotation marks (“the immense possibilities of misreading the experience”) is Fackenheim’s quotation from R.W. Halpern, Christianity and Paradox (London: Watts, 1958), 44. 70 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 40 (§63).

5 Can Philosophy Be Positive? The Place of Schelling in the Thought of Emil Fackenheim jeffrey a. bernstein

If it could happen that the Absolute Good did not manifest itself, nothing could be obtained from It, and if nothing were obtained from It, nothing could exist. Thus, there can be nothing if Its manifestation is not present, since it is the cause of all existence. Because It, by Its very nature, loves the being of what is caused by It, It desires to manifest itself. – Ibn Sina1

Other than the question of the possibility of philosophy and Judaism after Auschwitz, no other philosophical theme stirred the thoughts of Emil Fackenheim more than the problem of how to reconcile the concept of God (the highest concept that can be reached via philosophical dialectic) and the God that serves as the first cause of existence. The desire to find a way to narrate concrete human existence as it emerges from the very God that discursive philosophy conceptually grasps haunted Fackenheim’s thinking beginning with his early works in medieval philosophy,2 through his substantial forays into German Idealism and the religious existence-philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig’s “new thinking,”3 all the way through the “Midrashic thinking” of his later Shoahinformed work.4 Arguably, the radical rupture in thought and being that Fackenheim locates as a result of the event of Auschwitz makes such “narrating thinking”5 even more urgent and pressing than it had previously been. If conceptual or dialectical philosophy neither explains the origin of existence nor accounts for the connection between that origin and the entire manifold of reality that emerges out of it, then it forfeits its claim to be a genuine search for wisdom. Rather, philosophy would be simply the anemic rehearsal of logical syllogisms. One indeed finds something akin to this critique of discursive philosophy made by post–Ibn Sinan Islamic philosophy with reference to the Andalusian

146  Jeffrey A. Bernstein

Peripatetics.6 Similarly, Schelling and Rosenzweig, for their part, make no attempt to hide their disdain for (what they take to be) the Hegelian analogue.7 But while Fackenheim explores this theme in the works of Philo, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Maimonides, and Rosenzweig (among others), he accords special place to the thought of Schelling: “In my philosophical search, the names that were then around were obviously Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and not quite so obviously the late Schelling, who has been a great concern of mine all my life.”8 Why should the late Schelling – signally rejected by thinkers such as Kierkegaard (and, in a different manner, Heidegger) – exert such an influence on Fackenheim regarding an issue that (gleaned from Fackenheim’s writings) goes all the way back to Philo? While earlier thinkers surely attempted to show how existence emerges from out of God as first existent (i.e., Schellingian “positive philosophy”), their attempts to do so remained within the horizon of a dialectical ascent to the idea of God (i.e., Schellingian “negative philosophy”). For Schelling, Spinoza is instructive in this manner: “Spinoza … made that which necessarily exists into his principle (beginning), but from which he then just logically derived real things.”9 PreSchellingian attempts to show the emergence of existence from out of God only succeeded at the level of content, not of form. Schelling is the first one to have narrated the emergence out of God.10 Put differently, if the fundamental question for negative philosophy is “What is God?” the analogous question for positive philosophy is “How is God?” One begins to see Fackenheim’s preference for Schelling upon realizing that Schelling is the first thinker to both (1) call for a different philosophical procedure in positive philosophy from its negative precursor and (2) call for a coherence between the content and form of positive philosophy in a similar manner to the coherence involved in negative philosophy. If negative philosophy makes use of logic and conceptuality to ascend to the idea of God, positive philosophy would historically narrate the different periods of existence as they emerge from God as the absolute existent. Far from simply repeating the Hegelian gesture of “making the [rational dialectic] absolute” in his search for God, Fackenheim saw that the late Schelling was the first philosopher who placed “freedom and existence” at the centre of his philosophy.11 I believe that, in reading Fackenheim’s important essay entitled “Schelling’s Conception of Positive Philosophy” (occasionally supplemented by other works), one sees clearly the import of Schelling and positive philosophy for Fackenheim’s overall intellectual career. Doing so also allows readers to broach the broader fundamental question of there can be a harmonization of philosophy and religion – i.e., whether philosophy can be positive.



Schelling in the Thought of Emil Fackenheim  147

It would, according to Fackenheim, be a mistake to say that positive philosophy gives up on the method of dialectic. Rather, the limitations of that method are made clear: “the structures of thought and reality are not identical. Dialectic constructs a priori a system of essence, but it can do so only by abstracting from existence. Thus it moves necessarily toward God; but this is a non-existent God, a mere idea. God exists necessarily if He exists. Whether he exists is a question outside the reach of dialectic” (113). As a result, positive philosophy must respond to a fundamental question that lies wholly beyond the realm of negative philosophy, the question that Leibniz formulates and that Heidegger will transform two centuries later: “Why does anything exist at all? Why not rather nothing?” (113). Dialectic proceeds on the basis of empirical facts and ascends to universal essences – it therefore can answer the question “what exists?” It cannot, by itself, answer the question as to the meaning of existence. Since meaning in existence is inevitably indexed to the particularity and/or individuality of the existent, this means that “[r]eality is not in fact the internal unity which it is in ideal construction” (113). Facts, in other words, exceed the limits of the system. This disconnect between the idea and the existential (meaningful) fact leads to the second fundamental question to which positive philosophy must respond: “Why is what exists in discrepancy with what it ideally ought to be? Why is the world ‘questionable’?” (113). If both (1) the internal unity present in the (universal) idea and (2) the individual external fact as given in experience are present in the same world, a synthesis of both is only possible through a philosophy that is unhindered by the limitations of dialectical-conceptual ascent. For Schelling, the first principle of positive philosophy – insofar as it attempts to synthesize reason and existence, idea and fact – “cannot be an absolute Idea, but only an absolute Fact” (114). Fackenheim notes that this kind of fact has a peculiar consequence: “it is beyond all possible human knowledge. For wherever knowledge grasps fact, it is a fact dialectically qualified; and wherever it grasps an Absolute, it is mere idea” (114). Put differently, facts and absolutes (qua negative philosophy) are always ideational and never simply existential; an absolute fact would, in the strict sense, be unvordenklich – “un-pre-thinkable,” “unable to be thought in advance” (116). At this point, negative philosophy encounters a “‘crisis of reason’ and sets the stage for a radical leap” (114). Fackenheim is aware that Schelling does not use the term “leap” in this context. It would, in any case, not be too much of a stretch to hold that his knowledge of Kierkegaard (and Heidegger) helps him supply Schelling with it.12 Moreover, insofar as he is concerned with taking the content of an idea (the God-idea) and retroactively construing it as the

148  Jeffrey A. Bernstein

beginning of a process (existence), there would be a connection to be drawn between this leap and the moment that Rosenzweig describes as “conversion.”13 At any rate, Fackenheim notes that Schelling and Kierkegaard probably got from Lessing (who does use it in the context of distinguishing between “necessary truths of reason” and “contingent truths of history” (213n21). Insofar as rational (negative) philosophy finds its terminus in the absolute idea of God, “the end of rational philosophy, far from being the end of all philosophy … require[es] a wholly new point of departure” (114) in order to work its way back to connection with the world. The idea of God, in order to be more than a mere idea, requires precisely what it cannot itself deliver: God the absolute existent. “The form and content of [the] idea [of God] are in necessary contradiction. In its highest idea reason necessarily points beyond itself; but equally necessarily, it fails to achieve this beyond” (114). Differently put, negative philosophy abstracts from the very existence that meaningfully grounds it. Without that ground, negative philosophy is inconsequential. But negative philosophy also cannot attain the ground that gives it meaning. For Fackenheim, this “deadlock can be broken only if it can be remembered that rational philosophy, as a whole, is merely the abstract expression of a concrete spiritual condition; it has an existential setting” (115). The philosopher searching for the synthesis between thought and world does not merely engage in a purely universal rational exercise, but rather in a particular or individual existential struggle: “Contemplation is an attempt at self-surrender and self-oblivion. But just as a mere idea will not absorb any existence, so it will not absorb my own. The logical paradox here turns into a personal paradox which the philosopher lives and suffers” (115). Readers should note that Fackenheim reintroduces the tragic aspect of Schelling’s construal of positive philosophy at the precise moment in which Fackenheim believes that philosophy fails. He remains silent as to whether Schelling shares this belief. If concept and existence find no synthesis or harmonization in thought, where (if anywhere) do they find it? Fackenheim’s Schelling is utterly clear: in will – “From the lonely despair brought about by the search for God, a search at once rational and existential, arises the will, not to posit Him – for any such God would again be an idea only – but to accept Him, as prior to all thought and experience. Decision is the radical leap from the last idea of the negative to the first principle of the positive philosophy” (115). Such a leap is not (as it would be for Kierkegaard) irrational; rather, its rationality lies in the fact that it acknowledges the gap between God and humans (213n27). Whether the late Schelling is correct in seeing the negation of this gap in Absolute



Schelling in the Thought of Emil Fackenheim  149

Idealism is a topic that exceeds the purview of this chapter. This much can be said: the rationality characteristic of positive philosophy is one that acknowledges an “outside of reason,” while the rationality characteristic of negative philosophy does not.14 Whereas negative philosophy is based on rational necessity, positive philosophy (including its rational component) is based on freedom (116). Schelling puts this point in the following manner: “The positive philosophy proceeds from that which is entirely outside of reason, but reason submits to this only in order to immediately enter again into its rightful domain.”15 What is achieved in making this leap? For Fackenheim’s Schelling, the free leap is necessary for the attainment of the first principle of positive philosophy – God as the unvordenklich absolute Existent. This absolute Existent, God, is “individual beyond all universality, existent beyond all essence, and precisely for that reason, beyond all thought” (116). What is the relation between this absolute Existent and the world? It cannot be a necessary one, since necessity is a category indexed to universality and rationality. Yet to say that God has no relation to the world whatsoever (i.e., to assert a dualism) would (on Schelling’s account) amount to “the self-destruction and despair of reason.”16 Viewed from the standpoint of negative philosophy, the relationship is (to use a Schellingian term later picked up by Heidegger) one of ekstasis. From the standpoint of existence, it can be viewed as freedom: The absolute Existent as the Individual beyond all universality, must be outside all dialectic. The relationship can therefore be only one of free will. Free will is Schelling’s fundamental existential category. Reason may explain essence; only will can explain existence … Free will, for Schelling, transcends all necessity; it is absolute freedom of choice. All free will is therefore a mystery until it acts. The absolute Will is subject to no preexisting necessity … [this to such an extent that] if the absolute Existent is God, He himself has made Himself God.17

God is absolutely free, God’s relation to the world (as first cause) is a result of nothing other than His absolute free will, and any attempt to “get behind” this assertion of freedom is the result of mistaking the clarity of an idea for the facticity of existence. Fackenheim here calls into question the Latin translation (used by Thomists) of Exodus 3:14, where God reveals himself to Moses, as “I am who I am.” Schelling’s translation, says Fackenheim, is both more in keeping with positive philosophy and (as Buber and Rosenzweig were to see) more faithful to the Hebrew text: “I shall be who I shall be” (116). We might surmise that the rendering of the Hebrew Ehyeh asher Eyheh as “I am that I am”

150  Jeffrey A. Bernstein

would be seen as too tied to negative philosophy (Fackenheim remains silent about this). At any rate, for Fackenheim’s Schelling, the leap from negative to positive philosophy is nothing other than the leap from a philosophy grounded in rational necessity to one grounded in existential freedom. In so doing, “the positive philosophy has made existence, rather than reason, primary” (117).18 At this point, positive philosophy faces yet another problem: the God-idea, as discovered through negative philosophy, is supposed to refer to something ontologically real. This would be the absolute Existent as discovered by positive philosophy. Therefore, the universal and necessary God-idea must be somehow grounded in the individual and free absolute Existence (which Existent exceeds the purview of the very idea that is supposed to indicate it). If the God-idea cannot be grounded in the absolute Existent, then the former collapses into a mere idea, and the ontological primacy of the latter (in turn) disappears, leaving only the indefinitely many contingent existences making up the empirical world. Fackenheim states Schelling’s imperative as follows: “The negative philosophy … has founded the positive philosophy only hypothetically; the positive philosophy must now directly found the negative philosophy, and indirectly, itself” (117). The absolute Existent must ground both existence and rationality – or lose both (117). This leads Schelling to pose the third fundamental question facing positive philosophy: “Why is there reason? Why not unreason?” (117) For Fackenheim, this is perhaps the most important of the three questions insofar as it constitutes “the problem on which [positive philosophy] founders” (117). At this point, I only note that – in making this suggestion – Fackenheim is already separating himself from Schelling in a specific manner: we can see that his essay amounts to both a rational exposition of Schelling’s attempt at constructing a positive philosophy and a narration of that attempt.19 Positive philosophy may not be able to grasp the absolute Existent directly (in its absolute Existence), but it can categorically examine the fundamental principle that the former exhibits – i.e., free will. If “free will is freedom to will or not to will” (117), then the distinction is raised between potential will and actual will. Fackenheim notes that, according to Schelling, “neither potential nor actual will is, by itself, free to will and not to will, still a third element is involved. This is the synthesis of potency and act, and this alone is free to will and not to will” (117). Fackenheim approaches this synthesis in reference to Schelling’s doctrine of the three potencies that subtend all existence (which, for our purposes, amounts to a necessary digression): (1) that which can be (absolute potency), (2) that which must be (absolute act), and (3)



Schelling in the Thought of Emil Fackenheim  151

that which is to be.20 It is the third potency – “that which is to be” – whereby the synthesis of potency and act occurs, thus providing for the freedom both to will and not to will (119). The synthesis of these three ­potencies – Fackenheim calls them “the fundamental categories of the entire positive philosophy” (117) – is, in fact, a description of what in the absolute Existent of positive philosophy can be known. As such (i.e., as fundamental explanatory categories), they remain a rational/­negative contribution to positive philosophy. Put differently, Schelling does not ground the absolute existence in the synthetic unity of ­potencies – quite the contrary: “the absolute Existent must freely assume” this unity (which Fackenheim refers to as “the absolute Essence”) (117–18). This move allows Schelling to ground the absolute Essence (put forth by negative philosophy) in the self-grounding Will of the absolute Existent (as described by positive philosophy). As Fackenheim states, “the absolute Essence is the ground of all dialectical necessity, and … this essence is itself existentially grounded in an act of Will which is not only free itself, but which also imparts to the Essence it grounds, at crucial junctures, radically indeterminate situations” (118). With this explanation, Schelling has secured (on Fackenheim’s account) an answer to the first fundamental question: Why is there anything at all? Why not rather nothing? The answer is “Something exists because an absolute Existent has willed it” (118). Concerning the second question, “Why is there a discrepancy between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of the world?” – or in Fackenheim’s terms, “How are externality, meaninglessness, and evil possible in a creation which, as such, has none of these?” (119) – the answer also derives from the problematic of free will, this time human rather than divine. The primordial freedom of human being consists in the choice “between total surrender to the absolute Existent and total self-assertion” (119). Willing against the absolute Existent (God) Schelling equates to evil, while willing for Him amounts to good. Although Fackenheim does not explicitly answer the second question, he supplies all the materials for the following answer: there is a discrepancy between the “is” and the “ought” of the world – i.e., there is externality, meaninglessness, and evil in the world – because humans freely will their self-assertion over the absolute Existent. What about the third question, Why is there reason and not rather unreason? This is the question that, according to Fackenheim, fells Schelling’s positive philosophy. Initially, the answer seems straightforward: “there is reason because the absolute Existent has manifested Itself, in the creation, as absolute Spirit” (119).21 Creation, as Fackenheim’s Schelling has it, “is the realization of the absolute Essence. By an act of will, the absolute Existent spreads Itself out into the unity

152  Jeffrey A. Bernstein

of the potencies; or, which is the same thing, it makes Itself absolute Spirit” (118). In manifesting itself as that which can be, must be, and is to be, the absolute Existence becomes absolute Spirit (or, in different Schellingian terms, the Godhead reveals Itself in/as/to be God). In the movement of creation, God freely reveals Himself to be the totality of the three potencies of history as they show themselves in thought and being. But, Fackenheim pauses, is this really an answer to the question (119)? In turning to one of Schelling’s last texts, “On the Sources of the Eternal Truths,” Fackenheim notes that Schelling was “gravely concerned about the problem which in fact is fatal to the entire positive philosophy” (120). Interestingly enough, the tone of the text in ­question – unlike the tragedy-infused tone of much of Schelling’s middle and late work – is not particularly grave or dire. It is, rather, a fairly serene text. Be this as it may, Fackenheim reads it as the moment in which positive philosophy as such fails. In that text, Schelling reiterates that “[a]n absolute Reason justifies rationality, but it explains nothing else” (120). Least of all, as we know, can it explain its being grounded in an absolute Existent – or, as Schelling calls it, an absolute Individual. If, however, the universal (absolute) essence exists because an absolute Individual exists, the following problem arises: “how are we to justify the necessity indispensable to rationality? Reason cannot flow necessarily from the essence of the absolute Existent, for the latter has no essence. Nor can it be the product of an arbitrary will, for this would make rationality itself an [historical and empirical] accident. Schelling ends up by asserting that reason is a ‘necessary accident’ of the absolute Existent” (121). This, for Fackenheim, amounts to “an admission of failure.” On the one hand, if the relation between the absolute Essence (the God-idea) and the absolute Existent (the living God) is one of necessity, then positive philosophy turns out to be negative philosophy after all. On the other hand, if the absolute Existent is actually beyond reason, the absolute Essence is “not a necessary accident, but an accident pure and simple … the transition from the individual will which is the Absolute to the universal category of free will cannot be made” (121). It is important to emphasize that Fackenheim appears to take this much harder than Schelling does. For Fackenheim, “this admission is fatal to the whole conception of the positive philosophy” because reason remains ungrounded: “With it vanishes the right to all a priori metaphysical construction … the absolute Existent [God] itself, as a principle of a cosmic system, becomes indefensible [insofar as] the negative philosophy is deprived of its ontological foundation” (121). For Schelling, this problem of the intended “unity of being and thought” is simply



Schelling in the Thought of Emil Fackenheim  153

“the final limit … beyond which one cannot pass.”22 We might supply Schelling’s statement with a final clause: beyond which one cannot pass – at least from the standpoint of philosophy. Neither Schelling nor Fackenheim suggests that practitioners of speculative theology/Kalam (for whom the leap is, at the least, permissible) are barred from entering the sanctuary. The value of Schelling’s positive philosophy (for Fackenheim) is that it clearly delineates the problem that it “fails to solve” (121): “if the dialectical principle is true that there can be only one Absolute, but if at the same time this Absolute cannot be reason itself, how is reason to be grounded? Rationality must be justified in some way; without such a justification speculative metaphysics, at least, is impossible” (121). That Schelling was unable to synthesize thought and existence – the Godidea and the God that grounds being – left him seemingly unfazed. Is Fackenheim’s reaction to Schelling’s “failure” a product of living and thinking after the Shoah? Is it a product of having a personal investment in being able to affirm God’s life from the standpoint of philosophy? However it may be, it appears that the argument, action, and tone of Fackenheim’s engagement with Schelling – on the question of whether philosophy can be positive – all indicate a negative answer. NOTES   1 Ibn Sina, “A Treatise on Love,” trans. Emil L. Fackenheim, Mediaeval Studies 7.1 (1945): 228.   2 Emil L. Fackenheim, “The Possibility of the Universe in al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides,” in Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 17, 19–20; Fackenheim, “Review of Harry Austryn Wolfson’s Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” Review of Metaphysics 1.2 (December 1947), 90–1, 95, 96, 96n19, 97, 100n28.   3 See, e.g., Fackenheim, “The Systematic Role of the Matrix (Existence) and Apex (Yom Kippur) of Jewish Religious Life in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” in Jewish Philosophers, 89–96; Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 68.   4 See Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 20: “Negatively, Jewish theological thought resists the dissipation of the root experiences of Judaism. Positively, it aims at preservation. It succeeds in its aim by becoming Midrashic.”

154  Jeffrey A. Bernstein   5 Kenneth Hart Green, “Emil Fackenheim’s Response to a Letter: Reflections by the Author on To Mend the World,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 12.3 (November 2013): 439–45.   6 Cf. the introduction to Ibn Tufayl’s “Hay the Son of Yaqzan,” trans. George N. Atiyeh, in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, 2nd ed., ed. Joshua Parens and Joseph C. MacFarland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 108; Suhrawardi, The Philosophy of Illumination, trans. John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), 4.   7 F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134–63; Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 22. For Rosenzweig’s debt to Schelling’s positive philosophy, or at least acknowledgment of its impact on his own New Thinking, see Star of Redemption, 18, 24–5, 31; Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking,” ed. and trans. Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 34, 81; Stéphane Moses, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 41.   8 Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers, 99. See also Sharon Portnoff, Reason and Revelation before Historicism: Strauss and Fackenheim (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 308n37.   9 Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, trans. Bruce J. Matthews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 148–9. 10 Schelling already moves in this direction, during his middle-period, in the introduction(s) to his Weltalter project. See Slavoj Zizek and F.W.J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 113–20; Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), xxxv–xl). 11 Emil F. Fackenheim, “Schelling’s Conception of Positive Philosophy,” in Fackenheim, The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 112. Subsequent page citations are given in the text. 12 See Fackenheim, “Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion,” in The God Within, 101–2. In an important (if understated) note, Fackenheim remarks on Schelling’s relative silence concerning the term “leap” in the present context: “Schelling does not actually use the term ‘leap’ in this connection, although it had made its appearance in his writings as early as 1804 … It is most probable that Schelling writes with Lessing in mind … when [the latter] consider[s] the relation between ‘necessary truths of reason’ and ‘contingent truths of history’ … Kierkegaard, too comments on the Lessing passage” (The God Within, 213n21). Readers are left with the general sense



Schelling in the Thought of Emil Fackenheim  155

that Kierkegaard is somehow important for Fackenheim’s reading of Schelling without being given a clear sense of the connection involved. For this reason, a somewhat extended discussion of this connection seems in order.   Fackenheim traces the category of “leap” back to Lessing. In the latter’s 1777 text “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” Lessing (perhaps following Spinoza’s lead from the Theological-Political Treatise) draws a sharp divide between historical truths and necessary rational truths (as they relate to scriptural accounts of miracles and prophecies): “If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated by means of historical truths. That is, contingent truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason … This, this is the broad and ugly ditch which I cannot get across, no matter how often and earnestly I have tried to make the leap.” (“On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in G.E. Lessing, Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. H.B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 85, 87. Lessing’s point is that there can be no philosophically respectable account of miracles and prophecies as they are given in scripture. He does not go so far as to hold that all accounts of miracles and prophecies are false or nonsensical. To the contrary, he argues that the scriptural account in question (i.e., the Gospel of John) – while not an eternal truth – is “not for that reason any less divine” (88). Lessing seems to view the practical benefits of such an account as worth upholding despite the fact that it cannot count as a necessary truth of reason: “What does it matter to me whether the old legend is true or false? The fruits are excellent” (88). From one perspective, Lessing’s attempt to affirm the practical value of a “truth” not supplied by necessary reason can be viewed as prudence; from another perspective, it appears as evasion.   Søren Kierkegaard, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (vol. 1, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992]), addresses Lessing’s remarks. The significance of this moment in Kierkegaard’s text is due to his extended use of “leap” in Fear and Trembling with respect to Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. How does Kierkegaard understand Lessing’s remarks? Kierkegaard attributes no definite meaning to Lessing insofar as the latter has a habit of being “subjectively evasive” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 93). The ascription of meaning to Lessing’s remarks, for Kierkegaard, itself amounts to a leap of faith. Despite or because of this, Kierkegaard persists: “Lessing has said … that contingent historical truths can never become a demonstration of eternal truths of reason, also … that the transition whereby one will build an eternal truth on historical reports is a leap” (93). While limitations of time and space prevent me from

156  Jeffrey A. Bernstein discussing all the details of Kierkegaard’s treatment of Lessing’s claim from the standpoint of its rhetoric, the fact that Kierkegaard proceeds in this fashion is significant. For Kierkegaard (self-consciously qualifying each moment of his reading of Lessing with a “perhaps,” perhaps in order to rhetorically flesh out his own critique of the latter), Lessing “conceals” and “says [things] only in part” (97–8), speaks cunningly (99), amounts to an “ironist” (100), and makes use of the “pious fraud of eloquence” (103) in speaking about the “leap.” Returning to Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard notes that Christianity is essentially rooted in the paradox of the leap (105); as a result, he remains suspicious of Lessing’s treatment of the category: “Through a subsequent reading of Lessing, the matter certainly did not become clearer, because what L. says is so very little, but to me it was nevertheless an encouragement to see that he was aware of it. It is just too bad that he did not care to pursue the thought himself. But then he was not encumbered with ‘mediation’ either, the divine and idolized mediation that works and has worked miracles and has turned human beings into speculative thought and has bewitched Christianity” (106). It would seem, then, that Kierkegaard thinks Lessing protests a bit too much; rather than reading literally his otherwise critical account of making the leap from the contingent historical truth or witness of miracles and prophecy to a necessary truth of reason, Kierkegaard holds that Lessing’s ironic evasion of the question leaves a space open to wonder about the seriousness with which Lessing understood the problem. With respect to the pseudonymously authored Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard responds in kind: “Whether or not Johannes de Silentio became aware of the leap by reading Lessing, I leave undecided” (106). What is (and always has been) clear is the importance that Kierkegaard attributes to the category of “leap.”   Readers of Fackenheim know the extent to which he takes issue with Kierkegaard’s rendition of the Akeda (the scriptural account of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis) in Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1994), 63–77). While limitations of time and space again prevent me from discussing this critique in depth, it is important to note that Fackenheim’s critique of the Kierkegaardian rendition takes aim precisely at the conception of the sacrifice as requiring a leap of faith with respect to God’s command. Instead, Fackenheim holds up (at least for Judaism) the Midrashic discussions of the Akeda as the more adequate perspective: “In Judaism, the Torah ends the possibility of any such suspension [of the ethical], and … the Midrash denies that even in the Akedah itself it ever had the form that Kierkegaard ascribes to it” (Encounters, 63). For Fackenheim, the Midrashic perspective on the sacrifice of Isaac emphasizes survival



Schelling in the Thought of Emil Fackenheim  157

rather than martyrdom. Fackenheim finally asks: “Can a Jew accept a God who ranks this stage [i.e., sacrificial] highest? Can he ever accept himself or his children as singled out for that stage, so long as survival still remains a possible alternative? The Midrashic Abraham could accept the Akedah only on condition that it had a purpose, and on the further condition that this purpose was not between God and himself alone [i.e., the display of the leap of faith by martyring Isaac]” (75). It seems, then, that Fackenheim cannot countenance Kierkegaard’s construal of the leap.   However, if Fackenheim dismisses the content of the leap, as it refers to the Akeda, he preserves the category in his reading of Schelling. Insofar as negative philosophy amounts to the ascending rational discourse the terminus of which is the God-idea, it embodies what Lessing refers to as “necessary truths of reason.” Insofar as positive philosophy amounts to the historical account of the procession of life from God, it embodies what Lessing refers to as “contingent historical truths.” The movement from negative to positive philosophy, for Fackenheim’s Schelling, takes the form of a leap from rational to historical truth. This leap is Lessingian in its particulars – i.e., the movement from the rational to the historical; it is Kierkegaardian in its temperament – i.e., Fackenheim’s Schelling never synthesizes the negative and the positive (at most, the positive comes to refound the negative retrospectively). In the end, the leap remains a paradox. But while Fackenheim intimates that Schelling may have been familiar with Lessing’s usage of “leap” (The God Within, 213n21), it seems also true that he tacitly supplies his discussion of Schelling’s positive philosophy with Kierkegaard’s sense of paradox. How Fackenheim ultimately reads Lessing on this issue remains unclear. As I will show, however, he construes the paradoxical character of the leap (in Schelling) as tragic. 13 Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 98. 14 This seems to be the point to which Rosenzweig alludes in his assessment of miracles: “After the fact, every miracle can be explained. Not because the miracle was not a miracle, but because the explanation is an explanation.” See Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, and Translators, ed. and trans. Barbara Ellen Galli (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 210. 15 Schelling, Grounding of Positive Philosophy, 209. 16 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 24. 17 Fackenheim, “Schelling’s Conception of Positive Philosophy,” 116. For this reason, evil (i.e., the individual assertion of freedom over and against the System) becomes a fundamental and radical problem for Schelling (see Fackenheim, “Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion,”

158  Jeffrey A. Bernstein in The God Within, 95–9) – this to such an extent that he grounds his reading of Kant’s conception of radical evil in his understanding of Schelling (see Martin D. Yaffe, “Fackenheim’s Jewish Correction of Kant’s Quasi-Christian Eschatology,” chap. 2 of this volume, note 6). 18 It is tempting to wonder, in this context, why Fackenheim never explored the thought of Mulla Sadra. The train of non-peripatetic philosophy exemplified by Ibn Sina’s attempt to think existence as emanating from God leads (both conceptually and geographically) directly to Mulla Sadra’s creation of a philosophy based upon wuju¯d (existence/being). Would Fackenheim have found Sadra’s thought to be yet another instance of the failure of pre-Schellingian religious philosophy to break free from the constraints of negative philosophy? Would this be true both for Sadra’s conceptual and allegorical works? One can only speculate. 19 The question as to whether this constitutes an afterlife (Nachleben) of positive philosophy or a burial for it is beyond the scope of the present examination. 20 It is, again (qua Fackenheim), tempting to wonder about the similarities that exist between Schelling’s three potencies and the categories of possibility per se, necessity per se, and necessity ab alio that Fackenheim uses in his early “Possibility of the Universe.” Clearly Fackenheim is compelled by the medieval Arabic attempts at construing the category of possibility along the lines of indifference in a manner akin to Schelling’s various discussions of the indifference of the absolute prior to its revelation in/as existence (cf. the discussion of the “ungrund” in Schelling’s Freedom-text). Schelling’s “that which can be” (referring to the substratum of extended matter) would appear to exhibit a kinship with Ibn Sina’s possibility per se (referring to all caused matter). Similarly, “that which must be” (referring to the possible substratum of the spiritual world) appears kindred to necessity per se (God). Finally, “that which is to be” (referring to the universal soul of humanity in God) might be akin to the category of necessity ab alio (referring to immaterial and eternal beings other than God). The major difference between the two triads is that, in the end, Ibn Sina’s categories are ahistorical while Schelling’s describe the historical dialectic of God and humanity. For this reason, Ibn Sina’s categories admit of a great deal of discretion while Schelling’s potencies (all being modalities of God) amount to something like an indeterminate triad or trinity. 21 For some reason, Fackenheim reverses the enumerated order of the second and third question in the final pages of his essay. It is unclear to me whether this is meant to be an indication of the relative importance of each question and, if so, what that importance would signify. 22 Schelling, “On the Source of the Eternal Truths,” trans. Edward A. Beach, The Owl of Minerva 22.1 (1990): 65.

6 Emil Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History: Its Grounding in a Critique of Rosenzweig on Revelation kenneth hart green

It is impossible to comprehend the decisive shift in Fackenheim’s thought in 1967 until it has been properly grasped how this was built on his prior disengagement from the thought of his undoubtedly remarkable predecessor, Franz Rosenzweig. In both his pre- and post-1967 modes of Jewish thought, Fackenheim considered Rosenzweig the leading and most powerful modern Jewish thinker since Spinoza. And yet he dedicated a significant portion of To Mend the World to showing why Rosenzweig can no longer be judged to be the leading and most powerful modern Jewish thinker, at least in the wake of the Holocaust. In his pre-1967 mode of thought, Fackenheim adhered to a position which was roughly approximate to that of Rosenzweig. I say “roughly approximate” because he needed even then to modify this position, in accord with Rosenzweig’s rather strained relation to history, or the laboured historical character of his thought, which for Fackenheim (although there was not yet an awareness of how the Holocaust completely dominates the contemporary human horizon, whether consciously or unconsciously) was already unsatisfactorily dialectical. To be sure, Fackenheim viewed Rosenzweig (judged among the existentialists) as ultimately deeper than Heidegger in grasping the possibility of historical transcendence, or transcendence of history in the midst of history – rather than trying to deny transcendence in and yet beyond history, or setting artificial limits to it, by dogmatically asserting that every historical transcendence and every claimed access to the eternal is a false escape from the inexorable fate of human historicity. In admitting this unavoidable fate he will judge that Heidegger was the deeper thinker about the state of philosophy in the contemporary world. Hence, Fackenheim will eventually maintain that precisely this Heideggerian position must be confronted (Rosenzweig’s ultimately greater depth on transcendence to the contrary notwithstanding)

160  Kenneth Hart Green

if philosophy is to survive; and he will further suggest that the survival of Judaism and Christianity in history somehow depends on this survival of philosophy, even if they do not identify themselves with philosophy or root themselves in it. Philosophy must pass through and beyond Heidegger’s position, and cannot merely get around it. The imperative to pass through and beyond Heidegger’s position is likewise binding on Judaism and Christianity, because they cannot escape thinking with philosophy. But contrary to Heidegger, man was not fated and hence required to deny the possibility of transcendence of history (i.e., Rosenzweig’s deeper thought, even if he did not get the chance to fully confront Heidegger himself), just so long as such transcendence is perceived to have occurred in history. Philosophy was led to its Heideggerian impasse by its own modern constitutional connection with history. It remains fated to confront radical historicism as a question, indeed the question, in the wake of the Holocaust, with no certain answer prepared in advance, but only a possibility of transcendence to be considered. Only by doing so in the wake of the Holocaust, i.e., by confronting Heidegger, can the possibility of transcendence of history in the midst of history be proved possible, if it can be proved possible. Rosenzweig will offer Fackenheim decisive aid, or rather the fundamental clue, in considering the possibility of philosophy and revelation transcending history in history, i.e., transcending the Heideggerian position. However, Rosenzweig alone will offer a position which is not adequate to the task of stepping beyond the event (Ereignis) of the absolute destruction of Western tradition as occurred in and through the Holocaust (occurring similarly even if not equally to Judaism, Christianity, and philosophy), as well as of the modern tradition associated with the idea of humanity, even carrying with its devastation of the human the Heideggerian idea of humanity (i.e., man as being towards death). According to Fackenheim, the destruction which occurred during the Holocaust encompasses the essential idea contained in all of these traditions (not exempting Heidegger); and they can be saved or recovered only if some sort of transcendence, aided by a truth innate to these traditions (as Rosenzweig alone reached towards but did not attain), occurred in or during the Holocaust itself. For Fackenheim, this amounted to Rosenzweig’s setting the proper priority of issues in contemporary thought, and it already forced a pre-1967 “return” to history by Fackenheim. In Fackenheim’s pre-1967 thought, he judged Rosenzweig’s existentialism to be just as serious in fact and as concentrated in thought as Heidegger’s, since historicity for both Rosenzweig and Heidegger entails philosophically confronting modernity and secularization from a point of view of acknowledged



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  161

commitment or decision rather than claiming to follow necessary historical progress. But Fackenheim as a student of Hegel already recognized Rosenzweig’s starting, in his constructive thought, with a commitment or decision to put the Jews over and above history as an artificial position that is not historically sufficient. This position leaves the Jews vulnerable to being submerged by modernity precisely because mere faith in their transhistorical status is not enough protection of their historical difference, which must be better safeguarded in confronting modernity. For they lack a dialectical notion of just how to adequately confront modernity: they must be able to historically immerse themselves in and adapt themselves to it through legitimate and unimpeded historical criticism, while not mislaying or burying their fundamental difference. For him, such difference has to be based on authentic revelation – or as one might prefer to say it, so as not to seem to be expressing a uniquely religious conception: flash of insight, whose source is unknown – as is able to survive the encounter with history because occurring in the midst of history, even catastrophic history, and as such is not trying to escape from history other than in something like an ever-repeatable moment of personal revelation or lightning-flash of awareness of truth in the soul. Yet once we turn to Fackenheim’s immediate post-1967 thought on Rosenzweig, we notice that Rosenzweig is already faulted by Fackenheim for paying deficient attention, and lending too little religious credence, to concrete history as this unfolds not just in the past, but also most emphatically in contemporary actuality.1 Rosenzweig’s basic theological position was that, once revelation had occurred as a historical event or definite moment in the past, nothing could happen in history to change its character and content for the Jews as an unalterable testimony and legacy from Sinai to the Messiah – meaning to say by this that nothing fundamentally new could happen or be revealed in history. The period between Sinai and the Messiah is religiously neutralized, since it is not allowed to produce anything capable of yielding a challenge, or even a truly essential supplement, to the “revealed” character and content of the old Jewish religion. History is no longer the sphere of revelation, in which new divine presence could be encountered by or be significant for the Jews. The key structures of belief in their ontological orientation, as well as the categories of their life in the historical sense, have already been made known to them and remain set. In connection with God as man is related to Him, man knows God only via past creation, established revelation, and future redemption. One may say, once Sinai has occurred, Being is what it is, was, and will be until the Messiah is revealed to us.

162  Kenneth Hart Green

As a result, the Jews have been remade by Rosenzweig as the one, eternal, transhistorical people who will miraculously survive until the completed redemption. They will remain in and yet not of history, which cannot impinge on what they are essentially, even if Being may change for the rest of the peoples, insofar as the peoples move in history ever closer – not asymptotically but actually! – to the Jews. The Jews as a nation and religion float over and above the stream of history, as it were, as it rages beneath them and as they are not affected by it (at least with respect to the fundamental truth which they know and teach) – although it may well affect their mode of existence, or even their continued life as a single community. Communities, languages, cultures, and norms may change, but not the heart and soul as well as the rhythms, i.e., their calendar, liturgy, and family life, which is their true being as eternal life with God. As this also seems to assume, their mode of actual historical existence is unrelated to the essential truth they know and teach, which they communicate best by their continued being and their unchanged traditional religious life. Thus, in the spirit of Yehuda Halevi in the Kuzari, precisely their life of suffering in history during the exile is no detraction from the truth they represent or convey. In fact, their suffering almost confirms their truth, since (with exceptions of disloyalty always occurring in specific instances for discernible reasons) as a general rule they remain loyal to their people and faith although they could profit by abandoning these in favour of their persecutors. As a result, Rosenzweig never even attempted to answer the question of what would happen to Judaism if the Jews should cease to exist, since he considered this a simple impossibility, according to his version of how the Jewish faith in its pristine form works and endures. As it would seem from everything which can be known about Rosenzweig’s thought, the essential truth which the Jewish people represent, as the one and only chosen people manifest by their transhistorical “life with God” (calendar, liturgy, and family), i.e., that which makes them uniquely related to God, would not survive their demise – but this is not a genuine possibility, because they are protected by their belief in God and their way of life which elevates them over and above history, and because they always produce enough loyal Jews to carry on. Instead, they stand as the model of consummated humanity, i.e., the state of being with God in their “eternal” religious life, towards which the rest of humanity aspires in mind and heart, whether consciously or unconsciously, with their “eternity” proven by their unprecedented and inexplicable historical survival. Indeed, humanity needs the Jewish people to remain transhistorical so as to know what the true goal of human history is. Their task is to serve as faithful witnesses to the possibility of



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  163

divine truth manifest in life, as they show by their continued encounter with divine presence in and yet beyond history. The unprecedented survival of the Jews in spite of their being dispersed, and indeed in spite of their suffering and martyrdom, is God’s guarantee both to them and to man himself. Their mysterious fate shows the possibility of miracles in their very being. In this sense, and as Fackenheim was determined to imply, Rosenzweig is in accord with Hermann Cohen about the trouble with Zionism: its fundamental flaw is that it refuses to accept suffering and martyrdom as the unavoidable and not entirely unfitting Jewish fate. Zionism’s error is that it wants “happiness” for the Jews, as this was so elegantly put in a famous obiter dictum of Cohen’s (which Fackenheim frequently liked to reiterate). Zionism believes the Jews have a right to be happy, to enjoy an honourable and flourishing life while dwelling safely and securely in a land of their own. As with the good things desired and fought for by most ordinary human beings in order to ensure the achievement of “happiness” according to the laws of history, Zionism mandates against Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Haredi Judaism that the Jews will have to perform for themselves all functions of any normal society so as to preserve their common life (even if galut Judaism discourages and even bans the desire for this sort of thing, while it encourages a different set of virtues). Likewise, they will have to be capable of defending themselves against enemies and evildoers. In other words, once remade by Zionism, the Jews will build their own society and assume responsibility for themselves and their own fate (no longer being dependent on others), they will be able to retaliate against their adversaries as well as their potential persecutors, and they will avenge wrongs done against themselves rather than meekly accept affliction and suffering as willing martyrs who celebrate such affliction and suffering as the highest virtue. Rosenzweig, following Cohen, rejected such notions of ordinary happiness for the Jews, obtained through holding power, as morally unseemly and theologically unfitting in maintaining Judaism. To employ a contemporary term, for them Judaism “valorizes” a historical life of recurrent and even perennial suffering as noble, eminently worthy of commendation, ultimate, and unavoidable. Being preserved by God against almost every natural law of what enables peoples to survive in history is the transhistorical evidence of the guarantee for humanity of a truth which is both in and yet ultimately beyond history. The mysterious survival of the Jews, in spite of exile and suffering, is according to Rosenzweig the reason for human hope, whether the world knows it or not. That there is this “beyond,” eternity in history, is then what the transhistorical Jews

164  Kenneth Hart Green

represent for humanity, even if only as the “holy remnant” dedicated to the truth about God. As Fackenheim began to perceive once he started to seriously confront the Holocaust around 1967, this event has definitively proven that much of this theology argues for something that can no longer be theologically believed, politically sustained, or morally defended, nor is it even historically credible. The “holy remnant,” as well as the historical conditions for a galut-Judaism on which it depended, can be totally destroyed in actuality, and recently almost totally did become a past historical fact. This is something that Rosenzweig (and everyone like him prior to 1933–45) could not conceive as possible and regarded as unthinkable.2 For him, God guarantees the eternity of Israel as the transhistorical people, which is also the condition of its reception of revelation, which will be allowed to survive even if only as the tiniest remnant: it receives revelation in the transhistorical category of its very being, which will preserve it. In other words, it reveals eternity through its being the eternal people with God, which advances in time but is not of history. For Fackenheim, by contrast, the fact that the total annihilation of the Jews was conceived and almost successfully executed as a plan of action in history by a modern state, according to an ideology which has seemingly disappeared but is actually still flourishing in an altered guise of anti-Zionism, changes everything forever: henceforth it sets a precedent in history for hatred of the Jews. The Jewish historical strategy for survival, galut-Judaism, is no longer credible or even respectable. That annihilation was was to be total, intended by its planners and perpetrators to be the torture and murder of an entire ­people – man, woman, and child, with the unambiguous indication that no exceptions are to be tolerated – and was implemented and almost completed as an actual historical event meticulously documented, and was resisted by no non-Jewish state, demonstrates a possibility never previously conceived by anyone, and shows that this possibility can always become fact again. The human condition has changed in the course of history, and the Jewish historical strategy for survival must change with it. Other than through a historical accident (i.e., the military defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1945), the total annihilation of world Jewry could have been the case as a simple fact, and almost was the case for European Jewry.3 As a result of this project of the total annihilation of the Jews in history – almost fact but for a historical accident – ­Fackenheim was forced to declare Rosenzweig’s thought henceforth essentially obsolete and irrelevant on the historical plane, as well as morally illegitimate as a survival strategy, not to mention futile as an



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  165

antidote to “the curse of historicity.”4 The truth of the notion of a “valorized” way of life rooted in suffering has been voided as legitimate in every sense by the mass murder virtually to the point of disappearance that the Jews suffered while devoutly following this notion, whether according to a traditional or an Enlightenment rationale. Rosenzweig never considered this still-traumatic historical event either as a theoretical possibility or as a deed that could be implemented practically as an actual goal, although it occurred as a fact of history only ten years following his demise and in his own native land. Further, Fackenheim concluded that even if Rosenzweig had viewed it retrospectively on the basis of his existing thought – had he had the misfortune of witnessing the Holocaust, and had he survived it – he could neither have taken adequate theological account of the Holocaust nor given this unprecedented catastrophe its philosophic due, if he chose to remain in the essential limits of his thought as it had been defined and constituted during his own life.5 Fackenheim’s point is not to blame Rosenzweig, since this would fault him for not considering a possibility that no one (or virtually no one) considered possible prior to the event itself.6 Rather, according to Fackenheim, Rosenzweig would have had a clear-cut choice in the wake of the Holocaust: either attempt to maintain a historically obsolete as well as morally grotesque position, and so lose moral, religious, and philosophic credibility, or change his thought radically, which Fackenheim believed was the likelier option for Rosenzweig. Thus, he perceived that Rosenzweig’s thought – which had been able to articulate the most defensible and authentic modern version of traditional Jewish religious, galut-based theology prior to the Holocaust – utterly failed the test of history, which it supposedly had mastered insofar as this thought claimed to hold the transcendent view of history: it could not help the Jews to prepare for, to make sense of, or to respond to what happened to them in the Holocaust.7 Put bluntly but in the simplest terms: how could the Jews continue to be “witnesses” to eternity over and above – and yet even so through – history if it is to be made unconditionally the case, as it has been made the case, that a negative possibility henceforth and forever menaces them: if they are not to be permitted to survive as a people in history, as may well happen once the precedent has been set? As may well happen, if other powerful forces follow this precedent and decide that the Jews are no longer to be allowed to exist as a people (which unnamed forces continuous with Hitler and the Nazis still declare their wish to bring about), then they will no longer be able to perform their essential historical task as witnesses to God beyond history, and there will no longer be such witnesses.

166  Kenneth Hart Green

Yet, curiously, in spite of this damning critique some of Rosenzweig’s key ideas still had a formidable residual effect on Fackenheim: the thinking on history and eternity which drove Rosenzweig persisted in prompting Fackenheim. He was still convinced of the need to search for a transcendence of history which occurs in history and which emerges from history, as once happened at Sinai: merely to deny history, or to try to escape from it, is not adequate for any Jewish thinker. As the post1967 Fackenheim is willing to acknowledge along with Rosenzweig, the positive possibility, i.e., of revelation from beyond history occurring in history, once happened, and so it can happen again. The people Israel must continue to be able to receive or encounter revelation as an everpresent possibility in a transhistorical moment of history while they abide through history, further allowing the people of revelation to still transcend history in the life of each Jew in those “personal” moments by which he reappropriates the past as revelation. Thus did Fackenheim begin to pass through the decisive shift in his thinking, which viewed the Holocaust as the event that almost supersedes every past event in history (and not just Jewish history), however much the history of this people may once have been permeated with divine presence in selected moments. Against it every future event claiming revealed status must be measured. Indeed, he asked himself whether we can any longer speak of history as the site in which once-genuine divine revelation has the possibility of occurring in each human being’s personal life, since this once-genuine possibility (as conceptualized by Rosenzweig) involves a humanly chosen personal transcendence merely by openness to potential re-enactment, which makes God’s redemptive presence immediately accessible almost at will. Is not such presence of redemptive divinity henceforth closed to the Jews as a merely personal possibility, because of what happened to them in ­history – at least for the immediate or foreseeable future – since it has been extirpated by an enormous historical catastrophe and its accompanying divine absence, which cannot so readily be willed away? An event has occurred which covers history with a thick cloud (one certainly not reflecting a divine presence, and not a mere Buberian “eclipse”), and which prevents the breaking through of any light. In such a historical atmosphere of impenetrable fog between man and God, it would be improper even to want to re-enact the divine presence of an ancient event “merely” on a personal level. Fackenheim perceived that this was a truly unprecedented occurrence that, at least so far as we are able to know, cannot be transcended or “overcome” for the historical moment, considering that the mere possibility of repeating this catastrophic event is the worst nightmare haunting the Jewish soul, however much



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  167

the Jews may wish the trauma to evaporate and leave no impress on their souls. Further, this dark event constituted an ontologically emptying juncture, which inverted Being on the historical plane and exempted nothing human from its destructive reach. Hence, in its shadow all of history is henceforth redefined by whether it precedes or follows it. This is because history can no longer be the ground for momentous events, as singular presences of God, that bring to light something genuinely unprecedented as categorical truths about the divine through His presence for each person in his own life. Or rather: if an event of presence is still to be named “positive” revelation, it is perhaps a revelation of a different sort which still occurs in and through a historical moment, transcending history by resisting further encroachments of “negative” revelation which continue the diabolical presence uniquely manifest in the Holocaust. Each one of these resisting acts in history, occurring on the personal level which parallels Rosenzweig’s conception, is a marginal revelatory moment or echo of what Fackenheim called “resistance as an ontological category.” If according to Rosenzweig a past event of presence-in-history, however elevated (e.g., Sinai), was once remembered precisely in order to be re-enacted as a momentary presence, Fackenheim claims that in the wake of the Holocaust it cannot be known in advance whether even this sort of momentary presence is still divine, pure and simple, if it is not somehow linked with resistance. Everything which had been historically closed (according to Rosenzweig), in the sense of religiously settled, is suddenly open again. Every claim to transcendence from past or present must be met by seeing it in the harsh light of the empirical facts of contemporary history and its horror. With regard to knowable presence in the present world-night, we must first know what of the past can stand the test of confrontation with the unprecedented evil. As Fackenheim states about even the most holy book: Prior to the Nazi empire, a Jew, in order to possess the Jewish book, had to view himself as though he personally stood at Sinai. After the Nazi empire, a Jew is able to keep the Jewish book only if he views himself as though he had personally been present at Auschwitz or Buchenwald as well; and whether he will then still wish or be able to keep the book cannot be known in advance.8

To be sure, Fackenheim claims to be building on the basic approach of Rosenzweig. But once his criticism of Rosenzweig’s approach is fully unfolded through To Mend the World, not much of that approach

168  Kenneth Hart Green

is allowed to remain standing, at least in terms of the contents it used to have. Perhaps such “positive” revelation may have occurred once in the past (which Rosenzweig summarizes as encounters with divine love), and even been augmented on several occasions of actual but diminished presence in the wake of it. Perhaps in those momentous occasions it even made a decisive difference to Jewish life, on behalf of human life, since it was either a “root experience” or an “epoch-making event,” which either established or confirmed the unfolding tradition, allowing human beings the freedom of interpretation, in which moments – ­mediated by historical and hermeneutical process – they were allowed to continue to engage with the divine. Yet of how much worth – other than as memory – is such a possibility to us in the present, in which the only possibility of our encountering the divine is either in the form of its desolate divine absence, or in the form of the demonic antithesis of the divine which I prefer to characterize – in the last phase of his thought – as a virtually “diabolical revelation”? But once the Holocaust had been confronted by Fackenheim, the very problem of revelation will change for him forever, and he will be forced to consider completely different ways of interpreting the possibility of this sort of antior counter-revelatory event in historical terms. Indeed, he will have to admit to himself that what occurred as diabolical revelation in history is entirely unlike anything with which it might be compared on the basis of the type of thinking on this question made available to him in Rosenzweig’s thought. Fackenheim’s last link with Rosenzweig’s “system” – although a tenuous link, tied by a thin thread – is its notion of the “contracting logic” of the holy remnant, whether (for Rosenzweig) referring to the Jews as God’s “eternal people” in history, or (for Fackenheim) also to the “decency of humanity” in those rare ones who resisted, or resist, the anti- or counter-revelatory evil.9 This notion of “contraction” and its dialectical “logic” may rightly be regarded as an additional element that Fackenheim borrowed or adapted from Isaac Luria, or rather from Lurianic theology (along with tikkun olam [mending the world]), mediated through Rosenzweig’s refitting a similar notion for use in his philosophic system. To be sure, Rosenzweig had already borrowed and adapted this notion to account for the “shrinking” of the Jews during exile, but especially in modernity through assimilation, both through non-Jewish thought which is absorbed and transforms Judaism and through disappearing affiliation or attenuated commitment. It is true that Fackenheim moves much beyond this rather limited use of Lurianic thought, and appears to allow somehow for the concept of a “contracting God” (tzimtzum according to its original form) – although he



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  169

never elaborates on the notion as such, but leaves it on the level of an esoteric hint or suggestion. Seemingly adapting, and hence qualifying, a key theological notion on the origin of the universe,10 according to which it was God who contracted Himself in order to create the universe or to make it possible, Fackenheim instead suggests – though very tentatively – that the uncertain redemption, if not the very historical future, of humanity seems to terrifyingly depend on this human contraction of the sort he delineates, although reflecting a similar motion of the divine in contracting itself. Everything hopeful strangely depends on the ever-shrinking number of resisting Jews and decent human beings – “ever shrinking” because of (a) the murdered Jews; (b) the disappearing Jews; and (c) the diminishing number of courageously decent human beings who will defend the Jews. To illustrate that which seems to be embraced by what he is suggesting: the tiny number of Jews who resisted, among the enormous number who were murdered, are united with those rare human beings who acted righteously during the Holocaust as well as in its wake; they bear a significance as individuals which expands in inverse proportion to their shrinkage in numbers, and hence is vastly disproportionate to what they seem to have been able to actually achieve. The surviving Jews who helped to establish the free state of the Jews in their ancestral homeland, as well as the decent non-Jews who supported them, made possible a human future by their resistance against radical evil. Their rare decency or heroism in the circumstances of the massive human participation as well as collaboration in the diabolical revelation made the rare ones literally helpers of God in resisting His being usurped by Satan as ruler of the world. But to conclude from this that the collective diminution in numbers of the decent (along with the remaining Jews) in order to magnify their significance for God’s sake is in any sense to be a desired or a good thing is the diametrical opposite of what Fackenheim intends. Indeed, their reduction, contracting, or shrinkage in numbers might almost seem to express a countermovement away from redemption (as the direction towards which history is supposed to move) and towards apocalypse, and could be regarded as a virtual sign of a diabolical victory. Instead of carrying it this far, Fackenheim seems to imply that the very possibility of a human future depended and depends on those few. Being, inasmuch as human beings are still responsible for it in the Heideggerian (and Rosenzweigian) historicist conception of the universe, which was acceptable to Fackenheim, is still possible because God was able – or required – to “contract” Himself in His hiddenness during those catastrophic events just as at the beginning. Or rather, in the context of the Holocaust, Fackenheim suggests God was able to contract Himself in

170  Kenneth Hart Green

His suffering and misery for those many who were destroyed, rather than destroy the world by the enormity of his mourning for and anger at what man (in the form of Nazi Germany and its empire) allowed to be done.11 And yet, why did God not act, but only suffered (however great His suffering)? The answer to this tormenting question is not entirely evident from anything to which Fackenheim points. This obscurity of why God Himself did not act is especially acute in view of classical Jewish notions of God’s presence in history as a most vital actor, i.e., as liberator and redeemer, which has a much higher profile and significance even for Fackenheim’s Jewish theology than the “suffering God.”12 Was Fackenheim, like classical Jewish theology, perhaps compelled to resort to the absolute gift of human freedom? Thus, was his logic that man, endowed with a God-like autonomy, is what leads to the unfolding of history, almost solely determined by human freedom, as this is itself conditioned by or grounded in a divine self-limitation? No matter with how little literal seriousness Fackenheim may have wanted his readers to take the theological imagery of a self-limiting God – Who as the very condition of being the Creator, no longer allows Himself to act as He wills (a notion he seems to adapt from Rosenzweig as much as he borrows it from Luria) – he also seems to give the language some close-to-literal weight. He refused to travel the route of Hans Jonas’s post-Holocaust thought, which asserted a God with limited power to do anything. Fackenheim’s God possessed the power to act, but if He had acted, it would have been to destroy the world, as He almost did in the era of Noah. In the face of the Holocaust, God preserved the world only by keeping Himself, and hence His unspeakable agony, concealed. If He had not again “contracted” Himself, for no doubt mysterious reasons, it would have been unavoidable for Him to reduce the universe to primeval chaos again: How can both be in His place, asks the Talmud, weeping and gladness? One is in the outer chamber, the other is in the inner, is the reply. But which is where? … There is gladness in the outer chamber: God hides … Then why does He hide? He hides His weeping in the inner chamber, for just as God is infinite so His pain is infinite, and this, were it to touch the world, would destroy it … even then, the bond between the divine intimacy and the divine infinity was not completely broken; because God so loved the world that He hid the infinity of His pain from it lest it be destroyed.13

Hence, this “contracting logic” is an imperative resort – even if a desperate one – to a new paradigm for Jewish life and thought.



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  171

Rosenzweig represented “contraction” as a creative and dialectical Jewish historical process in the realms of life and thought that amounts to a this-worldly or historical turn away from the originally supernal Lurianic idea. Fackenheim seems to have moved closer to its Lurianic origins by applying “contracting logic” to revelation, deploying it so as to make sense of a catastrophic event in history, which can trace its direct descent from an account of how being or the universe emerges in its first moment by God’s shrinking or diminishing Himself. If it follows from this conception (or “logic”) that the world was created by divine “contraction,” it seemed almost a compulsory response to catastrophe for Fackenheim, in that this response through “contraction” is able to be paradoxically revelatory of something we previously did not know about God in history, especially concerning a knowledge of the reason for God’s self-imposed absence from history. This is something that, if we knew about His absence from history previously, we did not know how far it reached until the Holocaust.14 God has arrived at a stage in the development of Being, reflected by man’s being, that prevents Him from acting in history – or rather, He can do this only if He were to decide to destroy the world. If we are henceforth forced to face what one might call the “truth” about God (towards which the Gnostics clumsily and unsatisfactorily groped) – i.e., by contracting Himself in order to leave room for the world to be created as anything and everything which is non-God – then He can only act in the world or meddle in history by destroying it, since for Him to act there is to return to His “full” self, unimpeded by any and all non-God, and hence it is to remove the “room” which he allowed for being, which is non-God. According to Rosenzweig, Judaism “divests itself of un-Jewish elements in order to produce … remnants of archetypal Jewish elements” that revitalize and refresh it. Through spiritual reduction, subtraction, shrinkage, or retreat to its original self, this “logic of contraction” helps Judaism – by reaction to modern assimilation at its best – to produce novelty. Though powered primarily by appeal to and pressure from outer stimulus, through self-contraction it ultimately generates novelty from its own deepest spiritual resources, which emerge by contact and struggle with the other, while confronting its own untapped inner reserves. As I would like to suggest, it was precisely this notion of “contraction” that somehow enabled Fackenheim to allow something of the old transhistorical, once-and-for-all conception of revelation – as originally articulated by Rosenzweig – to endure and pass through the possible divine absence and absolute negative of the Holocaust itself. The decentered post-Holocaust era allows the once-cast-away original self (i.e., the “remnants of archetypal Jewish elements”) to re-emerge

172  Kenneth Hart Green

in some new and unanticipated historical forms as a “positive” force. Those “remnants,” reworked through contraction so as to bring forth revitalized and fresh “remnants” – which, for Fackenheim, precisely as “archetypal … elements” would seemingly have to be (at the fundamental level) transhistorical and hence of revealed origin – also pass through history embedded in the Jewish tradition, which it holds to itself in reserve as deeper spiritual resources which may be of possible future need or use. Separate from any human will, and hence reflecting an eternal character, they seem to enable a novel response to events and to change with them, because of a mysterious divine presence in the tradition (beyond or beneath any human spirit or “genius of the people” [Volksgeist]), accompanying the people as it moves through history and acting as pilot lights to ignite torches which guide it onward. But as a retreat to “remnants” of its own transhistorical substance while it is still immersed in history, it makes possible contact with primordial elements or embryonic constituents (the “archetypal remnants”) embedded in its own tradition, which are virtually fallen fragments from the shattered divine (if he tacitly postulates some sort of notion of “breaking of the vessels” [shevirat ha-keilim], occurring again as fully as humanly possible in the Holocaust, but also fragmentarily prior to it), or they are rediscovered direct links to the fragmented, blocked, or broken divine, as vessels, roots, or veins of the divine in being. If the tradition is a product of revelation as it claims, it seems the “self-contraction” represents a recovery of potential but forgotten truth hidden deep in its own past. In other words, through the dialectical process of history, as well as through the shattering confrontation with catastrophe, the “archetypal remnants” precisely as forgotten (or at least previously unpenetrated) fragments of old truth are still somehow capable of yielding new revelation of the transhistorical God – as if a closed or clogged passageway to on high has been suddenly opened or unblocked by events. What may seem only a human thing is rightly attributed to the transcendent God, as a source of fresh truth previously unanticipated.15 Although it is not entirely clear either how Fackenheim would answer this question about an admittedly tacitly held postulate (is such new light which emerges from old truth only a human thing, or is it rightly attributed to God?), or whether he would be aided by recurring to Rosenzweig from whom he derived the notion but whose notion was itself an attempt to modify Luria for present theological and political uses, there is no doubt that his older conception of revelation which transcends history (“eternity entering time”) will for him henceforth somehow have to be supplemented by and filtered through the newer



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  173

grounding in historical actuality. As much as Heidegger asserts (and Fackenheim accepts, at least on tentative grounds) the radical historicity of Being, in reply to this it seems that Fackenheim (schooled by Hegel and Rosenzweig) asserts the historicity of God – at least inasmuch as He makes Himself freshly present to humanity through His own contractions or absences evident through history. This may not exhaust His Being for either Fackenheim or Rosenzweig, but insofar as He intends to communicate with and make Himself present to man in history even through what He has seemingly not done, He must Himself be possessed of a historicity that is not dissolved by His eternity. If Heidegger had proved to Fackenheim the need for “ontological” truth to test itself in the actual, “ontic” events of history, even so once the historicity of Being itself has been established by Heidegger as unavoidable (although not quite truly radical for Fackenheim, because capable of being equated with the historicity of God – His historicity is only “more or less” one and the same as history), then this similarly makes the most authentic response to catastrophe, for Fackenheim – contrary to Rosenzweig – the utmost honest confrontation with historical actuality, as absolutely essential to any decent Jewish as well as human future. That result would apply to both those who are religious, i.e., those who avow revelation as witnessed by the mysterious but multifarious impulse to teshuva as affirmed by contemporary Jewish life,16 and those who are secular, i.e., those who either reject or merely suspend judgment on revelation but whom, as unconditionally committed to Jewish survival, Fackenheim regards as if they too share in as well as contribute to the mysterious but multifarious impulse to teshuva as equally a legitimately secular process. Teshuva represents a return to the most fundamental source or sources of Jewish life, and indeed of life itself (as the Holocaust proves, according to Fackenheim). Teshuva – whose creative human impulses meld with the creative presence of the divine in history – requires today a sort of contraction in which the “remnants of archetypal elements” (both Jewish and otherwise human) are revitalized, repaired, and even radically altered. This “contraction” to ancient forms (a revised cultural, political, and theological “tzimtzum”) conforms with what is “ontically” known to be the case as historical fact: something novel and unprecedented has happened. Thus did Fackenheim turn to Heidegger’s notion of “Ereignis,” i.e., an advent-event in the history of Being, but he adapts it so as to accommodate his notion of a diabolical revelation, which is possible as quasi-divine, or as divine in reverse, brought about by man acting against what he was capable of engendering, what he was destined to produce – misbirthing being as death instead of life. For it emerges

174  Kenneth Hart Green

that “resistance” to radical evil is an “ontological category” because it requires the original impulses or sources of life to reassert themselves as human deed and re-establish themselves through historical fact so to prove in extremis their continued life and authenticity. As such, by returning to the land of Israel in order to make a stand for survival, and to do so on the basis of the Hebrew Bible – the latter, the Book, as the original divine source by which the Jews were nurtured and formed in the past, and the former, the land, as the divine promise to provide it as the basis for their future – so both sides, secular and religious, had followed almost unwittingly the past “logic of contraction” as again made fully evident in Jewish history, and as the deepest force by which it has survived. The Holocaust deprived the Jews of their free being-toward-death as the condition of all authentically human life in history, according to Heidegger. But by mounting a resistance to being so deprived, in spite of such resistance being made virtually “impossible” for them by their torturers-and-murderers, this resistance is the same as affirming and even revealing, unbeknownst to themselves, a truth about being that is higher and deeper than Heidegger’s so-called Dasein as the condition of authentic human life. It is something closer to Rosenzweig’s “eternity,” but one which is buried in time, as had to be proved by the actual facts of life and history during the Holocaust, and confirmed by the struggle for the Jewish state which followed. The recovery of those “remnants of archetypal Jewish elements” – language used by Rosenzweig in The Star of Redemption – during the Holocaust which made resistance possible, the contraction to the most essential things in the tradition which were somehow able to arouse, compel, and command life against death, shows what human life truly depends on, or what its true transcendent “roots” are. By the Jews somehow climbing from consignment as a people to the grave to the will to make the greatest possible effort in order to survive (whether by heroic-military acts of resistance or by merely moral-spiritual acts of resistance), the veracity of a non-evident force for life higher than the force for death has been recovered and restored to plausibility beyond mere remote and unimagined possibility.17 Jewish resistance constituted a struggle for the right of life and death as individuals and as a collective in the midst of the Holocaust (even while knowing they had almost no hope of victory, rebelling against murderers who made it virtually impossible to resist). Directly following from the Holocaust, their resistance led to the fight to survive as a people in their ancestral homeland. As such, it revealed an “ontological” truth about human beings, and thus about Being itself. These two actions together show precisely how the divine



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  175

has been forced to make Itself present in the apparent radicalism of Its absence – even if not as It Itself would ever have wanted to make Itself present.18 Judaism again escapes the clutches of Gnosticism in the face of radical evil by affirming, through the historical facts of resistance during the Holocaust and the fight for survival following it, that the very refusal to be defeated and buried in history is the way in which divine presence and light manifests Itself almost against Itself. This is what the fragments of Jewish (aided by the fragments of non-Jewish) resistance mean “ontologically,” and why they represent a novel event in Being: this specific resistance alone offers hope that the total darkness produced by Hitler’s Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, which humanity has been so unfortunate as to witness, is not destined to prevail. NOTES   1 Fackenheim brings his main post-1967 commendation and criticism of Rosenzweig in To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1982; rev. ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 58–91. Focused especially on revelation are pp. 72–9. The gist of Rosenzweig’s originality on revelation lies, for Fackenheim, in his ability to make the case for revelation by mounting a truly cogent argument on the philosophic need to substitute modern (human) “freedom,” as the basis for adherence to revelation, for medieval (revealed) “authority.” His case will amount to an argument in favour of “commitment,” or an act of will, as the unavoidable basis (in the wake of Schelling, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard) of each and every philosophic position, or what he also calls “The New Thinking.” The alternative is one or another form of “fanaticism,” fanatical because rationally and historically unsustainable. The “fanaticism” resides in the modern religious or secular obscurantist’s blind willing of his position, which is no longer rooted either in the rationally self-evident truths or in a “self-evidently true” source. Any modern position that is not based on commitment is dishonest; commitment is both self-conscious and selfcritical willing. Dishonest commitment will tend to be, or to become, “ideological,” which is the attempt to rationalize or to justify one’s blind willing as if it were somehow “necessary” (whether according to science or to politics). However, “ideology” is not primarily concerned with actuality; this ultimately makes it just a refined consequence of what Rosenzweig calls “fanaticism,” and what Leo Strauss characterizes as “fanatical obscurantism.” (Fackenheim makes a distinction between “Rosenzweig’s technical sense” of fanaticism and Spinoza’s use of the term or concept in a

176  Kenneth Hart Green “nontechnical sense”: Mend the World, 74 note.) By “authority” Fackenheim is not speaking about some higher government-like agency so much as the ultimate and certain claim for a source (with the primary evidence for its truth grounded in itself), and the claim that this source is immune to modern historical criticism. Modern historical criticism will cast doubt on the ability of any source, on its own, to validate faith, as with Yehuda Halevi’s claim for Jewish revelation as validated by 600,000 witnesses, who passed on their reliable testimony unbroken and unchanged through the generations. Such an argument has been recognized as circular; it depends on faith in the religious truth of the Torah, which establishes the historical source of the Torah, and which supposedly grounds the religious truth of the Torah. The Torah is no longer an authentic source of historical truth to anyone who is not already a believer in the Torah (as the word of God, as religious truth). Hence it can no longer stand on its own as a self-authenticated and unbiased document of revelation, witnessing to the same revelation.   2 Fackenheim, Mend the World, xl–xliv, 15–18, 94–6, 311–12, 323–4; Fackenheim, What Is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 236–9; Fackenheim, “Holocaust,” in Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 126–8.   3 Fackenheim, Mend the World, 79–91, 320–1, deals with Rosenzweig’s thought self-characterized as a system of “absolute empiricism,” in which a historical fact is required in order to confirm or verify the possibility of transcending history and encountering, or “attaining,” eternity. (It is not sufficient to bring the evidence of “ecstatic moments of individual souls,” in which moments it is claimed “divine love is revealed”: the evidence is too ambiguous, since it may be dismissed as either “a spurious eternity” or “an empty conceit”; Mend the World, 78–9.) The proof resides in the Jewish people, whose miraculous survival over and above history, even while seemingly in history, proves the history-transcending and eternityattaining possibility towards which all history moves. Fackenheim will disavow almost the entire system of Rosenzweig, especially as it issues in the Jews as the people who are transcendent of history, even though he will retain aspects of its concept of revelation, which according to him are not entirely grounded in the system. This is something that is demonstrated in its acceptance by Buber, who never embraced Rosenzweig’s system.   4 See Fackenheim, Mend the World, 94–5: “most arresting is Rosenzweig’s reason for wanting a ‘system’”: for Rosenzweig, “system” in the mode of the “new thinking” (empirical, historical, and free of any authority) is the only avenue by which to escape from “the curse of historicity” (which



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  177

Fackenheim defines as “an all-encompassing historical relativism”). Fackenheim draws the lesson from this that Rosenzweig was right about the need for something like “system,” and about the assured unavoidability of historicity, but rejects the “price” he was willing to pay as too high: not only did he accept the legitimacy of “Galut-Judaism,” but he “elevated it to a metaphysical level,” just as it was about to be destroyed forever as a morally and religiously legitimate position.   5 Fackenheim, Mend the World, 91–101. The aspect of this criticism that most affects our issue, according to Fackenheim, is the avowed modernism of Rosenzweig’s position. First, his modernism resides in his rejection of all “authorities,” which is still valid but not so simple (Fackenheim seems to advocate the “postmodern”), because to be authentically Jewish, it needs some authorities. And second, Rosenzweig’s modernism resides in his use of “system” to escape historicity, which can no longer be escaped, even if “system” is still legitimate, as the “system” which makes sense of historicity (94–5). What is needed, according to the fully post-1967 Fackenheim, is a “radical self-immersion in history” (136 note), in which it is supposedly unknown in advance that, or how, this domain of absolute historical evil (i.e., the Holocaust) can be surpassed. If moments of human goodness are discovered in the domain of absolute historical evil, they begin the process of human “recovery,” and the “recovery” of humanity, which he will also call tikkun. (Whether it is also a “recovery” of God, just as Heidegger strives for a “recovery” of Being, is an important supporting issue, which Fackenheim only approaches obliquely: Mend the World, 329. God receives a “gift” from “recovering” man. “The Jew at prayer” – i.e., the Jew who continues to pray – engages in a most radical act, by which he offers to God the most radical “gift”: by it, he has “returned to God ‘His crown and His scepter.’”) It is this last point that leads some to regard Fackenheim’s final position as a moderated Heideggerianism. For reasons which are too complex to delay us, I believe that this is an unsatisfying resolution of the dilemmas (which are serious philosophic dilemmas) raised by his final position. But the key perhaps resides in what I called his “moderated” Heideggerianism: it is “moderated” because Fackenheim envisions even the possibility of escape from “historicity,” and because he allows as legitimate (or “authentic”) the desire to escape from “historicity,” i.e., to rise to something eternal and absolutely good. But Fackenheim allows for this desire precisely because he claims to know in advance what Heidegger believes cannot be known in advance, or indeed cannot be known by any confrontation with historicity, because it is against the very “nature” of historicity, namely, that there is this possibility of escape from historicity. If, then, he legitimates (as “authentic”) the desire to escape from “historicity,” it is a matter for reflection whether he has

178  Kenneth Hart Green truly accepted the terms of historicity and of the necessary submission to it. Hence we must also ask of Fackenheim whether such a “radical self-immersion in history” will ever be sufficiently radical for a true or unmoderated Heideggerian? Even the possibility of escape (as tikkun, or as “recovery”) makes submission to historicity itself – as the fact about being – seem either like a pretence or like a mere means to an end beyond historicity. The lesson seems to be that this cannot be a halfway house such as Fackenheim wishes to construct and to dwell in. Thought is faced with a fundamental choice, a sharply-drawn “either/or” of alternatives, which cannot be evaded or blurred. It is either Strauss’s return to what Fackenheim calls the “philosophia perennis,” or also the “old thinking” (Mend the World, 262–4), which may allow for a “detour” to historicity, and even for a “radical self-immersion in history,” but which need not depend on the “new thinking,” since it already knows about and admits the very possibility of an escape from historicity (and hence makes every visit more or less a “detour”). Or it is an acceptance of and submission to historicity in the genuine and thus radical sense, which encompasses everything by history. This total encompassing by history allows for no “escape” that is not either “the spirit of revenge” (Nietzsche) or wishful thinking (post-1945 Western liberal historicism à la Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty). In other words, what Fackenheim puts on offer may be only what would have to be admitted is a “corrected” Straussianism, in which he allows for its success as thought by compelling Athens to submit to Jerusalem, or philosophy to theology, and which puts him still in the orbit of the unbroken debate in Western civilization between “Jerusalem and Athens.” Thus may be avoided Strauss’s “grandiose philosophical failure” – but only by “correcting” Strauss along quasi-Straussian lines. For previous comments on acts by which “man returns to God His crown and His scepter,” which do not seem quite so monumental in their significance, see Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 20, 305. But see also Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 32, and 100–1: Truth may have been cast to the ground (as he teaches through a Midrash), but “Truth must rise again” (as he, like the author of the Midrash, apparently knows), since “Truth, despite all, remains the seal of God.”   6 Closer to considering the general possibility of genocide is a comment made by Leo Strauss in 1925; but it is not a prediction of any specific historical facts or any specific target of genocide. See Strauss, The Early Writings, ed. Michael Zank (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 132–3. For further elaboration of his notion of the “holy remnant,” consider also Fackenheim, “The Rebirth of the Holy Remnant,” in Major



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  179

Changes within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Ninth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference (June 1993), ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), 649–58. And for a historian’s comments on Fackenheim’s attitude towards the “holy remnant,” consider also Zeev Mankowitz, “She’erith Hapleitah – Reflections of a Historian,” in The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust, ed. Michael L. Morgan and Benjamin Pollock (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 173–84.   7 This is besides the claim, made by Fackenheim, that Hitler and the Holocaust also murdered the possibility of martyrdom; it is impossible if it has been predetermined how and why the Jews were killed. On the one hand, how: man is no longer free to choose whether to die his own death for the sake of the truth to which he is committed, only perhaps to choose the attitude he will take towards his own death, which is already a given; on the other hand, why: the Jews were killed not for anything they had said, done, or believed, but rather only because they existed or had been born. See Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, 234–51, esp. 244–9; Fackenheim, Mend the World, 132–6, 182, 200, 328–9.   8 Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, 250.   9 See Fackenheim, Mend the World, 90, 93–4, 307–8, 320–1. Fackenheim specifically mentions (90) Rosenzweig’s statement: “In Judaism, man is always somehow a remnant, … always somehow a survivor.” See Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1971), 404–6. 10 This is a fundamental notion – that God created the universe through somehow “contracting” Himself – whose first contours, or at least elements of which, were originally sighted in the Zohar, i.e., He leaves room in Himself for a universe. However, the notion was thoroughly thought through, radicalized, and turned upside down by Isaac Luria. To summarize his conception, God retreats away from a point, in which He makes Himself absent or empty; the universe is made possible at the point of His absence, which is a portion of non-God in God’s being; such a point of non-God allows for a universe to be “created” (to conditionally use a word about a portion of Being in which God also still is) as something which is only quasi-separate from Him; to be sure, a residue of God remains even in the point of non-God. In its comprehension of the divine, it is not immediately evident whether this radicalized notion of Lurianic Kabbalah is linked directly with Gnosticism or still slightly diverges from it in the direction of monotheism, which is obviously a highly significant issue. It is a matter that requires careful reflection. See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1995), 244–86.

180  Kenneth Hart Green 11 Fackenheim, What Is Judaism?, 285:   Being infinite, God had to exercise a tzimtzum – make Himself small – so as to leave room for the world created by Him … My criticism is this. If this is meant as a mere metaphor, it is well within the realm of Midrashic thinking. But if, [Kabbalah] rushing in [where Midrash fears to tread], it is meant to break the bounds of Midrashic metaphor, so as to penetrate to Divinity itself, then the thesis implies that God cannot enter the world He has created, lest in doing so He destroy it. Yet a Jew knows that God has entered into the world. He led Israel out of Egypt. He gave the Torah on Mount Sinai. Moreover, these two events are not the sole events of salvation and revelation.



See especially the passage cited in the next note concerning Jewish “vicarious suffering,” and the corresponding words of Fackenheim quoted in the main text, which addresses directly Fackenheim’s conception of “divine pain” to which the present discussion only alludes. It would seem that this might be a borrowing from A.J. Heschel; see his God in Search of Man (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1955), 22, and Fackenheim, “Review of A.J. Heschel, God in Search of Man,” Judaism (1960): 50–3. Yet Fackenheim seems to himself admit of the type of thought in philosophy which he disallows in mysticism, i.e., “ecstatic thought”: see Fackenheim, Mend the World, 240, 247. Such thought, confronted with a genuine “world of evil,” is compelled to “disclose” an actuality that it cannot truly comprehend. This is because what it discloses “yet lies beyond it.” And simultaneously, thought cannot “let [it] be,” for its absoluteness (as Ereignis) proves that this “letting be” is a gravely deficient Heideggerian (prophetic) imperative: thought cannot “let be” not just evil, but a world of evil, “a novum in human history just because it was a world.” The “novum in human history,” the “world of evil,” just because thought can only “disclose” this fact “ecstatically,” is revelatory, because it makes known that which was never known to man hitherto, and which is absolute in its manifestation of evil. It is the Absolute Negative of the Holocaust, which cannot be “overcome” in a Hegelian higher synthesis. This is true in the sense that it is impossible to dialectically surpass it through the progressive march of thought and history, which in this case cannot resolve the contradictions that were generated by it, precisely because the Absolute Negative consists of a specific historical event in which the most radical evil possible (though hitherto consider impossible, if considered at all) manifested itself, and which was not “overcome” by any divine Grace. Thought, which must confront and think through the evil, becomes unwittingly “ecstatic” in the effort not to collude with the evil by a thinking of it which (dishonestly) rationalizes it and reduces it to the already-known, amounting to an escape from thought: thought absents itself if it resorts to



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  181

the already-known. It can preserve itself as honest thought (and becomes “ecstatic”) only by holding to resistance against the evil during the event not only as a moral but also as a cognitive standard: by grounding itself in the proper moral response or attitude (i.e., surprised horror) to the radically evil event while thinking it through; by admitting those who were there and resisted knew better what it was; and then by calling for continued active, moral, and political resistance against the residual radical evil, which has not dissipated itself, but is still a present threat. 12 See Ignaz Maybaum, Trialogue between Jew, Christian, and Muslim (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 66–7, 171–2. Maybaum stresses that, in the wake of the Holocaust, Fackenheim rejected as immoral the notion of Jewish “vicarious suffering” for the sake of God or humanity, especially as used to justify why Jews are persecuted or oppressed. But this apparently did not prevent him from accepting the notion of God’s suffering vicariously for man’s evil, a seemingly Christian notion, even if it is not clear whether for Fackenheim the suffering of God in response to the suffering of the Jews is in any sense redemptive. 13 Fackenheim, What Is Judaism?, 291. 14 Fackenheim, Mend the World, 90; he refers to Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, 404–6; cf. Der Stern der Erlösung, ed. Albert Raffelt (Freiburg im Breigau: Universitätsbibliothek, 2002), 450–52. The German word is “Verengung.” A comparable paradox, in which faith has to rely on the opposite of God to testify on its behalf, is evident in The Trial of God (New York: Schocken, 1979), a play by Elie Wiesel. In the face of unjust and unjustifiable catastrophe, God is put on trial. His only defender is the character “Sam,” i.e., Samael or Satan. Those who are truly faithful show themselves in their rejection of the devil, who offers himself as the advocate for God; he is the only one who is able to theologize the radically evil and to rationalize the grotesquely absurd. Similarly, see Irving Greenberg, “Theology after the Shoah: The Transformation of the Core Paradigm,” Modern Judaism 26.3 (2006): 213–39, esp. 215: “The primary impact of the Shoah on the core paradigm of truth and coherence is evident when one recognizes the need to acknowledge the brokenness of all religious worldviews and value systems.” What remains problematic about both responses is the question of their undue dependency on contemporary thought: whether Wiesel’s response of grotesque absurdity is not too dependent on post–World War II French literary and philosophic existentialism, and whether Greenberg’s response of “the brokenness” of all truth is not too dependent on post-1960s American literary and philosophic postmodernism. It has to be asked whether it is only on the basis of these sources of their thought that the “negative” or the

182  Kenneth Hart Green “antithesis” can be so redemptive, rather than because this is required by the Holocaust. 15 If so, this would seem to bring it very close to what Rosenzweig himself styled “atheistic theology,” in which hidden human depths that rise to the surface due to personal or historical causes masquerade as revelations of God. See Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. Michael L. Morgan and Paul W. Franks (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 10–24. 16 The “contracting logic” of the post-Holocaust era, borrowed from Rosenzweig, is put to different use. See Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 404; Fackenheim, Mend the World, 90–1, 93–4, 307–8. It is condensed in the following passages from Mend the World, 321, 324, 329–30:   Our quest seeks eternity in our time … What we must and shall do is ask whether Rosenzweig’s eternity-in-time is accessible in our time … A contracting logic may decimate the Jewish people … But that even a remnant should be destroyed – it is a holy remnant – is, or very nearly is – impossible. But the nearly impossible has in our time become almost actual … An absolute transcendence of time is not attainable in our time. For to return the throne of judgment usurped by Dr. Mengele back to God has become a Jewish necessity … this returning would be an impotent gesture without a Jewish state … the Jew at prayer today is gripped by the most radical of all human questions … As his prayer is informed by these questions, it is transformed. It becomes a gift whereby is returned to God “His crown and His scepter.” … An eternity so momentary, so fragmentary, so precarious cannot but give rise to the most profound metaphysical, theological, religious disquiet … To “overcome,” “transcend,” or “go beyond” our fragmented, momentary, precarious eternity is impossible.

17 See Fackenheim, Mend the World, 223–5, 254. Fackenheim calls it, aiming to say something beyond a mere rhetorical flourish, an “impossible” tikkun (or mending) made “necessary” – “impossible” and “necessary” because it was done by some who were among those multitudes marked for murder. That this became an imperative is shown already by the actions of some of the murdered themselves who, however tiny their numbers and however unprecedentedly difficult their circumstances, resisted the absolute evil and behaved in such a way as to “sanctify human life” (kiddush ha-hayyim), rather than deludedly resort to no-longer-possible martyrdom, i.e., what Judaism names the “sanctifying of God’s name” (kiddush ha-Shem). If it is crucially significant to Fackenheim that those actions on behalf of life occurred during the Holocaust itself, even though most people – starved, tortured, and humiliated – could not bring themselves to engage in such acts of sanctifying life, then this tikkun is rather a veritable “miracle” in the midst of history, seemingly referring by this to whatever it was that enabled those few to resist absolute evil at all. It most definitely



Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History  183

is not aimed to show, in some people’s action, an ability to historically “overcome” the evil in a Hegelian sense, for he refuses to ignore the many who could not resist as a most immaterial fact. It matters not whether this resistance occurred on religious or on secular grounds – only that it happened. “A tikkun, here and now, is mandatory for a tikkun, then and there, was actual.” (The emphasis has been removed.) 18 Never should it be forgotten that for Fackenheim the events which followed and which still follow the Holocaust, in the fight for a Jewish state, had as their absolute precondition resistance during the Holocaust. This resistance revealed both a possibility and a necessity: it inspired and excited the fight for a Jewish state which followed by showing how such resistance to radical evil was possible; it legitimated fighting for Jews who were unaccustomed to fighting, and who were habituated to regarding fighting for life and freedom as irreconcilable with Jewishness; it aroused the survivors to make a major and even decisive contribution to the war effort; and it showed the absolute moral necessity for a free Jewish state, whose coming into being could no longer be allowed to remain contingent on politics, or be deferred until better historical circumstances permitted. Fackenheim was convinced that this resistance revealed something both fundamental as well as novel about the human situation on the ontological level, and changed forever the Jewish situation on the theological-political level. Or as Edward Alexander so eloquently put it, with words very much in the spirit of Fackenheim:   The creation of the state of Israel was one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame, and just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry it was one of the greatest affirmations of the will to live ever made by a martyred people. It is a uniquely hopeful sign for humanity itself, indeed one of the most hopeful signs for humanity since the dove brought Noah “an olive leaf freshly plucked” after the primeval flood had abated.



See Alexander, “America’s Academic Boycotters: The Enemies of Israel Neither Slumber nor Sleep,” in Jews Against Themselves (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2015), 126–7; cf., in the same work, “Choose Your Side: The New York Times or Judaism,” 143–4.

7 Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation: Re-evaluating the Existential and Historical Turn Away from Philosophy steven kepnes

In Fackenheim’s interpretation and use of the work of Martin Buber we see a mixture of discourses that Fackenheim displays in his writing, a mixture of careful philosophical analysis and situational theology – theology appropriate to the challenge of the moment. This is characteristic of Buber himself, who was not the philosopher’s philosopher but, like other existentialists, consciously utilizes a mixed discourse that includes literary, poetic, and aphoristic and even prophetic forms of expression. Fackenheim’s work can be divided into two parts, his philosophical studies and his post-Holocaust theology. In this chapter I aim to use his interpretation of Buber as a marker of his transition from philosopher to situational theologian and to assess his place as Jewish thinker in his time at the latter half of the twentieth century and ours at the beginning of the twenty-first century. My conclusion, in brief, is that the movement to the existential experience of the individual and historical events of the Holocaust to provide new criteria for Jewish thought, while understandable in its day, led Fackenheim to unwarranted conclusions that contributed to the breaking down of Jewish philosophy and Judaism rather than building it up. This had the unintended consequence of giving Hitler the victory Fackenheim wanted to deprive him of. In the present situation, then, I judge that Jewish philosophy is better served by Fackenheim’s pre-Holocaust writings than his post-Holocaust ones. From Philosophy to Post-Holocaust Theology In Fackenheim’s early work, from 1947–67 – in his book on Hegel,1 his still classic Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (1973),2 and his early philosophical essays (many of which are collected in part 1 of Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy)3 – we see his probing



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  185

analytical mind working carefully and dispassionately through central issues in Jewish philosophy from Maimonides to Hermann Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Strauss. In these works, Fackenheim sets a high standard for analytic rigour and in-depth analysis in Jewish metaphysics, post-Kantian and post-Hegelian thought, political philosophy, and social ethics, along with an ability to skillfully weave biblical and rabbinic Midrash into Jewish philosophy. But then “something happens.” As Fackenheim tells the story, after a New York conference in 1967 on the Holocaust and Jewish values, when Easter and Purim happened to fall on the same date, things changed for him in a radical way. Sitting for lunch with George Steiner, Elie Wiesel, and the great Cohen scholar Steven Schwarzschild, Fackenheim recalled the sermon of a German pastor in post-Hitler Germany who stated about Easter, “this is the day on which we wreak vengeance on the Jews for killing Christ.”4 As people walked by the restaurant on the way to church dressed in their Easter finery, Schwarzschild remarked, “Barbaric innocence[!]” Fackenheim, contemplating all that occurred in the conference and at the lunch, tells us he felt physically ill. But he interprets the illness in more than physical terms as “a crisis – religious, philosophical, even personal.”5 And then, shortly after, he came to a breakthrough that lifted his illness. This was the breakthrough to the “614th commandment”: “Jews are Forbidden to Hand Hitler Posthumous Victories.”6 Clearly, as he himself describes it, the 614th commandment came to him not as a carefully reasoned philosophical conclusion, but rather as a kind of personal “revelation.” And the way Fackenheim deploys the commandment has the sense of a prophecy. Thus, after his breakthrough we see Fackenheim often, although not always, eschewing the careful and considered language of philosophical analysis and argument for the elevated rhetoric and emotional language of personal revelation and prophecy, stark oppositions, and dramatic imagery. Fackenheim tells us that his “breakthrough” made him reconsider his proper audience, so that along with and sometimes instead of addressing philosophers he wanted to address “k’lal Israel” or “amkha,” i.e., the collective Jewish community that included teachers, workers, and, especially, Holocaust survivors. Buber, who was a great rhetorician and talented writer and also felt called to address the situation of the larger Jewish community, perhaps provided a model here. And we might also point to Fackenheim’s friend the Holocaust writer and occasional theologian Elie Wiesel. However, more relevant here is Buber’s twofold notion of revelation, first as a personal encounter with God and second as a historical event for the

186  Steven Kepnes

Jewish people, which clearly affected Fackenheim and helped him to articulate his post-Holocaust theology. This post-Holocaust theology entailed a significant and extended challenge to the very heart of the philosophical endeavour. In Fackenheim’s terms, philosophy “foundered” on the reef of the Holocaust since it could not comprehend it, could not include it in any of its systems of thought, could neither predict it nor heal it, and must be “schooled by it.”7 Thus, Fackenheim summarizes the two conclusions that the Holocaust brings to Jewish philosophy as (1) “Jewish life is in advance of Jewish thought,” and (2) “Jewish life … is in the grip of responding to epoch-making events,”8 with the central epochmaking event being the Holocaust. Any evaluation of Fackenheim today must contend with these two claims, but to start, I will look at how Buber was instrumental in Fackenheim’s movement to his two conclusions. Fackenheim’s Analysis of Buber’s Notion of Revelation Fackenheim took his understanding of Buber on revelation first from Buber’s I and Thou (1923)9 and other philosophical essays and then from his biblical essays, most notably Buber’s Moses (1958).10 Fackenheim specifically addresses Buber’s notion of revelation in the essay “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation” (1967),11 beginning with what he calls the “core” of the Jewish and Christian notion of revelation as faith in the notion that “God can reveal Himself and that in the entire history of man, He has done so at least once.”12 Fackenheim then refers to the problem of belief in revelation for all philosophers after Kant and the Enlightenment as the inability to believe in the supernatural incursion of the divine into a natural world that is ruled by regular natural laws. Allowing that a non-natural transcendent being could enter the world in a unique moment to reveal Himself upsets the very notion of scientific explanation and thus needs to be discarded as non-rational, nonepistemic, and an unwarranted belief. In Kantian language, the epistemological project of philosophy is limited to the phenomenal world in which rational objective inquiry and science can rightly operate, and the realm of the noumenal – of God, freedom, and the thing in itself – is impenetrable by rational thought. In the march to legitimate justifiable and verifiable beliefs, all religious belief claims are called into question and all claims to accept beliefs on the basis of religious authority and tradition are equally questioned, with the result that an “enlightened” educated person can no longer believe in revelation.



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  187

This was the problematic that Buber, along with other existentialists like Kierkegaard, had to address. And to this problematic Fackenheim tries to show Buber had a successful answer. Buber’s answer is so important for the modern Jew because it allows the Kantian critique of Western philosophy, including Jewish philosophy, to stand; i.e., it allows rational thought to function in the phenomenal world of the senses and preserves the value of objective scientific research, but it also offers an alternative path to revelation of God and the validity of the religious life. This is the path of the I-Thou relationship. In Fackenheim’s assessment, Buber’s I-Thou philosophy makes him existentialism’s “most profound spokesman of our time.13 He describes his new path to revelation as follows: If the law or cause-discovering kind of knowledge is phenomenal, existentialism argues, it is because it presupposes the detachment of a knower, who makes the world his object. So long as he perseveres in this standpoint he discovers laws upon laws, or causes upon causes. But what he discovers in this way is, as a whole, not reality, but merely reality made into an object or objectified. Reality ceases to be an object if we cease to view it as an object … if … we become engaged in it in personal commitment. In such personal commitment there is knowing access to the transphenomenal.14

For Buber, the “transphenomenal” form of knowing is knowledge of the whole being and not just a part. When an I relates to another as a “Thou” she relates to the whole person – body, mind, soul – and not just an object, a thing, an “It.” In the I-Thou relation, each partner is mutually committed to the other as a person and not a means to some end like the production of work or monetary value or the reception of sexual pleasure. Fackenheim shows what is positively gained by Buber’s move. “In the committed I-Thou relation there is knowing access to a reality which is inaccessible otherwise … and the most profound mistake in all philosophy is the epistemological reduction of I-Thou to I-It knowledge and the metaphysical reduction of the Thou to It.”15 Fackenheim goes on to praise Buber’s solution to the problem of religious belief in the modern world by stating that despite its critique of I-It forms of knowledge, Buber does not discount the value of I-It knowledge in the sciences, social sciences, and philosophy. Thus, Buber allows one to be both religious and modern, a member of both the Jewish community and the modern world. However, Fackenheim states that, as it stands, especially in the book I and Thou, Buber’s philosophy of I and Thou “does not justify the positive assertion” of a notion of revelation but only the “denial of its impossibility.”16 Thus Fackenheim,

188  Steven Kepnes

qua Jewish philosopher, demands three things of Buber’s concept of revelation: “It must show that religion is an I-Thou rather than an I-It relation, it must identify the criteria which distinguish it from all other I-Thou relations, and it must locate revelation in it.”17 This final criterion involves assessing the extent to which Buber supplies an alternative notion of revelation that answers the Kantian and Enlightenment challenge to revelation as false knowledge and unjustified belief. In an additional philosophical discussion of Buber, Fackenheim addresses the extent to which we can consider Buber’s philosophy as “true.” For Buber’s philosophy to address Fackenheim’s first criteria – that religion transpires in the I-Thou and not I-It modality – Fackenheim reviews central themes in Buber’s philosophy of religion. Religion, or rather what Buber calls “genuine” religion, is not found within an individual’s “feeling” but in a relation between an I and God as the divine (or eternal) Thou. When the I is absorbed into the divine Thou, that is mysticism, a “pseudo-religion” and not genuine religion. Genuine religion includes, on the human side, a “kind of committed openness which is ready to address God and to be addressed by Him.”18 Thus it involves a God who “at least can be a partner in a dialogical relationship.”19 As to what the human I receives in the dialogical relationship with God, it is essential that it is “the address of a Thou who is in what He communicates.”20 In other words, the address is directly given from the divine Thou to the human Thou. It can be neither “a system of dogmas” nor a “system of laws,” for both would “cut the communication off from Him who communicates.”21 In Buber’s terms, both theological dogmas and laws are I-It and not I-Thou forms of communication. At the same time, however, Fackenheim tells us that God’s address or “revelation” to humans “must translate itself into human statement, and that an essential part of the statement is commandment.”22 All this is possible because God who addresses the human Thou is not a “timeless presence” but enters into human time to “address the unique partner in the unique situation.”23 Therefore, for Buber, God is the “God of the moment,”24 a moment God whose name aptly is translated, “I shall be who I shall be” (Ex. 3:6). Fackenheim is satisfied that the first criterion he has set – establishing how Buber’s philosophy of I-Thou can serve as a basis for a religious notion of revelation – has been met. It is curious that Fackenheim uses the word “religious” and not “Jewish” for his criterion. Indeed, it remains unclear how, if God’s revelation can include neither theological dogmas (oneness, eternality, anti-idolatry) nor law (mitsvot, and a system of laws, i.e., halakhah), it could serve as a philosophy of revelation for Judaism. It also remains unclear how the crucial move



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  189

from God as revealed presence to “human statement” and “commandment” occurs. And Fackenheim provides us with only two references to support this. He quotes one line in Buber’s essay “The Gods of the Nations and God”: “There is no revelation without commandment … In that He addresses us, He distinguishes within human life between what is proper for us and what is not proper for us.”25 And he gives us another reference from Buber’s Two Types of Faith that vaguely equates the “teaching” of revelation with “what is commanded.”26 As to his second criterion, the clarification of what is different about an I-Thou relation with humans and nature and one with God, Fackenheim refers to Buber’s statement that all I-Thou human-to-human and human-to-nature relations are bound to turn into I-It relations. Things and beings in this world cannot sustain themselves eternally in the Thou relationship; they necessarily devolve into the I-It mode, although they can once more move into the Thou mode. Only God is “eternally Thou.” Only God is able to be always thoroughly and totally present as a whole being to the human being. With this, Buber does seem to Fackenheim to have an answer to the question of what makes God as Thou different from other beings whom we meet as Thou: God is eternally Thou and humans are temporally limited in their ability to remain in the Thou relation. But now Fackenheim returns to the issue with which he began his essay, to ask whether Buber’s philosophy of revelation from the eternal Thou of God to humans can supply an alternative notion of revelation that would answer the Kantian and Enlightenment challenge to revelation. Here, Fackenheim seems to think the answer is yes, but he does admit that Buber’s notion of revelation requires something different than an acceptance of universal commandments and laws. This is so because for Buber, the “core of revelation” is God’s presence and the content of revelation is a “unique response appropriate to the situation”27 of meeting with the eternal Thou. As Buber says, “I experience what God desires of me for this hour,” not for always and forever. Also, since the source of revelation is in a relational meeting, an I-Thou dialogue, it is unclear who is the source of revelation. Is it human or divine? There is a similar ambiguity regarding the content of revelation. Fackenheim tells us that in answering the question of the source and content of revelation Buber must rely on “antinomies.” Regarding the content, revelation is a “translation” of God’s address, and the listener knows it to be a translation. But the translation is “stimulated” by God.28 And regarding the source of revelation, as Buber puts it, “It is not man’s own power that works here, nor is it God’s pure effective passage, but it is a mixture of divine and human.”29 Finally, Fackenheim

190  Steven Kepnes

turns to Buber’s use of the term “grace” to understand the antinomies of revelation: “In my answering I am given into the power of His grace, but I cannot measure Heaven’s share in it.”30 With these antinomies of the unresolved human-divine roles in producing a contentful revelation from God, Fackenheim tells us that Buber’s “concept of revelation is complete.” Fackenheim is convinced that this concept is an answer to the Enlightenment challenge to revelation as an exceptional and unique incursion of God into the natural order. God can enter the natural order in revelation if the post-Enlightenment person is not looking for the revelation as a series of propositions or a list of “you shall” and “you shall not.” God can enter the natural order if, instead, one is open and committed to having a personal relationship with God ruled by the give-and-take dialogue of the I-Thou relationship. Fackenheim ends his essay with a discussion of whether or not Buber’s concept of revelation based on his notion of I-Thou is “philosophically true.”31 Here, Fackenheim points to the problem that Buber, following Kant, rules out rational inquiry as a form of thinking that cannot penetrate the I-Thou (or noumenal) realm. That is, for Buber, the knowledge gained in an I-Thou moment can only be gained in that moment. Once outside it, I-Thou knowing necessarily turns into I-It. Fackenheim does suggest that Buber and other existentialists do, from time to time, move into a “third” form of argument that escapes the dichotomy of I-It and I-Thou. Indeed, the fact that Buber bothers to establish an extended series of criteria to distinguish I-Thou from I-It and applies the distinction to critique modern philosophy and religion suggests that he is utilizing some of the resources of the philosopher’s toolkit. But Fackenheim admits that Buber is not systematic enough about developing his arguments, and specifically a third form of thought beyond the I-Thou/I-It dichotomy, to allow us to call his concept of revelation “true.” Thus Fackenheim concludes that we should refer to Buber not as a philosopher but as a “Hebrew sage.” He then summarizes Buber’s answer to the Kantian challenge and contribution to a post-Enlightenment doctrine of revelation as follows: The ultimate basis of his doctrine is an unargued commitment to dialogue with the ancient God of Israel, a commitment that the reader is called upon to share. Buber’s own commitment, and the commitment he asks of his reader, would simply rest on the ancient and irrefutable faith that God can speak even though He may be silent; that He can speak, at least, for those who listen to His voice with all their hearts.32

It is important to note that in his concluding remarks, Fackenheim leaves behind Buber’s antimony between human initiative and God’s



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  191

initiative in I-Thou communication, placing responsibility on human “commitment.” Indeed, he uses the word “commitment” four times in this conclusion, and I suggest we take this as Fackenheim’s interpretation of Buber to make him more usable for his North American and Jewish audience. Commitment seems more “Jewish,” perhaps, than the word “grace,” which sounds Christian. “Commitment” to a relationship with God suggests that Jews have a significant role to play in the reception of revelation. Although Fackenheim does not think that Buber’s concept of revelation can be considered “true” in the philosophical sense, he does seem to think that it constitutes an important answer to the Kantian and Enlightenment challenge. Indeed, throughout his work he often refers to Buber’s answer in an approving manner and uses it in his theological vocabulary. It is, however, interesting that Fackenheim asks whether or not Buber’s I-Thou thought is true in the philosophical sense of “warranted by sound rational argument.” In “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation” Fackenheim still seems to have faith in philosophy as an avenue to truth. As he comes to face the philosophical and religious implications of the Holocaust he seems to lose that faith. One way to address Fackenheim’s positive assessment of Buber’s view of revelation is to point out that Fackenheim’s acceptance of Buber’s individualistic and antinomian view of revelation meshes well with his being a Reform Jew and a rabbi.33 Indeed, many have said that if Reform Judaism needed a theology beyond its focus on social ethics, Buber could provide it with one. However, Fackenheim never wanted to limit himself to one sector of the Jewish community. And he does expand his use of Buber beyond the I-Thou writings. Indeed, he is very much aware that there is more to Buber’s concept of revelation that is given in I and Thou. As Fackenheim shows in later essays, Buber developed a more collective and historical notion of revelation in his biblical writings. Fackenheim makes important use of these writings, particularly of Buber’s book Moses, to develop his historical notions of “root experiences” and “epoch-making events” that are central for his post-Holocaust theology. We will turn to Fackenheim’s use of Buber’s Moses below, but first I will dwell a little more on the import of Buber’s I-Thou notion of revelation for Fackenheim personally and his work. Here, we return to the turning point in Fackenheim’s life and work that led to the 614th commandment. Clearly the formulation of this commandment fits very neatly into Buber’s notion of revelation. Fackenheim tells us that the series of events surrounding his Holocaust conference and lunch in New York around Easter/Purim 1967 led him

192  Steven Kepnes

to a significant realization that he took as something of a “revelation” addressed to him. The role of God in the events is unclear and undefined in the story we have, but Buber does allow that all “particular” I-Thou events can be a conduit to God, and all I-Thou meetings with humans and natural things supply a “glimpse to the Eternal Thou.” Whether or not Fackenheim also felt that he had a more direct encounter with God in that very fruitful period for him, he certainly believed that the events of the meeting issued in a specific statement, even a commandment, that he felt he needed to share with the Jewish public. Having such a significant encounter and receiving such a revelation meant that, in words Fackenheim quoted from Buber, he emerged “not the same being as he entered into it.”34 Indeed, I would suggest that what Fackenheim emerged as was no longer a Jewish philosopher dispassionately applying rational inquiry to issues in Jewish thought, but something of a “Hebrew sage” or prophet himself. As prophet, Fackenheim then believed that he had to give his community a specific message, even a new message, in his own weighty and loaded words a “614th commandment,” adding one commandment to the sacred number of 613 commandments the tradition assigns to the giving of the Torah at Sinai. Here, in this new role, Fackenheim turned more and more from the narrow worlds of German and Jewish philosophy towards what he referred to as “k’lal Israel” or “amkhah” – all of the Jewish people. Here, he allows himself to use more of the personal and literary language of the Jewish writer, rabbi, and theologian. And here he becomes consumed with the issue of Jewish survival after the Shoah as a new criterion for Jewish thought. Buber’s Moses: Revelation as Root Experience In Fackenheim’s three Deem lectures given in 1968 at New York University and published as God’s Presence in History,35 we see the effect of Buber’s biblical writings on revelation. Here, revelation takes on a historical and public quality. Here, Fackenheim follows Buber’s move to history and politics and also a deeper relation to Jewish texts. Fackenheim uses Buber’s explication of the text of Exodus in Moses to develop a much more biblical and traditionally Jewish notion of revelation that allows for both the content of Torah and its public and historical aspect. This, in turn, allows Fackenheim to develop a theology of “God’s presence in history” at Sinai, which is continually challenged to deal with a series of “epoch-making events” in Jewish history, most notably, with the Holocaust in the twentieth century. Fackenheim, indeed, found in Buber’s Moses a way back to revelation as not only public and historical but also what he calls “saving” and



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  193

“commanding.” Fackenheim extrapolates from Buber a whole Jewish theology based on God’s presence at Sinai and in the Exodus as “root experiences” that then sets a basic theological template for the “epochmaking event” of God’s absence in the Holocaust to challenge. Fackenheim begins his reading of Buber’s Moses with the matter that worried the Enlightenment thinkers, revelation as miracle – a supernatural entrance of God into the natural historical order. Buber’s approach here is to provide a distinction between “outer history,” the objective perspective of an outsider viewing an event (the perspective of a modern historian), and “inner history” or “saga,” the subjective experience of the people who actually go through the event. From the perspective of inner history the redemption from Egypt is, indeed, a miracle, even if the outside observer might see it differently. Fackenheim quotes Buber: “What is decisive with respect to the inner history of Mankind … is that the children of Israel understood this as a ‘miracle,’ as an act of their God.”36 In addition, Buber suggests that God’s intervention into the course of Jewish history goes beyond what an individual experiences because it has collective public significance for the Jewish people over the long course of time. Buber refers to this significance as an “abiding astonishment.” Thus, the person who sees God from the perspective of inner Jewish history “abides in that wonder; no knowledge, no cognition, can weaken his astonishment.”37 Furthermore, Buber insists that the event of redemption at the Red Sea is astonishing not because it is an experience of heaven or a vision of divine nature, but precisely because it is an “event which can be fully included in the objective, scientific nexus of nature and history.”38 And he goes further in suggesting that precisely because the event of redemption at the Red Sea takes place in history and not in heaven, it is a revelation of God and not some angel or divine spirit limited to the heavenly realm. In Buber’s terms, the event of redemption at the Red Sea “permits a glimpse of the sphere in which a sole power not restricted by any other is at work.”39 Fackenheim employs these very fertile suggestions of Buber in fashioning his expanded view of revelation as a root experience. The root experience has three elements: (1) God as sole-power (2) appearing in a natural-historical event to (3) the abiding astonishment of the witnesses. Fackenheim adds that root experiences are able to be re-experienced over time through ritual re-enactments, such as the Passover seder. This means that the sole power is “present still” and the memory of the root experience turns into “faith and hope.”40 With his notion of revelation as “root experience” Fackenheim clearly moves well beyond revelation as an I-Thou encounter between an individual and God. The root experience has a very important public and historical quality. Fackenheim underscores Buber’s insistence that revelation

194  Steven Kepnes

in the Jewish Bible occurs not in heaven but on earth, in a public and not merely a personal event. As to revelation as the revealing of the content of commandments, Fackenheim makes a move beyond Buber’s interpretation of Exodus to suggest that the Bible includes two central events of revelation of God’s presence – God’s “saving presence” in redeeming Israel from Egypt and God’s “commanding presence” at Sinai. Unfortunately, he does not explain the dynamics of God’s commanding presence enough to show just how that presence at Sinai communicates the rich and varied content of the revelation of Torah at Sinai. Instead, Fackenheim deals with the somewhat delicate Kantian philosophical issue of how the autonomous human will can still function in the light of commandments given heteronomously by an all-powerful God. He solves this problem by asserting a contradiction whereby God’s overwhelming presence at once nullifies and then graciously restores human freedom. “The divine commanding Presence can be divine, commanding, and present only if it is doubly present … As a sole Power it destroys human freedom and as a gracious power it restores that freedom, for human freedom is made part of a covenant with Divinity itself.”41 After noting the contradiction between divine ultimate power and the autonomous free will, Fackenheim lists two other contradictions that plague the root experiences of Judaism. These are the contradiction between divine transcendence of the world and divine immanence or involvement in the world in human history, and the contradiction between God’s revelation at one time in history (Buber’s moment God) and God’s providential concern for all of history. Here, it is clear that Fackenheim is employing a strategy of the existentialists to emphasize the contradictions, antinomies, and paradoxes of religion. Philosophical reflection can help articulate these contradictions, but it cannot resolve them. Because of this Fackenheim now makes an additional constructive move: the move to rabbinic Midrash to provide a “framework” to address but not resolve the contradictions of the root experiences of Judaism. This marks his movement away from philosophy towards other forms of expression favoured by the existentialists, like “story, parable, metaphor,”42 and what we could call hermeneutical forms of theology. Fackenheim explains this move: Midrashic thought, therefore, cannot resolve the contradictions in the root experiences of Judaism but only express them. This expression is (a) fully conscious of the contradictions expressed; (b) is fully deliberate in leaving them unresolved; (c) for both reasons combined, is consciously fragmentary; and (d) is insistent that this fragmentariness is both ultimate for human thought and yet destined for ultimate resolution.”43



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  195

With his notion of “root experiences” as public events of God’s presence in history at the Red Sea and Sinai and the “Midrashic framework” as a way to express the paradoxes and contradictions involved in the root experiences, Fackenheim has introduced Buber (in ways he did not himself foresee or condone) to construct a notion of revelation that comes a lot closer to the biblical record and rabbinic tradition. However, Fackenheim’s purpose here seems less to develop a more adequate notion of revelation than to prepare a way to address the implications of the Holocaust for contemporary Judaism. Here, he makes one more constructive move by suggesting that the central task of Jewish thought is to use the Midrashic framework to confront the epoch-making events of Jewish history. Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Theology In comparing the Holocaust to the catastrophe of 70 CE, Fackenheim means to leave no doubt about the magnitude of the challenge the former presents to the Midrashic framework he has established. Indeed, it is remarkable how Fackenheim’s rhetoric changes when he addresses the issue of the Holocaust. Part 2 of God’s Presence in History counters the challenge of twentieth-century secularism with a series of carefully reasoned arguments. For example, he argues that the critique of religion takes the person seeking purpose and meaning only so far, so that a “critique of critique”44 or the search for “immediacy after reflection”45 is needed. Fackenheim also is convinced that his theology of root experiences and his Midrashic framework can handle secularism. However, when it comes to the Holocaust, the challenge cannot be so easily met. Part 3 of God’s Presence in History begins with a “madman’s prayer” from the writings of Elie Wiesel, which articulates the challenge of the Holocaust with the drama and shocking prose that characterizes much of Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust theology: “Shh, Jews! Do not pray so loud! God will hear you. Then He will know that there are still some Jews left alive in Europe.”46 Fackenheim makes the challenge explicit: this madman is fearful lest God is alive and behind the killing of Europe’s Jews. Wiesel’s madman has all along held fast to a God who is Lord of history, its external events included. His was a sanity which held fast to God and to the world and was unable to disconnect the two. Hence it now turns into an unheard-of madness … Hence any prayer at Auschwitz is madness. Such is the terrible tale, such is the terrible Midrash of Wiesel’s madman.” 47

196  Steven Kepnes

This presentation of the challenge the Holocaust poses to the framework of root experiences and Midrash is characteristic of much of Fackenheim’s writings on the Holocaust – dramatic images, high-flown and radical statements like “any prayer at Auschwitz is madness.” Even as he groups the Holocaust with other epoch-making events in Jewish history, Fackenheim argues that the Holocaust is unique, a “novum” in Jewish and world history. “Peoples have been killed for ‘rational’ (however horrifying) ends such as power, territory, wealth, and in any case supposed or actual self-interest. No such end was served by the Nazi murder of the Jewish people.”48 This conclusion is stated rather than argued for, without any real historical evidence. One could argue against Fackenheim that we see a rationale similar to that of the Nazis used to condone violence against a small minority in countless genocidal movements.49 The Armenian genocide in Turkey, which immediately preceded the Holocaust, is a notable example.50 Fackenheim’s assertion that the Holocaust is unique in Jewish history is perhaps a more defensible claim, and this leads him to say that the “Midrashic framework” has been radically challenged. His response to this challenge is that Jewish survival rises to the level of a biblical commandment – the 614th commandment – so that the distinction between secular and religious Jews no longer holds because, as Fackenheim says, “the most secularist of Jews bears witness, by the mere act of his Jewishness, against the devil.”51 We also have the conclusions that affect Jewish philosophy mentioned at the beginning of this essay: that rational thought, philosophy in general, and Jewish philosophy in particular cannot adequately respond to the Holocaust since “reason is too innocent of demonic evil to fathom the scandal of the particularity of Auschwitz, and too abstractly universal to do justice to the singledout Jewish condition.”52 And thus living as a Jew and furthering Jewish life in the diaspora and especially in Israel, rather than thinking as a Jew and doing Jewish philosophy, constitutes the best response to the Holocaust. In To Mend the World Fackenheim does moderate his views somewhat. He argues that because there were some survivors who kept their human dignity and some who kept their Jewish faith, we who come after the Holocaust can assert a “fragmentary” faith. Also, although we cannot see the establishment of Israel as clear evidence of the existence of the God of Jewish history, the State of Israel provides a glimmer of hope in such a God. In addition, the continued existence of the new Jewish state becomes a new absolute value in post-Holocaust Jewish life. But when we read Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust theology, there is no doubt that he believes the Holocaust represents a far greater challenge



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  197

to Judaism than the Enlightenment poses to revelation, since Jews must question if there is any validity at all to the notion of God’s saving presence in history. Indeed, to believe this in the face of the Holocaust is, as Wiesel’s “Midrash” suggests, pure madness! Buber and the Holocaust Given the importance of Buber’s formulation of revelation to Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust theology, it is instructive to compare Buber’s response to the Holocaust to that of Fackenheim. To begin with, it is important to note that Buber, like Fackenheim, had a direct experience of the Holocaust as someone who lived and continued to live in Nazi Germany as late as possible (he left in 1938). Buber could have left earlier but remained to help run the Lehrhaus, the centre for adult Jewish learning, which provided Jewish education when Jews lost their government jobs and ability to study at German universities. Buber lost countless friends and many relatives in the Holocaust and had all his dreams for the flourishing of European Jewry go up in flames. However, he never expressed the despair about God and Judaism and the disgust for Germany that we see in Fackenheim’s writings. Indeed, what is remarkable is how little Buber said and wrote about the Holocaust. Certainly, the issue was very much on his mind; this we see throughout his writings where he addresses the suffering of the innocent, the presence of injustice in human societies, and even, at times, the passivity of God in the face of evil. Buber’s writings on the Psalms53 are replete with these issues, and his short essay on Job54 remains a penetrating study of theodicy in Jewish thought. In addition, he developed the notion of the “eclipse of God,” an adaptation of the rabbinic notion of the Hester Panim, the “hiding of the face of God,” to address the absence of God in the modern world. But unlike Fackenheim, Buber chose not to address the Holocaust directly. He also never went as far as Fackenheim did in voicing his despair and doubt about the existence of God and the future of the Jewish people. Buber’s strategy in relation to the Holocaust was to address it indirectly through figures like Job, Deutero-Isaiah, and the Psalmist. The Eclipse of God When Fackenheim addresses Buber’s response to the Holocaust he does not focus on his notion of revelation but instead on his notion of “the eclipse of God.” Buber employed this notion in a little book published in English in 1957 called Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation

198  Steven Kepnes

between Religion and Philosophy. He also refers to it in his interpretation of Job, where he says that Job “believes in a God who hides himself” and remarks that “this hiding, the eclipse of divine light, is a source of abysmal despair.”55 Thus, Buber did not use the concept of eclipse to address the Holocaust. Fackenheim’s first comments on the concept are found in his Quest for Past and Future, where he explains that “an eclipse of the sun is something that occurs, not to the sun, but between the sun and the eye; moreover this occurrence is temporary.”56 So if applied to the Holocaust, the notion of an eclipse of God would suggest that the Holocaust means nothing to God in Himself but reflects a human problem in perceiving Him. Fackenheim critiques this notion of Buber’s in God’s Presence in History, in which he writes that “it fails to sustain us in our confrontation with the Nazi Holocaust.”57 For Fackenheim tells us that the Holocaust requires us, like Wiesel’s madman, to contemplate that the eclipse of God is neither partial or temporary, but “total.”58 However, in a retrospective of his thought in 1967 Buber comments again on the “eclipse of God,” and here Fackenheim believes that he sees a different emphasis that hints at a changed view. Buber says: These last years in a great searching and questioning, seized ever anew by the shudder of the now, I have arrived no further than that I now distinguish a revelation through the hiding of the face, a speaking through the silence. The eclipse of God can be seen with one’s eyes, it will be seen. He, however, who today knows nothing other to say than, “See there, it grows lighter!” he leads into error.59

Fackenheim remarks, of this passage: “To be sure there is hope in this image, for an eclipse may come to an end. Yet in what is perhaps the last statement he wrote on this subject, Buber ends on a note of stark realism.”60 I believe that what Fackenheim is saying here is that Buber’s “stark realism” at the end of his remarks is an affirmation of a continuing eclipse or hiding of God. Fackenheim seems to be saying that the darkness “will not grow brighter.” That is the post-Holocaust reality. But my reading of Buber’s words is different. What Buber is saying here is that the hiding of God’s face is itself a revelation of God. As he says, “I distinguish a revelation through the hiding of the face, a speaking through the silence.” This means that in the post-Holocaust world God is neither unseen nor unheard, but must be seen in the midst of and in and through His hiddenness and silence. This is consistent with Buber’s comments on Psalm 73 in Good and Evil61 where he suggests that God remains with the “pure in heart” in and through the reality of



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  199

injustice and God’s silence. Thus Buber does not assert a final rupture between the believer and God because of the eclipse of God in modernity, but suggests perseverance despite the eclipse. Final Thoughts: Fackenheim and Jewish Philosophy From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, it occurs to me that there was great wisdom in Buber’s reticence and silence with regard to the Holocaust. For after Fackenheim, Jewish philosophy is dead and Judaism as a religion is crippled. After Fackenheim, rational thought and ideals, which have been declared too innocent, too abstract and tied up with the universal to address the particularities of Jewish existence, are useless. So Jews then must turn to history and politics and living life itself. Fackenheim did not intend to abandon God and Judaism. Indeed, he suggests that his “Commanding Voice of Auschwitz” issues from something like the Jewish God, and the intent is to motivate Jews to live precisely as Jews. But the God of Fackenheim’s post-­Holocaust theology has been rendered impotent since He might no longer be a God of history. He might also no longer have providential power. He must contend with the “devil” or “radical evil” that Fackenheim often refers to. And He must contend with a people who are no longer sure if they are chosen for good or evil. In relation to the discipline and tradition of Jewish philosophy, Fackenheim shows in his early work how valuable reason, careful analysis of arguments, and the logical extension and examination of ideas can be. The Holocaust without a doubt challenged Jewish beliefs and disturbed the quiescence and patience of the Jewish philosopher. It did not, however, impair the ability of Jews to think in a dispassionate, rational manner about the issues that both philosophy and Judaism have pondered for millennia and for today. These include the issue of revelation with which we started this chapter. For despite Fackenheim’s embrace of Buber’s existential notion of revelation, Fackenheim’s own analysis shows that notion to lack philosophical truth, and I have tried to show that it is not true to the doctrine of revelation of Sinai since it lacks the content of commandments and the words of Torah. As to the concept of revelation as a root experience and the Midrashic framework as a theology of Judaism, Fackenheim does offer a compelling model for Jewish theology. But he then moves far too swiftly to challenge this framework with the radical formulations of post-Holocaust theology. And he gives little compelling argument for why we must eschew philosophy and a logically argued system of thought for a Jewish theology that is satisfied with theological fragments.

200  Steven Kepnes

Whether or not we needed to toss philosophy aside to embrace the radical theodicies that Fackenheim and Wiesel proposed in their day cannot now be decided. It is certainly understandable that, in the wake of the catastrophic destruction of European Jewry, Fackenheim and other Jewish thinkers would pose radical challenges to traditional Jewish theology. However, today, when theology is ignored by both Jewish philosophers and laity and radical confusion about what Jews believe about God and other metaphysical notions is rampant, it does seem that there is still a need for rational thought and philosophical elaboration and discussion of Jewish belief. In the twenty-first century a series of new issues in environmental, medical, social, and sexual ethics have arisen for which sound rational thinking is necessary. For all this, many of Fackenheim’s pre-Holocaust essays present us with a model of good, clear philosophical analysis. Thus, we remain in Fackenheim’s debt and can admire his work as a model for Jewish philosophy even today. NOTES   1 Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1968).   2 Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1973).   3 Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael Morgan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).   4 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York: Jason Aronson, 1997), ix.   5 God’s Presence in History, ix.   6 God’s Presence in History, ix.   7 Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 15.   8 To Mend the World, 14. “Epoch-making events” are events of such magnitude that they define an age and present significant challenges to the core and root experiences of Judaism. One example is the destruction of the Temple at 70 CE, which led to the transformation from Israelite to rabbinic Judaism; the other is the Holocaust.   9 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. R.G. Smith (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958). 10 Buber, Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (New York: Harper, 1958). 11 I will quote from Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, 57–75. 12 Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers, 57. 13 Jewish Philosophers, 59. 14 Jewish Philosophers, 59. 15 Jewish Philosophers, 63.



Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation  201

16 Jewish Philosophers, 64. 17 Jewish Philosophers, 64. 18 Buber as quoted by Fackenheim in “Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” in Jewish Philosophers, 65. 19 Jewish Philosophers, 65. 20 Jewish Philosophers, 65. 21 Jewish Philosophers, 65. 22 Jewish Philosophers, 66. 23 Jewish Philosophers, 67. 24 Jewish Philosophers, 67. 25 Martin Buber, “The Gods of the Nations and God” [1941], in Israel and the World (New York: Schocken, 1948), 209. 26 Buber, Two Types of Faith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 93. 27 Fackenheim, “Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” in Jewish Philosophers, 69. 28 “Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” 69. 29 Buber as quoted by Fackenheim, “Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” 70. 30 Buber as quoted by Fackenheim, “Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” 70. 31 “Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” 73 32 “Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” 74. 33 Fackenheim’s views on the centrality of mitsvot to Judaism change over time. In his essay on Jewish theology in Quest for Past and Future (Boston: Beacon, 1968) he speaks of mitsvot as “customs and ceremonies” that have the “potency of becoming Halakhah … if fulfilled … as response on the part of Israel to the divine” (p.110). This is close to Buber’s view that a word of Torah becomes a command only if the Jew hears it as such. However, later in his writings, in his What Is Judaism? (New York: Collier, 1987), Fackenheim takes the position that mitzvot are not only central to Judaism but that they come from God, not humans: “A God from whom no mitzvot issue can never be the God of Israel” (130). 34 Fackenheim, “Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” 57. 35 I will quote from the 1997 Jason Aronson edition (Northvale, NJ), which includes a new preface. 36 Buber, Moses (1958), 75–6, as quoted in Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (1997), 12. 37 God’s Presence in History, 12. 38 God’s Presence in History, 12. 39 God’s Presence in History, 12. 40 God’s Presence in History, 12. 41 God’s Presence in History, 16. 42 God’s Presence in History, 20. 43 God’s Presence in History, 20.

202  Steven Kepnes 44 God’s Presence in History, 48. 45 God’s Presence in History, 47. Fackenheim attributes this notion to Kierkegaard. 46 God’s Presence in History, 67. 47 God’s Presence in History, 68. 48 God’s Presence in History, 70. 49 Norman Naimark, Genocide: A World History (New York: Oxford, 2017). 50 Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). As to the proposition that the Holocaust ranks as the worst genocide in human history, the destruction of native populations in colonial Africa and the Americas and the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean and North America, which went on not merely for twelve years but for centuries, provide examples that easily compete with the Holocaust in terms of inhumane genocides and the destruction of peoples and cultures. 51 God’s Presence in History, 82. 52 God’s Presence in History, 83. 53 Martin Buber, Good and Evil (New York: Prentice Hall, 1952). 54 Buber, “God of Sufferers,” in The Prophetic Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1960 [1942]), 188–97 (in Hebrew). 55 Buber, “God of Sufferers,” 193. 56 Fackenheim, Quest for Past and Future, 231. 57 Fackenheim, God’s Presence, 78. 58 God’s Presence, 78. 59 Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. P.A. Schilpp and M. Friedman (LaSalle: Open Court, 1967), 716. 60 Fackenheim, God’s Presence, 61. 61 Buber, Good and Evil, 33.

8 To Captivate the Jewish Thinker: Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger waller r. newell

Emil Fackenheim sensed early on that existentialism could be a source for the rejuvenation of Jewish identity. Precisely because it called radically into question the sovereignty of reason over the rest of life, it reopened the path to revelation. If Hegel’s claim to have ended the debate between reason and revelation by synthesizing both within the dialectic of Spirit had been shattered by the course of events and of thought, then the tension between them had to re-emerge with full vigour, especially since existentialism had forsaken the claims of reason even within philosophy. For Fackenheim, the most profound existentialist thinker was Martin Heidegger. The potential that Fackenheim saw in Heidegger’s thought “to captivate the Jewish thinker” is best conveyed by the following rather extraordinary passage: [W]hereas ever since Plato, philosophers “see,” ever since Moses, Jews “hear.” With this view in mind, one may well consider the later Heidegger to be engaged in no less startling an enterprise than the Judaization of the entire history of Western philosophy.1

We will consider in due course the sense in which Heidegger privileges “hearing” over “seeing.” The point to stress for now is that, based on this insight, Heidegger, according to Fackenheim, was arguably embarked on the unprecedented mission of assimilating all of Western philosophy to Judaism. And yet Heidegger had also embraced the Third Reich, which attempted the extermination of the Jewish people and faith. The complex conundrum of what could be disentangled from Heidegger’s ontology of Being that might contribute to a deeper exploration of Jewish existence as opposed to those aspects of it that appeared to endorse its most lethal foe was a recurrent theme in Fackenheim’s writings. In this

204  Waller R. Newell

chapter I will explore some of its major contours, including whether and to what extent the “later” Heidegger differed from the earlier. Fackenheim’s main encounters with Heidegger take place in his essay “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth” and in two later works, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy and To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought. The first of these is a philosophical reflection on Heidegger’s radical historicism and whether any earlier form of modern thought might have successfully reconciled the life-world of historical existence with philosophy’s transcendence of the here and now in search of permanent verities. The second two works are more robustly involved in the world of moral and political affairs, centring on Heidegger’s relationship to Judaism and his responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust. As we will see, the more purely philosophical encounter with Heidegger in the early essay laid the basis for the politically more engaged themes of the later works. Truth and Historicity Since Fackenheim’s engagement with Heidegger takes the form of commenting on his works, it would be useful to bear in mind some key Heideggerian terms. All previous philosophy, Heidegger writes in Being and Time, has searched for Being in terms of a higher, permanently true “actuality,” from Plato’s Ideas to Kant’s metaphysics of morals to Hegel’s teleology of history. Heidegger will be the first to pose the Question of Being in terms of “possibility.”2 Things come into being and pass away. Traditional metaphysics has privileged the moment of visible completion – when the acorn emerges into the oak tree – as the realm of eternal truth, the “form” of the tree. For Heidegger, this moment of visible “presence,” of a transitory completeness, is only one moment in a time-bound process of coming into being and passing away: The oak tree’s invisible roots are no less a dimension of the “being” of the tree. Among all the beings that come to be and pass away, one of these – man – is aware of the impermanence, the finitude, of all beings. Thus, only for man is the meaning of existence as a whole a question. The core of Being – impermanence – touches Dasein in our awareness of our own finitude. Dasein is the “there” (Da) of Being (Sein), the place where the Question of Being unfolds. Initially, our insight into our own and everything else’s finitude is a cause for anxiety – entering into the Question of Being is not a mere intellectual exercise, but courses throughout our whole existence. But when we grasp that finitude means nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, finitude can be the source of new



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  205

possibilities, of becoming that which is not yet. Facing the prospect of death is in reality liberating, enabling us to live “authentically.” Dasein is never an isolated individual, but is always already in a world with others, enfolded in the local heritage of a “community.” When the death of our community’s current historical possibilities is faced with “resolve,” when a people “goes under the eyes of Death,” new possibilities open up that draw upon the deep roots of our collective destiny, a past behind the received conventional interpretation of the past (such as a political ideology or a doctrine of historical progress). What exactly Heidegger means by a community will bode large in what follows.3 Preparatory to his consideration of Heidegger in “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth,” Fackenheim asks how philosophy as the search for a permanent truth can relate to the historical life-world. If there is no eternal truth about the good, the beautiful, and the holy, philosophy cannot judge historical existence. Logical positivism preserves a kind of “pure thought” by avoiding the “taint” of history.4 But if the rest of existence is irrational, how can one discriminate between better and worse actions? Traditional philosophy could make such judgments, but logical positivism eschews any claims to a permanent moral truth. The aridity of positivism leads to the need for existential choice amidst the “war” of historical world views. Even the philosopher must, as a man, make moral commitments. How can philosophy be rooted in history yet rise above it to transcendence? Ordinary language philosophy tries to reintegrate philosophy with existence. But is any ordinary language – for example, that of Himmler – valid? If so, ordinary language philosophy reduces to the indiscriminateness of logical positivism’s empty rationality. Or is there a structure of “true ordinary language”? If so, that would require a rational account of history and a ranking of commitments. But how can ordinary language philosophy achieve this transcendence based on its own non-transcendental claims?5 Fackenheim turns to Kant for a possible answer.6 Kant is not a fullblown historicist, but argues that philosophy has a ground in historical existence, an equipoise between the purely existential and the purely transcendental. There is a distinction between philosophical and moral knowledge, but the philosophical knowledge of moral freedom presupposes our moral obligation. Philosophy demonstrates the truth of moral freedom, but freedom is not the philosophic life (a marked contrast with Plato). Freedom is transcendental – it has the formal structure of reason (universality and necessity). But it is not theoretical in Kant’s sense, because it has no empirical correlate. It is a “fact” of reason, but

206  Waller R. Newell

has no content. Nevertheless, this “philosophic truth” does not dwell in eternity, but in the life-world, resolving the contradiction between logical positivism and historical existence. But now Fackenheim asks: Isn’t Kantian moral truth still “an abstraction from history”? Doesn’t Kant’s quasi-historical stance risk being overwhelmed by the “existential truths” of care, anxiety, guilt, revelation, beauty? If philosophy is situated in the life-world, how can it withstand the multifarious claims to truth made within it (“World-views”), since it possesses no “timeless standards of truth which transcend history,” such as Plato’s Ideas of the Good, the Just, the Beautiful, concepts that are both substantive and rational? Hegel’s teleological progress of history might be an answer to this difficulty, reconciling history with the actualization of wisdom over time. But, as Marx and Nietzsche protest, isn’t Hegel’s “end of history” merely the ideology of “the bourgeois-Christian world” of the present? Why stop there? But if there is no cumulative Hegelian transcendence within history, only unbounded historical action, how can Marx and Nietzsche posit a “new future” that is not itself merely ideological (the Overman or communism),7 a way station to further action? The answer is that only if there is a total break with the past, absolute alienation, can the future truly be the end of history because, unlike in Hegel’s teleology of progress, it has no roots in the past. It is a secularized version of apocalyptic millenarianism.8 Fackenheim believed that Heidegger, beginning with Being and Time, was attempting to reground the meaning of historical existence so as to avoid this dead end. I would ask, however, whether Heidegger’s own philosophy did not militate in favour of a millenarian outcome analogous to those of Marx and Nietzsche, first on the level of Das Volk, later on through the expectation that global technology might dissolve itself and usher in a new era in which man is “the shepherd of Being” – an either/or dyad of annihilation or salvation that Gadamer termed an “eschatological” reversal.9 For Fackenheim, the dead end reached by Marx’s and Nietzsche’s total break with the past dissolves into a “wholly open future” of endless, unpredictable, clashing world views. Far from comprehending history, philosophy is now “encompassed” by historicism.10 But, he continues, a doctrine claiming the historicity of all world views is not itself historical but a claim to a transcendent truth, and so a “formal self-contradiction.” One might reply that the truth of historicism is true in a different way than all previous truths, that it is the condition for the possibility of what comes to be considered truth. In my view, this is the status of Nietzsche’s will to power.11 The argument



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  207

that historicist philosophy contradicts its denial of the universality of reason when it claims its own universality – argues, in other words, that it is an absolute truth that all values are relative – fails to distinguish, in my view, between a category of Cartesian formal universality in which identical conditions obtain horizontally everywhere, so to speak, and vertical structures of origination that can be abstracted from events, and so are in that sense universal, but that are local monads of origination – what Heidegger means by “fundamental ontology” in Being and Time and its local upsurge as a “people.” This can also be expressed as the distinction between formal transcendence and genetic transcendence. However, Fackenheim immediately concedes that accusing historicism of “formal self-contradiction” is inadequate, and now turns to Heidegger, who, he believes, avoids the dead end of historicism – its failure to reconcile the life-world with transcendence – by asking how historical existence itself provokes the philosophical question of Being. What kind of historical situation, Heidegger asks, gives rise to the Question of Being? Because the “analysis of Dasein must be a possibility of Dasein,” Heidegger’s stance incorporates the life-world while refuting the relativism of the world-views. The eternal truth is replaced by the “structure of historicity.” Posing the Question of Being must have a historical setting lest it be “rootless and groundless.”12 Care is always care for this world, and the “ontological” question of Being emerges from our always already being engaged with the “ontic” world of actuality, the structure of Dasein as being with others in a world. Care, anxiety, death, and resolve are how Being touches us in everyday life and discloses our finite choices – not a flight from finitude, but an authentic embrace of it. Is this not a circular argument: our historical setting is authentic because it is our historical setting? It is saved from that, Fackenheim argues, because according to Heidegger some situations support the authentic engagement with Being and some do not – hence both the relativism of historicism and the inability of logical positivism to make discriminating choices are avoided. As I would put it, by jettisoning the Hegelian doctrine of progress, Heidegger finds recurrent structures of possibility – but, as Fackenheim cautions, possibly “at the price of emptiness,” because fundamental ontology abstracts from all existing, historically developed worlds in order to explain the foreground structures of every possible world.13 In forsaking the eternal truth about the whole for the roots of the whole, what Schelling termed “the infinitely finite,” Heidegger is in an odd way the antipode of Plato. In concluding his argument, Fackenheim asks whether Heidegger’s Being and Time truly did overcome historicism, by which Fackenheim

208  Waller R. Newell

means the relativity of world-views. In Kant’s thought, reason connects the philosophical understanding of freedom with moral obligation. In Heidegger’s thought, by contrast, there is no permanent moral teaching, so that Dasein’s capacity to explore the Question of Being may, Fackenheim warns, be swept away by its own “radical historicity,” lapsing into sheer decisionism. Freedom-toward-death, Fackenheim argues, rules out the rational suicide of pagan/Stoic morality (because Heidegger will not allow fundamental ontology to be dragged into mere “ontic” considerations of justice, pride, or the soul) yet “leaves no room for the call of God.” In contrast with Kant’s transcendental account of freedom – the categorical imperative and its concrete impact on real life – for Heidegger, freedom becomes a merely “historical” category of empty decisiveness. As we will consider, Fackenheim later modifies his view about the place of God in Heidegger’s thought. According to Fackenheim, the later Heidegger moves to overcome these difficulties caused by the “emptiness” of the fundamental ontology of Being and Time through a “far more radical” historicism. The quest is no longer limited to revealing Dasein’s historicity, but involves the historicity of Being as such. To my mind, however, this was implicitly true all along – in Being and Time, the modes of Dasein are inseparable from Being, are the “there” of Being. Dasein is never an individual subject, but a complex of forces that is intersubjective and collective at the deepest level. In other words, Dasein does not possess discrete properties such as being-in and being-with – those forces always already express Dasein “equiprimordially” as the presence of Being. For the later Heidegger, to paraphrase Fackenheim, traditional metaphysical reason has led to the forgetting of Being. But that forgetting is the history of Being to date, so that very forgetting opens up a “recalling” of the conditions for the possibility of metaphysics emerging in the first place. This, I would add, helps us to understand Heidegger’s pronounced preference for the Pre-Socratics over Plato14 – their view of existence as strife, war, ceaseless becoming, chance and necessity was the road not taken, supplanted by the “yoke of the Idea,”15 the identification of Being with a realm of higher permanent actuality by Plato that then sets out to bring the rest of existence under its sway, the beginning of technology. According to Fackenheim, Heidegger now evokes the truth as “presence,” not as a universal, because presence contains the “lighting” that is reified into metaphysics. I believe this account was already implicit in Being and Time, in the discussion, for example, of equipment and the contrast between the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand.16 Because, Fackenheim continues, for the later Heidegger Being itself is historical



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  209

through and through, and not merely the human life-world as in Being and Time, thinking is now akin to a poetic revelation of Being through language. Such a recollection “destroys” the putative universality and transcendence of reason and metaphysics, entailing a transformation of the essence of man. We are strung between the metaphysical forgetting of Being still in play and an as-yet-unknown future. I would note again that, in my view, there was never a division in Heidegger’s early writings between Being and the human life-world whereby only the historicity of the latter was explored. The historical existence of Dasein as coevally the historical presence of Being was elaborated as far back as Being and Time and An Introduction to Metaphysics, and the conflation of the Question of Being with the artwork was already underway in “The Origin of the Artwork,” first drafted in 1935.17 Moreover, if, as Heidegger maintains in “The Question Concerning Technology,” metaphysics working itself out as global technology finally turns on and dissolves its own fixity,18 we are not looking merely at an in-between condition between the forgetting of Being and an unknown future, but at a full-blown Third Age analogous to the millenarian visions of Marx and Nietzsche, the final forward thrust of the entire history of Being. Fackenheim’s central riposte here to the late Heidegger is: Because reason reveals its hidden ground as Being unfolds, Being can never “destroy or even indefinitely transform” reason – “it remains in its own distinctive sphere, unassailable.” But surely reason is not such a distinct, delineable quality or faculty in Heidegger’s thought, even his early thought. It is always evoked as one aspect of Being’s “presencing,” not a noun but a participle. Moreover, if Being’s unfolding as technology culminates in its “astonishing” self-dissolution and ushering in of a new age, reason will cease to belong in any kind of distinctive sphere – all such previous distinctions will dissipate as man becomes “the shepherd of Being.” 19 Fackenheim argues too that, in order for reason to be displaced by poetry, reason’s “insufficiencies” must be exposed, and that critique “preserves” reason even as it is negated. But as far back as An Introduction to Metaphysics, it seems to me, Heidegger obliterates any distinction between poetry and reason – Being is “poiesis,” poetry or making. It is neither solicited by final cause (as ancient metaphysics held) nor refashioned through efficient cause (as in the modern project) – it emerges, self-reveals.20 Hence, again, Heidegger’s preference for the pre-Socratics, whose oracular maxims are often indistinguishable from poetry or mystical exercises, and his strange habit in his later works of crossing out with an X the verb for “Being” on the grounds that it was still too latently delineable and susceptible to reification.

210  Waller R. Newell

Although Fackenheim makes a powerful argument in “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth” that Heidegger “has failed to destroy transcendent philosophic truth,” I am not certain that he does not persist in viewing what Heidegger means by reason as an at least relatively independent faculty, as opposed to a fluid and transitory aspect of Being coming to presence. I also wonder whether he does not underplay the millenarian, futuristic thrust of Heidegger’s later thinking about technology, the total transformation of everything (akin to Marx’s communism and Nietzsche’s Overman) that will further dissolve all such traditional distinctions, even their latent presence in his own thinking. Reason’s insufficiencies will never be exposed by reason, but only by its dismantling. God, Being, and the Third Reich In Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, Fackenheim further explores what some scholars regard as the “turn” from the early to the later Heidegger and its appeal for the Jewish thinker. He also squarely confronts Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism in the 1930s and the adequacy of his subsequent position on it. These two themes are intertwined. Here I must try to explain what Fackenheim identifies as the primacy of “hearing” over “seeing” amounting to “the Judaization of the whole history of philosophy” in Heidegger’s later thought.21 For Heidegger, the turn to metaphysics that began with Plato isolates the visible “presence” of the emergent phenomenon and extrapolates from it a realm of permanent super-sensible thingly perfection in which the phenomenon participates. Being is sought for as “another and higher kind of thing,”22 while the time-bound coming to be and passing away of the actual being is downgraded as “mere appearance.” The search for metaphysical clarity likens thinking to the clarity of sight; hence Socrates’s metaphor of the mind as “the eye of the soul” and its drive to classify all beings according to propositional speech and reasoning. Heidegger is asking us instead – not only in his later thought but as early as Being and Time – to tarry with the emergence of the phenomenon from Being as possibility, as the hidden roots. This is a prediscursive experience in which we are attuned to Being through silent wonder, stirred by the moods of care and anxiety by which the finitude of all beings touches Dasein in its uncanny awareness of its own finitude. Not the self-confidence of discursive assertion (what Heidegger, citing St. Augustine, calls “the lust of the eyes” that is the basis of Western reason)23 but a “circumspect” meditation on Being’s silent cycles is



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  211

called for – the “call of conscience” that summons us away from our obsession with the certainty of metaphysical rationality and our domination by public opinion and dogmatic ideologies, back to life’s more profound origins in the roots of the whole. This is the way in which Heidegger reorients philosophy to a “hearing” that seems to evoke the God of revealed religion, “so that,” Fackenheim observes, “the Jewish thinker is justified in being attracted to his later thought,” though far from uncritically so. I detect a shift here from Fackenheim’s argument in “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth” that the “radical historicity” of Dasein in Being and Time “leaves no room for the call of God.” What Fackenheim views as the late Heidegger’s shift from merely considering the historicity of Dasein to the historicity of Being per se, including Dasein within it, appears to be tantamount, for him, to an openness to revelation in Heidegger that was not there before. Although Heidegger insists in Being and Time that his exploration of Being should not be viewed as an interpretation of God,24 we should observe that he does evokes Dasein’s alienation from Being in, as is widely noted, distinctly Augustinian metaphors such as “lostness,” “fallenness,” and the “call of conscience.” There are further Augustinian undertones in the derogation of city life as a realm of “chatter” and the likening of metaphysical “curiosity” to a kind of vanity or “fascination.”25 By contrast, Heidegger’s complete disinterest in systematic theology such as Thomism, which interprets the divine through a metaphysical Aristotelian lens, is self-evident.26 While granting the Augustinian parallels, Fackenheim characterizes Heidegger’s thinking as “a pagan rival” to Christianity – pagan because, whereas the Abrahamic God stands outside the world, Heidegger’s Being is “in and of the world only.”27 Being as sheer possibility must be open to plural gods. However, while Heidegger at least implicitly addresses Christian sources like Augustine, his references to Jewish sources are, Fackenheim observes, “non-existent.” While for me, Heidegger’s evocation of Being’s all-encompassing power of self-origination points to a singularity reminiscent of the Abrahamic God, and not only the Christian version of the Abrahamic God, Heidegger’s earlier noted proclivity for the pre-Socratics does constitute evidence in favour of Fackenheim’s characterization of his thought as “pagan.” Where there are plural gods, Fackenheim continues, there can be no false gods or critique of idolatry. (Hence his allusion to an unnamed Hans Jonas’s warning to Christian theologians taken with Heidegger’s ontology.) If all existence is an unfathomable upsurge of multiple revelations, the distinction between the sacred and the profane collapses.

212  Waller R. Newell

For Fackenheim, this may be the “ultimate ground” for Heidegger’s “surrender” to Nazism. It is a compelling point, but I would argue that it is less important an explanation than the primacy of Das Volk in Being and Time and An Introduction to Metaphysics as the site for Being’s selfemergence. After all, succumbing to idolatry could mean no more than a purely apolitical hedonism. The political implications of what has been called the “anarchist commune” of Being and Time and An Introduction to Metaphysics, where the people is empowered by the “overpowering power” of Being’s upsurges, are clear from the Rektoratsrede, where the German people’s recovery of its destiny opens a Pandora’s Box of come what may: “nature, history, language, people, custom, state, poetry, thought, faith, disease, madness, death, law, economy, technology.”28 For Fackenheim, Heidegger’s identification of the true poet with a “prophet” inspired by radical anxiety and uncertainty is pagan. By contrast, Jewish and Christian prophets announce immediate certainty about our knowledge of God. In Heidegger’s view, therefore, their elevation of dogma over uncertainty is at the service of an inauthentic longing for “security,” a characteristic of the metaphysical thinking that insists on identifying Being solely with “presence,” with an eternal verity. Martin Buber’s riposte, as Fackenheim presents it, is to assert that the prophets of Israel never promised security, but aimed to “shatter all security and to proclaim in the opened abyss the final insecurity,” not taking “refuge in the certainty of the temple.”29 I would ask: Isn’t Buber refuting Heidegger by assimilating Jewish prophecy entirely to his understanding of Being as bottomlessly unfathomable? Do not the Law, the Covenant, and God’s promises to Israel constitute some measure of security? If religious prophecy culminates in total insecurity about the meaning of God, how do we know that idolatry – the belief in other gods – isn’t valid, in contrast with Fackenheim’s assertion that Jewish prophecy, unlike Heidegger’s pagan kind, begins and ends with certainty about God? Is this what Fackenheim means when he argues that “Buber is self-exposed to Heidegger’s paganism”? In Fackenheim’s comparison of Heidegger and Buber, for Heidegger the future is totally open, because his paganism makes all and any gods possible. For Buber as a Jew the future is not totally open, because his thinking knows the difference between the true God and false gods. Jews could mistake a false god for the true God, but the capacity for that mistake presupposes the very distinction. Heidegger has no way of distinguishing between true and false gods because nothing transcends the world. If it appears to manifest as a god, it is divine. Going behind metaphysics to Being as self-origination collapses the distinction common to both traditional philosophy and revealed religion between



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  213

seeming and being. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger identifies the original pre-Socratic evocation of the Greek word for “appearance” (apophainesthai) as a “shining forth” of “glory,” including divine glory, not the realm of irrational chance, becoming, and perishability in comparison with the eternal Ideas to which it is reduced beginning with Plato.30 For Fackenheim, while Buber is self-exposed to Heidegger’s paganism and runs some risk of being undermined by it, Heidegger cannot risk exposing himself to Judaism in any way whatever because his whole later thought would become deeply questionable. Why? Because for Heidegger, the gods speak through or as the word of the poet. The gods “presence” through great poets, thinkers, and rulers (the third member of this trio of creators from An Introduction to Metaphysics drops out after 1945). When Homer in the first line of the Iliad asks the Muse to “sing” through him, her wordless revelation takes on expression through the medium of the poet. By contrast, according to Fackenheim, the Jewish God speaks to the people. If Heidegger is correct, God could never have spoken or “even had the power to speak” – Moses would have been his Homer, his “maker” (poietes). Hence, whereas God gives the people his laws to obey forever, Heidegger’s pagan poet has the “authority to legislate” on behalf of the “not-yet of the god that is coming.” His prophecy is total openness to sheer possibility, a recommitment to destiny that changes our destiny because it unleashes a past behind the past and is therefore radically futural. In Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, Fackenheim squarely confronts Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism. He criticizes Being and Time in this connection, arguing that a “community” with a heritage could take many forms – including Israel, the Diaspora, the anti-Nazi resistance – but that Heidegger’s evocation of it is so lacking in concreteness and variety that it refuses to step over the line from ontological structures of possibility into real life.31 I would add to this that, while it may still be true in Being and Time that community might take forms other than the Volk, by the time of An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger argues for the self-evident primacy of the German people among all other communities and all other peoples, and identifies philosophy entirely with serving its destiny.32 As for Heidegger’s later repudiation of National Socialism, Fackenheim argues powerfully that his “no” was not as philosophic as his “yes” had previously been. Heidegger says he failed to see that National Socialism was just another version of global technology – in other words, that Hitler was every bit as bad as F.D.R.! Subsumed under the universal destiny of technology, Auschwitz was merely on

214  Waller R. Newell

a continuum along with forms of mass production including General Motors and hydroelectric plants replacing windmills. It is generalized into Heidegger’s post-war notion that we now live in a time of “world wars” and “Führers,” ignoring the truth that there has only been one Holocaust and one Führer. “Nationalism” is now stigmatized as a form of technological will to power, in contrast with the rooted “homeland” (Die Heimat) of a people, where no aggressiveness obtains.33 But we must, Fackenheim argues, suspect continuing “traces of Nazism” in this “nauseating” compassion for Germans’ loss of their bucolic roots in contrast with his complete silence about the death camps. In sum, although Fackenheim does not put it quite this way, I assume he means that Heidegger’s repudiation of National Socialism was not as philosophic as his commitment to it had been because the repudiation smacked of prevarication and obtuseness, while the commitment flowed robustly from his own philosophy of the twenties and thirties. I am deeply persuaded by Fackenheim’s observations, although as he later discusses in To Mend the World, Heidegger always stressed “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” (my emphasis) as “the encounter between global technology and modern man,”34 and as early as An Introduction to Metaphysics there are hints of the contrast between this original inner greatness and what National Socialism is becoming – another form of technology. But if it is true that Heidegger had originally envisioned a non-exploitive National Socialism whose mission was to lead in freeing all “the peoples” from the “pincers” of global technology and the Enlightenment values of individualism and materialism behind it, nothing in that vision could have excluded in principle either Nazi imperialism (to free “the peoples”) or the Holocaust, since Heidegger recognizes no ethical standards of a Platonic or Kantian character that stand outside of the “overpowering power” of Being as “war.”35 I remain unconvinced by Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy of the existence of a fundamental “turn”36 in Heidegger’s thought that, unlike his early thought, leaves “room for the call of God.” As we have observed, the Augustinian metaphors of Being and Time at least invite a comparison between the Question of Being and the mystery of at least one version of the Abrahamic God. Unlike Fackenheim, I believe that Being and Time was not concerned merely with human historicity, but that the history of Being is already implicit in the structure of Dasein. The exploration of what Heidegger calls “the determinate history of Being” as early as An Introduction to Metaphysics,37 along with a growing interest in the artwork as Being’s self-emergence already beginning with “The Origin of the Artwork,” to me are the fleshing out



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  215

of the ontology of Dasein in Being and Time. Whereas Being and Time concentrated on the foreground structures of Dasein’s involvement with Being – which admittedly did give the “existential analytic of Dasein” a rather abstract and anthropocentric quality – subsequent works follow through on that project by showing in more concrete historical and artistic terms how Being comes to presence through the structure of its “there.” If there is a decisive turn in Heidegger’s thought, I believe it is that after 1945, his hopes for the National Socialist revolution having been dashed, Heidegger turns away from any further explicitly political commitment. This is evident in the fact that he no longer writes of great thinkers, poets, and rulers as he did in An Introduction to Metaphysics, but only the first two. Heidegger’s Inauthenticity In To Mend the World, Fackenheim argues that there are two sides to Heidegger’s ontology. (1) Metaphysics has occluded our access to Being. In this sense, Heidegger is as skeptical as any logical positivist about the existence of an eternal truth. (2) Yet metaphysics is our history down to the roots. Metaphysics has declined into modern rationalism and must be saved through a recessional movement behind metaphysics to the conditions for its possibility. Ontology must account for metaphysics as one aspect of “presencing” (Anwesenheit) – that aspect of the process of Being which is reified as metaphysics – without succumbing to its bewitchment.38 The “enormous achievement” of Being and Time, Fackenheim writes, was to save the profundity of German Idealism from its breakdown into “half-hearted” revivals of Kant and empiricism and the destructive political extremes of the left and right.39 I would add that it is by jettisoning Hegel’s dialectic of teleological progress that Heidegger is able to rescue historicity with his existential analytic of mood, care, and community that grounds the Question of Being in Dasein’s finitude and “is nowhere able to transcend it.” Hegel also grounded transcendence in historical experience, but believed that the teleology of historical progress could transcend finitude: time culminates in the actualization of wisdom. Heidegger is saying: We must go behind Hegel’s metaphysical “concept” of the Truth, the Unity of Subject and Substance, back to his original authentic insight identifying existence with sheer “selforigination.”40 Fackenheim recapitulates his earlier argument that Heidegger’s assertion of an “unqualified human finitude” contradicts itself because it is a transcendental claim. Moreover, he adds, if human life is only finite, you could reinvoke traditional philosophy’s or revealed

216  Waller R. Newell

religion’s claims about the eternal truth in order to give it a higher transhuman purpose.41 I still believe that what Heidegger means by a transcendental or universal truth is different from such traditional claims, “vertical” rather than “horizontal” – genetic rather than f­ormal – and therefore immune to the critique of self-contradiction. To revive Being, as Fackenheim characterizes Heidegger’s thought, we must “seek out the old.” Perhaps “seek out” is not a strong enough formulation, inasmuch as in An Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger argues that historical “greatness” is only in the origins, not the subsequent development (for example, the Greek polis of Homeric heroism before its decline into the “metaphysical” routinization of ethics by Plato and Aristotle). The quest for Being is “not abstractly temporal,” it cannot “soar above history” to “freer, more universal truths” – no Kantianism or Platonism. We should note in this connection Heidegger’s contempt for Goethe’s cosmopolitanism, the Enlightenment, and the Hegelian rummaging through “the most exotic and alien of cultures”42 throughout Heidegger’s works of all periods. Our individual fates are conjoined in a “shared destiny” that, Fackenheim says, “in at least one instance” could be Das Volk. I would maintain that by the time of An Introduction to Metaphysics, destiny is only or fundamentally a Volk. This is less clear in Being and Time, where there could be, for instance, a scholarly community engaging with the history of metaphysics. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Germany, confronted by the “pincers” of global technology pressing in from either side as the technological superpowers of America and Russia, can alone redeem man all the way back to the Greeks, back to the crossroads before metaphysics launched our fate, and philosophy is now indistinguishable from the political leadership of that destiny. For Heidegger, Fackenheim observes, man is the being for whom Being “is an issue.” Dasein has “foreknowledge” of its finitude, an “ontic” situation that anticipates the ontological question.43 In this way, man is still central to philosophy, but as a who, not a what. Man is not “in the world” in the same way that “water is in a glass,” but Dasein’s “being-in-the-world” is the experiential ground for the possibility of propositional statements like “water is in a glass.” In pursuing the Question of Being, however, Dasein can “cut itself off from its ontic roots” in the ontological question and float away into the security of the “old thinking” of metaphysics and revelation, or reduce the ontological question to a mere ideology justifying a particular ontic value – for example, the Hegelian doctrine of the progress of history, Marxist dialectical materialism, liberalism, and so on. Standards for what constitutes authenticity inevitably conflict.44



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  217

Further: According to Fackenheim, Heidegger cannot rank the authenticity of, say (once again), a Stoic rational suicide – opposed by both Jewish and Christian ethics – in comparison with Abraham’s concern for Isaac’s life. It is “ominous” that when Heidegger does add a “more concrete” historical context for authenticity, it is adduced in terms of a community of “inherited possibilities” that may be Das Volk.45 I would add that for Heidegger, authenticity is established solely by the intensity of its “resolve” to bring back “that kind of Being by the neglect of which” Dasein has become inauthentic.46 Having set forth the ontological grounds for the possibility of all “ontic” choices, Heidegger will not allow any concrete historical, religious, or ethical standards ranking those choices to creep into defining their authenticity, lest the choices become chained to settled views about “everyday life” and “the Dictatorship of the They” that cover over the ground for the Question of Being. However, starting in An Introduction to Metaphysics, I would stress again, Heidegger moves to remedy the emptiness of existential choice in Being and Time with the “determinate history of Being” originating in ancient Greek physis as neither formal nor efficient cause, but self-origination.47 And by this time, the Volk is not merely a possibility among commitments, but the all-encompassing authentic commitment. In characterizing Heidegger’s argument, Fackenheim says that if we are to be in no doubt about what is authentic as opposed to inauthentic, if we are to avoid mistaking authenticity for fate, heredity, triviality, or arbitrariness, we must stress our power of decision-making while avoiding “laying down standards” for those choices.48 I would qualify this by adding that, for Heidegger, a surrender to “fate” and “heredity” can constitute our openness to the overpowering power of Being, a surrender that empowers our “choosing to make this choice,” recommitting ourselves to the destiny of our community, which does not equate with received tradition but with its destruction and uprooting. Hence the play on Heidegger’s word for “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit) and the word for “fate” (Shicksal). That resolve is as much a surrender as an act of will is conveyed in An Introduction to Metaphysics by his playing upon resolve (Entschlossenheit) to mean “unclosedness” (Ent-schlossenheit).49 But Fackenheim’s overall analysis of the liability in Heidegger’s thinking is spot on – authenticity means radical decisionism in an ethical void. Hence, he continues, what Heidegger means by authenticity is vastly more abstract than Kant’s categorical imperative. To me, Heidegger’s view of Kant makes it clear that his existential analytic of Dasein avoids anything like a formal ethic such as the Categorical Imperative. Kant’s chief value for Heidegger is that his philosophy empties selfhood of all historical content such as Hegel’s “shapes of

218  Waller R. Newell

consciousness.” His failing is that he still clings to an objectified concept of individual selfhood, hovering on the edge of descending still further behind the self into the power of sheer possibility disclosed through Dasein’s collectivized, pre-individuated structures of engagement. In conclusion, Fackenheim argues, Heidegger’s commitment to the German people’s “fateful decision” for Hitler was his only ontic decision in the realm of historical affairs. I would qualify this to say it was his only ontic political decision. He made other ontic decisions, for instance the superiority of Marxism to liberalism,50 his denunciation of internationalism,51 and his commitment to “prepare a free relation” to technology rather than attempt to control, evade, or submit to it.52 Fackenheim observes that for Heidegger, the decision to legislate an “abyss” between Germans and Jews was valid because it was a decision for Germany’s destiny.53 The content was secondary – Heidegger’s call to “cleanse” the sciences, for example, could have been aimed at Jews or German anti-Nazis or both. Heidegger’s collaboration, he rightly remarks, was no worse than that of many others (and not as bad, I would add, as some, including Carl Schmitt, who actively helped legislate that “abyss”). Heidegger’s imperative “Be authentic!” was, Fackenheim argues, so emptied of content that, while it did not “compel” his “surrender” to Nazism, it was “unable” to prevent it. But in my view, when the Question of Being is collectivized, it summons the Volk to submit to the possibility of Death (non-fixity or impermanence) in order to establish its freedom for new possibilities. The people’s recommitment to its destiny in Being and Time is a surrender to the overpowering local forces of historical Being, which compel us by empowering us through “resolve.” Dasein must take a stand in the midst of the overpowering power and “let be” great states, thought, and art.54 As Fackenheim observes, because for Heidegger the ontological question emerged in the ontic situation of Germany, it was open to historical action (because it was ontic) while avoiding an ontic immersion in the nuances and complexities of “historical study” (because it was ontological). As I would put it, Heidegger’s political stance was neither liberal nor conservative. The people must recover its destiny from any received doctrines about the past or current ideologies that enshrine the status quo; it must recover a past behind the past, a leap into a past so unknowable that it is a leap into an unknowable future. But why does Fackenheim believe that Heidegger’s stance did not lead to “specific involvement in historical action”? We know pretty thoroughly what Heidegger believed National Socialism stood for in 1933, a view still lingering in his evocation of Die Heimat in “Letter on Humanism.” The fact that the Nazis depicted themselves as the “anti-Party” without



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  219

specific policies and unwilling to compromise with other parties confirmed for Heidegger that they embodied the underlying open-ended destiny of Das Volk in its sheer possibility (Möglichkeit). Thus, while he did not engage in a “historical study” of German politics in reaching his decision, Heidegger certainly did embrace a specific involvement in historical action. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, he proclaims that the National Socialist “revolution” is “building the world authentically anew.”55 Fackenheim recognizes the possibility of a hidden critique of how National Socialism had turned out as early as An Introduction to Metaphysics, when Heidegger argues that Spirit has been “emasculated” by Marxism and positivism into the manipulation of economic production and the empirical ordering of things and by an unnamed Nazi “management of the … race of a Volk,” all components of the juggernaut of technology. I don’t agree with Fackenheim that this critique “strikes at the core of Nazism.” It is consistent with what Heidegger always saw as its “inner truth and greatness,” the revolution of German destiny against global technology, and nothing in his possibly dissident version of “the movement” could have precluded mass violence. In keeping with this dissident strain, Heidegger’s support for the regime, unlike Carl Schmitt’s, never included its doctrine of biological racism. For Heidegger, biological racism would have necessarily been a distortion typical of science as a whole, the reduction of the meaning of existence to materialism, just like Marxism and positivism. The Nazis sensed this, and even though Heidegger’s public commitment to the regime was unreserved, they disapproved of the way in which he supported them. In my view, for Heidegger, the “greatness” of Spirit and of German Idealism lay in Hegel’s original insight into existence as “self-origination,” an insight from which Hegel flinched, taming it and dimming it down by his positive doctrine of teleological historical progress and his endorsement of the Enlightenment values of liberalism. Heidegger aims to open the underlying Pandora’s Box of creative chaos, dismantling the metaphysical edifice of Hegel’s “Absolute Science of Spirit,” and he believed “the revolution” of 1933 could be the spark. It may well be that Heidegger never foresaw or intended what was to come about through National Socialism – the Nuremberg Laws, World War II, and the Holocaust. But, as Fackenheim puts it, neither did his understanding of the people’s return to its destiny “expressly exclude” them. I would go further and stress that Heidegger’s later identification of the Destiny of Being with technology included by implication the Holocaust as a mere subset of that global juggernaut along with Fordism, nuclear weaponry, and the tourist industry. For Heidegger,

220  Waller R. Newell

the outcome of the Third Reich may have shattered its “inner truth and greatness,” but that catastrophe – including its effects such as the Holocaust – must now be accepted as necessary stages in technology’s global self-dissolution bringing us to the millennarian either/or of mankind’s total absorption by it or the birth of a new epoch in which man is “the shepherd of Being,” closer to Being than ever before, closer even than the Pre-Socratics. Technology has to happen. As Fackenheim observes, Heidegger’s great antagonist is Hegel. For Hegel, man rises from finitude to infinity through the teleological culmination of history as Absolute Spirit. For Heidegger, Dasein’s finitude is the locus or site not only of human history, but of Being altogether. Fackenheim reiterates the quandary of how we can transcend finitude if Being itself, as Heidegger maintains, is finite. Heidegger’s answer is, as I would put it, that “presencing” – that moment of Being as coming into being and passing away that assumes a transitory stability and putative transcendence – is finite, so Being as such, which “presences” in the “lighting” of Dasein’s world, is finite. For Fackenheim, Heidegger’s “turn” from the historicity of Dasein to the historicity of Being as such was a “bold, fateful, monumental” one. I believe it was always implicit in Being and Time, where Heidegger goes behind Hegel’s dialectic of “determinate negation” to the sheer “notness” (Nichtigkeit) of open possibility. But Heidegger’s other and perhaps ultimate answer to the question of how we can transcend finitude if Being itself is finite is that technology is the destiny of the West bringing us toward a new millennium, a final resolution. Again, I believe that Fackenheim underplays the sense in which Heidegger’s historicist eschatology hailing the advent of the “Shepherd of Being” resembles the millenarianism of Marx and Nietzsche. Fackenheim observes that both Hegel and Heidegger undercut the subject/object distinction through their understandings of the historicity of existence. But whereas Hegel does this through an ascent to the Absolute through teleological progress, Heidegger “achieves that result” without “letting go” of the absolute finitude of man and Being (through, as I would put it, a recessional movement back behind the Hegelian Unity of Subject of Substance to sheer “self-origination”). Because the whole history of metaphysics since Plato is based on the subject/object distinction, the whole history of metaphysics has concealed Being, but also revealed Being through the looming power of its increasingly felt absence. So fundamental ontology still needs the history of Being. But whereas Fackenheim thinks that Heidegger turns from the historicity of Dasein to the history of Being itself, I have argued that the history of Being is already there in outline in Being and Time – for



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  221

example, the false path already taken by the ancient Greeks seduced by logic, the critiques of Hegel, the bewitching power of the presentat-hand. In Being and Time, Being always touches Dasein through our finitude, making us aware of the primordial possibilities that the everyday world, in its anxious search for security and control, tries to “dim down” and paper over.56 To my mind, Fackenheim reads too much of a separation between Dasein and Being into Heidegger’s early thought. For Heidegger, according to Fackenheim, our recognition that we exist between the end of metaphysics and an unknown future is a part of Being’s unfolding as technology. But technology isn’t, as Fackenheim puts it, about “our age” alone. It is the history of the West, “metaphysics working itself out as technology.”57 The “overpowering power” of Being in An Introduction to Metaphysics becomes the alternation between the “malice of rage” of technology’s juggernaut and the “healing power” it may release as it consumes itself. Again, I think, Fackenheim may underestimate how the lack of a transcendental stance in Heidegger’s thought that can “rise above history as a whole” – since that would do away with Being as sheer situatedness – is resolved by history’s coming millennium (like Marx and Nietzsche). Fackenheim astutely observes the strange alternation in An Introduction to Metaphysics between lofty speculation about Being and commonplace tropes of Volkish ideology worthy of the Kaiser or Richard Wagner and asks if this is the first sign of a split between Heidegger’s history of Being and “ordinary mortals.” But that paradox is already manifest in Being and Time, on one level a work for the ages – the structures of possibility from which communities emerge at any time and place – and on another replete with standard critiques of modern mass society from the far left and right (the “dictatorship of the they,” “everyday blather,” the alienation, impersonality, and corruption of city life – typically associated in Volkish ideology with Jews – versus the authentic bucolic homeland of Hölderlin’s Der Ister). This critique of modern life is redolent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (a leftist film adored by Hitler) and Moeller van den Brucke; it inspired Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and David Reisman’s 1950s sociology of “the lonely crowd” and was lapped up by the Frankfurt School. More fundamentally, since for Heidegger no transcendental ethic is possible, how could there be a concern with “ordinary mortals”? As Fackenheim observes, Heidegger’s critique of technology is often confused with a standard critique of its dehumanizing or unethical consequences on behalf of ordinary liberal politics or hippie Luddism.58 In reality, it goes much deeper than this. Technology is the history of Being, and far from wanting to reverse or curtail it, we need

222  Waller R. Newell

to experience it to the full – the worse, the better. As Fackenheim puts it, technology “moves into the vacated sphere” of departed Being and its origins precede modern natural science and actual machine technology. I wouldn’t say it “moves into” that sphere but has been latent in the history of Being from the outset. For example, Aristotle’s physics of the four causes is, for Heidegger, the metaphysical reification of the Greeks’ existential experience of those causes as four “ways” for the “occasioning” of Being.59 As self-origination or revelation, Being is “poiesis” – poetry or making. Today’s technology is rooted in Greek techne while distorting it, but its green shoots are still there, and can be poetically re-evoked.60 “The grim present,” as Fackenheim says, “can generate hope.” The third age, the shepherd of Being, can still come – alternatively, technology may reduce man to pure “standing reserve,” pure energy for the endless transformation of existence by metaphysics. As he awaits the either/or outcome, Heidegger’s final stance is, as Fackenheim puts it, one of “absolute composure” that “lets things be.”61 This stance of “absolute composure” brings us to Fackenheim’s central criticism of Heidegger, leading him to “part ways” with his thought (although, it transpires, not completely) over Heidegger’s failure to recognize the unique and unprecedented horror of Auschwitz. Because Heidegger did not see how the Holocaust decisively changed the history of Being – was an epochal “event” (Ereignis) – he “lapses into inauthenticity … even by (his) own standards.” As Fackenheim puts it, Heidegger “moves through WWII as if all that had happened was the intensification of technology” and “its terrible consequences for our Vaterland,” now split in half. Heidegger’s “absolute composure” renders the screams of the Holocaust’s victims unheard.62 But, Fackenheim contends, if thought in the age of technology amounts to “composure,” “letting-be,” while Auschwitz permits no composure, then how can Heidegger’s thought be real? How can it encompass modern life? Further: Dasein’s awareness of finitude, and therefore of possibility and the future, gave it an access to transcending its situation because death – the non-fixity at the core of Being – was also Dasein’s own. But during the Holocaust, the individual was robbed of his own death, he died as a “specimen.” Therefore thought is either robbed of its transcending power by the Holocaust or there cannot be thought where the Holocaust is. Thus, in order for Heideggerian thought to exist, it must be “in flight” from the Holocaust. By denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust’s total break with the past, Heidegger’s thought pays the price of its own “inauthenticity” in order to survive. Heidegger could never have faced the Holocaust and remained true to his new thinking.



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  223

Let me respond to these powerful arguments one by one. Heidegger’s failure to acknowledge the uniqueness of the Holocaust is, to my mind, consistent with his avoidance of making any such “ontic” ethical judgments about precise historical disasters, crimes, or tragedies, or ethically condemning whatever Being reveals, lest he undermine the openness of fundamental ontology. Furthermore, for Heidegger, the Holocaust would have to be subsumed as a subset of global technology: modernity as a whole, including liberal democracy, culminates in the attempt to become technological “lords of the earth,”63 a catchphrase of Nazi rhetoric revived by Heidegger to imply that all moderns are what the Nazis turned out to be. Heidegger’s thought could be another kind of thought from the sane and morally responsible kind of thought that cannot “let” the Holocaust “be.” As for the Holocaust making the transcending power of Heidegger’s thought impossible because it robbed the individual of his own death, I would reiterate that for Heidegger, as far back as Being and Time, death was never, strictly speaking, individual, the experience of a Cartesian subject. Dasein’s awareness of its finitude was always copresent with others, in a world, with a heritage, with a people. Only on that basis could the individual reflect on his own death. The notion that an entire people could collectively “go under the eyes of Death,” face the possibility of its own annihilation and thereby be empowered to reground its destiny, shattering mere inherited tradition, was the view of historical and political existence that led to Heidegger’s support of the Third Reich in the first place. As Fackenheim has already argued, Heideggerian “decision” can only be judged authentic by the intensity of its opposition to “inauthentic everydayness,” including the rule of law, deliberative politics, human rights, the progress of history, ethics, and either liberal or conservative values. Finally, while no one would deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust, it did possess structural similarities to other projects for utopian genocide.64 Fackenheim is aware of this, and his use of the term “New Man” to describe the reduction of the inmates of Auschwitz to living wraiths implies a Soviet comparison. But while acknowledging that the Gulag and the Killing Fields compel our deep concern, that concern, he contends, is “flawed” when used to detract from the uniqueness of Auschwitz. Fackenheim is surely right that the Holocaust was not a mere relapse into barbarism, but something unprecedented. Nevertheless, previous and contemporary forms of political barbarism (Bolshevism, the Khmer Rouge, ISIS) do provide some parallels that enhance our understanding. I must leave it to the reader to wade deeper into these reeds on his own.

224  Waller R. Newell

In spite of these powerful criticisms of Heidegger, Fackenheim still wants to salvage something from Heidegger’s notion of commitment that presupposes tradition but breaks with it in order to reinvigorate it. Jews need a post-Holocaust life, he maintains, not mere academic studies of what happened. But the Holocaust is a total “rupture” with the past, so a new departure is required. We need an access to the past that we are always already involved in, and this has been “partly inspired by Heidegger.” We can still “seek help” from this thinking, but also ask “where it falls short” in comprehending the Holocaust. We have to seek a past behind the past of received tradition, which it may transform in light of the future, and we can do this because we are involved in an “always-already-existing” engagement with that past. At the end of the day, then, Fackenheim still embraces a “historicist” hermeneutic. He does not follow Strauss, who wanted to understand past thinkers as they understood themselves, and while he is partial to Hegel’s “ever incomplete” dialogue with past thinkers, he leans towards Heidegger, for whom Being itself, as it were, speaks through the great books. Heidegger’s ontology features no universal dialectic of teleological progress, modernization, and secularization, which leaves the Jewish Dasein to unfold autonomously. Using Heidegger’s terminology, Fackenheim encourages “going back into possibilities of (Jewish) Dasein that was once Da.” One such possibility was the study of Jewish mysticism pioneered by Scholem. Scholem’s contention that Jewish medieval philosophy, including Maimonides, sacrifices “the living structure” of Jewish belief by converting it “into a bundle of abstractions”65 is much akin to Heidegger’s aversion for metaphysically infused theologies like Thomism in favour of the ecstatic mystic visions of Augustine or, as has been suggested, Meister Eckhart. Still, while the Jewish thinker might “seek help” from Heidegger’s ontology, we should remember that Heidegger cared primarily only about one Volk. When it was destroyed, his interest turned from his people’s Da to the either/or eschatology whose forces were now gathering within global technology. Fackenheim asks: Was Heidegger’s failure to confront the Holocaust inevitable? I would say he confronted it in the only way he could, as a subset of technology, and therefore did not confront it at all. In Heidegger’s view of Nietzsche, Fackenheim observes, the loss of Being leads to an absolute will to power – the ultimate expression of the drive for technological mastery – filling the “vacated sphere.”66 God is dead, everything is permitted. The Nazis filled the vacuum of departed Being, Fackenheim argues, by making the Führer’s will tantamount to the voice of God, a will to sheer destruction, and Heidegger could



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  225

not grapple clearly with this. For Heidegger, an “event” in Being, even Nietzsche’s will to power, is authentic, therefore good, and beyond moral judgment. If Being is not manifested, then moral judgment and historical analysis about what happens in human affairs is “trivial and irrelevant.” Either the Nazis were “a Presence of Being” or they betokened the withdrawal of Being, just one among many forms of technological malaise – which is in fact what Heidegger later judged Nazism to have been. Further analysis of its causes and characteristics would be “trivial.” Thus, the “evil uniqueness” of the Third Reich and Holocaust could “never come into view” for Heidegger. All true: I would only stress that Heidegger didn’t originally think National Socialism was trivial – in the 1930s, he thought it was the last hope. When that hope failed, he then regarded further dwelling on it as trivial compared to the sway of technology. Indignation or repentance were useless in the face of destiny. Twenty years after the war, Fackenheim contends, Heidegger still couldn’t admit that his endorsement of National Socialism had not been a “small, philosophically inconsequential error” but a “philosophical catastrophe.” But I don’t think Heidegger ever believed his commitment to National Socialism had been a small and philosophically inconsequential error, however much his apologists may have pushed this line. As a subset of technology, the Holocaust was a revelation of Being, and Being must culminate in catastrophe (Being is polemos, violence, power, “the storm”).67 How could the destruction of metaphysics by its own working-out as global technology, with the Third Reich as its way station, preclude the Holocaust any more than the fire-bombing of Dresden, the Battle of Stalingrad, and Hiroshima? And in the face of Being’s titanic “destining,” what use is moral condemnation, detailed analysis, or ethical discrimination? Conclusion While Fackenheim believes Heidegger’s thought is inauthentic by its own standards because he did not see that the Holocaust constituted a rupture with the entire past, I think that for Heidegger, the Holocaust would constitute just another form of technological mastery, like nationalism, war, or central planning. If National Socialism’s main failing to Heidegger was that Hitler turned out to be as bad as F.D.R., was the fate of the Jews (or any of Hitler’s victims) likely to concern him? I also believe that Fackenheim overstates the “turn” in Heidegger’s thought by identifying the existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time as merely human historicity in contrast with the later concern with the history of Being. As I have argued, in my view, the roots of the latter

226  Waller R. Newell

are already in Being and Time. I believe as well that Fackenheim overlooks the “eschatological” reversal whose forces Heidegger believes may be gathering through technology, a millenarian outcome that for Heidegger may resolve the questions Fackenheim validly raises about our capacity to understand historical existence when we are already situated within it, by pointing to a new epoch for mankind that will grant purpose to the entire preceding history of Being. Nowhere in Heidegger’s work do we find an actual endorsement of the Holocaust as the culmination of the National Socialist revolution. But Fackenheim is correct that Heidegger failed utterly to grasp the enormity or “evil uniqueness” of the Holocaust or repent for his role in supporting Hitler. However, the reason he could not atone for or retract his support of National Socialism was that he did not believe a thinker can regret or retract his support for any historical event, however terrible. In the “destining” of Being, no event transcends time, and there are no trans-temporal standards by which to judge good and bad behaviour. I wonder whether Fackenheim was well served by attempting to retain Heidegger’s distinction between authentic and inauthentic commitment in his exploration of the Jewish Da, and whether an argument that Heidegger lapsed into inauthenticity according to his own standards in failing to see the uniqueness of the Holocaust as an “event,” even if convincing, was as satisfactory as a straightforward moral condemnation of Heidegger for supporting the Third Reich according to the verities of traditional philosophy and revelation and their immutable standards of right and wrong. While Fackenheim’s exposure of Heidegger’s inability to reconcile historicity with transcendence, or how he contradicted himself by proclaiming the historicity of Being as a universal truth, is impressive and valuable, I wonder if it is possible to refute Heidegger on his own premises. He can always retreat to a deeper recession into the ground of Being behind metaphysical arguments, including the very principle of identity and contradiction. However, Fackenheim’s arguments about the historical and experiential poverty of Heidegger’s silence about the Holocaust are deeply convincing, and may point the way to a more general and solid basis for refuting his entire approach to the Question of Being. If Heidegger can argue that Hegel’s phenomenology of the “shapes of consciousness” occludes Being with a metaphysical overlay, might one not turn this around and ask how an approach to the Question of Being that excludes the possibility of the extraordinary historical and psychological richness of that phenomenology – including principles of moral



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  227

judgment and political prudence – can possibly be valid? It seems to me there is a very real sense in which the essentials of Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein are contained within Hegel’s evocation of the Unhappy Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit,68 merely one among a whole series of theoretically, psychologically, and morally insightful Gestalten from which Heidegger seals himself off in the dreamy abstractions of fundamental ontology. Cognate with the argument that Heidegger’s approach to the Question of Being is highly questionable owing to the psychological and historical barrenness it necessitates in order to avoid the taint of “ontic” reasoning and morality is the question: What justifies Heidegger in identifying anxiety as the fundamental human relationship to the whole? Why could it not at least as justifiably be love, whether of God or of wisdom?69 That in turn would argue for an eros for a wisdom of the eternal causes of the whole, in other words Platonic philosophy. Perhaps the most fruitful way into a critique of Heidegger’s ontology would be by way of his critique of Plato. For if Heidegger is correct, Plato’s metaphysics are the beginning of a project to impose “the yoke of the Idea” on the rest of existence. If, for Plato, philosophy were only a techne, Heidegger might have grounds for finding in it incipient global technology. But if, as I have argued,70 the technical dimension of that philosophizing was at the service of, and entailed by, an erotic longing for a knowledge of the eternal order of the whole – a recurrent and never-to-be-completed longing – how could it launch a project for the assimilation of the rest of Being to technology imputed to it by Heidegger? NOTES   1 Emil L. Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 218.   2 Martin Heidigger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 4, 26, 32, 38.   3 Heidegger, Being and Time, 356, 435–6. For further elaboration of this interpretation, see Waller R. Newell, “Politics and Progress in Heidegger’s Philosophy of History,” in Democratic Theory and Technological Society, ed. Richard Day and Ronald Beiner (London: M.E. Sharpe, 1988); Newell, “The Distant Command of the Greeks: Thoughts on Heidegger’s Rectoral Address,” in Proceedings, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, September 1988); Newell, “Heidegger on Freedom and Community: Some Political

228  Waller R. Newell Implications of His Early Thought,” American Political Science Review 78.3 (1984): 775–84, https://doi.org/10.2307/19618431984. On my understanding of the appeal of National Socialism for Heidegger, see Newell, “Heidegger’s Ontological Politics,” Kritika & Kontext 1 (1997); Newell, “Philosophy and the Perils of Commitment: A Comparison of Lukacs and Heidegger,” History of European Ideas 9.3 (l988): 305–20; Newell, Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).   4 Fackenheim, “The Historicity and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth,” in The God Within: Kant, Schelling and Historicity, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 153.   5 “Historicity and Transcendence,” 154–5.   6 “Historicity and Transcendence,” 156.   7 “Historicity and Transcendence,” 157.   8 On the apocalyptic millenarianism that I detect in the historicism of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger in contrast with Hegel, see Newell, Tyrants; Newell, Tyranny: A New Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Newel, “Reflections on Marxism and America,” in Confronting the Constitution, ed. Allan Bloom (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1990). A telling marker of the shift is that none of Hegel’s successors among this trio saw the value of writing a philosophy of right as he had done because there was nothing redeemable or legitimate about the modern present to salvage in the new age to come.   9 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1998), 305–15; Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 221; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, trans. R. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),107–10. 10 Fackenheim, “The History and Transcendence of Philosophic Truth,” in The God Within, 158. 11 Newell, “Zarathustra’s Dancing Dialectic,” Interpretation 17:3 (1980): 415–32. 12 Fackenheim, “History and Transcendence,” 159. 13 Fackenheim, “History and Transcendence,” 160. 14 Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993). 15 Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 16 Heidegger, Being and Time, 93–107. 17 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Artwork,” in Basic Writings. 18 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 310–15.



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  229

19 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 221. After studying “The Question Concerning Technology” for many years, I am not sure I understand what Heidegger is saying, but I think it may be this: Metaphysics launches technology beginning with Plato by erecting the pure rationality of the Idea over the rest of existence, and gradually subjugating the rest of existence to conform with it, converting it into sheer material fodder for limitless efficiency in continuing that project of subjugation. Having brought the rest of existence under its yoke, the Idea must turn in on itself to purge itself of any lingering taint from the world of emotional, poetic, customary, or religious experience and, finally, of any limitation imposed by the structure of rationality itself, so that at length technology may dissolve itself and release Being (and all the beings) from its grip. Perhaps it is analogous to Nietzsche’s argument that the ascetic ideal, first erected over the rest of existence as Plato’s Idea of the Good and as God, must eventually consume any latent traces of personality or emotion in God himself, resulting in God’s “death” and the liberation of the will to power. In the case of both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the outcome is an either/ or gamble: for Nietzsche, the overman versus mankind’s degeneration into the Last Man; for Heidegger, the fulfilment of man as “the Shepherd of Being” versus his absorption into technology’s “standing reserve” of efficiency. 20 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 13–15. 21 Fackenheim, Encounters, 218–19. 22 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 17–19. 23 Heidegger, Being and Time, 215–16. 24 Being and Time, 220. 25 Being and Time, 107. 26 Being and Time, 30; Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 7, 17. His comparative assessment of Luther and Thomas is instructive in this regard. 27 Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 28 Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” trans. Karsten Harries and Hermann Heidegger, Review of Metaphysics 38.3 (1985): 467–502. 29 Cf. Fackenheim, Encounters, 221. 30 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 100–3. 31 Fackenheim, Encounters, 217. 32 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 8–11. 33 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 217–21. 34 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 199. 35 Introduction to Metaphysics, 61.

230  Waller R. Newell 36 Fackenheim, Encounters, 218. 37 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 84, 92. 38 Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 151. 39 To Mend the World, 153. 40 Hegel’s Unity of Subject and Substance may be described as the interactive poles of the modern project for the conquest of nature (Machiavelli, Hobbes) and the romantic longing for harmony, community, and reconciliation (Spinoza, Rousseau). For Hegel, the conquest of nature works in tandem with the longing for harmony to ultimately yield the fulfilment of history. Heidegger, I believe, would argue that we know in the twentieth century that the Hegelian progress of history has revealed itself as driven only by the subjective side of this polarity, with no harmonious outcome in prospect. In other words, what Hegel terms the Subject pole of the dialectic of history Heidegger terms technology, the sole agenda of modernization. See Newell, “Origins of Enchantment: Conceptual Continuities in the Ontology of Political Wholeness,” in Logos and Eros: Essays Honoring Stanley Rosen, ed. Nalin Ransinghe (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2006); Newell, “Redeeming Modernity: The Ascent of Eros and Wisdom in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” Interpretation 37.1 (2009): 3–28; Newel, “The Recollection of Freedom: Hegel as Educator,” in In Search of Humanity: Essays in Honor of Clifford Orwin, ed. Andrea Radasanu (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015); Newell, “Kojève’s Hegel, Hegel’s Hegel, Strauss’s Hegel: A Middle Range Approach to the Debate about Tyranny and Totalitarianism,” in Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, ed. Timothy Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016). 41 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 162. 42 Heidegger, Being and Time, 43. 43 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 163. 44 To Mend the World, 164. 45 To Mend the World, 165. 46 Heidegger, Being and Time, 313. 47 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 13–16. 48 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 166. 49 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 21. 50 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 219. 51 “Letter on Humanism,” 217–21. 52 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 311. 53 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 168. 54 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 10–11, 21. 55 Introduction to Metaphysics, 126. 56 Heidegger, Being and Time, 177.



Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  231

57 Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in Vortrage und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954). 58 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 178. 59 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 289–93. 60 “The Question Concerning Technology,” 296–300. 61 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 180. 62 To Mend the World, 183. 63 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 307. 64 Newell, Tyrants. 65 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 23–31. 66 Heidegger’s interpretation of what Nietzsche means by “the will to power” is in my view an egregious misinterpretation, but not of concern to us here. See Newell, “Zarathustra’s Dancing Dialectic,” Interpretation 17.3 (1990): 415–32. 67 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics and “The Self-Assertion of the German University.” 68 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 69 Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 38. 70 Waller R. Newell, Ruling Passion: The Erotics of Statecraft in Platonic Political Philosophy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

9 Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Emil Fackenheim and Leo Strauss kenneth c. blanchard, jr.

We who live face an unprecedented situation. Two events within recent memory pose a profound problematic for human thought and action: I refer to the explosion of the hydrogen bomb and the liberation of the Nazi death camps. Since the first nuclear warhead was tested and appreciated, we can no longer be confident that there are any meaningful physical limits to man’s destructive powers. This is shocking enough in itself, bringing for the first time all of human life, and indeed all life simply, within the sphere of moral/political deliberation. Nonetheless, it would have less weight if not for the second and almost simultaneous event; for the truth about the Holocaust makes it impossible to believe that there are any effective moral limits to human destructiveness. As a consequence, we now know what could never have been known before: that left to himself, man can lose everything. Though this truth could not have been known prior to such events, this does not mean that it was unsuspected. In fact, it was suspected from the very beginning. And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever … he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Gen. 3:22–3)

The danger was confirmed when, after the flood, men tried to build a tower to reach to heaven. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  233 confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. (Gen. 11:6–7)

In both cases God acts pre-emptively to limit human powers, apparently out of a fear of man. Human thought and action depend, in part at least, on an answer to the question: “what is man?” Because of the Holocaust, a partial answer to this question is now simply irrefutable: man is dangerous. Facing such a situation, men naturally hunt for resources. This essay – which takes the form of an apologia on behalf of Leo Strauss, in reply to Emil Fackenheim – is intended as part of the hunt. My reasons for focusing on these fascinating and disturbing old men are two: first, I am one of these people, described by Fackenheim, “who never met Strauss in person [but] were gripped by a book of his, and it changed their lives.” And second, in 1985 Professor Fackenheim came to Claremont to deliver a lecture on Strauss, and I heard this lecture.1 No student of Strauss could have asked for a more gracious or enlightening talk. But in the midst of that talk, Fackenheim offered a challenge to Strauss’s thinking that has proven, for me at least, to be thought provoking. He said that Strauss, like Plato and Hegel, failed “to take evil sufficiently seriously.” In Strauss’s great autobiographical essay, he had written that “it is safer to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low.” Professor Fackenheim comments: This is clearly Platonic: You understand the perverse state of the tripartite “soul” in terms of its healthy state. Perversity and chaos come in many forms, and you recognize them for what they are. It seems to me that there are limitations here. The limitation is that there is one low that cannot be understood, or does not fully reveal itself, if looked at from the standpoint of the high. That low is Nazism and especially the Holocaust. And I think that Plato – and maybe I should say both Athens and Jerusalem – is not adequate when it comes to confronting the diabolical evil that is the Holocaust.2

This is a grave and surprising charge. It is surprising to those of us who became students of Strauss precisely because we believed that his writings provide the best account of modern evil and, more importantly, serve as repair manuals for the only effective alternative to that evil: liberal democracy. The charge is grave, because although Fackenheim calls Strauss “the most powerful Jewish philosopher since Rosenzweig” he scarcely devotes two pages to him in a book subtitled Foundations of Future Jewish Thought. It would appear that that error renders his work largely unhelpful in the task of mending the world after the Holocaust.

234  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

Interestingly, Professor Fackenheim’s judgment is the direct opposite of a complaint that is continually leveled at Strauss, and to which Strauss responded both for himself and for his interlocutor Alexandre Kojève. They had been accused of ignoring the true object of metaphysics, or worse, of distorting philosophical teachings for the sake of crass political purposes. At the end of what is perhaps the clearest and weightiest passage he ever wrote, Strauss says that although he and Kojève may have scarcely mentioned the conflict between the two fundamental hypotheses – that of Plato and of Hegel – nonetheless we have always been mindful of it. For we both apparently turned away from Being to Tyranny because we have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur, were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk of being.3

Strauss, then, sets for philosophy essentially the same challenge that Professor Fackenheim has set: in order to do justice to Being, it must show the courage necessary to confront the diabolical. Whether Strauss met that challenge, as he argues here, or failed it, as Fackenheim reluctantly concludes, may be determined only by appreciating their respective teachings concerning evil. For Professor Fackenheim’s account, we turn to his book To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought. One might have expected this book to be a philosophical account of the Nazi Holocaust, and perhaps a series of lessons drawn from that account. But Professor Fackenheim is less concerned with the crime than with the cover-up: the failure of post-Holocaust philosophy and theology to come to grips with that terrible event. The meat of his book is a theoretical proof for the central contention of a radical historicism: that thought is essentially subordinate to life or fate. For in the last analysis, the Holocaust itself cannot be accounted for: it is an instance of transcendent evil; it constitutes a unique rupture in the historical continuity of human life and thought.4 Despite the shocking sound of this claim, it is not immediately intelligible. A modern man, especially if he is not Jewish and has accepted the idea that there is no such thing as human nature, will have difficulty understanding what “historical continuity” might mean, and how the Holocaust could constitute a “rupture” of that continuity. The first fruit of this book is that Fackenheim’s notion of “rupture” speaks to (even if it does not “command”) the history of philosophy. We can understand what continuity is as it is expressed in three kinds of interpretation: the Platonic type, the Hegelian type, and the



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  235

historicist type. These three hermeneutics differ principally in their view of the relationship between History and Being. History presupposes the existence of Time, in the fullest sense: History is the realm of the contingent, of that which comes into existence, and passes away. Being, on the other hand, is the highest and fullest object of knowledge, the best and the most that men can know or hope to know. Now, for Platonic understanding, Being exits above and outside of history and is in no way affected by history. Continuity, for the Platonist, means that everything, regardless of its time or place, can be understood in the light of the same unchanging Being. For the Hegelian reader, on the other hand, history is a movement towards Being. Each stage or epoch in that movement incorporates all the previous stages into a new whole that is thus larger than any previous stage. Being is the final stage, in which all of human history is incorporated into a single, consistent discourse. Continuity, for the Hegelian, consists in the fact that there can be no possible human thought that does not form a part of this discourse.5 Finally, the historicist conceives Being to be radically historical. All that a man can understand, he understands on the basis of his own historical situation, which is to say, on the basis of a prejudice. He can enlarge the realm of his prejudices, but he can never escape it. For the historicist as for the Hegelian, history is driven by the action of men on the given situation; for the historicist, however, this process can never be completed: new prejudices are produced out of old prejudices as long as man lasts in this world. Continuity in historicism means that this process is never broken. Human creativity always acts in the context of a given past; to recover the past means to follow the discrete, consecutive steps by which one’s own prejudices came into being. Only in the case of a Platonic reading could continuity be threatened by the appearance of something really new in history, for this would indicate that Being were changeable. If something happens that is not comprehended by the same standard as all previous events, then either Being = Becoming, or History, rather than a partial or corrupt perspective on Being, must be seen as independent of Being. The former is a direct rejection of Plato; the latter is, at best, sophisticated. According to the Hegelian, on the other hand, new and unprecedented things are continually coming into being, prior to the end of history. It is man’s freedom from the given situation that allows him to act against it, creating the antithesis. That this creativity is only exercised in history means that only by the negation of the given situation can man be satisfied of his progress. Similarly, according to historicism, the intellectual distance (“hermeneutical gulf’) that exits between different historical situations is a consequence of human creativity harnessed towards the

236  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

impossible goal of a final and complete understanding. Nothing new, as such, could threaten this continuity so long as it is expressed in or modifies a language that is a product of the past. Now, if the Holocaust were so new that it had no precedent in any human culture, it would be entirely unintelligible. Fackenheim argues that it is only unintelligible at its very root. Indeed, he says the new principle of destruction in the Holocaust came about through “a progress in which design and chance gradually – from the Nazi point of view, by good fortune or stroke of genius – reached a sort of synthesis.” The italics are mine. Is this not how every synthesis comes about, according to the historicist? The Holocaust would not constitute a rupture of the continuity of history, either for Hegelian or historicist thought, merely because it was unique. It constitutes such a rupture, according to Professor Fackenheim, because it is uniquely evil. What will be less than obvious about Professor Fackenheim’s reasoning, at least to those readers educated in the modern social sciences, is the premise that no intelligible account of Being is possible that does not solve the problem of evil. If evil attains equality as a distinct principle with the good, and most emphatically if it threatens to vanquish the good, then one could not make sense of the world. For what would such a world be good for? To say that the Good is not in the world, but only in the human mind, is to say that the world is radically incommensurate with the mind. Or that the satisfaction man experiences upon reaching a conclusion is a lie. Clearly, this undermines any and all kinds of explanation: it is a preface to mysticism, not philosophy. Whatever else modern thinking may find wanting in Plato, it has been unable to disturb the centrality of the Good. Philosophy, then, must approach the Good; and to do so, it must solve the problem of evil. Now, for Platonic thinking, corruption can be only be understood in the light of perfection: it is defined by the degree of difference between the corrupt soul and the soul that is ordered or just.6 But this solution to the problem of evil, understanding the low in the light of the high, will stand only so long as no evil is discovered in the world that is both complete and self-consistent; for such an evil would no longer point towards the good. And this is the claim that Fackenheim makes, in his brief rejection of Strauss’s position: “the ‘low’ that Strauss considered it prudent not to inspect too closely – the Third Reich, and its inmost essence, the Holocaust world – does not, alas, reveal itself fully for what it is to an understanding of the high.”7 The basis of this claim is found in Fackenheim’s list of five basic facts by which he proves the uniqueness of the Holocaust. This list, found early in his book, is meant to be provisional.8 But nothing that comes



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  237

later will exceed it in clarity or completeness; for it challenges the previous solutions to the problem of evil to account for the Holocaust and finds them wanting. Facts four and five can be addressed specifically to Plato. 4. “The Final Solution” was not a pragmatic project serving such ends as political power or economic greed. Nor was it the negative side of a positive religious or political fanaticism. It was an end in itself. And, at least in the final stage of the dominion of the Third Reich (when Eichmann diverted trains to Auschwitz from the Russian front), it was the only such end that remained. 5. Only a minority of the perpetrators were sadists or perverts. For the most part, they were ordinary jobholders with an extraordinary job. And the tone-setters were ordinary idealists, except that the ideals were torture and murder. Prior to the Holocaust, all tyranny and slaughter had seemed to go on for the sake of ends that were at least reasonable, and on rare occasions even lofty. The Platonist wants to argue that all criminals either have a vulgar view of the Good or are ignorant of the proper means to attain it. But neither is true of the Nazis. On the one hand, they displayed a degree of self-sacrifice that would shame a saint (e.g., the diversion of trains); on the other, the annihilation of Jewish bodies and souls was not a finite means for the Nazis, it was “a boundless end in itself,’ an Ideal.9 The Holocaust alone is an unambiguous example of a sane and selfconscious pursuit of evil. Now, an ideal is something around which one can construct a world, in this case the “Holocaust world.”10 If Professor Fackenheim were correct about this – I believe he is not – then there would be a distinct and self-sufficient principle of evil in the world. This would indeed constitute a rupture in the historical continuity looked for by Platonic understanding. The Hegelian solution to the problem of evil is contained in the term “overcoming.” To employ a simple analogy: each leg of a tripod, taken by itself, “wants” to topple the tripod. Yet each leg wants to collapse in a direction that is antithetical to that of the other legs; hence these tendencies can be overcome by the synthesis that is the tripod itself. Evil in history is only a thesis or antithesis whose synthesis has yet to be effected. In a sense evil remains what it is just as the leg, by leaning, persists in its attempt to destroy the tripod. But it would be more correct to say that nothing can be understood as evil once it is seen in its role as a part of completed history. So, the Hegelian should be quite pleased that, in and by the Holocaust, evil and good have squared off

238  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

against one another, for that is a sure sign that a synthesis is about to be achieved. But the Hegelian cannot be pleased: for how can a synthesis now be possible when the very principle of the Holocaust involves extermination? 2. This murder was quite literally “extermination”; not a single Jewish man, woman, or child was to survive, or – except for a few that were well hidden or overlooked – would have survived had Hitler won the war. 3. This was because Jewish birth was sufficient cause to merit torture and death; whereas the “crime” of Poles and Russians was that there were too many of them, with the possible exception of Gypsies only Jews had committed the “crime” of existing at all. The Hegelian philosophy stands or falls by its ability to reconcile all the elements of human history: with the appearance of a thesis the very essence of which is extermination, the greatest attempt to reconcile philosophy and history has been refuted by history.11 What then of historicism? Professor Fackenheim is well aware of the superficiality of the historicist solution, as compared with that of the Hegelian and Platonist. In so far as the historicist recognizes evil at all, he perceives it as the direction away from which history is travelling, or better still, as the conservative resistance to that travel. Depending on whether he is more or less shallow, the historicist will understand evil to mean a desire to “turn the clock back,” or as a refusal to submit every principle to the court of dialogue. Fackenheim is aware that historicism rests on an unspoken confidence in the progressive character of history. And progress can only be understood in reference to a Good that stands either above history, as Being does for the Platonist, or at the end of history, as Being does for the Hegelian. For the historicist, on the other hand, history is always incomplete. Being is a progress without end; this means only that man at all times can say to himself: we are better than we were and will become better than we are. However, this account conceals a grave difficulty. Infinite progress implies at the very least that nothing good is impossible for human kind. But all limits on progress could be overcome only if man were infinitely malleable. With the Holocaust, modernity’s innocence is terminated once and for all; for we are now confronted with the possibility that man may be infinitely malleable towards evil.12 Far from solving the problem of evil, then, historicism radicalizes the problem and appears to render it inescapable. The loss of confidence in history has the gravest of consequences for the Jews, as it does for any human thought that has “returned to history.”



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  239

In one sense, this turn to history is as old as Judaism itself. Judaism stands to Christianity much as Aristotelianism did to Platonism. For both Christian and Platonist, Being can never be endangered by any historical event. As a consequence, salvation (eternal life) is guaranteed for the one, and for the other perfect knowledge at least becomes possible: for knowledge requires an object that must always be what it is, in order that what one knows or says about it can never become false. Aristotle achieves, or attempts to achieve, the same result as Plato does while yet exposing Being, or the Beings, to history. One can know, for instance, that the human soul has a rational and an irrational part not because the Being of the soul exists outside of history, but because there will always be human beings in history. This observation about the soul can therefore always be true.13 To the extent that knowledge of man, as opposed to the heavenly objects, is possible for Aristotle, it requires the eternity of the species. It would cease to be possible if some catastrophe threatened to destroy every last human being or, even worse, if man were infinitely malleable. The situation of Jewish thought is much the same: unlike the Christian, the Jew finds his immortality in the survival of the Jewish people. Furthermore, this survival itself proves the existence of the Divine, because it is the divine mission for which the Jewish people continue.14 Ordinary catastrophes could be met with patience so long as “the Gentiles, even when they oppressed the Jewish people, could be counted on to ‘fear God’ sufficiently to resist the temptation of (and oppose) wholesale murder.”15 As long as the Jew believed there were some limits to the evil in man, he could be confident that the Jewish people would survive. With the Holocaust, this confidence is destroyed. 1. Fully one-third of the whole Jewish people was murdered; and since this included the most Jewish of Jews – East European Jewry – Jewish survival as a whole is gravely in doubt. This, of course, is the punch line of professor Fackenheim’s book: because of the Holocaust, it is now necessary for the Jewish thinker in particular, as for all philosophers who have obeyed the call to return to history, to accept the fact that there is no possibility so horrible that it cannot happen. Professor Fackenheim’s case, if we accept it, appears to rule out the very possibility of a solution to the problem of evil. If no prior kind of thinking, ancient or modern, can resolve the evil of the Holocaust then how can the human mind find any grounds for resistance? His own solution is elegant: the evil of the Holocaust world was by all

240  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

previous standards irresistible; in spite of this, the Holocaust world was in fact resisted. Someone who does not appreciate the modern worship of historicity will find it difficult to understand Fackenheim’s profound shock at this discovery. After Heidegger, a student of philosophy could as little expect human beings to leap out of or “oppose” the historical world in which they find themselves as they can expect pigs to sprout wings and fly. But the Holocaust world itself, and the resistance to it, are trans-historical acts: in Fackenheim’s words, they constitute distinct “ontological categories.” And even more shocking, whereas the Holocaust was at least in part the act of a society, the resistance was an act of individual men and women. Fackenheim produces several examples of authentic resistance to the “logic of destruction,” which is to say, resistance that takes place in full awareness of what the Holocaust was: a prisoner suddenly realizes that the very purpose of the camp is to rob him of his humanity, and he resolves to resist this process with all his powers; a Catholic priest says a daily prayer, publicly in Nazi Germany, for “the persecuted ‘non-Aryan’ Christians and Jews.” A single example would have sufficed. An unprecedented evil could be met only by an unprecedented rejection of evil: the very fact of resistance demonstrates that the world ruptured by the Holocaust can be mended by an equally astonishing act. Clearly, for Professor Fackenheim, the resistance some victims showed in the face of the Nazi logic of destruction was miraculous: so much so that he speaks of “the voice of the metzaveh [the commander]” and of the 614th commandment. And that voice is in no way “a product of self-sufficient human reason, realizing itself in an ever-advancing history of autonomous human enlightenment.”16 He believes that all authentic thought after the Holocaust must proceed from a full awareness of the historical rupture and from an astonishment at the power that resisted it. Thought must follow life.17 Professor Fackenheim’s response to the Holocaust is not only forceful and thought provoking; it may be, for the present at least, indispensable. For we live in an age in which the possibility of the Divine Presence is no longer sufficient to make thinking serious, to save moral/political thinking from becoming a drab parlour game. As Strauss suggested in the quote above, the Question of Being may come alive for us only in the face of the diabolical. In “The People Israel Lives,” Fackenheim asks: “Dare we morally raise Jewish children, exposing our offspring to a possible second Auschwitz decades or centuries hence? And dare we religiously not raise Jewish children, completing Satan’s work on his behalf?” In a note, he completes this thought.



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  241 This contradiction, unlike Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical, does not involve morality on one side only. Among the worst of the Spanish inquisitors were descendants of converted Jews, and Reinhard Heydrich is said to have had a Jewish ancestor. By choosing for our children not to be victims, may we be exposing them to the possibility, or the likelihood, that they will be murderers?18

This is the most terrifying footnote I have ever read. I can testify that there is one kind of reader who cannot encounter it without taking the moral/political problem seriously. I am less certain, however, of the value of Professor Fackenheim’s increasingly emphatic insistence that the Holocaust is incomprehensible. In the first place, it risks letting everyone off the hook: if nothing in human history could have prepared humankind for the genesis of Nazism, then our initial failure to resist it can scarcely be held against us. In the second place, it neglects an earlier and, in my opinion, more profound argument that the radical evil of Nazism was not only understood but even anticipated from the earliest times. In “Idolatry as a Modern Possibility” he argued that the National Socialist ideology is a modern form of “what to the rabbis was the ultimate in evil fascination and the most devastating sin.”19 The sin of idolatry lies in the literal identification of the infinite and the finite. In the case of the modern idolater, the finite is no external image, but rather Volk and Fürher: something that is “known to be and remain within.” Now: the new, internalized idolatry is dialectically related to the old. It is wholly like the old in that it is composed of the same essential elements; wholly unlike the old in that these elements are totally reorganized.

Further: This new idolater takes himself as an enlightened modern … And, shocking though this is to Enlightenment-liberals, there is truth in this selfappraisal. The new idolater is not enlightened, but he is most decidedly modern. The new idolatry is not a relapse into premodern superstitions. It is a bastard-child of the Age of Enlightenment.20

This account, which comes close at least to comprehending the Holocaust, is almost a mirror image of Leo Strauss’s critique of modernity. We note two differences: for Strauss it was not the ancient rabbis so much as the Yevanim, the Greeks, who turn out to be wiser than Enlightenment-liberals; and for Strauss, the idolatrous child of the

242  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

Enlightenment turns out to be legitimate after all. It would seem that Professor Fackenheim’s neglect of Strauss parallels his neglect of his own, earlier thought. We bear this in mind in defending Strauss, and by implication Plato, against Fackenheim’s critique. For Strauss, as for Fackenheim, 1933 had profound personal and philosophical consequences. Strauss is best known for his attempt to achieve a return to an earlier philosophical tradition. Commenting on this project, Professor Fackenheim asks: “how does one know that to get back to either the Greeks or the Jews, Athens or Jerusalem, is possible? It must be possible because it is necessary! And why is it necessary? Because the shadow of Nazism hung over us.”21 Further, these two men understood the character of that shadow in much the same way. Says Fackenheim: The term “Aryan” had no clear connotation other than “non-Jew,” and the Nazi were not antisemites because they were racists, but rather racists because they were antisemites. The exaltation of the “Aryan” had no positive significance. It had only the negative significance of degrading and murdering the “non-Aryan.”22

So far from denying this, Strauss had said exactly the same thing – even endorsing what Fackenheim describes as “the scandalous particularity of Nazism.” In his famous “Preface,” he writes: The Weimar Republic was succeeded by the only German regime – the only regime ever anywhere – which had no other clear principle than murderous hatred of the Jews, for “Aryan” had no clear meaning other than “non-Jewish.”23

It is not quite the particularity of the Holocaust that is at issue. Rather, whereas Strauss and Fackenheim would agree that we are culpable for our failure to respond to the Holocaust, Strauss is more concerned with the fact that “when we were brought face to face with tyranny – with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past – our political science failed to recognize it.”24 The failure of modern political science was a precise reflection of the more general failure of Western civilization, expressed by the tardiness of resistance on the part of European Jews and liberal democrats. And according to Strauss, the error that proved so extremely costly to Jews was exactly the opposite of the one Fackenheim indicates: it was not a mistaken reliance on the limits imposed by human nature, and therefore on man’s capacity for evil, that left them unprepared; rather, it was the



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  243

belief – shared with all those who embraced modern l­iberalism – that human nature is much less limiting than heretofore thought.25 The failures of modern politics and political science are expressed in the first sentences of the second and third paragraphs of Strauss’s autobiographical essay: “At that time [1925–28] Germany was a liberal democracy,” and “The Weimar Republic was weak.” Liberal democracy had proven unable to fulfil its promise to make the Jews equal citizens in a universal and homogeneous state. Modern liberalism, as conceived by its theoretical founders, Spinoza and Hobbes, was built on the premise that the ancient sources of civil conflict have a human rather than a natural or divine origin; and what men in their ignorance have brought into being, they can in their enlightenment put an end to. The early moderns had understood the primary source of conflict to be the diverse and mutually antagonistic religions; and they had intended that these be replaced by a single, authoritative political science. In order to accomplish this end, it was unwise and unnecessary to attack religion directly. Liberalism began by diluting religion: God is expanded, generalized, one might almost say secularized. He becomes first a god whom both Christian and Jew can accept; later Muslims are admitted, then perhaps Buddhists, and finally who? Atheists? At any rate, tolerance seemed to be the most effective weapon not only against the violence of the sect, but against the sect itself. The aim of toleration is ultimately to charm conflict out of existence. But however noble the aims of this project may have been, it suffered from two fatal defects. In the first place, tolerance is an effective political principle only so long as the state resolutely distinguishes between those activities that are tolerable (religious, artistic, literary, and economic enterprises, for instance) and those that are not (e.g., human sacrifice, the enforcement of “public morals,” and slavery). But this resolve means that the tolerant or liberal state is in reality only another sect, defending its principles with the same severity and exclusiveness that had characterized all “pre-liberal” societies. After thinking this through, we find only two obvious alternatives. We might defend liberal democracy merely because it is “our own.” But this means affirming the free sovereign creation of our liberal societies on grounds that would give equal support to the strongest currents of German society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And since cultures may change, or fail to change, in unpredictable ways, this means in principle affirming anything that our society might one day chose to do – anything at all. As a consequence, in part, of its original decency, Western thought has tended to move towards the other alternative: we have become “bewildered,” uncertain of our purpose.26

244  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

The other defect of modern liberal thinking, in the short run far more dangerous, lies in the temptation to believe that severity can be dispensed with altogether. Even today it is not unusual for people to talk as if a charitable openness were sufficient for political life – as if politics could always be done gently and tastefully. This comfortable sentiment relies at best on a confidence in “the tameness of modern western man,” at worst on the opinion that evil is merely historical, a thing of the past. To put it charitably, this belief is naive. And liberal naivety had the most grave consequences for Germany in the twenties and thirties, for it turned out that the political passions that had once been expressed in the Inquisition and the religious wars had only been thinly disguised, not extinguished, by the rise of liberalism. “The old Germany,” Strauss tells us, “was stronger – stronger in will – than the new Germany.” The failure of the liberal openness became evident in the weakness and eventual demise of the Weimar Republic. It had failed because “human beings will never create a society which is free of contradictions.” Men will always have differences of opinion concerning the most important things. And as long as men’s passions and interests can attach themselves to these opinions, the possibility of evil is real.27 “The weakness of the Weimar Republic,” Strauss says, “made certain its speedy destruction. It did not make certain the victory of National Socialism.” Whereas the former was a consequence of the opinion that evil had been eradicated, the latter was a consequence of the opinion that evil can be, but is yet to be, eradicated. Looked at from this point of view, one can say that the Holocaust indeed has historical roots in medieval civilization; but not quite in Christianity. The lesson of the Holocaust for contemporary Christians – a lesson that Fackenheim passionately and quite correctly urges his readers to seek after – may turn out to be the same lesson taught by the dark history of the crusades: the pursuit of conversion by means of blade and flame is a sign not of piety but of hubris.28 However the crusade or Inquisition may begin, it leads by natural necessity to the corrupt opinion that God’s work depends on man for its success, or that finite men can do deeds of infinite import. Having said this, I wish to avoid the appearance of an error that Professor Fackenheim has laboured relentlessly to oppose, that of reducing the Holocaust to merely an instance of something more general. The Holocaust was indeed more than “the negative side of a positive religious or political fanaticism.”29 Nor was it “just one ‘tyranny’ among others.”30 Strauss agreed that “there is a fundamental difference between classical tyranny and present-day tyranny, or that the classics did not even dream of present-day tyranny”; however,



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  245 that fact … is not a good or sufficient reason for abandoning the classical frame of reference. For that fact is perfectly compatible with the possibility that present day tyranny finds its place within the classical framework. The difference between present-day tyranny and classical tyranny has its root in the difference between the modern notion of philosophy or science and the classical notion of philosophy or science.31

The progression that leads from ancient to modern tyranny, as from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler, is geometrical rather than arithmetical: a new dimension is added, making the new unreducible to the old. But it is a progression, nonetheless. I believe that, according to Strauss’s thinking, the Holocaust can be understood; it is the final radicalization of a temptation that had already been once radicalized by Christianity: the temptation to believe that a final victory can be achieved – by men – here on earth. The political problem that Strauss confronts is solved as best it ever can be in the first quarter of the “Preface”: the solution is a liberal democracy that attempts to balance and disarm political tensions, but that knows that it can never eradicate them, as they are “sown in the nature of man.”32 The liberal democracy that Strauss proposes avoids the weakness that doomed Weimar because it “derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modern at all: the premodern thought of our western tradition.”33 All liberalism, ancient or modern, rests on the rational society. But for Plato, to take one example, the rational society was more limited in its nature than the one imagined by modern liberalism: for it does not attempt to transcend the distinction between friends and enemies. Any constitution that is likely to become actual must meet this minimum condition. It may be that the Socratic teaching alone can give liberalism a backbone. It attempts to harness the severity of political passions to the task of defending a society in which dialogue and diversity will be possible. It respects philosophy but allows the polis to remain political. If Strauss is right about all this, there will be no end to conflict and troubles within and between nations as long as this world lasts. But the most terrible disasters, at least, may be avoided; and there is reason to hope that decency and civilization will be the rule rather than the exception. But these considerations are insufficient. According to Professor Fackenheim, the classical account of human nature to which Strauss appeals has been shown to be fatally incomplete. Fackenheim stressed the fact that Strauss always exercised “prudence and restraint” in speaking of evil.35 He connects this restraint, correctly in my opinion,

246  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

with a Straussian distinction between two kinds of understanding. This distinction is found in Strauss’s famous statement: It is safer to understand the low in the light of the high, than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully for what it is.34

Professor Fackenheim calls this statement “a superb expression of a grandiose philosophical failure.” For the evil of the Holocaust does not disclose itself to the high; rather, it constitutes a “unique rupture” between the low and the high.35 However delicately he has put this, Fackenheim’s criticism is damning. It means that Strauss is guilty of the same denial that has paralysed contemporary thought and that puts the future itself in doubt. In order to respond to this charge, it is necessary to more fully articulate the account that Professor Fackenheim finds wanting. What does it mean to say that there is something low in the modern world, “the Third Reich, and its inmost essence, the Holocaust world,” which does not disclose itself to an understanding of the high? The high is an arrangement of matter, part, and attribute into a distinct “whole.” The low may be understood as that which is ordered by the high: individuals become citizens by virtue of a constitution, the parts of body and soul become a single human being by virtue of a human nature. The high is not only greater than the low but also better: the republic includes the citizens while being more than the sum of the citizens; appetites and passions exist for the sake of the human being, and not vice versa. We may also use the term “low” in a derogatory sense, to describe what is corrupt: this is when the proper arrangement of the parts is disturbed, and that which is lower or worse determines that which is better. A man’s reason ought properly to direct his passions; and together, reason and passion ought to direct the body. Corruption occurs when this order fails. If a man is ruled by his physical appetites, which are the lowest part of his constitution, he is simply base. The “low” in this sense still discloses itself to the high precisely because it is only in the light of the high that it can be understood as corrupt. Now, as pointed out above, it is difficult to see how the wholesale murder of Jews – an act of astonishing self-sacrifice and demonic idealism – can be explained by the Platonic model of the soul. But the difficult is not necessarily impossible. If Professor Fackenheim does not fully exploit the classical account of the soul, it is perhaps because he pays insufficient attention to the demands of Socratic



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  247

rhetoric. In the Republic, Socrates likens tyranny, criminality writ large, to a drunken man, or a man “mad and deranged”; the tyrant is someone “become drunken, erotic, and melancholic.” But the claim that tyrants are motivated primarily by the most vulgar desires is misleading. A more accurate account would have been that of a spirited man who feels that his virtue is unappreciated by the city. But imagine the effect of such an account on Glaucon! Socrates’s scheme has the virtue that it presents tyranny as something vulgar, in the ordinary sense, and thus repugnant to his spirited interlocutors.36 The price attached to his rhetorical device is that it obscures the explanatory power of his own account of the soul. We observe that whereas the high and the low constitute a dichotomy, the Platonic soul is a trichotomy. Only the basest sorts of corruption can be explained as the triumph of the body over the soul. There is also the triumph of the spirit, or the passions, over reason. The latter sort of corruption is far more dangerous than the former for two reasons. First, whereas the desires of the body are strictly limited, those of the soul are not. The passionate is almost identical to the human: for passions retain the physical perspective of the animal (I am proud of myself, angry for what is done to us, etc.), but at the same time are open to the infinite (men sometimes pursue goods like wealth and victory beyond any apparent regard to their usefulness or limits). Second, the superiority of spirit to appetite is manifest to everyone: it conceals covetousness behind a badge of honour, or at least of industriousness. Now, if we reflect on the difference between the passions and the appetites, it is possible to see that the problem of corruption becomes radicalized. And it is no surprise that political life has seemed to men like Plato’s Kleinias and Thomas Hobbes to be an endless war of all against all. But even though spirited men may irrationally covet an unlimited supply of instruments and resources, their corruption does not thereby become radical enough to comprehend such an event as the Holocaust; for the purposes that define those instruments are still finite and human. It is not quite enough to say that the heroic discipline with which the Nazis pursued their goal supports the classical account of spirit. Fackenheim compels us to ask how human beings could have pursued such an inhuman goal. However, just as he misjudges Plato because of a lack of attention to Socratic rhetoric, so he underestimates Strauss’s answer to this second, decisive question, because he does not appreciate Strauss’s rhetoric. Philosophical writing, Strauss contended, is of necessity concerned not only with truth but also with beauty and justice. In the words of Xenophon, “it is both noble and just, and pious and more pleasant to remember the good things rather than the bad ones.”

248  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

Just speech takes into account what is good or bad for the body politic.37 In order to understand why Strauss, like Xenophon, was “bashful,” we must understand the precise character of his restraint. And that inquiry goes to the heart of his analysis of modern evil. I suggest that Strauss’s restraint consisted primarily in an emphasis on what was instrumental to modernity, and a lack of emphasis on what was essential to modernity. Professor Fackenheim shares, it seems, an error common to many students and readers of Strauss: that error is to suppose that the ancient/ modern distinction is exhausted by the relative ranking of the low and the high in human understanding. It is true indeed that Strauss commonly identified modernity as a lowering of the goals of classical philosophy that was done in order to guarantee the achievement of those goals. Whereas the ancients had dreamt of a regime dedicated to human excellence, the moderns intended to achieve a regime based on peaceful but entirely vulgar pursuits. Yet if this lowering were the essence of modernity, one would be unable to describe Marx’s radicalization of Hegel, for instance, as modern; for the Marxist-Leninists seem to have reintroduced the “principality which has never been seen” as the aim of politics. The consistency becomes clear when one realizes that modernity’s lowering of ends was merely an intermediate step: once a “realistic” regime had been constructed, one has a new condition from which to set out towards yet another “lowered” standard. Modern science consists in the art of defining every question in such a way that its solution can be guaranteed. Modern political science, even at its infancy, was intended to generate a dialectic that would move inexorably towards the rational society. But the lowering of goals was merely expedient – like the alliances made by Lenin and Stalin: whenever possible it would be dispensed with in favour of a direct and brutal march towards the end. It is this that accounts, in part, for the peculiar viciousness of totalitarianism. Guided by a goal so distant from actual political life, modern tyrants were willing to do whatsoever might be necessary to advance towards that goal. So, the lowering of standards was still instrumental, and not essential to modernity: why were the ancient thinkers unwilling to lower their standards for the sake of achieving the best regime? In fact, they were willing to do so. In the Laws, Plato speaks of a first, second, and third best regime, of which only the last, the rule of law, was consonant with actual human circumstances. And Aristotle spoke of a generally best regime that, while it was not the best simply, was the best one that most men could attempt. In recommending these “lowered goals,” neither philosopher in any way detracted from the status



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  249

of the highest political goal: as always, the highest goal defines and stands in judgement over the lower goals. “Higher” and “lower” imply a common scale of reference. It is therefore quite misleading to suggest, as Strauss does, that the moderns have deliberately lowered the ancient goal of political science in order to make the goal attainable. For he says immediately afterward that “just as Hobbes later on abandoned the original meaning of wisdom in order to guarantee the actualization of wisdom, Machiavelli abandoned the original meaning of the good society or of the good life.”38 “Abandoned” is a more accurate term than “lowered.” The moderns in fact rejected the ultimate goal of the classical political philosophers and substituted a new one of their own. Between the ancient and modern political teaching, there is no common scale of reference. But some sacrifice of clarity in this matter was perhaps justified, if it was important to present modernity as something vulgar, in the ordinary sense. The character of modernity’s lowered goals was only a reflection of a more general change in the relationship between the low and the high in human understanding. The criminal, after all, had not viewed the high in the light of the low; rather, he had been unaware of the high, or had failed to recognize it for what it was. The moderns chose to view the high in the light of the low, and they did so in full awareness of what the high was or claimed to be. The simplest explanation for this decision is that the modern thinkers had to understand the high as the sum of the low in order to be able to construct the highest things. Such an understanding was necessary, because the lowest things, passions and appetites for instance, exist in abundance; perfection, on the other hand, seemed all but a dream.39 But to say that the higher things are composed of the lower things is not to say that the high is identical with the low or is determined by the low. Rather, the higher thing comes to be by adding something to the low: the whole – the form or design of the thing. It does no good to know of what something is composed if the form is unavailable, or incomprehensible. From whence comes the form? If the forms of things exist independently of man, if they are supplied by a superhuman order, then man is always dependent upon that order for the realization of the best things. Modernity would have had no use for its instruments if it had not proposed that human freedom, and not divine or natural necessity, might become the source of the forms: the highest things are artificial. The root of modernity, its essential principle, lies the idea that there is nothing independent of man that is superior in dignity to human artifice.40 Strauss uncovers this root on a number of occasions; but it seems to be the case that he de-emphasizes it. Why? The answer is consistent

250  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

with the thesis that he did in fact complete a return to classical political philosophy. Strauss claims that there is nothing in modernity of which the ancients were unaware: modernity was not something they failed to discover, but rather something they deliberately avoided.41 Nor is it difficult to say why they maintained an almost unbroken silence concerning it. The Socratics saw both that modernity would lead in the end to monstrous evil, and that it would be almost irresistibly tempting to man. By their silence they intended that men not be exposed to this temptation. I suspect that Strauss’s restraint on the subject of evil has that same intention. For the ancients, silence was sufficient, because the modern idea was as yet hidden from all but the very few. All premodern men had supposed that there was an order independent of and superior to man, that man was but a product of this order. The varieties of ancient thought – pious, pre-Socratic, sophistic, Socratic, etc. – differed from one another only concerning the character of that order and the relationship between it and the human things. Strauss, on the other hand, lived in a time when there was hope, or at least romance, invested in man’s struggle against his world. Indeed, ancient thinking was in danger of being forgotten altogether. But it was not yet forgotten: the old thinking appears to be more natural to human beings, and it has therefore been very difficult to extinguish. By paying more attention to the instruments of modernity than to its root, Strauss chose the least dangerous means of appealing to the remnants of ancient thinking. Anyone who has not consciously accepted the central proposition of modernity will find it repugnant to understand the high in the light of the low; Strauss need merely point out that this is what modern philosophy does. It would seem safest to strengthen and support those age-old opinions that have been the stays of moderate and just regimes. On the other hand, to bring full attention to the root of modernity is to bring about a crisis that may not always be necessary. For the reader will then be forced to choose between these two stark alternatives, without having any independent grounds upon which to make the choice. For what grounds would not already imply either obedience or rebellion? To say the least, modern political philosophy is an essential ingredient of those ideologies that Fackenheim labels as “idolatrous,” and that are responsible for this century’s great disasters. Says Strauss: The unjust city will be uglier, more condemnable, more deserving of indignation in proportion as the just city will be more possible. Anger, indignation … spiritedness could never come into their own if the just city was not possible. Or, inversely, exaltation of spiritedness is the inevitable



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  251 by-product of the utopia – of the belief that the cessation of evils is p ­ ossible – taken seriously; the belief that all evil is due to human fault … makes man infinitely responsible; it leads to the consequence that not only vice but all evil is voluntary.42

Socratic philosophy counters this extreme danger in two ways: in the first place, it teaches that man is always limited by chance; the best regime is so unlikely ever to come about that mortal men have no hope for it. Second, it teaches that the good that philosophy seeks is unaffected by man and his deeds: Glaucon, who at the beginning of the Republic has a haughty desire to rule, concludes towards the end that it doesn’t even matter whether the best regime is established or not. Christianity, on the other hand, may not have taken sufficient precautions against the exaltation of spiritedness; perhaps this accounts for the violence that embarrasses its history. At any rate, what was prevented by Socratic moderation, and would require a manifest corruption of the teaching of Christ, becomes the purest truth in the hands of Machiavelli and his followers: not only is it possible to conquer chance, but everything that is beautiful and good is solely a product of our own, human virtue. It may well be that the greatest threat to humankind lies in a criminal who is no longer satisfied with the theft of vulgar treasures, who will pursue the transcendent goals of philosophy with the same means and in the same spirit as characterize his criminal origins. In Fackenheim’s terms, he will literally identify the finite and the infinite; in Strauss’s terms, he will take philosophy personally. Of course, if we could know that the cessation of evil was an impossible ambition, that there were limits placed upon human action beyond which we cannot go without bringing much worse evils upon ourselves, then we would no longer be tempted. Unfortunately, to be human is to be tempted. It is always possible to believe that humankind can conquer nature, including human nature. One can demonstrate that communism has not yet been established, but can one also demonstrate that Stalin and his successors have not been building it? If the modern project can succeed, would one not be compelled to attempt it? On the day that it can be declared a success, the finite period of its establishment ends and an endless perfection or at least satisfaction will begin. No finite cost in pain and suffering can outweigh the infinite pain and suffering prevented. On the other hand, if modernity is an error, that error will continue to have horrible consequences. The magnitude of pain and death that will result from vigorous pursuit of the ideal is enormous: three times as

252  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr.

many human beings have been murdered by national and international socialists as died in all this century’s wars combined. If modernity is impossible because the world, of which man is only a part, is stronger than man, then the terror that the modern project requires would be in vain. And not only that. The attempt may never “fail”; it may continue, unfinished. Man in his pride might prolong the useless suffering indefinitely. It is perhaps no accident that the story that tells of a military expedition against heaven is meant to account for the existence of hell: a finite creature such as man can deserve an infinite punishment only if the immortality of his individual or collective soul makes it possible for him to endlessly renew his crime. For Socrates and the prophets, wisdom was obedience to the highest authority. Professor Fackenheim’s proposition that will, the willto-resist, must become the foundation of all future thought may blur the distinction between these two fundamental ways of being human, and therewith obscure the distance between the ground on which they both stand and that new continent discovered by Machiavelli. Fackenheim’s proposition may owe as much to the fact of Heidegger as to the fact of the Holocaust. However this may be, I believe it is unfortunate. For I emphatically agree with him that because of the Holocaust, the survival of Judaism has become an imperative for our civilization. But Judaism, Strauss pointed out, “based its claim to superiority to other religions from the beginning on its superior rationality.”43 And I wonder therefore whether the power of this tradition to inform the soul of the West – a power nowhere more evident than in the writings of Emil Fackenheim – does not depend on the survival of that distinct tradition represented by Leo Strauss. If so, then our own power to resist rests largely on what these two men had in common. I say that what one ought to think about the Holocaust depends on whether there is, as Leo Strauss maintained, an “eternal and unchanging order in which history takes place, and which is not, in any manner, affected by history”; or whether history is the loftiest thing, as Alexandre Kojève proposes. At the root of what man says and does is a question about Being. NOTES This chapter has been reprinted, with revisions, from Remembering for the Future, vol. 2, ed. Yehuda Bauer and Alice Eckhart (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989), 1815–29. The author is grateful to Elsevier Global Book Production for permission to republish.



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  253

  1 A revised version of this lecture, “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” was printed in the Claremont Review of Books in 1985 and republished in Emil L. Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 97–105.   2 Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers, 103.   3 This English translation occurs in Michael Platt’s essay “Leo Strauss: Three Quarrels, Three Questions, One Life,” in The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective, ed. K.L. Deutsch and W. Soffer (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), 22.   4 Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 233–40.   5 Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 31–2.   6 Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968).   7 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 263.   8 To Mend the World, 12.   9 Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 107. 10 Jewish Return into History, 89–90. 11 Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 157. Professor Fackenheim’s treatment of a Hegel-Holocaust confrontation is much deeper than my brief account suggests. “Hegel could not have viewed Nazi Germany as a lapse into ‘un-free’ spirit uninformed by the modern identity of the divine nature and the human … Still less could he have seen it as the work of the unspiritual, fragmenting ‘Understanding,’ when it fact it was a protest of sorts against it. At work was an all-too-spiritual anti-Spirit that affirmed the modern identity of the divine nature and the human in an unprecedented, enthusiastic, self-sacrificing celebration of hatred, degradation, and murder.” To be certain, the breakdown of Hegel’s synthesis was already apparent to Fackenheim before he came to appreciate the radicality of Auschwitz: see Fackenheim, Religious Dimension, 11–14. 12 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 88, 233. 13 Leo Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis,” L’Homme 21.1 (1981): 19. 14 Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, 113. 15 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 95. 16 Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, 23. 17 Jewish Return into History, 53. 18 Jewish Return into History, 48. 19 Fackenheim, Encounters, 179.

254  Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr. 20 Encounters, 187. 21 Fackenheim, “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” Claremont Review of Books (Winter 1985), 22. 22 Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, 93. 23 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Shocken Books, 1965), 3. 24 Strauss, On Tyranny (New York: Cornell University Press, 1963), 21. 25 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 338–9. 26 Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 3. 27 See Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 1. The analysis of modern liberalism is equally important to Professor Fackenheim, but his indictment is closer to the surface. The original offer of emancipation made to the Jews by the French Revolution was qualified, i.e., not genuine. See Fackenheim, Jewish Return into History, 149–50. Strauss on the other hand questions not so much the honesty as the power of the giver. If there was sin involved, it was the original sin of modernity. 28 Anyone who believes that Christianity is no longer in need of such lessons need only ask how far liberation theology is willing to go in its support for “people’s armies.” 29 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 12. 30 Fackenheim, “Leo Strauss and Modern Judaism,” 23. 31 Strauss, On Tyranny, 190. 32 James Madison, Federalist no. 10, n.d. 33 Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin, 81–98 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 98. 34 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 2, 345. 35 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 262–3. 36 Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 289. 37 Strauss, On Tyranny, 198. At the beginning of Plato’s Laws, the Athenian Stranger asks Kleinias whether a man or a god gets credit for Cretan laws. Kleinias replies: “A god, stranger, a god – to say what is at any rate the most just thing” (The Laws of Plato, trans. T.L. Pangle [New York: Basic Books, 1975], 3). Strauss points out that the most just answer is not necessarily the truest answer (The Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1975], 3). 38 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 178, italics mine. 39 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 179. 40 Natural Right and History, 172–173. 41 Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 295, and Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 228: “One can



Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Fackenheim and Strauss  255

safely say that there is no moral or political phenomenon that Machiavelli know or for whose discovery he is famous that was not perfectly well known to Xenophon, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle.” See also Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (Westport: Greenwood, 1959), 37, 43, and Strauss, “An Epilogue,” in Liberalism, 208. 42 Strauss, City and Man, 129. 43 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 30.

10 Wiesel and Fackenheim: Theology, Philosophy, and the Problem of Jewish Persecution sharon portnoff

Elie Wiesel and Emil L. Fackenheim were lifelong friends. Both survivors of the Holocaust, each felt the weight of his historical moment. Wiesel had grown up in an environment in which he recognized hostility towards Jews as “normal,”1 while Fackenheim grew up in one that was, ostensibly – at least until the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws – not opposed to Jews or Judaism.2 Both experienced the Nazi approach – 1933 for Fackenheim in Germany, 1944 for Wiesel in what was then Hungary – as bewildering; each was unable to believe what was happening. And so, while each had experienced antisemitism, each tried to make sense of what had become lethal antisemitism. Does genocide indicate that the Jewish God does not exist or has chosen another people? Is the Jewish God not strong enough to resist the assault of the other nations – or chooses not to?3 Or, rather, does lethal antisemitism indicate that Jewish persecution is solely a human – and not a divine – problem? Neither Wiesel nor Fackenheim is willing to let go of the Jewish God and the Jewish covenant; neither is willing to avoid these questions. Wiesel, with his experience of Jewish life and his visceral knowledge of antisemitism, had both more faith in God and more recognition of the need for faith.4 Fackenheim, while striving to preserve Judaism, and to do so Jewishly, nevertheless had less faith in God’s continuing power, or, to be more precise, his thought was informed by German Idealism: as we shall see, while he seemingly rejects Kant’s thought – which he argued marked the beginning of the modern project of internalizing God – he also, as he himself came to see, adopts it.5 He argues, with qualifications, for the possibilities implicit in human autonomy in the course of human history. While the projects of these friends were similar – working in “defense of their people,” as Wiesel formulated it,6 against what they understood as a hatred in which Christianity is implicated – their differences are reflected in the way in which each engaged Christianity and, more generally, in the



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  257

form in which each writes: Wiesel, in the text under consideration, writes to invite his readers to “relive”7 a pivotal moment in Judaism’s foundations, while Fackenheim argues that modern philosophy should be informed with Jewish theology. Both writers focused at some point on the Akeda to make sense of their experience, defend their people, and pass down the Jewish past to enable the making of a Jewish future. The Akeda, or the binding of Isaac, is among the most powerful stories in the Bible. In just nineteen verses, it tells of God’s commanding the Patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, and Abraham’s binding his son, taking the fire and the knife, and almost following through. The story, of course, invites many questions, about ethics, about God, about suffering; and many Midrashim – commentaries – were written through the centuries exploring its meanings and relevance to contemporaneous circumstances. This chapter will look at two texts, Wiesel’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Story” and Fackenheim’s “Abraham and the Kantians: Moral Duties and Divine Commandments,”8 to explore the ways in which they reveal a deeper conversation about the post-Holocaust role of God in human history and about how Jews or Judaism might address Christian Jew-hatred in a way that preserves the Jewish past while safeguarding the future of Jews. Both texts, as we shall see, point to the importance of presence – or relationship – as the foundation of moral action, and both texts are informed by their writers’, so to speak, stepping outside the Jewish past, in order to defend Jews. Wiesel dramatizes his meaning by referencing various Midrashim, through which, as he writes, “internal conflicts become tangible and visible”;9 one might say that Wiesel writes a memoir-essay about the Akeda – and the Midrashim about it – in order to invite his readers to enter into his “story”10 even as it initiates theological conversations. Fackenheim, meanwhile, at least in the text under discussion,11 writes, one might say, not as a philosopher strictly speaking, but as a philosopher-theologian. But because in both cases their thinking is impelled by historical events, neither text functions entirely within the terms of traditional Judaism, that is to say, of sacred history. This chapter will examine the texts in order to spell out the similarities and differences in each thinker’s proposal for how to both acknowledge the Holocaust and return, so to speak, to sacred history. Wiesel’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Story” The first section of Wiesel’s text presents his question: how does the progenitor of the sons of Israel pass down his past – his insight that God’s Presence coincides with his own12 – after he has been asked and

258  Sharon Portnoff

has agreed to sacrifice his son? How can this experience not close off the possibilities implicit in both father and son’s relationships with God? To begin to understand, we note Wiesel’s characterization of the Akeda at the beginning of the text. The event has no beginning or endpoint in time: “at every step”13 Abraham and Isaac are present in the action. To be present, Wiesel writes, Abraham and Isaac share in an experience when “for one moment all of creation held its breath.”14 And further, “the same fear penetrated father and son.”15 The suggestion is that by being present, Abraham and Isaac lose the specificity of their respective roles in the drama unfolding. Further, because for that one moment Abraham and Isaac enter eternity, as it were, their experience is our experience, transmitted “in the most intimate way.”16 This is all rather difficult to understand. Wiesel appeals to his readers not to understand the story but to live through it: his readers become present in the story – both the Bible’s and his own.17 In order to reveal to them both what the story teaches and how it teaches it – what it means to be present – he signals that he is writing a fairy tale (“Once upon a time …”), and he employs Midrash, going “so far as to imagine the unimaginable.”18 At the decisive moment of the Akeda, as Abraham lifts his hand to slay Isaac, according to a Midrash,19 Isaac, in anguish, sees the future – the Temple destroyed and rebuilt and his experience endured again and again, by his children and theirs. At the same moment, perhaps, Abraham’s “anguish” is “not linked to the future” but rather the past – the loss of “his knowledge of God and his faith in Him.”20 How was his past life meaningful if he destroys his knowledge of God along with his own future? Abraham, the father, and Isaac, the son, share the same fear even as the impetus for that fear is as far apart as could be. The only thing that connects the past with the future is that both father and son are present in this most fearful moment.21 The content of the past – Abraham’s insight that God’s Presence has, at some time before, “coincided” with his22 – is transmitted not by words or thoughts, but through the relationship between father and son. It is because of this relationship that Jacob – that Israel – can be born. The threat to Abraham’s aspirations and Isaac’s fear and hope, then, informs the experience of their descendants; “torture,”23 as it were, informs the foundations of Judaism. Wiesel retells the biblical story as a story, embellishing it with questions and insights, so that his readers too experience it. As he writes, “To me the Akeda was an unfathomable mystery given to every generation, to be relived, if not solved.”24 It is only by living through it that readers come to know that a chasm exists between Abraham’s remembrance of his covenant with God and Isaac’s hope for the future, even



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  259

while the coincidence of their relationship in a moment in which both are present binds the past with the future.25 Wiesel’s retelling of various Midrashim in which Satan tries to convince first Abraham, then Isaac, to disobey God’s command illustrates this point. Having failed in numerous attempts, Satan “would use the most dangerous weapon of all: truth.”26 He says, “Do you hear me, old man: you have nothing to fear, neither does Isaac. Whether you continue or turn back, it will all be the same. It is nothing but a game, a simple test. So stop tormenting yourself and taking yourself for a hero.”27 Satan is, after all, telling the truth; truth, then, stands in opposition to God’s command.28 But were Abraham to have been convinced of the truth of Satan’s argument, he would have removed himself from God’s Presence. Wiesel, it seems, re-enacts the command of God’s angel: to understand the difference between intellectual and experiential truth is to be present in the story that first the biblical authors and then he tells. The Akeda describes the “precise point where despair and faith were to meet in a fiery and senseless quest.”29 Despair and faith meet when one doubts God and has the evidence to back up one’s doubt. To choose despair is “fiery”; to choose faith is “senseless.” The recognition that Abraham must be in relationship with God and with Isaac if he is to choose faith is shared by Wiesel and Fackenheim. But while the former invites his readers to “relive” without resolving the Akeda, the latter argues, as we shall see, that the Akeda teaches the absolute rejection of child sacrifice, and, since the rejection serves as the foundation of God’s Presence with the people Israel, Jews need not, strictly speaking, be present for it. Wiesel, for the most part,30 chooses faith over despair, while Fackenheim argues that the evident – what makes “sense” – is a means by which, through human choice, one might overcome despair with faith. Just as he dramatizes Abraham’s presence – his despair and faith – when he is commanded to sacrifice his son, so too Wiesel dramatizes Isaac’s presence, which, as was mentioned above, is as far apart in content as can be from Abraham’s. But both Abraham and Isaac are “victims,” “in spite of their opposing roles.”31 Wiesel emphasizes the possibility that Isaac might not have survived, stressing the importance of Isaac’s not being sacrificed. His emphasis stands in marked contrast with the primary title of his text, “The Sacrifice of Isaac”: despite the importance of Isaac’s survival, Wiesel will not allow his readers to remove themselves from the concern that the “miracle” of Isaac’s having been saved might not have happened.32 To kill the son, even for his father’s sin of preferring Isaac over Ishmael, as one Midrash teaches33 – Wiesel alludes, perhaps, to the rivalry between Jews and Christians

260  Sharon Portnoff

and, perhaps, Muslims – is to “mutilate the very image of God,” since it is God Himself who commanded that human beings shall not kill.34 The passage is worth quoting in full: For the Jew, all truth must spring from life, never from death. To us, crucifixion represents not a step forward but a step backward: at the top of Moriah, the living remains alive, thus marking the end of an era of ritual murder. To invoke the Akeda is tantamount to calling for mercy – whereas from the beginning Golgotha has served as pretext for countless massacres of sons and fathers cut down together by sword and fire in the name of a word that considered itself synonymous with love.35

Wiesel implicates Christians both explicitly and implicitly: while in Judaism, Abraham is asked by God to “become inhuman”36 – to keep God company, perhaps, in His lonely relationship with human beings – in Christianity, the realization of the Crucifixion has served as a “pretext” to murder Jews. Wiesel identifies the distinction between what the Christian God might want and how He has been used as a pretext for slaughter in his extension of the sacrifice of the son to the “countless massacres of sons and fathers.” Just as the killing of Isaac in Judaism is the killing of the image of God, so too the actual killing of sons and fathers – what Fackenheim, as we shall see, refers to as the transmutation of intention into execution37 – kills the Christian God along with His Son. God, then, desires the killing of Jews as “ritual murder” either because Christ was crucified or to serve as an example to “leaders of the world.”38 It is a “mistake,”39 though, to translate the Akeda as “sacrifice”: in the Christian Bible too Isaac is not sacrificed, he is merely “bound.”40 We have learned already that to look back in a way that is open to the future and the eternal, one must be present. The Crucifixion, Wiesel suggests, is a step backwards because neither human beings nor God can be present: human beings because mercy was not shown, God because human beings killed His Image. The question of how to encounter the role of Christians or Christianity in the Holocaust is raised by both Wiesel and Fackenheim’s texts. In fact, it seems it was Wiesel who awakened Fackenheim to the idea that not just Judaism but also Christianity died at Auschwitz.41 The latter too, as I have just said, invokes the transition from the theologically imagined to the actual killing of Jews, but Fackenheim’s argument points more to medieval Jewish responses than to (premodern) Christian culpability.42 He thus argues – in seeming opposition to Wiesel43 – that there is precedent for Jews to fight persecution without God’s Presence. Underlying their different directions is how to choose – since



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  261

it might seem in our historical moment that Jews must – between Judaism and Jews. That is to say, what is the better strategy for “defending one’s people”: the passing down of the past of Midrashic Judaism (“it is better to err in ignorance than presumptuously”)44 at the risk of complete decimation,45 or the safe perpetuation of Jews at the risk of a Judaism cut off from its past, a Judaism whose authority issues solely from human beings and not from God? Wiesel emphasizes the former option – though he does not, as we shall see, relinquish his human authority – and in this way incorporates hope for God into contemporary Jewish-Christian relations.46 His text is, in its way, an invitation to revelation through the ambiguity of his writing, its evocative quality, and the dramatization that it is the same God Who revealed Himself to Jews of the past in his citing of Midrash. Fackenheim, as we shall see, is more concerned with Jewish survival;47 he writes rationally – or quasirationally – even as he reformulates Midrashic Judaism in a way that leaves open the possibility of God’s Presence. Both Wiesel and Fackenheim, however, affirm that to choose one strategy to the exclusion of the other cannot perpetuate the Jewish past into a Jewish future after the Holocaust. Wiesel’s text invites its readers to “relive” the Akeda so that its writer might pass down his insight that he, like Abraham and Isaac, experienced a moment when God was not Present, even as the insight serves to reaffirm the relationship between God and his people. But by affirming the need to relive the Akeda, Wiesel in a way undermines the foundation on which what Fackenheim calls the developed life of Judaism48 rests. In order to point to the way in which he might uphold both divine and human authority – that is, in which he might perpetuate Midrashic Judaism and guard Jews’ safety – in this post-Holocaust moment, Wiesel reminds us that an angel – and not God Himself – appears to order Abraham to halt the sacrifice. A Midrash teaches that “God alone may order death, but to save a human life, an angel is enough.”49 But Wiesel prefers his own explanation,50 that the Akeda is a “double edged test.”51 That is to say, not only was God testing Abraham, also Abraham was testing God: would God allow Abraham to go through with it? God’s sending of his angel to stop the sacrifice is Abraham’s first “victory”; his second “victory” is to challenge God, who is “embarrassed” at the proceedings, to appear Himself.52 According to a Midrash that Wiesel cites, Abraham argues with the angel until “God had to give in again: He Himself finally had to tell Abraham not to harm his son.”53 To obey God, it seems, invites a translation of God’s meaning into human terms, so to speak, that appear at once with God’s terms: “while God cannot suspend His law, it is given to man – to man and not to God – to

262  Sharon Portnoff

interpret it.”54 More to our point, Wiesel finds in this Midrash precedent for challenging and questioning God without usurping God’s authority. But he stretches the precedent perhaps too far, inviting his readers to relive the pre-rabbinic foundations of the Akeda; that is, as Fackenheim might put it, for Wiesel, the Akeda does not teach – or no longer teaches – that sacrifice is absolutely rejected. To put this another way, Wiesel steps outside of the Jewish past in order to explain to his ­readers – even as he invites them to relive the Akeda – why their presence is needed. Wiesel suggests that, after the Akeda, God “understands man better … He knows it is possible to push some endeavors too far.”55 His asking Abraham for his “total commitment” to his “battle” or “theory”56 at the expense of his being present – his even “making believe that he was obeying”57 God – precludes the possibility of his relationship with God because it nullifies Abraham’s human experience.58 God must, so to speak, meet Abraham in the hailing distance between the divine and the human. But it is not only God on Whom the possibility for the divine-human relationship rests; Abraham must also, paradoxically, disobey God for the possibility. If Abraham refuses to remain human – to remain present to his human relationships – God, paradoxically, will have failed the test. The Akeda is a double-edged test because it issues in a meaning neither entirely divine nor human, or, alternatively, both divine and human. Wiesel dramatizes that this meaning of the Akeda is what can or should be passed down from the Jewish past because the Jewish future depends on the divine-human relationship. And yet, in the modern context, what we mean by “human” may have changed: Abraham’s “humanness” may not be simply to be present to his relationships with God and Isaac, but also to be conscious of that presence.59 Near the beginning of the text, Wiesel had raised the concern that inspires or impels it: “The question is no longer whether Isaac was saved but whether the miracle could happen again. And how often. And for what reasons. And at what cost.”60 In other words, while what can or should be passed down from the Akeda is the divine-human relationship that issues from the coincidence of divine and human presence – God’s, Abraham’s, Isaac’s61 – Wiesel questions whether God’s Presence remains. Rather than answering, he invites his readers to relive the Akeda without self-consciousness. This is most evident when he writes a single word to introduce a Midrash of particular moment: “Listen …”62 Without commentary, he retells the Midrash, which dramatizes that Abraham exacts from God His promise that He will forgive Abraham’s children and children’s children who act against God’s will and law. Wiesel claims the Midrash as his own63 and yet removes



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  263

himself as interlocutor between Midrash and readers. The strategy lends immediacy to the Midrash and creates a unity, as it were, of the Jewish past and the present: the moment includes the past, the future, himself and his readers. The Akeda, then, is brought into a present that includes consciousness of its past, even as it is relived: “[T]he theme and term of the Akeda is used throughout the centuries, to describe the destruction and disappearance of countless Jewish communities everywhere.”64 His “storytelling”65 – his dramatizing the Akeda so that his readers “relive” it – is the writer’s means of, so to speak, creating God’s Presence and, more particularly, God’s mercy. In suggesting that the question has changed (“… is no longer …”), Wiesel, like Fackenheim, goes a step beyond the Akeda and its commentaries, to Kant’s question – as we shall see below in our discussion of Fackenheim – of whether revealed morality can be moral: is it God, is it Christians, is it Jews that adhere to the “torture” that informs the foundations of revealed religion? During Wiesel’s own holocaust66 it was not the son but the father who was sacrificed: the Akeda is upended, opening the way for the story – for the relationship with God – to be rejected, paradoxically, through the presence that it teaches. There were “some who went mad when they saw their father disappear on the altar, with the altar, in a blazing fire whose flames reached into the highest of heavens.”67 The altar too disappears: God does not learn forgiveness, and God is destroyed. Wiesel’s dramatization, then, that the double-edgedness of the test – the interconnectedness of divine and human authority that describes the covenant – enables him to remain within the terms of Midrashic Judaism comes to a halt.68 If the altar is gone, there perhaps can be no sacred history; the developed life of Judaism, as Fackenheim formulates it, is at the least at an end and, perhaps, cannot be moral.69 While “Abraham defied God, Isaac defied death.”70 Like Wiesel, Isaac “became a poet – author of the Mincha service – and did not break with society. Nor did he rebel against life. Logically, he should have aspired to wandering, to the pursuit of oblivion. Instead, he settled on his land, never to leave it again, retaining his name. He married, had children, refusing to let fate turn him into a bitter man … After Moriah, he devoted his life and his right to immortality to the defense of his people.”71 Logically, we are in the realm of “despair” over what actually happened; but by “retaining his name,” Isaac earns the “right to immortality” by both acknowledging the reality of what happened to him and also “not break[ing] with society.” The fault of the suffering of the innocent72 as a side-product of Abraham’s “total commitment” to God is now shared by both God and Abraham, because God pushed

264  Sharon Portnoff

things too far, putting Abraham in the position of aspiring to be godlike. But “Isaac knew how to transform [his suffering] into prayer and love rather than into rancor and malediction.”73 It is for this reason that he “laughs.” Wiesel’s text, as might be clear, is one that invites its readers to “relive” faith, even as it questions the legitimacy of that faith. His questioning is not, as Fackenheim points out, unlike the doubt of the rabbis when they too call upon Midrash. In this way, Wiesel’s doubt is a manifestation of sharing in the faith of his people. His use of storytelling and his call to past Midrashim dramatize his recognition of the priority of faith, despite what that faith might expose one to. While Wiesel “defends his people” by locating a partnership between Jews and God, between past and future, nevertheless his calling into question the persistence of the Akeda’s altar calls into question also whether Midrashic Judaism can survive. And yet, for Wiesel, it remains a question: by dramatizing the presence of God, Abraham, and Isaac – and inviting his readers into that presence – his text makes manifest the ever-presence of the Akeda, its past and its present, and the future hope that was then imagined. He would, as it were, create the God in Whose ways he would walk. And further, he would teach that Christians too need that presence: only through fostering an ability to listen to Jews in dialogue can Christianity survive. Fackenheim’s “Abraham and the Kantians: Moral Duties and Divine Commandments” As we have said, Fackenheim and Wiesel influenced each other; they were good friends, and one suspects that Fackenheim’s loss of his brother and uncle – along with his having to study, given the Nuremberg Laws, Judaism rather than philosophy, his primary interest74 – may have drawn him to Wiesel in unexpected ways. Wiesel, as we have seen, was in the text under consideration a “storyteller” as well as a memoirist and theologian. By inviting his readers to “relive” the Akeda, he reveals a means by which to make hidden worlds visible, pointing to what is underneath, so to speak, the visible language of the text. Drawing on the tradition of Midrash, by which the rabbis, without worldly power, gave voice to their presence, their doubts, and the hope that their Midrash-making dramatized, Wiesel claimed their power. At the same time, however, he steps outside Torah in order to affirm explicitly – i.e., in the words of the memoirist-storyteller – the threat to the Jewish (and Christian) connection to the Akeda: torture and hope once grew out of Abraham and Isaac’s experience with God beyond



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  265

the human, so to speak, but now, perhaps, the altar itself has gone up in flames. What is left is only what human thought divorced from the divine – divorced from hope – can recognize: torture. Fackenheim did not invite his readers to relive moments of the Jewish sacred past. But just as Wiesel sought to reveal hidden worlds to invite his readers to be present with the divine, Fackenheim argued that there are irrational worlds that inform – for better or for worse – human action.75 And just as Wiesel wrote the memoir-theology-story of his experience beyond the human, so too Fackenheim – in the text we will consider – wrote philosophy-theology that issued from knowledge of experience beyond humanity. He invites his readers not to relive but to reassess the Akeda, within the new terms of sacred-secular history.76 That is to say, he takes Wiesel’s work one step further by seemingly answering his question – “… And at what cost …” – in the hope that the response might become, at least temporarily, the foundation of thought. While Wiesel dramatizes that the Jewish past has, perhaps, no permanent content – that is, the Jewish past is the presence of the human-divine relationship – Fackenheim spelled out the terms of that relationship so as to safeguard Jews and secure the Jewish future. As we shall see, he argues that what Kant characterizes as the irrationality – and thus immorality – of revealed law nevertheless grounds morality in a way both more just and that philosophical rationality cannot.77 For Fackenheim, this was especially pressing because experience had proved to him that morality cannot be rational only.78 Morality must rely also on lived experience – and perhaps, as Fackenheim argues, on the possibility of revelation. But, as we shall see, the dependence of his argument on the necessary transition from morality to religion – which Kant proposes – challenges him as, he argues, it persisted in challenging Kant, to address the problem of human autonomy in assessing the morality of revealed law. In other words, just as Jewish theology was confronted with Kant’s categorical imperative, so too was revelatory religion in general. In his earlier thought, Fackenheim looks to Midrash to formulate his argument, but the fundamental irrationality of Midrash – which he ­categorizes79 – was not sufficient to the moment: even as he recognized the power of Midrash to sustain and revitalize Judaism, he characterizes the Holocaust as an “epoch-making event”80 that premodern forms of Midrash could not adequately address.81 He was struck by historical consciousness and was less interested in what was beneath the words of a text than in the real-world ramifications of what was spelled out. He concurred with Wiesel insofar as he recognized – at least at the time of the relatively early text that we will consider – the

266  Sharon Portnoff

centrality of Midrash for the perpetuation of Judaism,82 but rather than follow in the steps of the rabbis after the Destruction – as far as might be possible – he re-enacted their impulse: the religion is threatened with complete destruction; how does one implant at the religion’s root that at some point in their past it was possible that Jews and Judaism no longer have worldly power?83 Unlike the rabbis, who in writing Midrash continued to work within the terms of sacred history, Fackenheim steps outside it to inform his thinking with secular experience: for him the possibility that there is no God – or that human beings have abandoned God decisively (or God, human beings) – was too salient to escape into believing that recent experience might serve as a sign of God’s purpose for Jews.84 The Midrashic form was necessary so that the religion might remain Jewish – that is, grounded in the particular irrationality reflected in Midrash – but Jewish powerlessness had reached its limit.85 Like Wiesel, he recognizes the contemporary need for relationship, but what Wiesel asks his readers to relive as though they were present, Fackenheim rationalizes in the semi-revelatory reason of post-Kantian thought. And so Fackenheim turns to the Akeda to consider what might have been taught about the possibility of the end of the religion at the religion’s beginning: surely God’s commandment that a human being kill another human being impugns God; how is the Akeda salvaged – indeed, how is it foundational – for Jewish morality? Kant, as we shall see, rejects the Akeda for this very reason. But Fackenheim asks whether what we might consider immoral can be moved past without abandoning the foundations of Jewish morality, and further, whether this rejection is possible within the terms of what Judaism will become. And so he begins by explaining how it can be that Judaism both aspires to the morality enacted at the Akeda and also rejects what Abraham was commanded to do. He argues that the Akeda is moved past within Torah itself and that this moving past may provide the Jewish foundation, as it were, for future – that is, post-Holocaust – thought.86 More precisely, he argues, as we shall see, that the Holocaust may provide the occasion when pre-Holocaust Jewish morality (kiddush ha-Shem) might be moved past. It is to be noted that Fackenheim’s thought is motivated by historical experience – and historical consciousness of that experience – and so is not, strictly speaking, theological or philosophical: in informing his thought with what Judaism will become, he changes the terms of Torah from sacred to secular history, arguing that today “[s]acred and ‘secular’ history cannot be, for a Jew, two things wholly apart.”87 This is the heart of his strategy – which was not to change even in his later thought: he argues that historicism must now inform thought since it



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  267

now informs experience, even as he leaves open the possibility that at some future point it may be discarded in favour of a return to sacred history.88 In the text we will consider, “Abraham and the Kantians: Moral Duties and Divine Commandments,” Fackenheim’s encounter with the Akeda89 is informed by his encounters with Kant and Kierkegaard, whose work is a “response to Kant.”90 Because Fackenheim affirms the need for Jews to claim some worldly power without abandoning the possibility of God’s Presence, he adopts (or quasi-adopts) and rejects (or quasi-rejects) both Kant’s teaching of autonomy and Kierkegaard’s teaching of faith. Because he affirms the need for Jews to remain Jews and for the Presence to remain the Jewish God, he contextualizes Kant and Kierkegaard’s formulations of autonomy and faith within what he understands to be Judaism. The Torah, he notes, both supports and challenges Kierkegaard’s knight of faith: God’s Presence is always a possibility, but also some things must be rejected. Likewise, it supports and challenges Kant’s moral imperative: it teaches both that Jews must reject God’s call to Abraham – insofar as Judaism rejects child sacrifice – and also “exalts Abraham for what he did (or was prepared to do) at Mount Moriah.”91 He argues that the original Akeda can be accepted at the same time as “any possible present Akedah”92 can be rejected: while Torah challenges Jews to see the moment of ultimacy that Abraham experienced, they are not invited, strictly speaking, to relive that moment because they are members already of the covenant that was then affirmed. Fackenheim’s argument is grounded in Micah 6:6–893 and in the Midrash on it in Genesis Rabbah 55:5.94 Micah 6:8 provides the threeterm morality of Judaism: justice, mercy, humility; the Midrash on Micah 6–7 connects the rejection of sacrifice implicit in Micah’s formulation with the Akeda. Read with the Midrash, then, Micah teaches that the rejection of sacrifice – as epitomized in the Akeda – results in the three terms of Jewish morality. In Fackenheim’s words: [God] confronts man with the demand to turn to his human neighbor, and, in doing so, turn back to God Himself. Micah’s celebrated summary of the commandments does more than list three commandments that exist side by side. For there is no humble walking before God unless it manifests itself in justice and mercy to the human neighbor. And there can be only fragmentary justice and mercy unless they culminate in humility before God.95

Jewish morality, then, is grounded in relationship – with Torah, with God, and with other human beings – and arises as the result of the

268  Sharon Portnoff

rejection of sacrifice. Insofar as he accepts the original and rejects subsequent iterations of the Akeda, Fackenheim both adopts and challenges the thought of Kierkegaard and Kant by juxtaposing their thought with what Torah teaches about relationship: the interconnectedness of Godhuman being-neighbour is given by God. He argues for the need to affirm this relationship as the foundation of Jewish morality even in the face of rationality. So while Jewish morality and Kantian morality agree in their recognition that humanity has intrinsic value, for Kant the intrinsic value of moral law and of humanity is ultimate, therefore – because humanity is an end in itself – the Akeda must be rejected as having always been immoral.96 For Kierkegaard humanity, radically considered, has only relative value since God might call on the knight of faith to suspend the ethical; for him, then, the Akeda is preserved, but can have no end.97 Judaism, however, need not choose: while Kant affirms the immorality of child sacrifice, and Kierkegaard affirms the priority of the two-term relationship between God and Abraham, Fackenheim builds his argument against either position alone by grounding it in the three-term relationship established in the Akeda and reaffirmed in Micah and Genesis Rabbah.98 But can there be a revealed morality in the sense that Judaism (or another revealed religion) understands it? Both Kierkegaard and Kant challenge this possibility. At the time of this earlier text Fackenheim argues, more or less simply, that the answer is yes. And yet neither Kierkegaard nor Kant reflects the ways in which Judaism might address this question. Fackenheim, we should note, is in this text concerned more with the Jewish encounter with modern thought than, as Kant was – and indeed as Wiesel was – with the encounter between revelatory religion generally and modern thought. Kierkegaard argues that because the divine voice claims to speak immediately to him, Abraham must face up to this claim – even if it is ultimately rejected. But he posits that Abraham knows what is ethical, in its universality, and knows that the divine voice must remain objectively uncertain. The individual who determines his relationship to the absolute by his relationship to the universal is thus juxtaposed with the individual who determines his relationship to the universal by his relationship to the absolute, i.e., the knight of faith, which threatens morality with destruction. Against Kierkegaard Fackenheim argues that Jews cannot stand in absolute relation to the divine voice because Torah teaches – as a result of the Akeda – that an ever-present relationship exists also, and interconnectedly, between and among human beings. When Kierkegaard argues for the teleological suspension of the ethical – at least at its extreme – there is no real relationship among human beings: if the ethical is suspended



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  269

once, it is potentially suspended any time. In contrast, Torah concerns itself with care for another, and the knight of faith is isolated from others in a way that Torah cannot tolerate.99 In Judaism, there can be no suspension of the ethical once Torah is given: the Akeda is present for the believer as a “perpetually reenacted and superseded”100 past that dramatizes the three-term relationship of God-human being-neighbour. It is Kant, however, that poses the stronger challenge: “it is Kant that breaks new ground,”101 Fackenheim writes, identifying his thought as what ushers in the break from medieval thought, when reason and revelation could coexist in mutual toleration. Most simply, Fackenheim argues – on the basis of the three-term relationship he identifies in Micah – that when Kant argues that it is “absolutely certain [that a man] may not kill … [his] good son,”102 he does not expose his thought to the God-givenness of the relationships implicit in the covenant. Kant argues that Abraham should have been certain that the commanding voice was not divine because it commanded something contrary to moral law: there can be no revealed morality because morality is rational.103 The moral law, then, is autonomous, or self-imposed, and the morality of the law must come from within the person who obeys. But Kant leaves room for revelation insofar as he argues that the human being does not necessarily create moral law, but moral will must act as though it did; that is, the human being must accept himself as obligated in order to be obligated. Nevertheless, “the God-givenness of a moral commandment becomes inessential in the act of human appropriation.”104 Fackenheim argues that relationship must be the foundation of moral action, and, insofar as Kant’s view of morality is that it is self-legislating reason that is attributed to God only because it is intrinsically moral, there is no real relationship to God.105 Kant’s challenge to Judaism (and to revealed religion in general) is, more deeply, his argument, first, that revealed law comes from outside the human self, and second, that it is actually revealed. Kant’s categorical imperative reveals the foundation of morals as autonomy (or self-determination) and the recognition of humanity as ends in themselves. Since the human being is capable of self-determination, he is obliged to actualize this capacity. Suicide or religious sacrifice is self-murder because it reduces the human being to a thing and thus ends the process of self-determination. Because, according to Kant, Isaac is reduced to a thing in the Akeda, Abraham’s obedience is condemned. But this is not sufficient for Fackenheim, whose project informs thought with experience; he argues that Kant’s objection to Abraham’s obedience in the Akeda fails to recognize the Jewish experience – the realworld experience – of martyrdom. Kant, for instance, does not address

270  Sharon Portnoff

Wiesel’s concern, and the concern of certain Midrashim: if Isaac is a “knowing, willing adult participant,”106 should he have acquiesced?107 That is to say, should he have allowed the religious commandment to be enacted? Recognition of such a concern would, perhaps, have led Kant to identify a distinction between the seeking out of martyrdom and martyrdom as theologically (or historically) necessary. While Wiesel could hardly be said to have promoted martyrdom as theological necessity, his identification with Isaac suggests, at the least, that Isaac is not an object; he is, like Wiesel, and like Jews in many times and places, an involuntary participant, “collateral damage” of a specifically Christian (or post-Christian) encounter with God, but one that nevertheless grounds Jewish suffering in “laughter.”108 Against Kant Fackenheim argues that in Judaism revealed law is not autonomous, first, because it stands in relation to the Commanding God; and second, because human beings must perform commandments both for their own sake and for the sake of God. Insofar as the adoption of the belief in human autonomy challenges revealed religion, it challenges both Judaism and Christianity; but the uniqueness of Judaism, according to Fackenheim, and what makes its encounter with Kant’s thought more problematic, is the interconnectedness of what it teaches one does for its own sake and for God’s sake.109 Commandments are not truly performed until they are performed for their own sake, and therefore revealed law is not simply heteronomous: it can be both revealed and moral. The Torah serves as a bridge between God and the human being. To obey God, the human being accepts his neighbour and the commandments regarding his neighbour.110 As we saw above in Fackenheim’s reading of Micah 6:8, the Torah enables love among human beings and is a gift from God that can be appropriated by humanity. It teaches – and gives – the ever-present interconnected relationship of God-human being-neighbour. Abraham’s covenant marks the moment that the interconnectedness of the three-term relationship is established: “By Myself I swear, the Lord declares: Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your favored one, / I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore; and your descendants shall seize the gates of their foes. / All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your descendants, because you have obeyed My command.”111 The Akeda is, in other words, a pivotal moment within Torah itself; its teaching is in this sense self-authenticating – or perhaps, as Wiesel might formulate it, its teaching is “to imagine the unimaginable.”112 The foundation of Jewish morality is irrational: it emerges from the ongoing give and take that



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  271

characterizes the relationship between and among human beings and God. While on the one hand, Kant condemns Abraham because for him the divine-human relationship is a rational moral relationship, and on the other hand, Kierkegaard praises Abraham, such that every moral relationship is threatened by teleological suspension, Torah avoids either condemning or praising Abraham because it is the Akeda – the paradox of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son coexisting with God’s teaching that he should not – that is the foundation of the covenant between God and Israel, a covenant that includes Israel’s care for its neighbour.113 Fackenheim characterizes this seeming paradox as the distinction between what he calls the “pristine moments of divine Presence in which every content and all standards are called into question”114 and the developed life of revealed morality, that is, revelation as a system with intrinsic value. Once Torah has been given, humanity itself is a gift from God.115 Pristine moments call all standards into question and require human will to decide for or against divine will. These moments require that human will be one with divine will, motivated by only the pure love of God. The Akeda is one such moment, but, Fackenheim argues, because God’s Presence issued a commandment that was specific, it does not, as we said above, ask Jews to relive it. Jews, in other words, encounter the text bound already by the covenant then affirmed. Nevertheless, Judaism as the developed life of revealed morality makes room for pristine moments in its distinction between moral and religious commandments, that is, for commandments that do not, so to speak, issue directly from God’s Presence. Moral commandments are performed for their own sake, as Kant argues, but remain revealed because they can be abrogated by their divine source;116 religious commandments are performed for God’s sake, which, contra Kierkegaard, does not dissipate the intrinsic value of subsequent commandments that are not given through God’s Presence. By pointing to Judaism’s distinction between moral and religious commandments and contextualizing this distinction within the framework of the difference between pristine moments and the developed life of revealed morality, Fackenheim, as it were, makes room for what one might suggest is a new kind of commandment, one that responds to both Kant and Kierkegaard; one that, so to speak, is an echo from Judaism’s past – now rejected – that remains as the patriarch’s enactment of his faith in the future within his relationship with God. This new kind of commandment is the issuing of a moral law, which, barring a new specific commandment, has, like the Akeda, the ability to be suspended and yet, unlike the Akeda, its suspension takes place within secular and not strictly speaking sacred

272  Sharon Portnoff

history. Fackenheim identifies kiddush ha-Shem, Jewish martyrdom, as both fundamental to Jewish morality and what might now be suspended; that is to say, what might be specifically commanded to the post-Holocaust Jew is that he or she reject self-sacrifice. Fackenheim argues that since the moral law is divinely given, pristine moments of divine Presence are only relatively pristine since some value is given already. The gift of the Akeda, the interconnected of God-human beingneighbour, remains a gift, given as a result of Abraham’s merit in his willingness to sacrifice his son, even as our historical consciousness may call into question the morality of self-sacrifice. Kant rejects the Akeda because, although it is possible to accept with subjective certainty what is objectively without doubt, it is absolutely certain that a human being may not kill his good son. But his thought rules out a priori all possible pristine divine commandments given in God’s Presence – specific commandments from God – in favour of pristine commandments and universal Presence. Simply by virtue of what was commanded, the voice speaking to Abraham was a priori false, and in obeying, Abraham was an idolator.117 That Kant does not allow for the possibility of specific commandments is a crucial insight for Fackenheim because it reveals that Kant, rather than confronting the problem of sacrifice, disregards it. While perhaps open to moral sacrifice, he excludes the possibility of religious sacrifice. And although Fackenheim too might wish to end the possibility of self-sacrifice, he does not exclude it: for him, as for the rabbis, a specific religious sacrifice might be commanded at one time and abrogated at another. The question for Fackenheim is: is the post-Holocaust moment the right time to abrogate kiddush ha-Shem?118 Jewish tradition understands the Akeda as a religious sacrifice that occurred once through God’s Presence and that thereafter forbids child sacrifice. Like the Akeda, Fackenheim argues, the Holocaust teaches that sacrifice is forbidden. In the first case, it is child sacrifice that is forbidden; in the second, it is self-sacrifice, i.e., kiddush ha-Shem. And there is precedent for this rewriting of the Akeda’s meaning: when it was needed to confront persecution of Jews in medieval times, the Akeda was appropriated to reframe child sacrifice as martyrdom.119 Kiddush ha-Shem was a strategy – derived from Torah – by which Jews in Mayence and Worms attempted to preserve Judaism during the persecutions of the Crusades: one should martyr oneself for the sake of preserving God’s image in the human being. Accompanying this action was the belief either that God is eternal, or that there will remain a “holy remnant” of Jews to perpetuate the religion, or both.120 This Jewish medieval appropriation of the Akeda, like its appropriation by



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  273

Christians, as Wiesel – more interested in the problem of revelatory morality ­generally – points out, transformed its ending: the sacrifice was completed. Intention became execution because Jews were singled out in history for slaughter. In the context of Jewish sacred history, the religious commandment may be binding because it upholds the perpetuation of the covenant’s interconnectedness of God-human being- neighbour, and further, because no commandment was issued to abrogate it.121 Fackenheim argues that because we are historically conscious – because, so to speak, historical consciousness has been attained in execution – Jews must now take a step beyond the medieval appropriation of kiddush ha-Shem.122 They must now suspect that there will be no theodicy sufficient to save Jews, their neighbours, or the Jewish God.123 Fackenheim, then, follows Kant insofar as he regards religious sacrifice as no longer commanded: because the historical context has changed – from belief in the externality and revealedness of the commandments to autonomy and the self-imposition of them; and from the usefulness of the theodicy of the holy remnant to the possibility that today’s weapons will leave no holy remnant – so too has the commandment changed.124 He, then, agrees with Kant insofar as the morality of revelation must itself be questioned. But he addresses the question not from a Christian or post-Christian perspective, but from a Jewish or post-Jewish one. He argues that the introduction of secular historical consciousness to the three-term relationship that describes the developed life of Judaism allows for both relative pristine moments and the relative value of humanity, because each rests on their ultimate value.125 The development of the Akeda from intention to execution in the Middle Ages provides for Fackenheim justification that secular historical consciousness should not simply be rejected by post-Holocaust Jews: Jews were literally confronted with the Akeda as a present demand, therefore history itself must inform the Jews’ relationships with God, Torah, and other human beings. Present history has provided evidence of something specific, that is, never before experienced: martyrdom itself was murdered at Auschwitz. Since the Nazis did not give Jews the choice of apostasy, Fackenheim argues, survival now ranks higher than martyrdom. A specific commandment was issued to surviving Jews, though it was not issued by God to the holy remnant. In understanding the Akeda as a “perpetually reenacted and superseded” surprise that teaches that child sacrifice is rejected, Fackenheim weds Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the possibility of moments in God’s Presence to Kant’s foundation of the intrinsic ultimate value of human life. Micah, by formulating a three-term relationship of God-human

274  Sharon Portnoff

being-neighbour, and Genesis Rabbah 55:5, by connecting this relationship to the Akeda, can address the dispute between the two thinkers by recognizing Abraham as the father of the covenant that dissolves the distinction between care for others/oneself and care for God. As Wiesel might have formulated it, Abraham’s concern for the past and Isaac’s concern for the future, even as father almost killed son, makes room for Micah 6:8 and the Midrash to be implicit in the Akeda. But as Fackenheim argues, historical experience – the Holocaust – has commanded Jews, so to speak, and all human beings to inform that past and future with secular historical thinking. A Final Word: Wiesel and Fackenheim Fackenheim’s introduction of secular history in the giving of Torah bears some similarity to Wiesel’s questioning the possibility of future miracles to save Jews, but differs in one decisive respect: it is displaced from memoir-theology as storytelling to philosophy informed with theology. While both thinkers recognize that Midrash serves to formulate encounters between the experiences of its writers and Torah – that is to say, at times dramatizes the real-world experiences of Jewish persecution – for Wiesel, after the Holocaust, Isaac remains as always a symbol and enactor of hope, even as the memoirist explains the importance of being present in one’s encounter with God and other human beings. For Fackenheim, who informs his argument with secular history – at least temporarily – with the development from child sacrifice to its rejection and, so to speak, from Torah to Midrash – that is to say, introduces the possibility of reading the development from the Akeda to Micah 6:8 to Genesis Rabbah 55:5 as secular rather than sacred history – the Holocaust is living proof that Jewish life is more precious than Jewish death. 126 Both Wiesel and Fackenheim, as it were, step outside Torah in order to affirm it, either, as in the former case, to ask readers whether the Holocaust threatens Judaism and future Jewish existence and to invite them to relive Abraham’s concern for the past and Isaac’s hope for the future; or, as in the latter case, to argue, paradoxically, that Torah gives – and teaches the priority of – loving-kindness towards God and one’s neighbour as an everlasting possibility. In both cases, this stepping outside reveals an implicit acceptance – to a lesser or larger degree – of “history” as secular development, which grounds their writing in something other than Torah or sacred history.127 At the same time, however, each text invites its readers to step in, so to speak, to participate in the recreation of what Wiesel calls the coincidence of



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  275

the presence of God and other human beings and what Fackenheim argues is the ever-present three-term relationship of Judaism, in order to defend their people, and to ask Christians to come to know the love that attends to obedience to Jewish law. Such a strategy is dangerous: a secular (historical) grounding may close off the possibilities implicit in experience itself and, perhaps, the means by which we might lift experience to reflect our humanity. At the least, it may offer theology that displaces God as its root. Wiesel’s invitation to relive the Akeda may render ineffective his text’s displacement of God, but Fackenheim, in writing ­philosophically – even as he argues that experience must now inform thinking – may walk too closely to literalism. He argues that the Nazis proved that God is not in human history by making it so and that our response should be to take back the narrative, as it were, that is, to introduce secular history as a means of understanding without displacing sacred history. But the truths of human experience are not narratives;128 they are visceral responses we have to narratives, responses that are experienced in moments that are like those of our neighbours and that we might hope are in the sight of God. By writing the texts under consideration here in the way that they did – Wiesel as memoirist-storyteller-theologian, Fackenheim as philosopher-theologian – each dramatizes the possibility that what binds the three terms of relationship in Judaism together may have come undone. Both texts dramatize or teach that human action is required to put them back together again.129 Wiesel works more traditionally within the Midrashic tradition, asking whether the time has come when Jewish experience must inform Jewish thought, which would require Jews to ask whether the next time might destroy even the holy remnant. As a result, his text is inclusive of Christians and Christianity and the extent to which Jewish experience has impugned that religion. Fackenheim more readily embraces secular history, building a Jewish philosophical argument for a new understanding of what sacrifice – especially of one’s children130 – might mean and its inadequacy to the challenges of the modern era. By grounding his argument in a specifically ­Jewish – i.e., Torah-based – response to the problem of revelatory morality, he, as he came later to realize, avoids dialogue with Christians about Kant’s more general challenge to revelatory religion, abandoning in a way – paradoxically – the Jewish post for which he argued so passionately. We might, as I suggested earlier, point on the one hand to Wiesel’s visceral knowledge of both Jew-hatred and faith, and on the other to Fackenheim’s more distant knowledge of them and his quest for moral foundations for modern philosophy – in this case, as reflected in his responses to Kant and Kierkegaard.131 Both Wiesel and Fackenheim,

276  Sharon Portnoff

however, agree that it is due to the absence of the everlasting presence of the essential interconnectedness of God-human being-neighbour that God has been banished from the world. NOTES   1 Avraham (Alan) Rosen, “Stealing the Fire: Responses to Jewish Persecution in the Life and Work of Elie Wiesel,” Antisemitism Studies 1.2 (2017): 284–5, https://doi.org/10.2979/ANTISTUD.1.2.03.   2 One of Fackenheim’s bitterest memories of his experience in Germany under the Nuremberg Laws was that it made impossible his pursuit of a German girl in his class on whom he had a crush. Personal conversation between the author and Fackenheim, Jerusalem, July 2003.   3 See Reuven Firestone, “Holy War in Modern Judaism? ‘Mitzvah War’ and the Problem of the ‘Three Vows,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74.4 (2006): 954–82, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4139958?seq=1.   4 Fackenheim recounts that one day, walking with Wiesel on Fifth Avenue in New York, the latter told him that “he could not respect a God lacking power” (Emil L. Fackenheim, What Is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age [New York: Summit Books, 1987], 289). Fackenheim, conversely, in recognizing in the hanging of a boy at Auschwitz that God lacks power, asks whether Jews can continue to believe in a powerful God. In that hanging, Fackenheim writes, God “lacks [power] absolutely, and this is because He persists in His intimacy with His people. Is the price paid for that intimacy, then and there, not a total loss of the infinity?” (What Is Judaism?, italics in original).   5 The inability to dwell, so to speak, in the tension between reason and revelation leads to what Fackenheim calls elsewhere the “divided middle.” In Midrash Judaism dwells in such tension, but as rationality informed modern moral thought with the prerequisite of consistency, followers of Judaism, as in other revelatory religions, became polarized. See W.A. Shearson, “The Fragmented Middle: Hegel and Kierkegaard,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, ed. Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson, 64–89 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). In the Fackenheim text under consideration here, the polarization ushered in by Kant’s challenge to revealed morality is manifested in the distinction between the orthodox, who to keep God essential stress the heteronomy of the law, and the liberal, who to keep morality a chosen obligation stress autonomy (Fackenheim, “Abraham and the Kantians: Moral Duties and Divine Commandments,” in Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 43–4.



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  277

  6 See Elie Wiesel, “The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Story,” in Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1977), 109.   7 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 90.   8 Fackenheim, Encounters, 31–77.   9 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 100. 10 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 104. 11 As Fackenheim put it, he separated his selves, the philosophical and the theological, until the writing of his great book To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, first Midland ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 12 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 86. 13 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 85. 14 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 87. 15 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 87. 16 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 85. 17 See, for instance, Wiesel’s remembrances of his encounter with the story “as a child” (“Sacrifice of Isaac,” 88) and later statement that “[t]he time has come for the storyteller to confess that he has always felt much closer to Isaac than to his father, Abraham” (104). 18 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 85, 97. 19 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 87. 20 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 87; italics in original. 21 This is the deepest meaning of the three repetitions of “hineni” (here I am) in the nineteen verses (1, 7, 11). 22 As, for instance, in Gen. 12, when God calls to Abram to go out, and Abram, without asking where, goes. 23 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 87. 24 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 90. 25 Fackenheim formulates the coincidence of the presences of God, Abraham, and Isaac as the Akeda’s gift of humanity given by God. As he writes, “Yet the source and life of the revealed morality of Judaism lies precisely in the togetherness of a divine commanding Presence that never dissipates itself into irrelevance, and a human response that freely appropriates what it receives” (Encounters, 44). See below. 26 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 100. 27 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 100. 28 And, indeed, this reading is supported in the text: when the angel of God calls to Abraham to stop, he explains that “now” he knows that Abraham fears God. Had he not known before? Is this different kind of knowing – a human knowing informed by the living through time – precisely the lesson God wanted to teach Abraham? 29 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 100.

278  Sharon Portnoff 30 See below. 31 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 102. 32 Wiesel writes that he has always felt closer to Isaac (see note 17 above), yet to understand his survival from Auschwitz as a “miracle” is, as Fackenheim argues, absurd. See Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections, 1st Jason Aronson ed. (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1997), 73. 33 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 88. 34 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 89. 35 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 91. 36 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 88. 37 See below. In emphasizing the distinction between intention and execution, Fackenheim follows Maimonides, who, in order to tamp down the messianism implicit in the Crusades-era Jewish practice of kiddush ha-Shem, draws a distinction between the confession of Muslim faith under duress and the following of the Torah’s commandments. See Maimonides, “Letter Concerning Apostasy,” translated in part in Leon H. Stitskin, “Maimonides’ Maamar Kiddush Hashem: Historical Evidence and Halakhic Principles,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, vol. 16, no. 4 (Summer, 1977): 95–120. (Page 96: “Utter the formula and live!”). Also see Fackenheim, Encounters, 58, 59, 72, 75. Fackenheim, as we shall see, takes Maimonides one step further by contextualizing the distinction between theology and practice within non-sacred history. 38 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 93. 39 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 90. 40 One might, however, read the text such that Isaac is sacrificed: the ram which is put “in the stead” of Isaac might be read as “under” Isaac, and there is no specific mention of Isaac’s returning with Abraham to the young men. Indeed, it is not only Christians who read it that way; Jews in the Rheinland during the Crusades invoked this reading as the paradigm of their sacrificing themselves. See Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans. Judah Goldin (New York: Pantheon, 1967), chap. 3. 41 “Elie Wiesel is reported as remarking to the Christian theologian Claire Hutchet-Bishop that Christianity died at Auschwitz” (Fackenheim, What Is Judaism?, 250). While Fackenheim’s Encounters (1973) preceded Wiesel’s “Sacrifice of Isaac” (1977) by a few years, Wiesel’s remark about the death of Christianity was published in 1987. 42 This is not to say that Fackenheim avoids implicating Christianity; but his critique of Kierkegaard and Kant, as we shall see below, implicates what he labels elsewhere as post-Christianity, that is, Christianity that has been informed by secular thought. See Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History,



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  279

35–66, esp. 44–55, and 69–79, esp. 74–5. In Encounters, he argues that Kant’s thinking is informed by Pauline anti-Jewishness: recognition of the obligation to act on behalf of God without recognition of the love that makes the action possible. In other words, Kant adopts Paul’s prejudice that the distinction between Judaism and Christianity is that the former teaches law, while the latter teaches love. As a consequence, Kant’s moral philosophy, he argues, does not recognize that God’s love is in the commandments. See Encounters, 52. This is akin to Wiesel’s critique of Christianity here: love requires the presence of both God and the human being. Fackenheim’s argument in tracing Kantian moral philosophy to the Christian past, however, follows from his adoption or quasi-adoption of historicism. 43 As we shall see, the opposition is only seeming: Wiesel too points to the possibility that the Holocaust, in its actuality, destroyed the altar on which Abraham was to have sacrificed, not Isaac, but a ram. See below. 44 See B.T. Baba Batra 60b, in which is depicted a conversation between young men, despairing over the destruction of the Temple, and an interlocutor. The conversation ends with the interlocutor telling the men to continue to find joy in life even as they remember Jerusalem – that is to say, that they live in the tension – because “it is better to err in ignorance than presumptuously.” 45 Prophetic and rabbinic Judaism formulated persecution as punishment for sins, which nevertheless would leave a “holy remnant” to perpetuate the religion. See, for instance, Ezra 9:13. Neither Wiesel nor Fackenheim accepts the model for post-Holocaust Judaism, first because the Holocaust’s Jewish victims had not sinned, and second because secular history has introduced to thought the possibility that there will be no Jews remaining. 46 “One [Christian] theology student, reeling after having read of Crusader atrocities, asked Wiesel if perhaps the correct thing to do would be to give up on Christianity. Wiesel said no, the answer was not to abandon one’s faith tradition but rather to work to bring out the beauty within it” (Rosen, “Stealing the Fire,” 286). 47 See Fackenheim, Encounters, 74–7. In this again Fackenheim, with modification, follows Maimonides, who in his “Letter” puts forward that Jews must survive if Torah is to persist (110). Fackenheim’s position on this is explicit in God’s Presence in History, in which he advocates – though he later regrets the emphasis given to it by his readers – a new commandment issued by the Voice of Auschwitz not to give Hitler any posthumous victories. See God’s Presence in History, 84. 48 See Fackenheim, Encounters, 70, and below, section titled “Fackenheim’s ‘Abraham and the Kantians: Moral Duties and Divine Commendments.’” Fackenheim’s formulation is informed by historicism – which, as I hope

280  Sharon Portnoff this chapter makes clear, is the precise point of disagreement between Wiesel and Fackenheim. 49 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 104. This Midrash does not satisfy Wiesel because, as he writes, it does not allow him to find a means of identifying with Abraham. One hears the echo of Wiesel’s sense that he must embody – that is, remember – his father, who was killed by the Nazis. 50 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 104. 51 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 105. 52 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 105. 53 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 106. 54 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 104. As Fackenheim formulates it, the three terms of Judaism – mercy, justice, humility, as per Micah – bind not only human beings, but also God, to the existential moment when God meets the human being. 55 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 108. 56 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 107. 57 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 107. 58 The nullification of human experience describes Wiesel’s disagreement with Kierkegaard (“Sacrifice of Isaac,” 104): it is not simply that God must obey His own law, he claims, but, more deeply, that one must be “human” at all times. Wiesel writes, “I have never really been able to accept the idea that inhumanity could be one more way for man to move closer to God” (104). God is bound by His law so that He can remain in relationship with human beings, just as human beings must remain “human” so that they may challenge God to remain at all times ethical. Kierkegaard’s suspension of the ethical destroys the image of God and the image of man. Reformulating Kierkegaard, in a way, Wiesel suggests that “[t]here is an element of the unknown in every injustice, in every adventure involving total commitment … to win who knows what battles, to prove who knows what theories” (107). Injustice is what happens when one removes oneself – even for a moment – from one’s relationships and the presence that they require. There is always an “innocent victim”: this is why in the Midrash Sarah dies when Satan tells her what Abraham is doing and why Isaac dies actually in another. “Isaac did not accompany his father on the way back because the divine intervention came too late” (108). Wiesel in this way allows for sacred history – or, alternatively, storytelling – in his dramatization of what happened on Mt. Moriah: surely something in Isaac or in his relationship with God died there. As we shall see below, Fackenheim similarly argues that Kierkegaard fails to take seriously the relationship between God and Abraham. And yet both Wiesel and Fackenheim include in their understanding of the “human” something beyond presence: consciousness of that presence. This is why it is not



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  281

sufficient for Wiesel to dramatize – and thus have his readers “relive” – the Akeda; he must also teach why the reliving is important. See below. 59 While Wiesel, as it were, invites his readers to relive the Akeda without self-consciousness, Fackenheim formulates the Jewish longing to inform contemporaneous Jewish experience with the Jewish past meaningfully: if God is the God of history He is the God of secular history as well. 60 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 88. Fackenheim, too, is motivated by this question; in fact, one might argue that the question is the starting point of their divergences: while Wiesel poses the thought as a question – one which can be “relived, if not solved” (“Sacrifice of Isaac,” 90) – Fackenheim allows secular history to inform the foundation of his thinking. For him, since modern technology and atomic weapons have made the complete decimation of Jews possible, Jews cannot continue to have faith that periodic persecutions against them will leave a holy remnant, and without Jews there can be no Judaism. In other words, what we mean by “human” has itself changed. As a consequence, as we shall see below, he argues for the need (at least temporarily) to communicate the meaning of the Akeda in philosophical or quasi-philosophical language. 61 The coincidence of their presence, as Wiesel dramatizes, is akin to Fackenheim’s argument that God-human being-neighbour must remain in the everlasting relationship entered into at the Akeda if modern thought is to teach justice-humility-mercy. See below. 62 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 106. 63 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 104. See also note 17 above. 64 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 108. 65 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 104. 66 Wiesel uses the word “holocaust” to describe the Akeda in the midst of the text’s discussion of his childhood encounter with story (“Sacrifice of Isaac,” 89). He coined the word “Holocaust” to identify the Shoah. 67 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 108–9. 68 It is quite possible – but beyond the scope of this chapter – that Wiesel’s suggestion that Jews relive the Akeda in order to know experientially the possibility that the altar has gone up in flames grows out of his early exposure to Hasidism. 69 In Fackenheim’s reading, Kant’s argument for the necessity of the transition from morality to religion is the basis for his “reality principle,” which stopped him from “internalizing God.” Hegel’s thought, however, more informed by historicism – though Fackenheim qualifies this reading of Hegel – disposes of the need for the transition. See Sharon Portnoff, Reason and Revelation before Historicism: Strauss and Fackenheim (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 179–80 and 91–106. 70 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 109.

282  Sharon Portnoff 71 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 109. 72 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 107. 73 “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 110. 74 Fackenheim told the author that he spent many afternoons of his childhood discussing philosophy with his mother. 75 As he writes elsewhere: “That human personality as an end in itself is the heart and soul of Kant’s categorical imperative. As for the Third Reich, its heart and soul was the aim to destroy just this principle” (To Mend the World, 272, italics in original). To define humanity as an abstraction is to strip individuals of personality, which is the abstraction’s necessary foundation. Eichmann’s challenge to Kant’s moral imperative, then, was made possible by the imperative itself. See Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 272–3. 76 It should be noted, however, that Fackenheim does not simply reject Wiesel’s strategy: his text invites his readers to be present, so to speak, to his argument, insofar as he periodically introduces thoughts in the context of the willing suspension of disbelief. See, among other places, Fackenheim, Encounters, 35 (“Let us for the present renounce Abraham …”) and 46 (“It may thus seem that if there is human freedom … Yet just a freedom of this sort could not survive”). 77 Fackenheim characterizes the impetus to decide in favour of either reason or revelation as a modern problem. Premodern thought allowed for their mutual toleration: because there is a common Author, neither reason nor revelation can refute the claims of the other. As he understands it, Kant did not go this far, returning always to the problem of what connects God and human beings, but the followers of Hegel “internalized God” as a result of the shift from theo- to anthropo-centrism – irrationally believing that reason can disprove revelation. Reason thus lost its grounding. In practical terms, as he identified, modern thought ended in polarization: each side promoted its position; neither side lived in the tension that is the foundation and locus of relationship. 78 Experience cannot be used to prove anything, as Fackenheim’s teacher Leo Strauss revealed, but, with Wiesel’s influence (and his personal loss), Fackenheim begins his thought in experience. This is not to say that he ends his thought in experience: he argued that history is the realm in which temporary, i.e., specific – not permanent or universal – commandments are issued. See also Fackenheim’s discussion of Kurt Huber in To Mend the World, 267–77. 79 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 16–21. 80 See God’s Presence in History, 8–9. 81 God’s Presence in History, 69–79. 82 And, indeed, Fackenheim cites Midrash throughout “Abraham and the Kantians.”



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  283

83 This teaching is developed by the prophets, primarily, for Fackenheim, in Micah 6 but also in Jeremiah (his favorite prophet) and Ezra, and then reaffirmed by the rabbis in their development of Oral Torah, which, they taught, is given simultaneously with Written Torah. 84 See Fackenheim, What Is Judaism?, 214. Buber’s use of Psalm 51 – God’s hiding His Face – did not suffice for Fackenheim because, he argues, the Holocaust constituted a decisive break with sacred history. In order to perpetuate Judaism, a link from past to future must be found. While premodern Jews might understand the death of the infant, in accordance with sacred history, as punishment for his sin, with the Holocaust something decisive happened in human history that requires the attention of human beings – that is to say, their consciousness of secular history. One recognizes, in this, the Hegelian influence on Fackenheim’s thought. 85 So, for instance, Fackenheim writes that “Jews have always had to struggle with the fearsome story of the Akeda (‘the binding’), calling it by that name so as to forever remind themselves that there was no sacrifice but a reprieve. Many Midrashim grapple with the story. And then there were times when no reprieve came: the Crusades, the Inquisition, and – a catastrophe as yet hardly confronted by the religious consciousness – the Holocaust. New Midrashim may be required for the Akeda” (What Is Judaism?, 186). See also Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 69–75. Wiesel, in contrast, more elusively asks, as quoted above, “The question is no longer whether Isaac was saved but whether the miracle could happen again. And how often. And for what reasons. And at what cost” (“Sacrifice of Isaac,” 88). 86 As we shall see, Fackenheim finds precedence for this moving past in the transmutation of the Akeda in the medieval period – a transmutation that was similarly motivated by the development from imagined to executed experience. 87 Fackenheim, What Is Judaism?, 215. 88 Just as Wiesel affirms the need for Jews and God to, as it were, share authority – though now “human” authority includes not only presence with God, but consciousness of that presence – so that a return to sacred history is possible, so too Fackenheim leaves room for human authority: Jews must hope that God remains intimate with them in the only way possible after the Holocaust, by renouncing “the infinity” (What Is Judaism?, 289. 89 Fackenheim’s spelling of the Akedah in this text differs from his spelling elsewhere. For consistency’s sake, except in the case of direct quotations from the present text, we will adopt the spelling “Akeda.” 90 Fackenheim, Encounters, 36. It is to be noted that Fackenheim’s encounter with Kant in this text does not reflect his later understanding of – and corrective to – Kant. See Portnoff, Reason and Revelation, 90. A more

284  Sharon Portnoff thorough understanding of his encounter with Kant is contained in Martin D. Yaffe’s excellent contribution to this volume. 91 Fackenheim, Encounters, 57. 92 Encounters, 57. 93 “With what shall I approach the Lord, / Do homage to God on high? / Shall I approach Him with burnt offerings, / With calves a year old? / Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, / With myriads of streams of oil? / Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, / The fruit of my body for my sins? / ‘He has told you, O man, what is good, / And what the Lord requires of you: / Only to do justice, / And to love goodness, / And to walk modestly with your God.” See Micah 6:6–8 in The Jewish Study Bible, ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, consulting ed. Michael Fishbane (New York: Oxford, 2004), 1203. 94 Comenting on Micah 6:6–7, Genesis Rabbah 55:5 identifies the apparent reference to Mesha with Isaac: “R. Joshua of Siknin said in R. Levi’s name: Though the passage was said about Mesha, king of Moab, it refers to none but Isaac.” 95 Fackenheim, Encounters, 49. 96 Note that this critique, while limited in the article to Judaism, applies equally to Christianity and other religions insofar as they adopt or partially adopt historicism. 97 Fackenheim, Encounters, 69. 98 This should not be taken to mean that Fackenheim works strictly within the terms of the covenant. His impetus is not Torah, strictly speaking, but experience. As he writes, “the Holocaust involved the systematic killing of Jews, therefore thought that is absolutely separate from experience can no longer be accepted on the basis of rationality only.” Just as Wiesel explains, even as he invokes, presence, so too Fackenheim invokes both rationality and irrationality to inform his thought with the importance of presence. The question common to them both is one that modern thought raised: is there a permanent human nature with whom God’s Presence might coincide? 99 Kierkegaard, according to Fackenheim, formulates his knight of faith within the terms of Christianity, and against the morality taught in Micah: “If any man cometh to me and hateth not his own father and mother and wife and children and brother and sister, yea, and his own life, also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26, as cited in Fackenheim, Encounters, 64). Wiesel, whose text concerns itself more with premodern JewishChristian relations, reminds his readers that, perhaps, Kierkegaard speaks only to a post-Kantian Christianity. Fackenheim, more concerned with the post-Holocaust moment, brings into (secular) history the detritus of preChristian Jew-hatred.



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  285

100 Fackenheim, Encounters, 70. 101 Encounters, 37. 102 Encounters, 57, citing Kant, Streit der Fakultaten, in Werke, AkademieTextausgabe (10 vols.; unaltered photomechanical reprint of Prussian Academy edition of 1902 ff.; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), vol. 7, 63 (italics in original). 103 This is a new challenge to Jewish thought: before Kant, Fackenheim argues, revealed morality was not a contradiction in terms. Because God gave human beings reason, and because the Noahide laws posit a division between laws of reason and of revelation, pre-modern Judaism can understand the laws that are irrational as revelatory. Laws of reason, that is, moral laws, while revealed, do not need to be revealed directly since God gave human beings reason. See Fackenheim, Encounters, 37–40; and, for instance, Saadya Gaon, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, trans. and abridged Alexander Altmann with an introduction by Daniel H. Frank (Cambridge: Hackett, 2002). 104 Fackenheim, Encounters, 42–3. Fackenheim, like Kant, remained dissatisfied with this conclusion: it was “a theme to which [Kant] kept returning, as if unable to leave it alone” (39). That is to say that what is rational cannot be rational without human affirmation of its rationality: the human being must be present, in the way in which we have defined it, in order for moral action to actually be – in order to be executed – in this world. 105 Elsewhere, Fackenheim formulates this as the internalization of God; indeed, the non-presence implicit in the relationship with the God-idea is the argument that underlies the essays compiled in his The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 106 Fackenheim, Encounters, 73. 107 This is precisely the question Maimonides addresses in his “Letter.” Does one, so to speak, empower the vocabulary of “torture,” as Wiesel put it, by voluntarily acquiescing to self-sacrifice? Fackenheim argues that Maimonides’s view that the seeming apostate who utters the confession of another religion “has broken at least one commandment, the sanctification of the divine name” (Encounters, 75), impugns the God Who would not rank His children’s survival higher than the observance of kiddush ha-Shem. 108 One notes here that experience is understood within the framework of what ought to be: the one hand extrapolates experience to thought, the other hand responds with an argument of what ought to be against what is. This is precisely Fackenheim’s critique of Kant: while he did not abandon his “reality principle” (see Fackenheim, Jewish Philosophers

286  Sharon Portnoff and Jewish Philosophy, ed. Michael L. Morgan [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 47; Portnoff, Reason and Revelation, 88), he was unable to recognize the reality of evil. 109 Fackenheim’s formulation here – as he came later to acknowledge – fails to acknowledge his continued reliance on Kant’s belief in the necessity of the transition from morality to religion. 110 For the problematics with this argument, see Laurie McRobert, “Kant and Radical Evil,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, ed. Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson, 18–42 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 111 Genesis 22:16–18 ( Jewish Study Bible translation). Note that God, swearing by Himself, promises that Abraham’s descendants shall “seize the gates of their foes”: the covenant is not an equal partnership. With this precedent, Fackenheim finds precedence to invoke God’s promise to justify the post-Holocaust Jew’s claim to worldly power. 112 Wiesel, “Sacrifice of Isaac,” 97. 113 As Wiesel dramatizes that in the coincidence of the presences of God, Abraham, and Isaac a relationship that binds past and future, God and humanity, is manifested, Fackenheim argues that in Judaism “the Divine manifests itself as commanding, and in order to do so it requires real human freedom. And since the Divine is presence as well as commanding, the required human freedom cannot be merely conditional – it must be unconditional and absolute … The freedom required in the pristine moment of divine commanding Presence, then, is nothing less than the freedom to accept or reject the divine commanding Presence as a whole … that is, for no other reason than that it is that Presence” (Encounters, 46, italics in original). 114 Encounters, 68. 115 See Encounters, 70. 116 Because they can be abrogated, they cannot be tied to a permanent human nature. Their revelation is tied to the rabbinical solution: the laws of the destroyed Temple are abrogated only temporarily. See, among other places, Fackenheim, What Is Judaism?, 187–9. 117 So too the belief of many post-Enlightenment thinkers: they read Spinoza as having proved that miracles do not exist, when what he argued is that miracles were beyond the scope of his treatise. See Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. E.L.M. Elwes, bibl. and notes Francesco Cordasco (New York: Dover, 1951), 80; Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 213; and Portnoff, Reason and Revelation, 69–70. 118 Fackenheim was, one might say, influenced equally by his friends Wiesel and Leo Strauss, the latter of whom characterizes kiddush ha-Shem as a



Wiesel and Fackenheim: The Problem of Jewish Persecution  287

“noble illusion” (cf. Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green [Albany: SUNY Press, 1997], 323, with 328). We do not know whether kiddush ha-Shem is a commandment now abrogated, but not far from Fackenheim’s thinking is the possibility that self-sacrifice is a human, rather than a divine, directive. 119 See, for instance, Spiegel, The Last Trial, 3. 120 See, for instance, as cited above, Ezra 9:13. Note Ezra’s concern with the loss of the ability to enact Temple ritual, including sacrifice. 121 Already during the Crusades, Maimonides questions the practice. Wiesel, as we have seen, implants, so to speak, the pattern of punishment and saving at the Akeda when, according to a Midrash, Abraham gets a promise from God that he will forgive his future generations for their sins. 122 Fackenheim’s argument in one sense follows Maimonides in his call to end martyrdom – though for Maimonides the call is qualified – and in another sense challenges him in his call to ground future Judaism, at least temporarily, not in fulfilment of the mitzvot but in historical consciousness of experience. “Maimonides does not cope adequately with Jewish realities from the Crusades to Hitler when he writes: ‘If a man is forced to transgress the commandments, he is forbidden to remain in that place but must emigrate, leave everything behind, wander by day and by night, until he has found a place where a man can observe the commandments’” (Fackenheim, Encounters, 240n108). 123 In perhaps the text’s most moving sentence, Fackenheim writes, “for the sake of both God and the world, a Jew must not leave his covenantal post” (Encounters, 76). 124 Fackenheim follows Kant further insofar as he questions whether God can (today) issue a specific religious commandment: it is for this reason that Fackenheim’s “614th Commandment” issues not from God but from Auschwitz. See Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 84ff. Note his adoption of a quasi-historicism. He seems to argue in this earlier text that to situate the universal within history is to literalize it – that is, to equate the equality of human beings with human freedom – while to situate the particular within history leaves open the possibility that God might return into human history to grant – and limit – human freedom. 125 This follows from his reading of Micah, as cited above: “there can be only fragmentary justice and mercy unless they culminate in humility before God.” 126 Fackenheim, Encounters, 77. 127 While the rabbis too at times stepped outside Torah, so to speak, they did so within sacred history and always with a disclaimer, such as “as

288  Sharon Portnoff it were” or “this is a difficult thing to say and it is impossible to say it clearly” (Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts [New York: Summit, 1984], 195). 128 Susan Shapiro suggested as much when she criticized Fackenheim’s To Mend the World as having omitted the Muselmänner. See Shapiro, “The Recovery of the Sacred: Hermeneutics after the Holocaust” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1983). 129 This, of course, is not a necessary conclusion. Leo Strauss writes that “the knot which was not tied by man could not be untied by man” (“Why We Remain Jews,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green [Albany: SUNY Press, 1997], 92); and Primo Levi, writing in the voice of the Greek whom he meets on his way home from Auschwitz, writes, “Guerra è sempre” (War is always). See La Tregua (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 57; The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 52. Indeed, by whose authority does Wiesel or Fackenheim reanimate God? 130 Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, 71: “Which would we rather have our great-grandchildren be – victims, or bystanders and executioners?” 131 In conjunction with Fackenheim’s search for religious foundations for modern philosophy is his search for such foundations in Kant, which he identifies as the latter’s argument for the need for the transition from morality to religion; the transition allows Kant to avoid the problem of abstracting God. See Portnoff, Reason and Revelation, 85–6.

Contributors

Jeffrey A. Bernstein is professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross. He works in the areas of Spinoza, German philosophy, and Jewish thought. His Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History was published in 2015 by SUNY Press. Kenneth C. Blanchard, Jr. is professor of political science at Northern State University, where he teaches courses in political science and philosophy. He has published articles on Socrates, Plato and Machiavelli, and Xenophon. His primary research field is biopolitical philosophy, with a special focus on interpreting classical and modern political philosophers in light of contemporary evolutionary biology and using Plato and Aristotle to interpret evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He is the editor of and a contributor to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question (2009), and the author of a chapter on biology and political ethics in The Handbook of Biology and Politics. Kenneth Hart Green is professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, which has been his academic home since 1987, teaching Judaism and Jewish thought. His published books are Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss (1993); Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought by Leo Strauss (1997); Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides (2013); and Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings (2013). He is the editor of a series titled “The Thought and Legacy of Leo Strauss” for State University of New York Press and has published articles on Jewish thinkers from Moses Maimonides and Yehuda Halevi to Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem. His book on Emil Fackenheim’s thought, The Philosophy

290 Contributors

of Emil Fackenheim: From Revelation to the Holocaust, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Martin Kavka is professor of religion at Florida State University, where he teaches courses in Jewish studies and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), which was awarded the first Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Philosophy and Jewish Thought by the Association for Jewish Studies (2008), and the co-editor of five books, including Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (Indiana University Press, 2014), as well as the co-editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics (2011–21). Steven Kepnes is professor of world religions and Jewish studies and director of Chapel House at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. Kepnes is a founding member of the Society of Scriptural Reasoning, which focuses on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim dialogue based on group readings of scripture. He has taught at the Rabbinic School of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Jerusalem, the religious studies program at the University of Virginia, and the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome. He is the author of seven books, including The Future of Jewish Theology (Wiley Blackwell, 2013), Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (Oxford, 2007), and The Text as Thou (Indiana University Press, 1992), and is editor of the recently published Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Benjamin Lorch teaches public affairs and political philosophy at James Madison College, Michigan State University. He received his B.A. from St. John’s College and his Ph.D. in political theory from Boston College. His research focuses on classical and medieval political philosophy, particularly on the relation between philosophy and religion, and his published articles include studies of Plato, Xenophon, and Maimonides. He is currently researching a book on Maimonides’s interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University, where he helped found and teaches in the College of the Humanities, Canada’s only four-year baccalaureate in the Great Books. He was educated at the University of Toronto, where he received a B.A. in arts and sciences and an M.A. in political economy, and at Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in political science. He has been a visiting fellow in humanistic studies at the Black Mountain Institute,



Contributors 291

University of Nevada Las Vegas (2014–15), a John Adams Fellow at the University of London (1997), a fellow of the Eccles Centre at the British Library (1997), a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC (1990–91), a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (1985–86), and a junior fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto (1974–75). He has also held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship. His books include The Recollection of Freedom: The Dangerous Quest for Political Wholeness from Rousseau to Heidegger (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press); Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice and Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Tyranny: A New Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2013); The Soul of a Leader: Character, Conviction and Ten Lessons in Political Greatness (Harper Collins, 2009); The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country (Harper Collins, 2003); What Is A Man? 3000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue (Harper Collins, 2000); Ruling Passion: The Erotics of Statecraft in Platonic Political Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); and Bankrupt Education: The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1994, with Peter C. Emberley). He is the author of numerous articles on classical, Renaissance, and modern European political philosophy and literature in journals including The American Political Science Review, Political Theory, and History of European Ideas. He has been a keynote speaker at Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, Peterhouse College of University of Cambridge, the University of Toronto, the University of Richmond, Hamilton College, and the Onassis Cultural Center of New York City. Sharon Portnoff holds the Elie Wiesel Chair in Judaic Studies and is associate professor of religious studies at Connecticut College. She holds degrees from St. John’s College (Annapolis), Harvard University, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is the author of Reason and Revelation before Historicism: Strauss and Fackenheim (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and co-editor of The Companionship of Books: Essays in Honor of Laurence Berns (Lexington Books, 2011) and Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew (Brill, 2008). Her most recent articles include “Holiness in the Holocaust: Emil Fackenheim and the Challenge of Historicism” (in Holiness in Jewish Thought, Oxford University Press, 2018) and “Reenacted Humanism: If This is a Man and Primo Levi’s ‘New Bible’” (in The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience, Brill, 2015).

292 Contributors

Paul T. Wilford teaches political philosophy at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Tulane University in 2016. He holds a B.A. in liberal arts from St. John’s College (2007) as well as a B.A. in classics (2009) and an M.Phil. in political thought and intellectual history (2013) from King’s College, Cambridge University. He is co-editor of Athens, Arden, Jerusalem: Essays in Honor of Mera Flaumenhaft (Lexington Books, 2017). Martin D. Yaffe, professor of philosophy and religion at University of North Texas, holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Shylock and the Jewish Question (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and of Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn (University of Chicago Press, 2012); editor of Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader (Lexington Books, 2011); translator of Benedict Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise (Focus Philosophical Library/Hackett, 2004); co-translator of Thomas Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on the Book of Job (Scholars Press/Oxford University Press, 1989); and co-editor of Emil Fackenheim – Philosopher, Theologian, Jew: A Collection of Critical Essays (Brill, 2008); of The Companionship of Books: Essays in Honor of Laurence Berns (Lexington Books, 2011); of Reorientation: Leo Strauss in the 1930s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and of Civil Religion in Modern Political Philosophy: Machiavelli to Tocqueville (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020).

Index

Abraham, 9, 11, 22, 45 – 6n22, 69, 116n249, 157n12, 217, 257 – 64, 266 – 72, 274, 277n17, 277n25, 277n28, 278n40, 280n49, 280n58, 282n76, 286n111, 286n113; Abrahamic, 211, 214. See also Akeda Adorno, Theodor, 116n249 Africa, 202n50 Akeda (Akedah), 11, 45 – 6n22, 156 – 7n12, 257 – 75, 277n25, 281nn58 – 61, 281n66, 281n68, 283nn85 – 6, 287n121 Akiba, 69, 79, 103n121 Alexander, Edward, 183n18 Al-Farabi, 7, 19 – 20, 23, 146 America, 142n44, 181n14, 216; AngloAmerican, 133; North America, 118, 124, 126, 191, 202n50 Améry, Jean, 124 antisemitism, 17, 256. See also Jews: hatred of Aquinas, Thomas, 51, 92nn5 – 6, 104n29, 229n6; Thomism, 149, 211, 224 Arendt, Hannah, 47n26 Aristotle, 23, 29n22, 84, 101n95, 216, 222, 239, 248, 255n41; Aristotelianism, 7, 19 – 20, 22 – 4, 211, 239; Peripatetics, 146, 158n17

Aryan, 69, 71, 242; non-Aryan, 240, 242 Athens and Jerusalem, 14, 28, 98n70, 99n76, 178n5, 233, 242. See also Jerusalem Augustine, 92n5, 92n7, 97n53, 104n129, 210 – 11, 224; Augustinian, 211, 214 Auschwitz, 27, 38, 40 – 2, 48n39, 69 – 70, 72 – 3, 75 – 80, 82, 86, 88, 91n3, 100n77, 105n134, 108n173, 108n187, 114n234, 145, 167, 195 – 6, 213, 222 – 3, 232, 237, 240, 253n11, 260, 273, 276n4, 278n32, 278n41, 287n124, 288n129; Commanding Voice of Auschwitz (“614th Commandment”), 6, 79 – 80, 100n77, 124, 126, 128, 131, 185, 191 – 2, 196, 199, 240, 274, 279n47, 287n124; post-Auschwitz, 72. See also Holocaust Avicenna. See Ibn Sina Ayer, A.J., 133 Baal, 134 – 5 Bar Kochba, 88 believer, 55, 65, 69, 87, 100n82, 101nn94 – 5, 133, 176, 199, 269; non-believer, 40. See also faith (belief); Job

294 Index Bernstein, Jeffrey, 9 Bible, 23, 25, 46n22, 130, 135 – 6, 174, 194, 257 – 8, 260; biblical, 11, 14, 20, 23 – 26, 36, 87, 93n10, 101n94, 136, 185 – 6, 191 – 2, 195 – 6, 258 – 9; the Book, 105n35, 167, 174; Scripture, 24, 49n59, 153n12; Tanakh, 69, 133, 135. See also Torah Blanchard, Kenneth C., Jr., 11 Boehme, Jacob, 143n51 Buber, Martin, 10, 64, 72, 76, 81 – 2, 93n15, 110nn203 – 4, 134 – 5, 149, 166, 184 – 202, 212 – 13, 283n84 Buchenwald, 78 Buddhists, 243 Cartesianian, 207, 223 Catholicism, 67 Celan, Paul, 41, 212n215 Christ, 60 – 1, 98n70, 185, 251, 260 Christianity, 17, 25, 35, 57 – 62, 83 – 6, 88, 93n12, 95n26, 97n48, 97n54 – 5, 98n70, 102n105, 105n132, 105n134, 111n203, 114n231, 156, 160, 211, 239, 244 – 5, 251, 254n28, 256, 260, 264, 270, 275, 278 – 9nn41 – 2, 279n46, 284n96, 284n99; bourgeoisChristianity, 115n237, 206; ethics of, 7, 32, 42; Hegel’s transfiguration of, 57 – 62; and Heidegger, 211 – 12; and the Holocaust, 71 – 2, 243 – 4, 260 – 1, 278nn41 – 2; Jewish-Christian/ Judeo-Christian, 69 – 70, 261; Judaism’s relation to, 118, 239, 264, 270, 284n99; notion of revelation, 186; and original sin, 35; postChristianity, 270, 273, 278n42; pre-Christianity, 284n99; quasiChristian eschatology, 7 – 8, 33, 38, 42 – 3; relation to philosophy, 94n20; Rosenzweig on, 93n12 Christocentrism, 123, 128, 133

Cohen, Hermann, 108n173, 118, 123, 128, 156n12, 160, 163, 185 Constantinianism, 53, 93n13 Covenant, 46n22, 52, 69, 86, 89 – 90, 101n92, 118, 130 – 3, 194, 212, 256, 258, 263, 267, 269 – 71, 273 – 4, 284n98, 286n111, 287n123 Crucifixion, 260 Crusades, 244, 272, 278n37, 278n40, 283n85, 287nn121 – 2 David, 99n75 Davidson, Herbert, 30n22 demonic, the, 7, 32 – 3, 43n6, 74, 85, 87, 103n115, 104n125, 108n187, 114n234, 168, 196, 246; diabolical, the, 167 – 9, 173, 233 – 4, 240; diabolical evil, 11, 28; devil, 181n14, 196, 199; Satan, 169, 240, 259; pandemonium, 78. See also evil/demonic/diabolical Denmark, King of, 105n131 Derrida, Jacques, 178n5 devil. See demonic, the deVries, Willem, 121 – 2 Dews, Peter, 115n243 diabolical, the. See demonic, the Divinity/the Divine. See God Donat, Alexander, 106n148 Doull, James, 57, 86 – 7, 115n243 Dresden, 225 Easter, 185, 191 Edward I, 68 Egypt, 193 Eichmann, Adolf, 37, 47n36, 68, 105n131, 237 Elijah, 8 empiricism, 9, 25, 137. See also Ayer, A.J.; Fackenheim: “Elijah and the Empiricists”; Flew, Antony; positivism

Enlightenment, the, 165, 188 – 90, 197, 241 – 2, 286n117; postEnlightenment, 85, 190, 286n117 Esau, 135 ethics, 7, 11, 32, 34, 37, 40, 42, 45n22, 61, 75, 100n77, 118, 156n12, 185, 191, 200, 214, 216 – 17, 221, 223, 225, 241, 257, 268 – 9, 280n58. See also Kant, Immanuel; morality Europe, 74, 165, 197, 242 evil/demonic/diabolical, 11, 28, 43n6, 74, 87, 196, 233; good and, 49n59, 51 – 4, 66, 88 – 9, 104n129, 199, 117n257, 132, 151; Hegel on, 51 – 91, 102n101, 115nn243 – 4; overcoming of, 42 – 3, 66, 89, 163; particularity or uniqueness of, 16 – 17, 73 – 5, 79, 103n115, 225 – 6, 236; phenomenon or reality of, 28, 286 – 7n108; problem of, 7 – 8, 11, 51 – 4, 89, 92nn5 – 7, 177n5, 236 – 44; radical, 7 – 8, 11, 32 – 7, 39 – 40, 43 – 4n6, 54, 70, 78 – 9, 87 – 8, 105n130, 107n154, 125, 157 – 8n16, 169, 174 – 5, 180 – 1n11, 181n14, 183n18, 199; rational incomprehensibility of, 28, 80, 85 – 90, 101n93, 105n130, 106n146, 107n166, 114n234, 116n248, 180 – 1nn11 – 12, 225 – 6, 232 – 4; resistance to, 125, 167 – 9, 182 – 3nn17 – 18; restraint of Strauss on, 245 – 51; victims of, 48n39. See also demonic, the exile, 26, 101n93, 162 – 3, 168; galut, 163 – 5, 177n4 existentialism, 9, 76 – 83, 100n82, 104n122, 109n191, 110n197, 111n203, 159 – 60, 181n14, 184, 187, 190, 194, 203; Jewish existentialism, 77, 80, 82 – 3, 100n76, 110n198 Exodus, 149, 188, 192 – 3 Ezra, 279n45, 283n83, 287n120

Index 295 Fackenheim, Emil L.: “Abraham and the Kantians,” 11, 257, 267 – 74, 282n82; “Elijah and the Empiricists,” 9, 133 – 9; Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, 11, 131, 133, 156n12, 184, 204, 210 – 15; God’s Presence in History, 10, 55, 62 – 8, 126, 195, 198; “The History and Transcendence of Philosophical Truth,” 10, 204 – 11; The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust, 71; Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Philosophers, 184; “Kant on Radical Evil,” 33 – 6; “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” 191; To Mend the World, 7, 11, 19, 24 – 28, 27, 32 – 3, 39 – 42, 76, 131, 167, 196, 204, 214 – 22, 234 – 41, 277n11; “Metaphysics and Historicity,” 125; “Moses and the Hegelians,” 86; “An Outline of Modern Jewish Theology,” 67; “The Possibility of the Universe in al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Maimonides,” 7, 19 – 24; The Religious Dimension of Hegel’s Thought, 83, 125; “Samuel Hirsch and Hegel,” 8, 143n8 Fagenblat, Michael, 139n4 faith (belief): Abraham’s, 266 – 74; challenge to, 24, 28, 51 – 2, 63 – 5, 94n19, 161 – 4, 256, 270; Christian, 59 – 60, 93n13, 97n55, 98n70, 114n231, 284n99, 245, 254n28, 279n46; commitment and, 109n194, 109 – 10nn196 – 7, 111nn207 – 8, 175 – 6n1; in creation, 21 – 3; despair and, 73, 258 – 9; fideism, 132; fragmentary, 196; history (temporality) and, 66, 101n89, 109n192; Jewish, 25, 63, 66, 69, 73, 90, 104n122, 105n38, 112n213, 162, 179n7, 196, 199 – 200,

296 Index faith (belief) (cont’d) 203, 224, 239, 272 – 3, 275, 281n60, 133, 199 – 200, 276n4; Jewish as defined by Nazis, 69, 77; knight of, 45n22, 267 – 9, 284n99; leap of, 9, 82, 89, 110n197, 155 – 7n12; in miracles, 286n117; modern, 242 – 4, 251; Muslim, 278n37; pagan, 212; philosophy and, 8 – 9, 12 – 7, 21, 25 – 6, 30 – 1n32, 41, 56 – 65, 67 – 8, 80, 84, 87, 92n7, 94n20, 100n77, 102n105, 113 – 14n229, 133, 137, 148, 161 – 4, 181n14, 186 – 96, 251, 256, 286n109; questioning of, 264, 273; rational, 51, 91 – 2n4, 191; renewal of, 104n122; unbelief (disbelief), 134, 282n76. See also believer Fall, the, 117n257 Ferdinand and Isabella, 68 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 57, 95n25, 96n28 Fichte, J.G., 38, 48n32, 98n67 Final Solution, 237 Flew, Antony, 133 Foucault, Michel, 178n5 Frankfurt School, 221 French Revolution, 85, 87, 254n27 Führer, the, 37, 214, 224 Funkenstein, Amos, 119 Galston, William A., 46 – 7n24 galut. See exile Gans, Eduard, 142n50 Genesis, 117n257, 135, 156n12, 232 – 3, 286n111 Genesis Rabbah, 267 – 8, 274, 284n94 genocide, 178, 196, 202n50, 223, 256 Gentiles, 68, 71 – 2, 239 Germany, 13, 38, 112n216, 158, 185, 197, 216, 218, 243 – 4, 276n2; German Idealism, 9, 100n86, 145, 215, 219, 256; German people, 11 – 12, 212 – 13, 218; Germans, 37 – 8,

40, 47, 48n32, 112n216, 119, 122, 181n14, 185, 192, 197, 214, 218 – 19, 242 – 3, 256, 276n2; Nazi Germany, 3, 12, 74 – 5, 164, 170, 175, 197, 240, 253n11; Weimar Republic, 242 – 5. See also National Socialism; Nuremberg Laws; Third Reich Glatstein, Jacob, 42 Glatzer, Nahum, 118 Gnosticism, 175, 179n10 God, 3, 8 – 10, 12, 20 – 3, 25 – 8, 35 – 6, 39 – 41, 48n20, 51 – 3, 58, 60 – 1, 63 – 7, 72 – 7, 80 – 1, 83 – 6, 88 – 91, 105n131, 105n138, 109n191, 111n208, 112n220, 113n227–8, 116n249, 125 – 6, 129 – 37, 139, 143n45, 145 – 53, 158n19, 161 – 73, 177 – 8n5, 181n12, 181 – 2nn14 – 17, 185 – 200, 208, 211 – 14, 224, 227, 232 – 3, 239, 244, 256 – 64, 266 – 76, 276nn4 – 5, 277n22, 277n28, 280n54, 280 – 1nn58 – 9, 281n61, 281n69, 282n77, 283n84, 284n93, 285n103, 286n111, 287n121, 287nn123 – 5, 288n129, 288n131; commands (commandments) of, 9 – 10, 12, 31n55, 36, 45 – 6n22, 60, 63 – 6, 77 – 80, 82 – 3, 90, 100n77, 101nn92 – 3, 103n115, 108n119, 128 – 31, 136, 156, 174, 188 – 9, 192 – 4, 199, 201n33, 234, 257, 259, 266 – 7, 269 – 73, 277n25, 279n42, 285n107, 286n113, 287n118, 287n122; concept or idea of, 9, 36, 38, 145 – 53, 157n12, 158n17, 186, 229n19, 243, 256, 285n105; death of, 100, 125, 224, 229n19; Divine/Divinity, 59, 97n54, 110n203, 166, 194, 239; eclipse of, 72, 197 – 9; existence of, 9, 20 – 1, 36, 51, 92nn5 – 6, 197, 256; God-hypothesis, 100n77; God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, 9,

116n249; God of history, 52 – 3, 63 – 4, 66 – 7, 73, 88 – 90, 99n76, 101n93, 103n113, 126, 129 – 30, 134, 137, 170 – 1, 173, 185, 192 – 6, 199, 257, 287n124; God of Israel, 103n112, 112n210, 190; God of the philosophers, 9, 26, 36, 85, 109n191, 112n220, 113nn227–9, 116n249, 125, 129, 131 – 2, 145 – 50, 152 – 3, 158n17, 243, 256; God’s creation of the world, 20, 22, 58, 67, 130, 152, 179n10, 180n11; hiding of God’s face (hester panim), 52, 169 – 70, 197 – 8, 283n84; kingdom of, 113n223; Lord, 51, 60, 195, 232, 270; presence of, 52, 64, 66 – 7, 84, 100n76, 126, 166 – 7, 170, 189, 192, 194 – 5, 197, 257 – 64, 267, 271 – 2, 275, 277n25, 279n42, 281n59, 283n88, 284n98, 285n105, 286n113, 287n124; Son of (Adam Kadmon), 130, 143n51; YHWH, 135. See also God god, 57, 80, 87, 115n245, 135, 211 – 13, 243, 264; godlessness, 57 Goethe, J.W., 112n216, 216 Golgotha, 260 Gordon, Peter E., 119 Graetz, Heinrich, 120 Greeks, 53, 59 – 60, 62, 73, 97n54, 98n70, 102n106, 213, 216 – 17, 221 – 2, 241 – 2, 288n129, 288n131; GreekRoman, 67 Green, Kenneth Hart, 9 Greenberg, Gershon, 140n8 Greenberg, Irving, 181n14 gypsies, 238 Hadrian, 66, 68 – 9, 79, 104n122 Halakhah, 200n8. See also Jewish: law Halevi, Yehuda, 162, 176n1, 289 Harris, Errol E., 92n7, 104n129 Hasidim, 78, 281n68

Index 297 Haym, Rudolf, 113n228 Hegel, G.W.F., 8, 14, 25, 51 – 91, 92 – 3n10, 94 – 5nn20 – 1, 95n25, 96n30, 96n33, 96n35, 96–7n41, 97n46, 97n48, 97n50, 98n58, 98n67, 98n70, 99–100nn75–7, 100n82, 101n86, 102n96, 102n101, 102nn105–6, 106n146, 108n173, 109n191, 110–11n203, 112n212, 112–13n220, 113nn224–5, 113n227, 113–14n229–31, 114n233, 115n237, 115nn239–41, 115nn243–5, 117n257, 117n267, 118, 121 – 32, 161, 183n17, 184 – 5, 203 – 4, 206, 215 – 17, 219 – 20, 224, 227, 228n8, 230n40, 233 – 8, 248, 253n11, 281n69, 282n77, 283n84; Hegelianism, 8, 11, 14, 53, 55 – 9, 65, 68, 73 – 77, 80, 84 – 91, 95n25, 95n29, 98n70, 100n77, 107n173, 115n241, 115n245, 116n249, 117n262, 118 – 139, 143n46, 146, 180, 183n17, 206 – 7, 216, 220, 230n40, 234 – 8, 283n84; post-Hegelianism, 14, 56, 80, 185; transfiguration of Christianity, 57 – 62 Heidegger, Martin, 10 – 13, 76, 94n16, 94n18, 102n110, 105n133, 114n230, 117n267, 119, 146 – 7, 149, 159 – 60, 169, 173 – 4, 177 – 8n5, 203 – 27, 228n3, 228n8, 229n19, 229n26, 230n40, 231n66, 240, 252 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 118, 180n11 Heydrich, Reinhard, 241 Himmler, Heinrich, 205 Hiroshima, 225 Hirsch, Samuel, 8, 118, 129 – 39, 143n48 history, 3 – 17, 24 – 7, 33, 36 – 9, 41 – 3, 46 – 7n24, 52 – 5, 57 – 79, 81, 84 – 5, 87 – 91, 92 – 3n10, 93n12, 93 – 4nn15 – 16, 94 – 5nn19 – 21, 96n33,

298 Index history (cont’d) 97n48, 99–101nn76–7, 100n82, 101n86, 101n88, 101n93, 102n101, 102nn105–7, 103n113, 106n146, 107–8n173, 109n192, 113n227, 115n241, 117n267, 118 – 20, 126 – 7, 129 – 30, 132 – 4, 137 – 9, 146, 148, 152, 154 – 7n12, 158n19, 159 – 75, 175 – 6n1, 176 – 8nn3 – 6, 180n11, 182n15, 182 – 3nn17 – 18, 184 – 6, 191 – 7, 199, 202n50, 203 – 10, 212, 215 – 23, 225 – 7, 230n40, 234 – 41, 244, 251 – 2, 256 – 7, 261, 263, 265 – 7, 270, 272 – 5, 278n37, 279n45, 280 – 1nn58 – 60, 282n78, 283n84, 283n88, 284n99, 287n122, 287n124, 287n127; ahistorical, 27 – 8, 158n19; anti-historicism, 119; historians, 78, 116n248, 179n6; historicism, 10 – 12, 54 – 5, 94n16, 98 – 9n70, 102n110, 119, 160, 178n5, 204 – 8, 220, 224, 228n8, 234 – 6, 238, 266 – 7, 279n42, 279n48, 281n69, 284n96; historicity, 12, 56, 76, 81 – 2, 84, 90 – 1, 94n18, 95n26, 97n48, 125 – 6, 159, 160, 165, 173, 176 – 8nn3 – 5, 206 – 9, 211, 214 – 15, 217, 220, 225 – 6, 240; quasihistoricism, 94n16, 206, 287n124; superhistorical/supra-historical, 46n24, 64; transhistorical, 161 – 4, 166, 171 – 2, 206, 240; unhistorical, 93n15; world-historical, 60, 67 – 9, 74, 76, 85, 102n101, 106n146, 196. See also God: God of history; Jewish: history (historicity) Hitler, Adolf, 11, 37, 80, 103n114, 104n122, 124, 164 – 5, 175, 179n7, 184 – 5, 213, 218, 225 – 6, 238, 244, 279n47, 287n122; post-Hitler, 185 Hobbes, Thomas, 230n40, 243, 247 Hodgson, Peter, 143n51 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 221

Holocaust, 4 – 5, 10 – 12, 15 – 17, 19, 24 – 8, 32 – 3, 36 – 7, 39, 41, 51, 68, 70, 72 – 5, 76, 79, 83, 86, 88, 93n12, 103n118, 105n130, 107n166, 111n209, 114nn233–4, 115n245, 116n248, 123 – 6, 159 – 60, 164 – 9, 171 – 5, 177n5, 179n7, 180n11, 182 – 3nn17 – 18, 184 – 6, 191 – 3, 195 – 200, 202n50, 219, 222, 224 – 6, 233 – 4, 236 – 42, 244, 246 – 7, 252, 253n11, 266, 279n43, 279n45, 281n66, 283nn84 – 5, 284n98; Holocaust Kingdom, 106n147; post-Holocaust, 10 – 11, 15, 39, 77 – 9, 83, 104n122, 124, 126, 170 – 1, 182n16, 184, 186, 191, 195 – 9, 224, 234, 257, 261, 266, 272 – 3, 279n45, 284n99, 286n111; Shoah, 4, 9, 53, 55, 69, 71 – 3, 75 – 6, 89, 145, 153, 181n14, 192, 281n66 Homer, 213, 216 Huber, Kurt, 37 – 8, 40, 48n32, 48n34, 282n78 Hume, David, 92n6 Hutchet-Bishop, Claire, 278n41 Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 7, 19 – 20, 23, 145 – 6, 158n17, 158n19 idolatry, 45n22, 156, 188, 211 – 12, 272; modern idolatry, 80, 87 – 8, 113n229, 115n245, 116n247, 241, 250. See also paganism Iljin, Iwan, 96n36 Inquisition, 68, 241, 244, 283n85 Isaac, 9, 11, 45n22, 116n249, 156n12, 257 – 64, 269, 274, 277n17, 277n25, 278n40, 284n94, 286n113. See also Akeda Isaiah, 51, 91n1; Deutero-Isaiah, 197 Ishmael, 259 Islam, 20, 22, 67, 120; Muslims, 243, 260, 278n37 Israel: Israelites, 64, 131; Jewish people, 52, 65, 103n113, 112n211,

130, 135, 190, 200n8, 258; land or state of, 24, 47n26, 82 – 3, 111n209, 174, 183n18. See also Jews Jackson, M.W., 112n218 Jacob, 9, 116n249, 135, 258 James, William, 140n12 Jeremiah, 73, 133, 135 – 8, 283n83 Jerusalem, 14, 28, 66, 73, 77, 98n70, 99n76, 178n5, 242, 279n44. See also Athens and Jerusalem Jewish, 27, 42 – 3, 55, 65, 70, 72, 78, 88 – 9, 93n11, 93n15, 95n26, 98n70, 99n77, 105n138, 108n173, 111n208, 124, 129, 131, 134, 141n29, 143n46, 161, 163, 166 – 7, 170 – 1, 173 – 5, 176n1, 177n5, 180 – 1nn11 – 12, 185, 187, 191 – 2, 194, 211, 217, 234, 237 – 8, 240 – 1, 256 – 7, 260 – 70, 272 – 5, 278n37, 279n45, 281n59, 287n122; anti-Jewishness, 279n42; belief/ faith, 25, 63, 69, 73, 90, 104n122, 112n213, 133, 162, 196, 199 – 200, 203, 224; existentialism, 77, 80, 82 – 3, 100n77, 110n199; history (historicity), 8, 33, 54, 64, 67 – 8, 73, 91, 102n107, 119, 164, 166, 171, 174, 192 – 3, 195 – 6; Jewish-Christian/ Judeo-Christian, 69, 71, 261; Jewish question, 75; law, 23 – 6, 30 – 1n32, 36, 46n22, 66, 94n19, 108n189, 110n202, 118, 188 – 9, 212 – 13, 275, 279n42, 280n58, 286n116 (see also Halakhah; Moses; Noah; Torah); life, 26, 83, 123, 126, 128 – 9, 132, 142n44, 168, 170, 173, 186, 196; morality, 39, 101n92, 266 – 8, 270 – 2, 275, 277n25 ; mysticism, 224 (see also Kabbalah); people, 3, 26, 33, 77, 82 – 3, 103n117, 130 – 1, 133 – 4, 162, 176n3, 186, 192 – 3, 196 – 7, 203, 239 (see also Israel: Jewish people);

Index 299 non-Jewish, 8, 25, 73, 118, 164, 175, 186, 242; philosophy, 3 – 4, 9 – 10, 14 – 15, 19, 24 – 5, 28, 29n6, 53, 56, 63, 118 – 20, 123, 128 – 9, 184 – 6, 188, 192, 196, 199 – 200, 224, 233, 275 (see also Jewish: thought); post-Jewish, 273; revelation (see revelation); state, 54, 82, 174, 182n16, 182n18, 196 (see also Israel: land or state of); theology, 9 – 10, 14, 24, 62, 76, 103n113, 109n197, 136, 153n4, 165, 170, 192 – 3, 199 – 200, 201n33, 257, 265; thought, 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 19, 53, 76 – 7, 82 – 3, 90, 103n113, 111n209, 112n211, 119 – 20, 123, 142n44, 153n4, 159, 166, 184, 186, 192, 195, 197, 200, 203, 210 – 11, 224, 239, 275, 285n103 (see also Jewish: philosophy); tradition, 8, 30n2, 45n22, 120, 133, 172, 272 Jews, 3, 10 – 13, 15, 17, 25, 30n32, 40, 62 – 4, 66 – 7, 69, 71 – 3, 75, 80, 82, 93n15, 99n73, 103nn118–19, 105n134, 108n187, 108n189, 112n213, 112n216, 114n234, 118, 120, 124, 126, 130 – 1, 134, 141n29, 157n12, 161 – 9, 174, 176n3, 177n5, 179n7, 180 – 1nn11 – 12, 182n18, 185 – 6, 191, 195 – 7, 199 – 200, 201n33, 203, 212 – 13, 218, 221, 224 – 6, 238 – 43, 246, 254n27, 256 – 7, 259 – 61, 263 – 8, 270 – 5, 276n4, 278n40, 279n45, 279n47, 281n60, 281n68, 283nn84 – 5, 283n88, 284nn98 – 9, 264n111, 287n123; hatred of, 17, 131, 256, 257, 275, 284n99; nonJews, 40, 130, 169, 242 (see also Gentiles); Reform Jews, 191 Job, 26, 53, 73, 197 – 200, 203 – 4, 217 – 18 Jonas, Hans, 70–1, 170, 211 Judaism, 6 – 8, 11 – 12, 19, 22 – 8, 30n32, 36, 39 – 40, 42, 53 – 4, 60, 62 – 4, 66,

300 Index Judaism (cont’d) 68 – 9, 71, 75 – 7, 79 – 80, 86, 88, 90 – 1, 93nn10 – 12, 94n19, 94n25, 99n75, 103n117, 107n159, 108n173, 109n192, 115nn239–41, 117n273, 118 – 20, 123, 131 – 4, 136, 143n50, 145, 153n4, 156n12, 160, 162 – 4, 168, 171, 175, 177, 179n9, 182n17, 184, 188, 191, 194 – 5, 197, 199, 200n8, 201n33, 203 – 4, 213, 238, 252, 256 – 8, 260 – 1, 263 – 70, 275, 276n5, 277n25, 279n42, 279n45, 280n54, 281n60, 283n84, 284n96, 285n103, 286n113, 287n122; Haredi Judaism, 163; Judaization, 10, 203, 210 Kabbalah, 39, 40, 143n51, 179 – 80nn10 – 11 Kant, Immanuel, 7 – 8, 11, 25, 32 – 50, 56, 60 – 1, 98n67, 101n86, 101n92, 110n199, 113n227, 114n229, 116n250, 116n252, 158n16, 185 – 90, 194, 204 – 6, 208, 215, 217, 256, 263, 264 – 74, 278 – 9n42, 281n69, 282n75, 282n77, 283 – 4n90, 285nn103 – 4, 285 – 6nn108 – 9, 287n124, 288n131; Kantian morality (see morality: Kantian); post-Kantian, 185, 266, 284n99 Kass, Leon, 118 Kavka, Martin, 8 – 9 Kepnes, Steven, 10 kiddush ha-Shem, 69, 79, 182n17, 266, 272 – 3, 278n37, 285n107, 286 – 7n118 Kierkegaard, Søren, 45 – 6n22, 76, 80, 82, 95n26, 100n82, 102n96, 108n173, 109n192, 109–10nn196–7, 114n229, 146 – 8, 154 – 7n12, 175n1, 187, 202n45, 241, 267 – 8, 271, 273, 275, 276n5, 278n42, 280n58, 284n99 Kojève, Alexandre, 96n36, 234, 252 Kristallnacht, 107n159

Lang, Fritz, 221 law, 46n22, 82, 122, 163, 186 – 8, 212, 223, 248, 254n37; Jewish (see under Jewish); moral, 34 – 7, 39, 48n40, 268 – 9, 271 – 2, 276n5, 285n103 (see also Kant, Immanuel); of nature, 22, 34, 108n199, 163, 186 – 7; revealed, 4 – 5, 25 – 6, 36, 261 – 2, 265, 269 – 70, 285n103; Noahide laws, 285n103. See also Nuremberg Laws Lehrhaus (Frankfurt), 197 Leibniz, G.W., 8, 49 – 50n59, 147 Lenin, 248 Lessing, G.E., 8, 49 – 50n59, 148, 154 – 7n12 Levi, Primo, 41, 70, 104n125, 288n129 Levinas, Emmanuel, 118, 139n4 Lewinska, Pelagia, 78 – 9 liberalism, 89, 93, 115n237, 178, 216, 218 – 19, 221, 223, 241 – 5, 254n27, 276n5; liberal democracy/ democrats, 223, 233, 242 – 3, 245; liberal state, 27, 243 Lloyd, Vincent W., 142n45 Lorch, Benjamin, 6 – 7 Lord. See God Löwith, Karl, 93n10 Lublin, 78 Luria, Isaac (Lurianic), 168, 170 – 2, 179n10 Luther, Martin, 229n26, 245; Lutheran, 59 Maccabees, 68 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 230n40, 248 – 9, 251 – 2, 255n41; Machiavellian, 104n127 Magid, Shaul, 142n44 Maimonides, Moses, 6 – 7, 19 – 32, 130, 146, 185, 278n37, 279n47, 285n107, 287nn121 – 2 Mankowitz, Zeev, 179n6

Marx, Marxism, 57, 95n26, 205, 209 – 10, 216, 218 – 21, 228n8, 248; Marxist-Leninists, 248 Matthai, Albert, 48n32 Maybaum, Ignaz, 181n12 Mayence, 272 McRobert, Laurie, 39 – 40, 42 Meister Eckhart, 224 Mendelssohn, Moses, 118 Mengele (Dr.), 182n16 Mesha, king of Moab, 284n94 Messiah, 89, 161; Messianic, 26, 64, 66 – 7, 83, 86, 89 – 91, 108n173, 109n192; messianism, 100, 278n37 Micah, 36, 46n22, 267, 270, 274, 280n54, 283n83, 284nn93 – 4, 287n125 Middle Ages/medieval, 6 – 7, 9, 19 – 20, 24 – 5, 28, 29n9, 53, 59, 67, 93n11, 109n191, 110n197, 119, 145, 158n119, 175n1, 224, 244, 260, 269, 272 – 3, 283n86 Midrash, Midrashic, 12, 19, 55, 65–6, 91, 99n76, 100n79, 101n89, 117n273, 132 – 3, 145, 153n4, 156 – 7n12, 178n5, 180n11, 185, 194 – 7, 257 – 9, 261 – 7, 270, 274 – 5, 276n5, 280n49, 280n58, 282n82, 283n85, 287n121; neoMidrashic, 100n77. See also Genesis Rabbah miracle, 8, 20, 23 – 5, 28, 64, 83, 155 – 6n12, 157n14, 162 – 3, 176n3, 182n17, 193, 240, 259, 262, 274, 278n32, 283n85, 286n117 mitzvah/mitzvot, 36, 42, 70, 78, 80, 188, 201n33, 287n22 modernity, 7, 13, 16, 24, 27 – 8, 32, 53, 61, 77, 85 – 6, 94n19, 110n201, 113n229, 160 – 1, 168, 199, 223, 238, 241, 248 – 52, 254n27; modern idolatry (see idolatry); modernism, 177n5; modernization, 224, 230n40;

Index 301 modern Judaism, 6, 19, 24; modern liberalism (see liberalism); modern outlook, 19; modern philosophy, 7 – 9, 11, 15, 19, 24 – 5, 28, 43n6, 53 – 4, 56, 58 – 9, 77, 85 – 6, 97n54, 160, 175n1, 187, 190, 215, 249 – 50, 257, 275, 288n131; modern political science, 242 – 3, 248 – 9; modern science/technology, 24, 82, 214, 222 – 3, 230n40, 236, 248, 281n60; modern state, 25, 61, 102n95, 164 (see also totalitarianism); modern theology, 8, 10, 109n197; modern thought, 5, 13, 15, 159, 204, 239, 244 – 5, 249, 268, 276n5, 281n61, 282n77, 284n98; modern world, 26 – 7, 80, 87, 93n11, 94nn19 – 20, 114n231, 115n244, 116n247, 187, 197, 246; postmodern, 177n5, 181n14; premodern, 24 – 5, 90, 94n19, 108n173, 245, 260, 265, 282n77, 283n84, 284n99, 285n103 (see also Middle Ages/medieval) Moeller van den Brucke, Arthur, 221 Moloch, 46n22 morality, 7, 17, 23, 25, 32 – 9, 51, 54, 56, 70, 73 – 4, 79 – 80, 88 – 9, 104n129, 106n146, 113n223, 163 – 5, 174, 177n4, 181n11 – 12, 204 – 5, 208, 223, 225 – 7, 232, 240 – 1, 243, 255n41, 257, 269, 271 – 2, 275, 276n5, 284n99; Kantian, 7, 25, 32 – 42, 44n6, 45n22, 46 – 7n24, 47n26, 48n40, 98n66, 204 – 6, 208, 265 – 9, 271, 276n5, 279n42, 281n69, 282n75, 285nn103 – 4, 286n109, 288n131; moral character, 35 – 6; moral consciousness, 7, 33 – 5, 38; moral duties, 34 – 6, 89, 205; moral law (see under law); revealed morality, 263, 265, 268 – 71, 273, 275,

302 Index morality (cont’d) 277n25, 285n103. See also Jewish: morality; mitzva/mitzvot; tikkun Morgan, Michael L., 132 Moriah, 260, 263, 267, 280n58 Moses, 22, 64, 79, 103n113, 149, 191, 203, 213; Mosaic Law, 24. See also Halakhah; Jewish: law Munk, Reinier, 39, 41 – 2 Muselmann/Muselmänner, 27, 69 – 70, 104n128, 144n56, 288n128 Musil, Robert, 221 Mutakallimun, 20 Myers, David N., 119 mysticism, 53, 57, 66, 69, 73, 180, 188, 209, 224, 236. See also Kabbalah National Socialism, 10, 104n125, 104n129, 210, 213 – 15, 218 – 19, 225 – 6, 228n3, 241, 244, 252; Nazi, 3, 11 – 12, 19, 26, 32 – 3, 37 – 8, 41, 47n26, 51, 69 – 71, 73 – 5, 77 – 9, 87 – 8, 103nn116–17, 104n127, 104n129, 105n131, 112n213, 115n237, 115n243, 116n247, 131, 164 – 5, 167, 170, 175, 196 – 8, 204, 212 – 14, 218 – 19, 223 – 5, 232 – 4, 236 – 7, 240 – 2, 247, 253, 256, 273, 275, 280n49 Nazism. See National Socialism Neoplatonism. See Plato/Platonic Newell, Waller R., 10 – 11 Newton, Isaac, 56 Nicholson, Graeme, 124 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 47n24, 47n26, 62, 99n72, 108n173, 114n229, 175n1, 178n5, 206, 209 – 10, 220 – 1, 224 – 5, 228n8, 229n19, 231n66 Nissenbaum, Rabbi Yitzak, 79. See also rabbis Noah, 170; Noahide laws, 285n103 Novak, David, 118 Nuremberg Laws, 219, 256, 264, 276n2

paganism, 11, 53, 77, 130, 208, 211 – 13. See also idolatry Parens, Joshua, 31n55 Passover, 63, 124, 193 Paul, 279n42 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 99n73 Peripatetics. See Aristotle Persian empire, 73 Pharaoh, 68 Philo, 146 philosophy: Jewish, 3 – 4, 9 – 10, 14 – 15, 19, 24 – 5, 28, 29n6, 53, 56, 63, 118 – 20, 123, 128 – 9, 184 – 6, 188, 192, 196, 199 – 200, 224, 233, 275 (see also Jewish: thought); modern, 7 – 9, 11, 15, 19, 24 – 5, 28, 43n6, 53 – 4, 56, 58 – 9, 77, 85 – 6, 97n54, 160, 175n1, 187, 190, 215, 249 – 50, 257, 275, 288n131; relation to Christianity, 94n20; relation to religion, 94n20 Pinkard, Terry, 142n50 Pippin, Robert, 141n22 – 3, 142n41 Plato/Platonic, 11, 28, 47n26, 49n48, 84, 113n224, 203 – 6, 207 – 8, 210, 213 – 14, 216, 220, 227, 229n19, 233 – 7, 239, 242, 245 – 8, 255n41; Gorgias, 50n59; Laws, 248, 254n37; Neoplatonic/Neoplatonism, 20 – 1, 57, 97n50; Platonism/Platonists, 96n33, 235, 237 – 9; Republic, 247, 251 Poles, 238 Pollock, Benjamin, 123 – 4 Portnoff, Sharon, 11 – 12, 42, 93n13 positivism, 219; logical positivism, 205 – 7; theological positivism, 94n19 Pre-Socratics, 208 – 9, 211, 213, 220, 250 prophets, 4, 6, 8, 25, 30n32, 99n75, 133 – 8, 180, 184, 192, 212, 252, 279n45, 283n83

Protestantism, 25, 59, 67, 86, 134. See also Christianity Psalms, 52, 99n75, 197 – 8, 283n84 Purim, 185, 191 rabbis, 19, 66, 69 – 70, 73, 79, 107n159, 114n234, 117n273, 129, 191 – 2, 241, 264, 266, 272, 283n83, 287n127; prerabbinic, 262; rabbinic Judaism, 24 – 6, 93n10, 94n19, 108n173, 200n8, 279n45, 286n116; rabbinic thought, 66, 185, 194 – 5, 197. See also Akiba; Midrash, Midrashic; Talmud Red Sea, 64 – 6, 193, 195 Reformation, 85 Reisman, David, 221 reveal, 6, 55, 70 – 1, 79 – 81, 85, 95n21, 116n247, 161, 164, 166, 172, 174, 176n3, 183n18, 194, 208 – 9, 230n46, 233, 236, 246, 257 – 8, 264 – 5, 272 – 4, 282n78; God’s revealing Himself, 130, 149, 152, 186, 189, 261; revealed authority, 31n32, 175n1; revealed law, 4 – 5, 36, 265, 269 – 79; revealed morality, 39, 263, 268 – 71, 276n5, 277n25, 285n103; revealed religion, 114n229, 211 – 12, 215–16, 220, 263, 268 – 70; revealed truth, 93n13 revelation: of the absolute (Schelling), 158n19; alternative path to, 187 – 99, 203; of Being (Heidegger), 208 – 13, 222, 225; beyond objective understanding, 82, 90; challenge to, 100n77, 186, 197; defense of, 9 – 10, 15, 25, 197; diabolical (of Holocaust, of 614th commandment), 80, 87, 168 – 9, 173, 185, 192, 225; as direct encounter, 110n199, 110nn201 – 2, 185, 189 – 90; during self-contraction or eclipse of God, 171 – 3, 198; as historical novum, 87, 101n88, 161; history as

Index 303 site of, 25, 62 – 8, 81, 134, 160, 166 – 7, 185, 206 ; as incursion into history (time), 72, 77, 173, 197n168, 180n11, 189 – 99; invitation to (Wiesel), 261; Israel preserved as receiver of (Rosenzweig), 164; as miracle, 25, 64, 176n3; morality and, 265 – 73; as open-ended, 25, 109n192; presupposes subjective openness, not traditional authority, 109–10n197, 111n207, 112n202, 175 – 6n1; reason (philosophy) and, 23, 55 – 6, 58, 88, 90, 194, 199, 203, 226, 269, 276n5, 282n77, 285n103; refutation or rejection of, 27, 134; as resistance to diabolical evil, 41, 167; as root experience, 193 – 5, 199; sudden deep insights masquerading as divine, 182n15; of Torah, 42, 62 – 4, 199, 286n116 Romans, 73; Greek-Roman, 62, 67, 98n70 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (FDR), 213, 225 root experiences, 62 – 8, 76 – 7, 90, 100n77, 191n91, 153n4, 168, 191, 193 – 5, 199, 200n8 Rorty, Richard, 178n5 Rosen, Avraham (Alan), 276n1 Rosenzweig, Franz, 9 – 10, 48 – 9n46, 53 – 6, 76 – 7, 84, 93n12, 94n19, 100n82, 103n113, 107n169, 107–8n173, 109nn191–2, 113n223, 118 – 20, 145 – 6, 148 – 9, 154n7, 157n14, 159 – 75, 175n1, 176 – 7nn3 – 5, 179n9, 181n14, 182nn15 – 16, 185, 233, 289 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 230n40 Ruge, Arnold, 57 Russia, 216, 237 – 8 Sacks, Robert D., 46n22 Sadra, Mulla, 158n17

304 Index Sarah, 280n58 Satan. See demonic, the Schachter-Shalomi, Zalman, 142n44 Schelling, FWJ, 9, 43 – 4n6, 76, 109n196, 110n199, 114n229, 115n243, 145 – 53, 154n7, 154n10, 154 – 7n12, 157 – 8n16, 158n19, 175n1, 207; pre-Schellingian, 158n17 Schiller, Friedrich, 45n14 Schmitt, Carl, 218 – 19 Scholem, Gershom, 62, 99n73, 105n131 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 47n26, 108n173 Schwarzschild, Steven, 185 Scripture. See Bible Scruton, Roger, 100n83, 110n199 secularism, 14 – 15, 17, 24 – 5, 27 – 8, 40, 67, 77, 80, 83, 85, 93, 95, 100, 102n107, 111n208, 112nn212 – 13, 114n231, 124 – 6, 141n29, 160, 173 – 5, 183n17, 195 – 6, 206, 224, 243, 265 – 6, 271, 273 – 5, 278n42, 279n45, 281nn59 – 60, 283n84, 284n99 Seeskin, Kenneth, 30n22 Shapiro, Susan, 288n128 Shoah. See Holocaust Sinai, 26, 42, 62, 64 – 7, 79 – 80, 101n93, 108n173, 132, 161, 166 – 7, 180n11, 192 – 5, 199 Six Day War, 7, 33, 42 Smith, Steven, 115n237 Socrates, Socratic, 48n34, 50n59, 70, 75, 117n257, 210, 245 – 7, 250 – 2 Sonderkommandos, 104n124 Sperber, Manès, 41 Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict), 27 – 8, 31n55, 47n26, 48 – 9n46, 77, 88, 96n29, 104n127, 113n227, 146, 155, 159, 175n1, 230n40, 243, 286n117 Stalin, Josef, 248, 251 Stalingrad, 225

Stangneth, Bettina, 47n36 Steiner, George, 185 Stoicism, 208, 217 Strauss, Leo, 11 – 14, 28, 30n32, 33, 45n11, 49n46, 76, 94n16, 94n19, 134, 175n1, 178nn5 – 6, 185, 224, 232 – 52, 254n27, 254n37, 282n78, 286 – 7n118, 288n129 Talmud, 170; B.T. Baba Batra, 279n44; B. Shabbat 88, 132 Tanakh. See Bible Temple, 63, 66, 200n8, 212, 258, 279n44, 286n116, 287n120 Terence, 55 Third Reich, 33, 38, 71, 104n128, 203, 220, 223, 225 – 6, 236 – 7, 246, 282n75 tikkun, 39 – 40, 83, 112n215, 177 – 8, 182 – 3n17; tikkun olam, 168 Titus, 66, 68 Torah, 30n32, 42, 45 – 6n22, 62, 65, 67, 70, 101nn92 – 4, 103n113, 156n12, 176n1, 180n11, 192, 194, 199, 201n33, 264, 266 – 75, 278n37, 279n47, 284n98, 287n127; oral Torah, 93n10, 283n83. See also Jewish: law Torquemada, 68 totalitarianism, 87, 248; antitotalitarianism, 118 Toynbee, A.W., 93n15 Turkey, 196 van den Brucke, Moeller, 221 Wagner, Richard, 221 Warsaw Ghetto, 78 – 9 Weimar Republic, 242 – 5 White Rose, 38 Wiesel, Elie, 11 – 12, 41 – 2, 68, 72, 75, 105n131, 105n138, 181n14, 185, 195, 197 – 8, 200, 256 – 88

Wilford, Paul, 8 Wolfson, Harry A., 118 World War II, 1, 15, 183n14, 214, 219 Worms, 272 Xenophon, 247 – 8, 255n41

Index 305 Yaffe, Martin D., 7 – 8 YHWH. See God Yom Kippur, 104n122 Yovel, Yirmiahu, 112n218 Zion/Zionism, 112n213, 163; antiZionism, 164

This page intentionally left blank

The Kenneth Michael Tanenbaum Series in Jewish Studies Michael L. Morgan, Fackenheim’s Jewish Philosophy: An Introduction Daniel R. Schwartz, Judeans and Jews: Four Faces of Dichotomy in Ancient Jewish History Michael Marmur, Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Sources of Wonder David Novak, Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, and Nature Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe (editors), Emil Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical Sources

EMIL FACKENHEIM’S POST-HOLOCAUST THOUGHT AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL SOURCES

Recognized as one of the leading philosophers and Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, Emil Ludwig Fackenheim has been widely praised for his boldness, originality, and profundity. As is wellknown, a striking feature of Fackenheim’s thought is his unwavering contention that the Holocaust brought about a radical shift in human history so monumental and unprecedented that nothing can ever be the same again. Fackenheim regarded it as the specific duty of thinkers and scholars to assume responsibility to probe this historical event for its impact on the human future and to make its immense ramifications evident. In Emil Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical Sources, scholars consider important figures in the history of philosophy – including Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Strauss – and trace how Fackenheim’s philosophical confrontations with each of them shaped his overall thought. This collection details which philosophers exercised the greatest influence on Fackenheim and how he diverged from them. Incorporating widely varying approaches, the contributors in the volume wrestle with this challenge historically, politically, and philosophically in order to illuminate the depths of Fackenheim’s thought. (The Kenneth Michael Tanenbaum Series in Jewish Studies) kenneth hart green is a professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. martin d. yaffe is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas.

The Kenneth Michael Tanenbaum Series in Jewish Studies The Kenneth Michael Tanenbaum Book Series features outstanding research on topics in all areas of Jewish Studies. This interdisciplinary series highlights especially research developed within the framework of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Jewish Studies. The Centre is an interdisciplinary research and teaching unit with a large and diverse cohort of affiliated faculty and an impressive roster of annual conferences, symposia, and lectures. Reflecting the Centre’s vibrancy, the series highlights the best new research by local and international scholars who contribute to the intellectual life of this interdisciplinary community. The series has been enabled by a generous donation from Kenneth Tanenbaum, whose family has long supported the Centre and helped make it a leader globally in Jewish Studies. General Editor: Anna Shternshis, Director, Centre for Jewish Studies, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto For a list of books in the series, see page 307.

Emil Fackenheim’s Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical Sources

EDITED BY KENNETH HART GREEN AND MARTIN D. YAFFE

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2021 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-2964-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2965-9 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-4875-2967-3 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-2966-6 (PDF)

The Kenneth Michael Tanenbaum Series in Jewish Studies _____________________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Emil Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust thought and its philosophical sources / edited by Kenneth Hart Green and Martin D. Yaffe. Other titles: Post-Holocaust thought and its philosophical sources Names: Green, Kenneth Hart, 1953– editor. | Yaffe, Martin D., editor. Series: Kenneth Michael Tanenbaum series in Jewish studies. Description: Series statement: The Kenneth Michael Tanenbaum series in Jewish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210236256 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210236477 | ISBN 9781487529659 (paper) | ISBN 9781487529642 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487529673 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487529666 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Fackenheim, Emil L. | LCSH: Philosophy, German – Influence. Classification: LCC B995.F334 E45 2021 | DDC 181/.06 – dc23

_____________________________________________________________________ University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an Ontario government agency.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

To Emil Fackenheim’s past, present, and future readers.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Introduction 3

kenneth hart green and martin d. yaffe

  1 Emil Fackenheim on Moses Maimonides and the “One Great Difference between the Medievals and the Moderns”  19 benjamin lorch

  2 Emil Fackenheim’s Jewish Correction of Kant’s Quasi-Christian Eschatology  32 martin d. yaffe   3 The Meaning of History: Knowledge of Good and Evil in Hegel and Fackenheim  51 paul t. wilford   4 Strategies of Jewish Hegelianism: Emil Fackenheim and Samuel Hirsch  118 martin kavka

  5 Can Philosophy Be Positive? The Place of Schelling in the Thought of Emil Fackenheim  145 jeffrey a. bernstein   6  Emil Fackenheim’s Way from Presence to History: Its Grounding in a Critique of Rosenzweig on Revelation  159 kenneth hart green

  7 Fackenheim and Buber on Revelation: Re-evaluating the Existential and Historical Turn Away from Philosophy  184 steven kepnes

viii Contents

  8 To Captivate the Jewish Thinker: Fackenheim’s Ontological Encounter with Heidegger  203 waller r. newell   9 Philosophy in the Age of Auschwitz: Emil Fackenheim and Leo Strauss  232 kenneth c. blanchard, jr. 10 Wiesel and Fackenheim: Theology, Philosophy, and the Problem of Jewish Persecution  256 sharon portnoff

Contributors  289 Index  293