Nature and Norm: Judaism, Christianity, and the Theopolitical Problem 9781644695104

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NATURE AND NORM J U DA I S M, C H R I S T I A N I TY, A N D T H E T H E O PO L I T I CA L P RO B L E M

New Perspectives in Post-Rabbinic Judaism Series Editor Shaul Magid (Dartmouth College) History, Metahistory, and Evil: Jewish Theological Responses to the Holocaust Barbara Krawcowicz Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism Shaul Magid Tangle of Matter & Ghost: Leonard Cohen’s Post-Secular Songbook of Mysticism(s) Jewish & Beyond Aubrey Glazer Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide Aubrey Glazer Personal Theology: Essays in Honor of Neil Gillman Edited by William Plevan Justice in the City: An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism Aryeh Cohen For more information on this series, please visit: academicstudiespress.com/newperspectives

NATURE AND NORM RANDI RA S H KOV E R

J U DA I S M, C H R I S T I A N I TY, A N D T H E T H E O PO L I T I CA L P RO B L E M

BOSTON 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rashkover, Randi, author. Title: Nature and norm : Judaism, Christianity, and the theopolitical problem / Randi Rashkover. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Series: New perspectives in post-Rabbinic Judaism | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020037571 (print) | LCCN 2020037572 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644695098 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644695104 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644695111 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Judaism--Relations--Christianity. | Christianity and other religions--Judaism. | Political theology. Classification: LCC BM535 .R295 2020 (print) | LCC BM535 (ebook) | DDC 261.2/6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037571 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037572 Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 9781644695098 (hardback) ISBN 9781644695104 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644695111 (ePub) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services. Cover design by Ivan Grave. On the cover: “Reflections, Night, New York,” by Alfred Stieglitz, 1897. Published by Academic Studies Press. 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

To Andy, Anna, and my mother

Contents

INTRODUCTIONxi CHAPTER ONE: THEOLOGY AND SUBJECTIVISM IN ROSENZWEIG AND KANT I. Kant, Rosenzweig, and the Challenge of Skepticism A. Kant and the Limits of Practical Reason B. Rosenzweig and the Subjective Turn

1 3 3 6

II. Diagnosing the Problem: Kant, Rosenzweig, and the Fact-Value Divide

17

III. Symptoms of the Fact-Value Divide

23

CHAPTER TWO: ACCEPTANCE AND THE THEOPOLITICAL PROBLEM27 I. Acceptance29 II. Case Study: Spinoza and Hobbes

34

CHAPTER THREE: FROM REDESCRIPTION TO EXTERNAL CRITIQUE

55

I. Redescription or the Turn to the “More”

56

II. Case Study: Martin Buber and Carl Schmitt

61

CHAPTER FOUR: FROM EXTERNAL CRITIQUE TO THE CRISIS OF SKEPTICISM

78

I. External Critique

78

II. Case Study: Karl Barth and Leo Strauss

80

CHAPTER FIVE: BEYOND THE FACT-VALUE DIVIDE I. The Philosophical Demands of the Theopolitical Problem II. Characteristics of a Post-Fact-Value Jewish and Christian Thinking A. Intelligibility, Justification, and the Who, How, and When of Knowledge B. Habituation, Disuse, and Rehabituation: The Social Determination of Warranted Assertability

109 110 113 113 123

III. Case Study: Peter Ochs and Nicholas Adams

130

CHAPTER SIX: SCIENCE APPREHENDING SCIENCE

152

I. The Fact-Value Model: From Sense-Certainty to Self-Alienated Culture A. Pre-Idealism: Epistemology, Self-Consciousness, and the Fact-Value Value Paradigm B. Transcendental Idealism and Scientific Theory C. Transcendental Idealism and Practical Freedom

166 177 180

II. External Critique: Pure Insight and the Enlightenment

186

III. Immanent Critique: From the Moral Law to Communal Justification A. Immanent Critique: From Moral Consciousness to the Reconciliatory Community B. Religious Representation and Philosophical Authority

188

165

188 195

IV. Conclusion203 Bibliography206 Index214

Acknowledgements

No one ever writes a book alone. Over the years, I have been fortunate to have a circle of friends without whom the ideas in this book would not have come to life. I am grateful to Yonatan Brafman, Martin Kavka, Leora Batnitzky, Mark James, and Peter Ochs for the many years of conversation. I am also grateful to Maria Dakake for her support of my work throughout the years that we have been colleagues at George Mason University. I am particularly grateful to Mark James, who offered careful editorial attention to the manuscript. I also want to thank Shaul Magid and Alessandra Anzani for expressing interest in the project. Most of all, I want to thank Andy, Anna, and my mother, who offer the daily support required to complete projects like this one. 

Introduction

Nestled deep in the middle of Gillian Rose’s essay “Athens and Jerusalem: A Tale of Three Cities” is a reproduction of a painting by Poussin entitled Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion. “Recently,” Rose says, “I discovered a painting by Poussin which illustrates the unintended consequences of our substitution of the New Jerusalem for the missing analysis of the old Athens.”1 The painting, she tells us, is inspired by Plutarch’s Life of Phocion. Phocion was an Athenian general and statesman who, despite a lifetime of public and political service, was ultimately accused of treason, forced to take hemlock, and denied burial. His body, Rose tells us, “was taken outside the city walls and burnt by a paid alien; his ashes left untended on the pyre.”2 The painting depicts Phocion’s wife and a companion gathering Phocion’s ashes in anticipation of giving them a proper resting place. Rose first encountered Poussin’s Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion through a television show called Sister Wendy’s Odyssey that showcased the nun Sister Wendy and her love and interpretations of painting. However, Rose and Sister Wendy disagreed on how to interpret the painting: the gesture of the women, the backdrop of Athens in its architectural dominance, and the position of the women in relation to it. Sister Wendy, Rose tells us, interpreted “the wife bending down to scoop up the ashes as an act of perfect love.”3 According to this argument, The classical orders as such stand for the tyranny of the city of Athens. . . . In this presentation of the rational order in itself as unjust power, and the opposition of this domination to the pathos of redeeming love, I discerned 1 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 22. 2 Rose, Mourning, 23. 3 Ibid., 25.

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the familiar argument that all boundaries of knowledge and power, of soul and city, amount to illegitimate force and are to be surpassed by the new ethics of the unbounded community.4

Phocion’s women, Sister Wendy’s interpretation suggests, commit the ultimate act of ethical critique by refusing to engage the city and its structures, insisting instead upon the privacy and individuality of their sentimental love and sadness in the wake of the city’s indifferent cruelty. For Rose, Sister Wendy’s reading effaces the philosophical and political character of the women’s act as a public appeal to the city’s norms of justice. As Rose says, “to oppose the act of redeeming love to the implacable domination of architectural and political order—here, pure, individual love to the impure injustice of the world—is completely to efface the politics of the painting.”5 Rose points to the women’s physical proximity to the city and the architecture of Athens, which elegantly frames them. Athens is no sinister symbol of political tyranny and cruel insensitive dominion. Rather, confident in its structures and in the possibility that they may provide justice, Phocion’s women perform not a private act but a very public and unsentimental rite of mourning. By taking up space and making itself visible, their rite wagers on the world as a place that can accommodate it—a place within which the women may present the claim implicit in their mourning, a place where their ethical line in the sand can be publicly acknowledged and generate a legislative response. With this act, the women defend the rationality of their claim that Phocion’s treatment was unjust and call for a legislative response. There ought to be, their action attests, a law against prohibiting a person’s right to a proper burial. Phocion’s women exercise self-conscious philosophical authority by justifying normative claims on the grounds of their contribution to the current worldly conditions within which they find themselves. They demonstrate the philosophical courage to boldly assert their normative claim as a justifiable hypothesis in light of the material conditions of the world in which they live. No doubt Rose interprets Phocion’s women in her own philosophical image, and no doubt Rose’s philosophical self-awareness is a product of the history of modern Western intellectual reflection that she inherits. Stated otherwise, there is a backstory to Rose’s deep appreciation for 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

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worldly conditions as the context within which philosophical reflection about norms occurs. More specifically, it is the story of the slow process by which modern Western intellectual culture came to terms with the scientific revolution and its valorization of natural knowledge over and against theological, ethical, and political discourse, what is commonly referred to as the “fact-value” or “nature-norm” divide, by apprehending the logical significance of both scientific and non-scientific knowledge, or what are understood as “fact” and “value” claims. Nature and Norm draws inspiration from Rose’s hard-earned interpretation of Phocion’s women and recognizes its back-story in the specific intellectual trajectory of modern and contemporary Western Jewish and Christian thought. If Rose’s philosophical courage emerges from the gradual process by which Western European thought comes to apprehend the significance of the material conditions within which communities live as the conditions for the justification of scientific and non-scientific claims, Nature and Norm offers a picture of how Jewish and Christian thought finally catches up with and participates in this same philosophical apprehension. Nature and Norm: Judaism, Christianity, and the Theopolitical Problem is a book about the encounter between Jewish and Christian thought and the fact-value divide. The fact-value divide is the belief that statements of facts concerning the objective world alone may be considered true or false, whereas claims about values are subjective or strictly relative to those who hold them and are devoid of intelligibility or validity. Entranced by the new developments arising from natural science, scientists and philosophers alike began to take for granted that scientific knowledge offered the most accurate representation of reality and that only claims concerning the natural world could be considered potentially true or false. Not an attempt to tear down the value of scientific inquiry to prop up theological discourse, Nature and Norm argues for a logic of discourse that gives ample space to both religious thought and scientific inquiry by dissolving the so-called “fact-value” binary. At its core sit three observations. First, a good deal of modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought has adhered to the logic of the fact-value distinction. Second, adherence to this logic has had calamitous results for Jewish and Christian thought, including an inability to articulate clear and meaningful claims, an inclination towards utopian theopolitical positions, a vulnerability to skepticism, a tendency for coercion, and an overall inability to advance effective platforms for theopolitical change. Finally, contemporary Jewish

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and Christian thought needs a logical reorientation that would illuminate conceptual practices capable of issuing on-going and changing measures of the justifiability of claims derived from both natural and social orders of discourse. In 1610 Galilei Galileo confirmed Copernicus’s heliocentric model using a self-designed telescope. In 1620, Francis Bacon published Novum Organum Scientiarum  (New Instrument), which introduced his observation-based method of scientific inquiry. In 1687 Isaac Newton published the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), laying the foundations for classical mechanics. The rise of modern science sent shock waves through Europe and dramatically altered the contours and standards of Western thought, generating what Jonathan Israel has referred to as the “crisis of the European mind.” In his classic text, The Radical Enlightenment, Israel states that, During the Middle Ages and the early modern age down to around 1650, western civilization was based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition, and authority. By contrast, after 1650, everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned  .  .  .  challenged or replaced by startingly different concepts generated by the New Philosophy and what may still be usefully termed the Scientific Revolution.6

Undoubtedly, those of us living in the early twenty-first century are the beneficiaries of these shock waves and the fruits they have borne in medical science, chemistry, biology and technology. Nonetheless, it is the central claim of this book that this crisis of the European mind has reverberated throughout modern western Jewish and Christian thought since the seventeenth century and continues until our current time. According to Israel, the crisis of the European mind arises from the impact of the scientific revolution upon philosophical thinking. It was unquestionably the rise of powerful new philosophical systems, rooted in the scientific advances of the early seventeenth century and especially the mechanistic views of Galileo, which chiefly generated that vast Kulturkampf between traditional, theologically sanctioned ideas about Man, God and the

6 Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–4.

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universe and secular, mechanistic conceptions which stood independently of any theological sanction.7

Israel’s book offers an exquisitely detailed documentation of the scientifically primed “philosophical radicalism” of the early European Enlightenment and the challenge this new picture of reality and its “mechanistic conceptions” posed to traditional ideas about God, authority, and morality. Most importantly for my purposes, Israel’s project attests to the logical valorization of these new ideas or claims over and against non-scientific claims concerning God, morality, and politics, or what has come to be known as the fact-value divide. Israel makes a convincing case for identifying Baruch Spinoza as the primary exemplar of the fact-value divide insofar as his “general philosophy was profoundly influenced by his conception of science [and science constituted for him] the only certain and reliable criterion of truth we possess.”8 According to Israel, Spinoza’s thought is transformative because he explicitly maintains that, “the laws science demonstrates through experiment and mathematical calculation are universally valid and the sole criterion of truth.”9 The import of identifying logical validity with scientific knowledge for the logical status of non-scientific claims is clear. Either one considers them thinly veiled claims about the natural world or one dismisses them as logically invalid. On the one hand, therefore, Spinoza “seeks natural causes for every phenomenon which has impressed or frightened men.”10 On the other hand, Spinoza also insists that some phenomena have no place in the natural order of things and that claims about them therefore have no logical validity. Israel offers Spinoza’s treatment of miracles as an example. The discussion of miracles in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus vividly illustrates the centrality of scientific criteria and modes of explanation in the overall structure of Spinoza’s system. . . . Nothing [for Spinoza] happens or exists beyond Nature’s laws and hence there can be no miracles; and those that are believed, or alleged, to have occurred, in fact had natural causes which at the time men were unable to grasp.11 7 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 14. 8 Ibid., 242. 9 Ibid., 244. 10 Ibid., 243. 11 Ibid.

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However, miracles are not the only phenomena that have no place in the natural order of things. In both the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Ethics, Spinoza asserts that there are no values in nature either.12 Normative claims derive from the subjective human experiences of nature and its laws and are therefore relative to the individuals who have these experiences. Ethics, politics, and religion are discourses that express these kinds of claims and different ways of organizing and managing them. Consequently, they cannot satisfy the logical standard of adequate knowledge or the scientifically determined criterion of truth.13 Certainly, as we will see, Spinoza is not the only thinker whose work exemplifies the fact-value divide, nor do all thinkers influenced by the fact-value divide agree on how knowledge of nature is achieved. However, regardless of whether scientific facts arise through empirical observation or by way of a priori natural laws, the factvalue divide presupposes that knowledge of nature is the logical standard of “true knowledge.” In the shadow of this confidence, theopolitical or normative claims—claims whose subject matter is theology, ethics, or politics— are excluded or reduced away. Immanuel Kant—an unabashed Enlightenment cheerleader for the power of reason—recognized these implications of Spinoza’s thought. Kant expressed a deep concern for the potential crisis of the same Enlightenment 12 For example, Spinoza says, “For this reason we could not conceive sin to exist in the state of nature, nor imagine God as a judge punishing man’s transgressions; but we supposed all things to happen according to the general laws of universal nature, there being no difference between pious and impious, between him that was pure . . . and him that was impure, because there was no possibility either of justice or charity.” Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 246. And, as Michael Rosenthal states, “a common procedure to address questions of value is to first define the meaning of the good, then develop a normative ethical theory based on this idea . . . Spinoza seems to have reversed the order. He thinks that there is no truly independent basis of the good.  .  .  .  Spinoza’s own idea of natural law is value neutral.” Earlier in the same essay Rosenthal states that, “somewhat surprisingly, Spinoza rejects the idea that anything in nature is intrinsically good.” Michael Rosenthal, “Politics and Ethics in Spinoza: The Problem of Normativity,” in Essays on Spinoza’s Ethical Theory, ed. Matthew J. Kisner and Andrew Youpa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 86. This claim seems to conflict with Spinoza’s thoroughgoing insistence upon the highest good of the intellectual love of God. Nonetheless, these ideas, Rosenthal argues are “counterfactual guides to action and not true descriptions of things” (Rosenthal, “Politics and Ethics,” 100). 13 Defense of these claims requires a careful analysis of the function of ethics in Spinoza’s Ethics and the function of religion and politics in the Theologico-Political Treatise. My discussion of this claim appears in chapter two and draws heavily from the work of Donald Rutherford and Michael Rosenthal.

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if and when reason was used to undermine traditional beliefs and social norms and associated this crisis with Spinoza’s thought. Left unchecked, reason could lead to “materialism, fatalism, [and/or] atheism.”14 It could, in other words, revert to Spinozism.15 Ultimately, the rise of scientific materialism led to the inscription of Spinoza’s fact-value divide onto the dominant academic distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften,16 and neither Jewish nor Christian thought was immune to its influence. As Timothy Reiss maintains, “scientific discourse was to remain the model and exemplar of all discourses of truth—of all knowledge with few doubts until the last third of the nineteenth century and, even with increasing attacks, until the present.”17 Most often, the notion that value statements are excluded from “the domain of rational discourse”18 is associated with a philosophical school known as logical positivism. As Hilary Putnam explains, “according to the positivists, in order to be knowledge, ethical ‘sentences’ would have to be either analytic, which they manifestly are not, or else ‘factual.’ And their confidence that they could not be ‘factual’ . . . derived from their confidence that they knew exactly what a fact was.”19 Like Spinoza, the logical positivists took for granted the identification of truth with true knowledge about the objective world.20 In the Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein expresses the logical positivist’s account of the world as a realm of facts without meaning. 14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), B xxxv. 15 See Omri Boehm, Kant’s Critique of Spinoza (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2014). 16 For a helpful discussion of the intensification of scientific materialism and corresponding development of Geisteswissenchaft in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Rudolph A. Makkreel and Sebastian Luft, “The Status of the Human Cultural Sciences,” in The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Philosophy, ed. Dean Moyar (New York: Routledge, 2012), 554–598. 17 Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 37. 18 Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 17. 19 Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, 21. 20 In The Unity of Science, Rudolph Carnap offers the prototypical fact-value account. “[A]ll statements belonging to metaphysics, regulative ethics and epistemology . . . are unscientific  .  .  .  and [in] the Viennese Circle, we are accustomed to describe such statements as nonsense. . . . [W]e do not intend to assert the impossibility of associating any conceptions or images with these logically invalid statements. Conceptions can be associated with any arbitrarily compounded series of words; and metaphysical statements are richly evocative of associations and feelings both in authors and readers.” See Rudolph Carnap, The Unity of Science (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Hubner, 1934), 22.

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“The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world, everything is at it is and everything happens as it does happen. . . . In it no value exists.”21 But since for the early Wittgenstein, as Omri Boehm explains, “talk of what is outside the world is meaningless”22 and since in this objective world, no values exist, it follows that there is no potential truth to value claims. As Robert A. Harris states, “the positivists [also] rejected all talk about values (ethics, morals, religion, philosophy) not only as ‘references without foundation’ but as meaningless or ‘non-cognitive’ babble.”23 In the Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel describes this prioritization of the logical status of natural scientific claims as the privileging of Substance over Subject. Such a position neglects subjectivity both as the subject matter of knowledge (that is, human “values”) and as the activity of the knower, or the vantage point of those who take up and live with objective knowledge. In these terms, the “fact-value divide” is the assumption that the standard of truth for all knowledge derives from our knowledge of substance, the physical and so-called “objective world”, or as Timothy Reiss describes it, “a way of conceptualizing the world that ‘marks a total distancing of the mind from the world.’”24 The fact-value divide has undoubtedly undergone damaging criticism by philosophers and scientists. As Robert A. Harris notes, “positivism’s claim that ‘only statements of [objective] facts have meaning’ was a claim not subject to [objective verification] and thus, by its own definition . . . had no meaning. Thus was the philosophical basis for positivism refuted.”25 A long line of thinkers as diverse as William James, Leo Strauss, and Thomas Kuhn have demonstrated the extent to which “the practice of science involves much more than the compilation of self-evident facts.”26 Nonetheless, despite this pushback, as Putnam says, “the idea that ‘value judgments are subjective’ is a piece of philosophy that has gradually come to be accepted by many people as if it were common sense”27 and this is no

21 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922), 87. 22 Boehm, Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, xv. 23 Robert Harris, “A Summary Critique of the Fact-Value Dichotomy,” accessed May 10, 2020, http://www.virtualsalt.com/int/factvalue.pdf. 24 Timothy Reiss, Discourse of Modernity, 140. 25 Harris, “A Summary Critique,” 2. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Putnam, Collapse of the Fact/Value, 1.

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less the case among Jewish and Christian thinkers who continue to assert arbitrarily determined ethical and theological claims. Certainly, I am not the first to take note of the influence of scientific naturalism and the attending logical prioritization of natural scientific claims over and against theopolitical claims upon modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought. In God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars, Benjamin Lazier tells a new story about inter-war and post-war Jewish and Christian theology as polarized between a this-worldly incarnationalism and a return to naturalism characteristic of Strauss and Schmitt on the one hand and the neo-gnostic acosmism of the Krisis theologians, Barth, Rosenzweig and Gogarten on the other hand. In this lively review, Lazier categorizes thinkers as critics or defenders of the thematic contents of Spinozistic philosophy. “For a variety of reasons,” he asserts, “the interwar period witnessed an explosion of interest in Spinoza.”28 During this time, the Spinoza-gnostic rivalry [manifests itself] in one of its purest forms. Barth and his minions count as the theological expression of a sentiment that insisted man drain his cup to its dregs. . . . But for many, it offered an overly bleak outlook on the world. . . . This very fact made Spinoza’s revival important. . . . In its depth and breadth, Spinoza’s revival . . . outstripped by far the gnostic recrudescence.29

In Lazier’s estimation, the force of Spinoza’s influence at this time even pitted theologically minded thinkers like Schmitt and Barth against each another. As Lazier explains, “it should perhaps come as no surprise that interwar Catholics  .  .  .  would invoke Spinoza in the name of banishing once and for all the bugbear that would not go away. . . . The Catholic (and Spinozist) penchant for inclusion . . . stood in sharp contrast to the demand the crisis theologians laid upon man to decide—either for the world or for God.”30 And if Lazier concedes that, “Schmitt . . . did [not] expressly mobilize Spinoza to contest the gnostic spirit, . . .”31 his thought, unlike Barth’s, could be associated with the Spinozistic focus on this world.

28 Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 78. 29 Ibid., 79. 30 Ibid., 80. 31 Ibid., 81.

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Nonetheless, Lazier’s analysis overlooks key points of overlap between the thinkers hereby profiled—points of overlap that I maintain can be best explained not by an assessment of their response to the contents of Spinoza’s philosophy but by an account of their appropriation of its logic. Indeed, the best evidence of a thinker’s appropriation of the fact-value paradigm is the arbitrary anchoring of the thought in question. From the vantage point of the fact-value divide, knowledge is valid only when reducible to scientific terms. Claims that are irreducible to these terms, such as those acquired in the humanities, lack a proper ground and therefore register as arbitrary and vulnerable to skepticism. Nature and Norm argues that arbitrarily anchored claims appear in significant portions of the modern canon of Christian and Jewish thought. The failure of Jewish and Christian thinkers to identify their adherence to the logic of the fact-value divide, in turn, perpetuates a range of negative outcomes. The appropriation of the fact-value divide also accounts for unexpected similarities between thinkers whose thematic positions vary greatly and produces a range of predictable problems in the thought of these same thinkers. Consequently, the analysis presented in Nature and Norm is, first and foremost, diagnostic. I first discovered the influence of the fact-value divide upon modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought as a result of an unexpected overlap between the theological realism in in the philosophical theology of one of post-modern Judaism’s theological stars, Franz Rosenzweig, and the theological skepticism in the bright light of the liberal, philosophical enlightenment, Immanuel Kant. In chapter one, I describe an unexpected vulnerability to skepticism in Rosenzweig’s and Kant’s accounts of theopolitical discourse and argue that their shared indebtedness to the fact-value paradigm offers a plausible explanation for it. Developing the conclusions of this case study, chapter one then launches a conceptual analysis of how recognition of the appropriation of the nature-norm divide offers a new and effective theory for understanding how much of modern Jewish and Christian thought functions or, more accurately, does not function. I discuss four major types of problems that emerge from the attempt to present theopolitical claims within the framework of the nature-norm divide: meaninglessness, acosmism (inability to relate to other worldly claims), pragmatic ineffectiveness, and dogmatism. This constellation of symptoms signals appropriation of the fact-value paradigm.

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As noted earlier, the signature mark of a body of thought influenced by the fact-value divide is the arbitrary anchoring of its claims. Jewish and Christian thinkers who appropriate it will inevitably maintain a logical distinction between fact discourse and value discourse, such that the former is taken to exemplify the standard of objective intelligibility. Theological, political, and ethical claims, consequently, refer to an area of content that sits outside of and is other than the sphere of what is considered objectively intelligible. Consequently, Jewish and Christian theopolitical claims remain haunted by the shadow of skepticism. To say, however, that theopolitical claims are unknowable is also to suggest that they are unintelligible, devoid of any stable meaning. Immanuel Kant’s postulates of God, the highest good, and the immortality of the soul serve as appropriate examples. As well, Rosenzweig’s inability to determine a substantive difference between claims concerning a wholly other God and claims concerning subjective religious desire also exemplify this problem. Since to determine a claim as meaningless is to maintain that it holds no clear or determinable relation to the things we consider knowable, meaningless claims are also inevitably acosmic (the failure to identify the relation and/or ramifications of one’s claims on the world). Tendencies towards such acosmism appear in early twentieth-century Jewish and Christian forms of theological gnosticism exemplified in the messianic discourse of thinkers like Jacob Taubes and Giorgio Agamben. The acosmic character of theological claims, in turn, entails their pragmatic ineffectiveness, their inability to operate as reliable roadmaps for action. Efforts to deploy them pragmatically instead result in tragedy or polemicism. The former is evident in the work of thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and the latter in the new Pauline theology of thinkers like Alain Badiou.32 A closer examination of these four symptoms also indicates differences between the ways Jewish and Christian thinkers have appropriated the fact-value divide. In chapters two, three, and four, I outline three forms of the appropriation of the fact-value divide that also constitute three 32 For an account of the tragic ineffectuality of Levinasian and Derridean ethics see Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law. For an examination of the polemical thrust of the work of Alain Badiou see Sarah Hammerschlag, “Bad Jews, Authentic Jews, Figural Jews: Badiou and the Politics of Exemplarity,” in Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology, ed. Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

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primary strategies that Jewish and Christian thinkers have deployed to contend with it. I call these acceptance, redescription, and external critique. By “acceptance” I mean presupposing the self-evident validity of factual claims over and against theopolitical (value) claims. By “redescription” I mean positing a theopolitical reality that cannot be reduced to the terms of factual knowledge claims while nonetheless recognizing the latter as the standard of logical validity. This theopolitical reality is invoked as an irreducible “more,” but this appeal to the “more” functions only to redescribe the fact-value paradigm rather than contest it. Lastly, by “external critique” I mean critiquing the logical self-evidence of fact discourse but failing to provide an alternative account of logical validity, without which theopolitical claims remain susceptible to arbitrary anchoring. In the end, none of these three strategies adequately resolves the theopolitical problem. We know that they fail, since they all manifest the arbitrary anchoring of theopolitical claims. Moreover, we know why they fail to adequately resolve the theopolitical problem, since none begins with an admission of the problem and of the potential unintelligibility of Jewish and Christian claims. Admitting the theopolitical problem requires recognizing the failure of one’s own thought to render certain key claims intelligible. It requires the thinker to perform an immanent critique of her own system, which acknowledges that the theopolitical problem arises out of her method of thinking and not from scientific naturalism’s incomplete description of reality. It means recognizing that Jewish and Christian claims are coterminous with the theopolitical problem, not an antidote to it. In chapter five, I offer a detailed analysis of how Jewish and Christian thinkers caught in the grip of the fact-value paradigm can respond. The first step is to gain a proper appreciation of the goal of the analysis. If the problem introduced by the fact-value divide is the apparently unbridgeable chasm between scientific discourse about the world and theopolitical discourse about human affairs, the goal of this analysis is to resolve this divide, not to deny the validity of one of these forms of discourse. The answer to the theopolitical problem will not arise from a theological critique of scientific naturalism, but rather when Jewish and Christian thinkers exercise a deeper philosophical apprehension of how their claims relate to the world. The goal is to find a way to sustain the modern Jewish and Christian appreciation for the fruits of the scientific revolution without sacrificing the logical validity of Jewish and Christian thought in the process.

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The second step requires that Jewish and Christian thinkers recognize the theopolitical problem as implicit within their own method of thought by engaging in an immanent critique of the intelligibility of their own claims. Most Jewish and Christian thinkers who have appropriated the fact-value divide nonetheless do not recognize the theopolitical problem or the damage caused by this appropriation; but this so-called failure reflects the at least partial workability of the Jewish and Christian appropriation of the fact-value divide. Our current situation differs from that of thinkers who knowingly or unknowingly appropriated the fact-value divide in that we now stand in a position to recognize the damage that it does to the ability of Jewish and Christian thinkers to present intelligible claims. As a result, an immanent critique of the Jewish and Christian tendency to appropriate the fact-value divide is a necessary condition of a logical reorientation of Jewish and Christian thinking in the current philosophical climate. An immanent critique of the impact of the fact-value divide offers an effective approach to resolving the theopolitical problem because it stimulates a method of reflection that requires Jewish and Christian thinkers to consider the ongoing relationship between their theoretical claims and the justification of these claims in relation to the world within which they live. Chapter five of Nature and Norm displays the elements of this method and draws analytical support from John Dewey’s pragmatic account of the logic of inquiry. If an immanent critique of the theopolitical problem begins with the recognition that certain claims in a thought-system cannot be recognized as meaningful in relation to other claims of knowledge, a thinker faced with such a situation has one of two choices. Either she can allow these claims to perish given their lack of self-evident utility, or she can attempt to take up the critique and engage in an investigation of how in fact, these claims could relate to other claims we make about the world. To engage in such an investigation is to attend to three specific conditions: the “who,” “how,” and “when” of the claims in question. More specifically, immanent critique requires reflecting upon: 1) the “who” or community of persons who make such claims, since knowledge claims are meaningful publicly or to a community rather than privately,33 2) “how” this community relates these claims to 33 In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein presents what has come to be known as the argument against private language. In brief, Wittgenstein maintains that meaning is a rule-driven activity, but an individual cannot practice a ruled activity since she cannot correct herself if her application of a rule is wrong since said individual is both the agent of the error and the deciding judge all at once. Linguistic/semantic rules

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other claims they hold, which requires an investigation into the inferential relations between claims—the rules governing when and how claims follow other claims,34 and 3) the “when” or the temporal moment in which the community performs claims according to certain rules, since how a community holds its claims changes over time. In sum, immanent critique is reflection upon the conditions of the possibility of the meaningfulness of certain claims, where these conditions are tantamount to an account of how a community holds certain claims in a particular context. In light of this account, we can appreciate why immanent critique affords a plausible strategy for resolving the theopolitical problem. Arising as it does from out of the ashes of the potential dissolution of key Jewish and Christian claims, immanent critique prompts a process of reflection that gives rise to a new standard of logical validity, and one that does apply therefore require verification by others and therefore meaning, as a rule-driven activity is a socially verified practice. For example, at §257 Wittgenstein says, When one says “He gave a name to his sensation,” one forgets that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. And when we speak of someone’s having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word pain; it shews the post where the new word is stationed. But, Wittgenstein continues, the stage-setting required includes the deployment of rules and he questions whether any such system could exist in the privacy of one’s own mind. At §261, Wittgenstein shows that it is extremely difficult to talk of a private sign “S” having any linguistic role whatsoever that is not grounded in public rules. At §258 he suggests that a private rule would have to be an “ostensive definition” grounded in a memory of the proper link between word and object but Wittgenstein says, there is no criterion for determining when the connection is made correctly since again, the user is also the judge. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1968). 34 For a detailed analysis of the relation between the inferential practices of a community and reasoning practices see Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. There Brandom speaks of the “iron triangle of discursiveness” or the idea that meaning is a product of claims as they get used by way of “inferential practices” or ruled relations between claims such that one claim is taken to follow from another. As such, the meaning and rationality of claims are linked. As he says, “the space of reasons is the space of concepts. What discursive beings as such do is apply concepts undertaking cognitive commitments as to how things are and practical commitments as to how things shall be.  .  .  .  Such discursive activity is a kind of consciousness or awareness. . . . For it depends on the sort of conceptual understanding that consists in practically knowing one’s way about in the inferentially articulated space of reasons and concept.” Robert B. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 9–10.

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to and can be used in the assessment of Jewish and Christian claims. In particular, immanent critique bridges the apparent divide between theopolitical claims and claims about the “world” by reflecting upon how theopolitical claims are related to other claims a community makes about the world at the current time. As a reflection upon the inferential practices of a given community, immanent critique does not posit a fundamental difference between the condition of the possibility of the meaningfulness of a theopolitical claim and that of a scientific claim. Theopolitical claims do not operate outside of the normal conditions of rationality used to determine the intelligibility of claims concerning the natural world, but according to the same inferential rules a community deploys with respect to any claim. This logical reorientation equips Jewish and Christian thinkers to identify the intelligibility conditions of their claims and avoid the threats of meaninglessness, acosmism, utopianism, and dogmatism characteristic of their adherence to the fact-value logic. In chapter five, I also identify Peter Ochs and Nicholas Adams as examples of contemporary Jewish and Christian thinking that show what this kind of reflection looks like and how it establishes an inextricable connection between the articulation of Jewish and Christian claims and the network of other knowledge claims held by particular Jewish and Christian communities. These examples clarify how a post-fact-value Jewish and Christian thinking exercises a continued appreciation for worldly inquiry without succumbing to the damaging consequences of the fact-value logic. Consequently, it will also become clear that the fact-value divide and its appropriation by Jewish and Christian thinkers was itself a pragmatic response to the emergence of scientific knowledge. As such, the recalibration of the logical orientation of Jewish and Christian thought turns out to be part and parcel of the Western cultural and intellectual project of thinking through the significance of the scientific revolution. Nature and Norm’s attention to this process of cultural and intellectual self-reflection follows in the footsteps of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which provided one of the first and certainly the most influential immanent critiques of the fact-value divide. Like Nature and Norm, the Phenomenology documents a process of reflection that arises from the problems confronting the modern European identification of natural scientific claims and logical validity and culminates in a portrait of a new standard of logical validity, the historical activity of reflection on the conditions for the intelligibility of communal claims that Hegel calls, “absolute knowing.”

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Chapter six of Nature and Norm illuminates this important overlap between the two projects in order to highlight the extent to which Nature and Norm participates in this long Western process of reflection on science and its impact upon logic and epistemology. Both Nature and Norm and the Phenomenology are motivated by the skepticism that accompanies the factvalue divide as a theory of knowledge. As has been discussed above, the fact-value divide identifies the logical validity of natural scientific claims as the criterion for the logical validity of all knowledge claims. Nature and Norm identifies the problems caused by the appropriation of the fact-value divide by Jewish and Christian thinkers. The Phenomenology of Spirit identifies the problems caused by taking the fact-value divide as the ground for the validity of any knowledge claim. Like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before it, Hegel’s Phenomenology presents a philosophical quest to identify the conditions of the possibility of knowledge claims. Unlike Kant’s Critique, however, Hegel’s Phenomenology provides a negative transcendental deduction of these conditions since, like Nature and Norm, it begins with an epistemology that Western thinkers have taken for granted and identifies the skeptical threat facing this apparently self-evident standard. However, when appraised for its utility as a viable theory of knowledge, this standard cannot account for itself and turns out to be indistinguishable from any other contestable knowledge claim. “Facts,” the Phenomenology demonstrates, are not self-justifying ideas, but presuppose particular conditions (that is, relations to other claims as these claims are held by communities) in order to be justified. This is as much the case for “scientific” facts as it is for any other kind of knowledge claim. Described by Hegel as a “way of despair,”35 the Phenomenology documents the long trail of responses to the initial failure of natural empiricism to ground itself. In the process, the Phenomenology reveals itself as a quest to uncover an unconditioned ground for a theory of knowledge. It uncovers this ground, however, not through a transcendental deduction of some set of facts or preestablished categorical conditions for the objective validity of knowledge. As is well documented, refusing this strategy is the core of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theory of knowledge.36 Instead, the unconditioned ground of knowledge is Reason’s ongoing activity of grounding, of 35 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 49. 36 For a discussion of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s transcendental categories see Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge

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offering accounts of the validity of claims by perpetually challenging their intelligibility, what Hegel calls the “negative”. Reason grounds not as a “fact” or a “law” or a self-certifying idea. It grounds in the act of grounding that never rests secure in its past achievements but is effective only when it responds to the ever-changing challenges to communally agreed upon habits of propositional intelligibility. Hegel’s account of the condition of the possibility of knowledge claims in Reason’s ongoing activity of grounding echoes Nature and Norm’s account of both the stages in the process of coming to terms with the fact-value divide documented in Nature and Norm, that is, acceptance, redescription, and external critique as well as Nature and Norm’s appreciation for the forced option and demand for immanent critique and the process of reflection upon the “who,” “how,” and “when” of the Jewish and Christian claims introduced above. Both offer philosophical analyses of the logical limits of the fact-value divide. Both document the process by which Western thought has slowly reflected upon and ultimately gained a more mature apprehension of science, such that natural science no longer bears the burden of establishing universal criteria of logical validity but rather, like other discourses, offers a body of knowledge whose rationality depends upon the continued assessment of its suitability for human social existence. Nature and Norm pays particular attention to the implications of this logical reorientation for Jewish and Christian thought since it has taken longer to recognize the negative impact of the fact-value divide upon the sustainability of Jewish and Christian claims. Still, the goal of both is the same: as Hegel put it, “Spirit’s insight into what knowing is. . . .”37 When it is achieved, scientists and religious thinkers alike acquire the freedom and authority to assert their knowledge claims as rational when by rational we mean, useful for those communities who hold them in a changing world. Once thinkers recognize that logical criteria are not given by the sciences, they realize the authority of philosophy to address those questions by its own transcendental method. Ultimately, Nature and Norm invites the shocking and unsettling recognition of the dramatic acosmism that shadows and undermines a considerable number of modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought systems. Exposing the forced option presented to Jewish and University Press, 1999), 16–41. See also Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2005). 37 Ibid., 17.

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Christian thinkers by the continued appropriation of the fact-value divide, Nature and Norm motivates Jewish and Christian thinkers to perform an immanent critique of the failure of their thought systems to advance rational theopolitical claims. By identifying the critical juncture at which many Jewish and Christian thinkers currently find themselves, Nature and Norm uncovers a new standard of logic whereby Jewish and Christian thinkers gain the authority and freedom to advance their claims as reasonable hypotheses that hold the potential for enacting effective change in our current historical moment.

Chapter One

Theology and Subjectivism in Rosenzweig and Kant

The study of nature seems in itself to be cold and dull because the satisfaction derived from it consists in a uniform, continued and uninterrupted feeling. . . . Nevertheless, the discovery and application of a new method of philosophizing, the kind of enthusiasm which accompanies discoveries, a certain exaltation of ideas which the spectacle of the universe produces in us—all these cases have brought about a lively fermentation of minds. . . . Spreading through nature in all directions like a river which has burst its damns, this fermentation has swept with a sort of violence everything along with it which stood in its way. . . . Thus, from the principles of the secular sciences to the foundations of religious revelation, from metaphysics to matters of taste, from music to morals . . . from natural law to the arbitrary laws of nations . . . everything has been discussed and analyzed, or at least mentioned. The fruit of this . . . general effervescence of minds has been to cast new light on some matters and new shadows on others, just as the effect of the ebb and flow of the tides is to leave some things on the shore and to wash others away.1

1 Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, “Elements de Philosophie,” in Nealgnes de Litterature, d’Historie, et de Philosophe, new edition, six volumes, vol. 4 (Amsterdam, 1759), 3–6, quoted in Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 4.

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With these words, the famous French philosophe, Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, elegantly captures the force, beauty, and impact of the scientific revolution on modern European thinkers. However, D’Alembert also notes that the emergence of modern science not only generated a new world of knowledge, but destroyed “everything . . . which stood in its way,” including ideas that for centuries framed and ordered the worldviews of European Jewish and Christian thinkers. Consequently, the history of Jewish and Christian responses to the rise of natural science has been marked by the inevitable struggle facing these thinkers to negotiate between their admiration for science and the “new light” it “has cast on some matters” and their concern for elements of Jewish and Christian thought systems that the “ebb and flow of the tides” threatens to wash away. I first began to consider the impact of the scientific revolution on Jewish and Christian in order to diagnose and explain a range of conceptual inconsistencies and antinomies shared by Jewish and Christian thinkers generally identified with different schools of thought. I discovered one of the most noteworthy instances of these shared antinomies in the twentieth-century, post-liberal Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig and the eighteenth-century leader of the liberal Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant. This chapter introduces a method for diagnosing symptoms of the factvalue divide in a wide range of Jewish and Christian thinkers by examining Rosenzweig and Kant as a working example, setting the stage for the conceptual analysis of this method. The central hypothesis developed in the rest of this volume arises inductively from this diagnostic method. We credit the Enlightenment led by Kant for devolving high theological certainty into a melancholy longing for a God no longer discoverable in our midst. Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption is a proclamation of the possibility of theology in the wake of Immanuel Kant’s powerful challenge to traditional proofs for the existence of God. At the heart of the Star is a driving desire to “publicize” the miracle of divine revelation by recovering and epistemologically situating the God-talk of the biblical text over and against the nineteenth century’s tendency to reduce God-talk to human fantasy, human projection, and human hopes. No mere confession of faith, Rosenzweig’s Star outlines a philosophically respectable recovery of theological discourse. Yet upon closer examination, Rosenzweig’s theological realism is indistinguishable from Kant’s theological skepticism. If Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason puts an end to theoretical arguments for the existence of God and relegates knowledge of God to a mere practical

Theology and Subjectivism in Rosenzweig and Kant

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postulate, Rosenzweig’s own attempt to posit God as a metaphysical reality fails to establish adequate criteria for distinguishing between this metaphysical fact and mere human longing for a knowable and intelligible God.

I. Kant, Rosenzweig, and the Challenge of Skepticism A. Kant and the Limits of Practical Reason As is well known, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason establishes the conditions for and limits of human knowledge. Kant’s analysis begins with the recognition that we have and use a priori concepts that we take as adequate to determine the objective validity of knowledge. But how can we have a priori concepts if knowledge arises out of sense perception first and how can we use these concepts in judgments that provide objective knowledge? The answer, Kant maintains, is that “we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves have put into them.”2 There is a correspondence between our a priori concepts and the objects of knowledge because knowledge is a product of what we contribute to experience through the understanding and what we perceive by way of sensibility.3 In light of this realization, Kant distinguishes between two different kinds of logic: general logic and transcendental logic.4 General logic concerns the formal rules of thought in general while transcendental logic concerns the rules governing the knowledge of objects in general, that is, the rules governing the a priori relation between the laws of thought and objects of experience. Only knowledge claims about objects of experience that conform to the joint conditions of sensibility and the understanding have objective validity. Transcendental reflection is the exercise of identifying the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience. The consequences for theological knowledge of Kant’s transcendental delimitation of objective validity are dramatic. Since theological claims refer to a supersensible reality beyond the limits of sensibility, their purported objects are deemed objectively unknowable. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 2 Kant, Critique, B xviii. 3 “There are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding. . . . Through the former, objects are given to us; through the latter, they are thought. . . .” Kant, Critique, B 29. 4 “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied  .  .  .  with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.” Kant, Critique, A 12.

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puts an end to theological efforts to present epistemologically justified theoretical claims concerning a supersensible God, leaving believers with little else than their longing for a God whom they cannot know. If, however, Kant’s appraisal of theoretical knowledge places theological claims outside the bounds of objective validity, Kant’s analysis of practical reason attempts to “make room for faith”5 by grounding theological discourse in the rationality of the moral law. This strategy, however, will not succeed in overcoming the challenge presented to theology by Kant’s account of theoretical reason.6 Kant seeks to establish a new basis for the validity of moral, and hence theological, discourse beyond the conditions of understanding and sensibility in what he claims is our a priori rational knowledge of the moral law. “Pure reason is practical of itself alone, and it gives (to man) a universal law, which we call the moral law.”7 Implicit in the moral law is the freedom of the human person or, more specifically, the autonomy of the will that Kant says is the “sole principle of all moral laws and of the duties conforming to them.”8 Reason obligates every rational agent to exercise her rational freedom by acting for the sake of the moral law, rather than letting her heteronomous desire for objects determine her action. If, however, there is rational freedom, then it must be possible to demonstrate its rational character, and doing so requires speaking theologically. We may do so, Kant argues, by postulating “the possibility of those objects of pure speculative reason whose objective reality could not be assured by speculative reason,”9 “as soon as they are sufficiently certified as belonging imprescriptibly to the practical interest of pure reason.”10 For example, although human freedom cannot become an object of experience, we must postulate that we have freedom because it is a necessary condition for the possibility of the moral law. Similarly, while Kant’s account of the categorical imperative establishes that virtue or autonomy is the highest good, Kant concedes that, as natural beings, all people also desire happiness. 5 Ibid., B xxx. 6 This is not to suggest that the status of the moral law and the status of theological claims are the same. As I will discuss below, Kant posits the moral law as a “fact of reason” but only “postulates” a belief in God. 7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1983), 32. 8 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 33. 9 Ibid., 139. 10 Ibid., 126.

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There must therefore be a correlation between the pursuit of virtue and the achievement of happiness; and yet we “cannot hope to effect this [highest possible good] except through the agreement of my will with that of a holy and beneficent Author of the world.”11 Consequently, Kant argues, we have to postulate God’s existence. We must also postulate a belief in immortality since only this belief allows us to us to hope that we will come closer to virtue so as to be worthy of happiness. The rationality of the postulates of God and immortality, however, depend on the intelligibility of our moral freedom. As Kant states, The concept of freedom insofar as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason, is the keystone of the whole architecture of the system of pure reason and even of speculative reason. All other concepts (those of God and immorality) which, as mere ideas, are unsupported . . . now attach themselves to the concept of freedom and gain, and with it and through it, stability and objective reality.12

The fate of theology thus rises or falls with the fate of the moral law and its accompanying concept of freedom. Still, how successful is Kant’s effort to make room for theology by way of moral action? Does Kant’s analysis of practical reason offer an antidote to the insatiable longing of the finite knower for a God who exceeds the terms of justifiable claims? At the heart of this question is the more specific question regarding the relationship in Kant’s work between knowledge of the phenomenal world determined by the categories and the knowledge or “rational faith” of the noumenal world associated with moral freedom and its postulates.13 In light of this distinction, how can reason determine a noumenal property like freedom? Kant suggests that practical reason is somehow 11 Ibid., 134. 12 Ibid., 3. 13 Kant’s systematic divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal has long been recognized as a central problem in his attempt to make room for faith and ethics. Already in an essay entitled, “Faith and Knowledge,” for example, G. W. F. Hegel argues that in his attempt to determine the rightful limits of human knowing, Kant’s system becomes overly restrictive, since it maintains that theoretical reason cannot know reality in itself (the ding an sich), on the one hand, and the freedom or practical autonomy of the moral will together with the theological postulates required to enact this autonomy, on the other hand. For a helpful discussion of these issues, see John Silber, Kant’s Ethics: The Good, Freedom and the Will (Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter, 2012).

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self-determining, sustaining its own standard of measure without reference to objective standards of validity in the phenomenal world. In the Critique of Pure Practical Reason, he argues that, “freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other.”14 Yet this reciprocity has a limit; Kant maintains that we cannot derive the moral law from the concept of freedom since the concept of freedom cannot be inferred from experience. By contrast, the moral law is a “fact of reason”15 of which we become “immediately conscious as soon as we construct maxims for the will,”16 and that the concept of freedom arises from it. Unfortunately, Kant never justifies the idea of a “fact of reason” or makes it intelligible.17 We cannot, Kant says, “ferret it out from antecedent data of reason . . . [but rather] it forces itself upon us as a synthetic proposition a priori based on no pure or empirical intuition . . . it proclaims itself as originating law.”18 However, if Kant cannot justify the validity of the moral law and if the validity of the concept of freedom derives from its reciprocal relation to the moral law, then Kant cannot establish how moral freedom can operate according to a standard of validity independent of theoretical reason. Without a persuasive account of how moral freedom can determine itself or stand in a positive, but irreducible, relation to that which is said to be objectively valid, Kant’s theoretical account of objective knowledge guarantees the dissolution of the autonomous “ought” into an unintelligible beyond which will remain unrealizable by those looking to determine it as a principle for action. But this means that the “autonomous” moral law is indistinguishable from finite heteronomous desires, and the rational hope in God grounded in the moral law is indistinguishable from subjective longing. In the end, Kant’s system remains haunted by the shadow of skepticism.

B. Rosenzweig and the Subjective Turn Not surprisingly, many Jewish and Christian thinkers found Kant’s postulate of God an inadequate basis for theological work. Surely God is more 14 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 29. 15 Ibid., 31. 16 Ibid., 29. 17 For contemporary criticisms of Kant’s appeal to a “fact of reason,” see Allen Wood, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 135; and Paul Guyer, “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Inquiry 50 (2007): 444–464. 18 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 31.

Theology and Subjectivism in Rosenzweig and Kant

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than an object of rational hope, more than a necessary addendum to our free, moral effort. Within Jewish thought, Franz Rosenzweig’s work presents one of the boldest post-liberal responses to the Kantian challenge. In The Star of Redemption and his summary restatement of it, “The New Thinking,” Rosenzweig aspires to show that there is a philosophically justified form of theological discourse evidenced in the biblical text. Resistant to the Kantianinspired “reduction or ‘grounding’ of experiences of the world and of God in the I that produces these experiences,”19 Rosenzwieg calls for a new theory of knowledge where, “he who does not believe in this [subjectivist] dogma . . . [can] be taken seriously.20 Regrettably, Rosenzweig laments, the discourse of miracle has been shattered by the multiple “enlightenments.”21 To restore it, we must distinguish between the Enlightenment concept of God and the true and actual God who we know “through the intuitive knowledge of experience.”22 The true God whose revelation we characterize as miracle is encountered only in our relation to him. Thus, Rosenzweig argues, the time is ripe for a new approach to theological work, whereby “the authentic miracle, belief ’s dearest child, which it had given up for lost, is brought back to its arms by knowledge”23 and through which Jewish and Christian theologians can recover a theological realism lost through Kant’s reduction of faith in God to the hopes and longings of a finite knower. Ironically or otherwise, Rosenzweig pursues such a theological recovery on the back of Kant’s own critique of the limits of human knowing. Rosenzweig argues that we do not have theoretical knowledge of God, self, and world, just as Kant taught.24 Rosenzweig also maintains, like Kant, that we have a second, practical mode of knowledge, though he does not echo Kant’s appeal to the a priori moral law. Rather, for him, this practical mode of knowledge occurs through eventful encounters between God, human beings, and the world, three posited facticities that remain after the critique of the limits of theoretical knowledge. “As essentialities, God, world and man are equally transcendent in regard to each other and, as regards 19 Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” in Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. Paul. W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 115. 20 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 116. 21 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 97 22 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 118. 23 Rosenzweig, Star, 108. 24 For this discussion see Rosenzweig, Star, 10–19. See also Kant, Critique, A 420.

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the actualities, we cannot say what they ‘are’ but only that [they are]. . . .”25 Experience, he says, “does not experience the things . . . however, what it experiences, it experiences in these matters of fact [namely, God, world, and man]. . . .”26 Rosenzweig sought to foster a “healthy human understanding”27 where knowledge claims are the content of narrated responses to events that happen to us. “He who tells something does not want to say how it “really” was but, rather how it actually came about.”28 The “New Thinking” therefore is a “speech-thinking” that takes shape in narration, dialogue, and expectation. Since speech-thinking occurs in time, Rosenzweig insists, “one cannot cognize independently of time.”29 Knowledge emerges in events and encounters and is therefore situational and never static. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, speech-thinking is theological since our receptivity to any “other” is a result of our original receptivity to the one who, as wholly other, both creates and loves us. Speech-thinking is a thinking in and with God. As such, it constitutes the centerpiece of Rosenzweig’s account of the theological rationality of the Hebrew Scriptures, that is, his attempt to demonstrate the correlation between a science of knowing and the Jewish tradition. In light of this analysis, Rosenzweig had high hopes that his interpretation of the biblical text would be the site of this encounter with God. However, a closer examination of the history of his scriptural hermeneutics evinces an unresolved tension between a theological hermeneutics, which identifies the biblical text as the call of God, on the one hand, and a hermeneutics of the subjective wishes of the Jewish community, on the other hand. According to Mara Benjamin, this tension appears when we juxtapose the role of scripture as the site of the divine call in the Star with its role in Rosenzweig’s later writings on biblical translation where, “Rosenzweig began to emphasize the role of the reader in . . . creating the vitality of the Bible [such that its meaning was thought to be] determined by its treatment at the hands of its readers. . . .”30 25 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 118. 26 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 121. 27 Ibid., 123. 28 Ibid., 122. 29 Ibid. 30 Mara Benjamin, Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 157.

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Benjamin reads the Star as a testament to the centrality of divine revelation, the transformative event in the life of human beings and the world. In the Star, she maintains, philosophy is the set of hypotheses that point to the possibility of, but do not propositionally express an event of divine revelation that can only elicit an after-response of narrative and liturgical witness. If revelation gives rise to speech, it is speech in the service of a theological call, announced in and through the text. In itself revelation is content-less, a call rooted in the dramatic otherness experienced in the encounter with divine reality. Still, as Benjamin details, Rosenzweig appeals to the biblical text as an intelligible expression of this content-less revelation, giving rise to the paradox of the Star’s account: “On the one hand, the Bible was to be the literal manifestation of the divine revelation; on the other hand, revelation for Rosenzweig would always escape any definitive content.”31 In the Star, the Bible is an “unmediated source of [a] truth,”32 which nonetheless exceeds language and whose content cannot be definitively conveyed. Yet Rosenzweig’s Star attributes a theological meaning to the biblical text through a method Benjamin labels “re-writing.”33 Picking and choosing texts and arranging them to convey the theological realism purportedly expressed by the text, Rosenzweig issues his own version of the text, a “canon within the canon” in the name of earmarking the event of God’s call which, in his estimation, constitutes its essential meaning. Still, the theological realism of the Star’s scriptural hermeneutics operates in only one of Rosenzweig’s two dominant hermeneutic approaches. As evidenced in Rosenzweig’s essays in biblical translation, Benjamin maintains, “the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish reading of it began to form a component of Rosenzweig’s eccentric political identity.”34 If, as she claims, the “Bible became for Rosenzweig the site for declaring the Jewish contribution to German history and culture”35 (contra the influence of Luther’s translation), it was the reading Jewish community who determined the very meaning of the text itself. Benjamin explains that, “as he entered into his late period of writing, Rosenzweig used scripture as the vehicle not for an argument for greater integration . . . but to articulate a critique of German

31 32 33 34 35

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 20.

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identity.”36 Rosenzweig, it seems, had changed focus. What was once an interest in reconciling Jewish learning with a science of knowing morphed into a more polemical initiative to identify Judaism itself as the primary source of the intelligibility of German culture. Ironically, Rosenzweig’s thinking comes to resemble the very “Jewish people theology” he challenges in his first theological essay “Atheistic Theology” and which he originally sought to replace with a theological and/ or philosophical science. Describing the emergence of this “Jewish people theology,” Rosenzweig says, Here recent decades produced a change. A representation of people developed, not without contact with that older concept of peoplehood of German Idealism, yet nevertheless essentially new, which granted to it the rank of an eternal existent. He who is able to see through the pseudo-naturalist wrappings of the race idea, to which this idea owes its broad popularity, recognizes here the striving to transform the concept of peoplehood in such a way that the people obtain the right to exist simply from their existence, independently of their factual achievements.  .  .  .  Carefree and without consciousness, . . . the people now lives its life, the question of the meaning of this existence seems to have lost its justification.37

Rosenzweig was adamantly opposed to this trend, underlying which he discerned an “atheistic theology” for which “the distinctness of God and man . . . [remains] a frightful scandal.”38 He insisted that it was high time for this theology to be replaced by a theological realism that can alone adequately efface this “theistic denial.”39 Considering the force of Rosenzweig’s commitment to reinstating a theological dimension to Jewish thought, the subjective turn in his hermeneutics is all the more surprising. Even so, it is difficult to deny that Rosenzweig associated the meaning of the biblical text with the privileged status of Jews who read it. Rosenzweig announces similar themes in his letters on Jewish learning where he speaks about text study as the vehicle for expressing the

36 Ibid., 105. 37 Franz Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology,” in Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 16–17. 38 Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology,” 19. 39 Franks and Morgan, Rosenzweig, 5.

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desires of the Jewish community. “Wishes are the messengers of desire,”40 he tells us in his essay, “Towards a Renaissance of Jewish Learning,” in which he details how text study expresses the community’s hopes and dreams. Indeed, as Martin Kavka explains, Rosenzweig conceives of scriptural text study and the development of a communal center of Jewish education or “Lehrhaus” as the primary “tools of German Jewish identity-formation.”41 In the Lehrhaus, a modern version of the classical Jewish beit midrash, individual Jews caught in the divide between their assimilated German personas and their longing to recover a Jewish identity can: [c]om[e] into the speaking space of the [seminar room] [and] give testimony to the fact that the Jewish human being is alive in them. . . . And from the hearkening, words will grow. And the words will grow together and unite into wishes. And wishes are the messengers of confidence. Wishes that find each other, human beings that find each other, Jewish human beings—let us then attempt to create what they desire.42

For Rosenzweig, the cultivation of Jewish identity happens in and through the study of classical Jewish texts. As Kavka states, The people in the Lehrhaus seminar room are communicating their wishes both to and through messages that are already written and placed within their arms’ reach, namely the texts of the Jewish tradition. They are just as much their neighbors as the other participants in the seminar. Indeed, they are intimate neighbors, since it is they that are the tools of identityformation. . . . The person who walks into the Lehrhaus can do nothing but desire; the person who reads a text and tries on various conceptual personae develops options for action—and a Jewish identity—through the act of becoming another character. The participants in the Lehrhaus seminar are therefore performers and audience members in the drama of becoming a self.43 40 Rosenzweig, “Towards a Renaissance of Jewish Learning,” in Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, trans. Nahum Glazer (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 69. 41 Martin Kavka, “What Does It Mean to Receive Tradition?: Jewish Studies in Higher Education,” Cross Currents 56, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 193. 42 Franz Rosenzweig, “Bildung und kein Ende,” in Zweistromland; Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 501. The English translation comes from Michael Zank, “Franz Rosenzweig, the 1920s and the Moment of Textual Reasoning,” in Textual Reasonings, ed. Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene (London: SCM Press, 2002), 237. 43 Kavka, “What Does It Mean to Receive Tradition?,” 193.

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Text study in the Lehrhaus is more an enactment of the subjective demands of the community than an encounter with a divine revelatory call. These developments in Rosenzweig’s scriptural hermeneutics suggest that his early theological realism takes a subjective turn that challenges the prospects for justified or intelligible theological discourse. Not only does God appear to be something that human beings do not know to exist, the very concept of God appears so unintelligible that it fades away as the focus of the community’s discourse. Undoubtedly, this shift in Rosenzweig’s hermeneutical position may be due to personal or historical circumstances.44 However, it is difficult to rest satisfied with such a conclusion since the seeds for this antinomy are already present in Rosenzweig’s philosophical theology. Rosenzweig’s subjective turn signals the collapse of Rosenzweig’s theological realism into Kant’s profile of the subjective believer and her theological desires. This collapse is most evident in the infamous Section 2.2. on Revelation in The Star of Redemption. As I will discuss below, Rosenzweig claims to have established the philosophical intelligibility of revelation in Part 1 of the Star. Even so, this attempt does not compensate for his account of revelation in Part 2 as a conceptually unintelligible event that leads to the believer’s “unquenchable longing” or “cry”45 for knowledge of a God who exceeds her apprehension. While revelation, Rosenzweig argues, may engender the believer’s “belief ” in the event together with her desire that this belief sustain some degree of rational validity, its unintelligibility ultimately prohibits her from being able to “live by this belief ”46 and consequently, her faith perpetually teeters on the edge of doubt. In the end, Rosenzweig’s dramatic attempt to restore the language of revelation falters because he cannot demonstrate the intelligibility of theological discourse. A God who cannot be conceptualized cannot be meaningfully distinguished from a community and its desires. In Section 2.2. of The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig proposes that in revelation, God reveals himself as Other through an act of love and not by disclosing a unique set of attributes. Love is “not an attribute, but an event.”47 If revelation dispensed propositions about divine attributes, then propositions about God’s nature would become part of the human body 44 See Benjamin, Rosenzweig’s Bible, 103–135. 45 Rosenzweig, Star, 185. 46 Ibid., 184. 47 Ibid., 164.

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of propositional knowledge about the world. God cannot be Other than humankind and also be made intelligible in human language. In short, revelation has no propositional content. It is not even the communication of something called “love” from God to humankind. Rosenzweig can only express the content of revelation as an empty tautology: “revelation is nothing more than revelation, a revelation in the narrower—indeed, in the narrowest sense.”48 Certainly, Rosenzweig does not deny that people use language in their response to the event of revelation, but there are definite limits to the testimony they can offer. The beloved cannot testify to God’s divine love in a way that mirrors or repeats this love, for a simple repetition would require an identity between human love and divine love that would destroy the divine transcendence revealed through this event. Rosenzweig attempts to solve this problem by arguing that an individual’s witness to God’s love is a witness to the absence of God’s love in her life. In positive terms, she experiences “an awe . . . together with a feeling of dependence. . . .”49 In negative terms, she experiences God’s love as desire, since the love she feels is momentary, and she can neither control nor conceptualize it. Existentially uncertain and unable to apprehend that which she desires, her testimony “climaxes . . . in the cry of an open question. . . .”50 Despite his reputation as a dialogical theologian,51 in this moment Rosenzweig’s phenomenology of revelation as objective miracle dissolves into subjectivity. Some readers of the Star might object that Rosenzweig apparently recognizes the antinomy facing the believer and maintains that it is nevertheless possible to render her experience of an unintelligible God, well, intelligible. There is, Rosenzweig maintains, a way to identify the transcendental conditions of the possibility of a God whom we can encounter, but whom we nonetheless cannot conceptualize. As Robert Gibbs puts it, Rosenzweig embarks on a philosophical inquiry to “safeguard the incomprehensible from dialectical snares  .  .  .  [and] to isolate what cannot be known . . . [or to explore] the not knowing the that of an existing being.”52 48 49 50 51

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 185. See Ephraim Meir, Dialogical Thought and Identity: Trans-Different Religiosity in Present Day Societies (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2013). 52 Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 35.

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Indeed, among the signature features of the New Thinking touted by Rosenzweig is its unique combination of philosophical and theological resources. “As practiced by the theologian, philosophy” Rosenzweig argues, “becomes a prognostication of revelation  .  .  .  the Sybilline Oracle which predict[s] the miracle . . . [so that] theology for its part therefore looks longingly to philosophy as the authentic auctoritas suited to its new form.”53 But what precisely does philosophy do such that theology longingly seeks its help? For the answer, Rosenzweig returns to Kant—not, however, to Kant’s account of God or of the moral life, but rather to Kant’s transcendental method. In the face of the shared threat of skepticism, Kant’s transcendental investigation into the conditions of the possibility of the objective validity of knowledge appears to exemplify an analogous strategy for establishing the rational validity of revelation. Rosenzweig explains that, “Kant, alone among all the thinkers of the past, showed the way which we are now to follow, . . .”54 since Kant sought to identify the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. Rosenzweig maintains that we can deploy the same method to determine the conditions of the possibility of what we do not know, or more precisely, the conditions of the validity of what we experience but cannot conceptualize. In the Star, Rosenzweig refers to the God whom we cannot conceptualize as a “Nought.” Rosenzweig does not mean to suggest that this God does not exist since the believer claims to have experienced him. Rather, the problem is that the object of this experience sits outside of the believer’s conceptual reach. If the experience is to amount to anything more than an expression of the believer’s hopes and dreams, there must be a way to conceptualize the “un-conceptual.” We must ask, as Robert Gibbs explains, “What sort of thing must something be in order for it to be unknowable? What is the nature of the unknowable?”55 In “The New Thinking,” Rosenzweig expresses the need to articulate linguistically the idea of something that, in its existence or interaction with human beings, is not conceptualizable. But to say that something unconceptualizable is intelligible is to say that it has a “whatness” or some kind of determinate meaning. If the encounter with a non-conceptualizable something is to have meaning, even the non-conceptual must be thinkable. 53 Rosenzweig, Star, 108. 54 Ibid., 21. 55 Gibbs, Correlations, 50.

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In “Atheistic Theology” Rosenzweig insists that, while we do not know God, something of God “remains and must remain”56 and even more significantly, the something which remains can be described. In the Star, Rosenzweig offers a more detailed account when he attempts to arrive at a conceptual determination of a revelatory God who cannot be conceptualized by using a negative transcendental deduction. Rosenzweig speculates that a negative deduction produces two different sorts of negatives: first a positive negative—a deduction of a positive divine nature that exceeds our apprehension—and second, a negative negative—a deduction of a God whose nature always negates anything at all. Rosenzweig labels the first aspect as “nature” and the second as “freedom” within the God we do not know, and posits a “restless polarity” between these characteristics. The “free Nay, shooting forth out of the negation of his Nought, is not in itself essence, for it contains no Yea: it is and remains pure Nay. It is not a ‘thus’ but only a ‘not otherwise.’”57 Rosenzweig clarifies that the freedom here spoken of is not the freedom of God but rather the freedom in God;58 and within God, this energy of negation can only act against the divine essence or nature itself. Nonetheless, in acting upon the divine essence, this freedom, “ends up in the magic circle of its inert being. This being [freedom] does not emit any force towards caprice, and yet the latter [that is, nature] feels its own force ebbing.”59 Inevitably, this movement culminates in the synthesis of freedom and nature into an “infinite” or active inertia. “For at that point the infinite power of the divine act so to speak enters the magnetic field of the divine essence, and while this power is still predominant over the inertia of that essence, it is already constrained by it.”60 And the result of this infinite inertia is a solipsistic silence in the exchange between the polarities. The God whom we cannot know we can only intuit in silence. Rosenzweig’s deduction is rigorous and detailed.61 The question, however, is whether or not it offsets the unintelligibility of his theological position. Technically speaking, there is much that is right about 56 Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology,” 19. 57 Rosenzweig, Star, 29. 58 Ibid., 30. 59 Ibid., 31. 60 Ibid. 61 As is commonly noted, Rosenzweig’s account is highly influenced by his reading of Schelling’s Weltalter. See Gibbs, Correlations, 40-46 and Randi Rashkover, Freedom and Law: A Jewish–Christian Apologetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 152-164.

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Rosenzweig’s effort. While it may seem rather odd to consider the conditions of the possibility of things we can wonder about but cannot know, such an investigation is possible as a series of hypotheses or speculative inferences about the possible (and changing) lines of relations between this object and other intelligible objects available to human knowledge. A transcendental deduction of such an object is tantamount to a hypothetical inquiry into the range of possible meanings such an object might assume in relation to what people already know. However, since for Rosenzweig human knowledge arises in language and language is conditioned by time, transcendental speculation on the possible meanings of the revelatory God would need to be ongoing, and it would only make sense in relation to the changing contents of speech-thinking. Rosenzweig can legitimately speculate about the possible meanings of a non-conceptualizable God, but these meanings must be tested in relation to other things people know and according to the standards of intelligibility operative in that knowledge. The best Rosenzweig’s method can offer, therefore, is a set of hypotheses about how a certain something that humans experience can be thought in relation to other intelligible concepts and claims. Here, however, Rosenzweig hits a roadblock because he does not advocate a process of speculative review like the one suggested here. This is largely because he does not recognize that the standards of rational intelligibility derive from and are implicit within human language. Instead of subjecting his own hypothesis concerning the concept of a revelatory God to a test that could display its semantic commensurability with other knowledge, Rosenzweig insists that his determination of a conceptual construct puts an end to any further transcendental inquiry. Stated in the language of this project, Rosenzweig treats his account of the concept of God as a universal claim that requires no further justificatory review. Consequently, Rosenzweig also maintains that determining it provides sufficient intelligibility to overcome the antinomy of revelation, instead of recognizing that any intelligibility afforded by this concept is contingent upon implicit standards of linguistic meaning deployed by believers and philosophers alike. The upshot of this problematic move is that Rosenzweig can neither credit the believer or theologian with an intelligible discourse nor establish a philosophical strategy that could productively initiate a process of hypothesizing and testing through which the believer could discover the conditions of the intelligibility of her theological discourse or the rationality of her hope in a God she cannot know. Comparable to Kant’s efforts

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to justify the intelligibility of the moral law by insisting arbitrarily that it is a “fact of reason,” Rosenzweig’s determination of God’s character amounts to an unjustified, arbitrary proclamation, without a rigorous account of the rational conditions within which such a notion could achieve intelligibility. In the end, Rosenzweig’s believer can do little to guard against the skeptic’s doubt and the difference between the liberal and post-liberal positions dissolves. The collapse of Rosenzweig’s position into Kant’s gives rise to a host of serious problems. Rosenzweig’s failure to justify theological discourse leaves his account of Jewish life mired in a series of antinomies that reflect the meaninglessness of his theological claims. For example, Rosenzweig sees the revelatory God as the commanding authority of the halakhic community. Indeed, Rosenzweig pinned his hopes for an orthopraxic Jewish renaissance on a recovery of the biblical event of divine command.62 Yet it is difficult to see how a wholly other God could issue specific Jewish laws, since such laws would surely serve as a point of access between God and the community. Indeed, in a letter to Martin Buber dated July 16, 1924, Rosenzweig concedes that, “for me too, God is not a Law-giver. He commands.”63 Still, what would it mean to say that God commands but does not issue laws? Moreover, even if a wholly other God could issue comprehensible commands, why would people choose to obey a God whom they cannot know? Rosenzweig’s position unravels into a meaningless antinomy that can do little to motivate the Jewish community into increased levels of observance.

II. Diagnosing the Problem: Kant, Rosenzweig, and the Fact-Value Divide This comparison of Rosenzweig and Kant casts doubt upon the common division between liberal and post-liberal Jewish and Christian thought. Nonetheless, we have yet to arrive at a working hypothesis to explain it. At first glance, it might seem that Rosenzweig’s theology mimics Kant’s because both thinkers doubt the ability of finite knowers to acquire conceptual knowledge about an infinite God. Like Kant, Rosenzweig attempts 62 For Rosenzweig’s discussion on the need for a Jewish legal renaissance, see Franz Rosenzweig, “The Builders: Concerning Jewish Law,” in Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, trans. Nahum Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1965), 72–92. 63 Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, 116.

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to “make room for faith” or establish conditions for intelligible discourse about theological and ethical claims. However, the similarity between Rosenzweig and Kant goes beyond their parallel attempts to “make room for faith” to their common failure to do so. Neither Kant nor Rosenzweig succeed in offering an adequate account of how, or on what grounds, ethical or theological claims can be intelligibly determined. Both thinkers succumb to the arbitrary anchoring of these claims and fall prey to the factvalue dichotomy. It might seem that Kant’s turn to the subject as the source of the transcendental conditions of the possibility of objective knowledge distinguishes his philosophy from those that privilege scientific knowledge in accordance the fact-value divide. However, Kant’s account of transcendental subjectivity takes for granted Newtonian science as the privileged model for valid and reliable knowledge. As is well known, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was in part motivated by David Hume’s challenge to the law of causality.64 Hume maintained that there are no metaphysical grounds for scientific determinations of the law of cause and effect. Our knowledge of cause and effect derives from our experience of two things frequently conjoined, but we have no reason to conclude that frequent association between things is evidence of a necessary connection between them. According to Kant, Hume’s challenge to the law of causality undermined more than this particular scientific principle; it called into question the lawful foundations of scientific knowledge in general. Kant understood his Copernican revolution as the key to reestablishing a metaphysical system of principles upon which the propositions of natural science might rest.65 In the Preface of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant distinguishes between two different types of science: historical science, or 64 See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, revised edition, trans. and ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4:257–261. 65 In his Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer notes the intellectual indebtedness of Kant’s philosophy to Newtonian science when he says, “the philosophy of the eighteenth century takes up  .  .  .  the methodological pattern of Newton’s physics. . . . However much individual thinkers and schools differ in their results, they agree in this epistemological premise. Voltaire’s Treatise on Metaphysics, d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse, and Kant’s Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality all concur on this point. All these works represent the true method of metaphysics as in fundamental agreement with the method which Newton, with such fruitful results, introduced into natural science.” Cassirer, Philosophy of Enlightenment, 12.

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the classification of scientific knowledge, and pure natural science, which provides the pure and apodictic principles that provide the foundation for scientific knowledge. “All natural science requires a pure part,”66 which consists in the categories of the understanding laid out in the first Critique. While the first Critique offers us the basic categories through which any object gains objective intelligibility, The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science attends specifically to categories relevant to knowledge of corporeal objects. Taken together, the first Critique and The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science provide apodictic foundations for Newtonian science.67 Kant’s indebtedness to the fact-value divide becomes clear when we appreciate that the same categories Kant determines as the apodictic foundations of Newtonian science also function as the condition of the possibility for all objective validity. Kant valorizes Newtonian science as the paradigm for all knowledge. Viewed from such a perspective, it is no longer surprising that Kant’s account of practical reason devolves into an endless and spurious pursuit of a good unrealizable in the world of nature. In a philosophical world where Newtonian classifications function as the privileged standards of logical (metaphysical) intelligibility, moral and theological claims are inevitably relegated to the status of subjective values. Kant’s failure to establish the philosophical intelligibility of moral and theological discourse reflects the determination of these discourses as arenas of “value” earlier introduced by Spinoza.68

66 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. and ed. Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6. 67 For the best in-depth analysis of the Newtonian character of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, see Michael Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 68 For Kant’s most condensed account of his concerns over Spinoza’s materialism and the attending threats of atheism and superstition, see his essay, “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” Written as a response to the debate between F. H. Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn about the impact of Spinozism on the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the essay echoes the above account of Kant’s attempt to secure the structure of a “rational faith” rooted solely in “the right of reason’s need, [or what is] a subjective ground for presupposing and assuming something which reason may not presume to know through objective grounds; and consequently for orienting itself in thinking, solely through reason’s own need, in that immeasurable space of the supersensible, which for us is filled with dark night.” Immanuel Kant, “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself In Thinking?,” in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and

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Readers might also question the diagnosis of Rosenzweig’s New Thinking as a child of the fact-value divide since by his own account, Rosenzweig strove to establish an altogether different account of the rational validity of knowledge, one that did not treat natural scientific knowledge as the self-evident standard of objective validity. However, the primary evidence for sustained impact of the fact-value divide is the arbitrary anchoring of theopolitical claims, and Rosenzweig’s account of theology falls prey to this condition. Instead of recognizing that people can intelligibly express the idea that God’s nature is unknowable, and that speech-thinking itself sustains the conditions of the intelligibility of the knowledge claims we hold, Rosenzweig appeals to an arbitrarily anchored claim about God to overcome what in his view is the strictly subjective, human response to what one wants to believe is a theological event. Because Rosenzweig’s analysis of speech-thinking does not identify the linguistic conditions of the intelligibility of lived knowledge, human theological testimony remains logically inadequate. All told, Rosenzweig’s New Thinking in general and his account of believer’s testimony in particular remain vulnerable to charges of skepticism. To the extent to which he does not identify a post-fact-value standard for the logical validity of theopolitical claims, his thought remains governed by the fact-value divide. Moreover, the relation between the fact-value divide and these versions of transcendental philosophy points to another important feature of its impact on modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers, namely, the slow pace throughout the modern period of attempts to respond to scientific knowledge and ultimately to apprehend its philosophical value. As will become clear throughout this volume, the widespread influence of the fact-value dichotomy arose because of the functional utility of scientific knowledge, even if this same standard generated a host of problems for Jewish and Christian thinkers. The upshot of this hybrid situation is that Jewish and Christian thinkers (like modern European philosophers in general) have been slow to call the fact-value paradigm into question and issue intellectual responses to it in direct correlation to the degree to which they have felt negatively impacted by these problems. Stated otherwise, there is a direct correlation between the degree to which a thinker recognizes problems associated with the fact-value ed. Allen E Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 8:137.

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paradigm and the degree to which she will engage in a philosophical review of this standard of logical validity. Consequently, as we review Jewish and Christian responses to the fact-value paradigm, we will notice a pragmatically driven progression from: a) Jewish and Christian thought projects most influenced by the fact-value paradigm and least aware of its damaging effects and therefore also least philosophically reflective about this standard of logical validity; to b) a range of Jewish and Christian responses that recognize problems with the fact-value divide, but only redescribe or externally critique it without offering an alternative account of the justification of claims; which finally gives way to c) contemporary projects like Nature and Norm that recognize what I will refer to as the forced option facing Jewish and Christian thinkers either to succumb to the threat the fact-value divide poses to the intelligibility of their claims or to exercise an immanent critique of their own inability to identify a standard of logical validity and to engage in a transcendental investigation into the conditions necessary for establishing such standards. Appreciation for the pragmatic character of these developments sheds light on what will at first glance appear to be significant differences between Jewish and Christian responses to the fact-value model. For example, it is hard to deny that Rosenzweig’s New Thinking is more critical of the fact-value standard of rationality than, for example, the Wissenschaft des Judentums of Leopold Zunz. Analogously, there appears to be a significant difference between Karl Barth’s challenge to the self-evident validity of human knowledge and, for example, the “authority [Friedrich] Schleiermacher gave to natural science.”69 Nonetheless, as will become clear in the analysis that follows, the differences between these thinkers reflect different degrees of awareness of the problems generated by the factvalue divide and correspondingly different commitments to the kind of philosophical investigation required to respond to it.

69 Daniel James Pedersen, The Eternal Covenant: Schleiermacher on God and Natural Science (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2017).

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It is not surprising, therefore, that one finds a progressive development towards the sort of transcendental reflection practiced by thinkers such as Rosenzweig and Barth,70 who consciously reevaluate the conditions of the possibility of knowledge claims. Their efforts signal a broader sense of crisis concerning the philosophical self-evidence of the fact-value divide. Just as Kant’s concern to overcome burgeoning skepticism about natural scientific knowledge led to a transcendental critique, a marked turned towards transcendental analyses in Jewish and Christian thought derives from a similar anxiety about the justification of knowledge in general and theology in particular. As such, the transcendental turn in Jewish and Christian thought was a relatively late development in the modern period. But this increased appeal to justificatory reflection in late modern Jewish and Christian thinkers does not enable them to completely and self-consciously overcome the influence of the fact-value divide since, as the above analysis of Rosenzweig’s thought illustrates, the signature feature of a thought-system constrained by the fact-value divide is its arbitrary anchoring, and transcendental systems that do not subject their transcendental structures to ongoing justificatory analysis remain arbitrarily anchored. To appreciate the full impact of the fact-value standard of logical validity on Jewish and Christian thinkers, it is necessary to consider a much broader sweep of intellectual history. The implicit Jewish and Christian acceptance of the fact-value divide accounts for recurring intractable crises of justification facing thematically diverse Jewish and Christian thought systems. Indeed, the more intractable these crises, the more plausible my hypothesis. As will become clear in what follows, Nature and Norm argues that the same fact-value divide at play in the overlap between Rosenzweig and Kant’s theological conclusions also appears in a large swath of modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers. If a careful analysis of Rosenzweig’s theological realism results in an unexpected overlap between his position and Kant’s subjective theological desire, one can identify analogous points of overlap between other unlikely and apparently opposed thinkers including Leo Strauss, Karl Barth, and Carl Schmitt. Despite their attestations to the contrary, many modern Jewish and Christian thinkers appropriate Spinoza’s nature-norm divide. The fact that they appropriate the fact-value divide not only accounts for unexpected similarities between 70 In chapter four, I will offer an account of Barth as a transcendental thinker. See also Randi Rashkover, “Barth and Judaism,” in Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth, ed. Paul Nimmo and Paul. D. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

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otherwise very different thinkers but also produces a range of common and predictable problems in their thought. In this way, therefore, the hypothesis of Nature and Norm offers a useful gauge for anticipating the possibility for success or failure of modern and contemporary forms of Jewish and Christian thought. The pragmatic hypothesis presented in Nature and Norm thus includes an account of the current crisis of intelligibility facing Jewish and Christian thought and confronts Jewish and Christian thinkers with what I call a forced option. They must either a) conclude that they lack a non-arbitrarily anchored standard of rationality and hence that they cannot succeed in making many of their central claims intelligible, or b) acknowledge the crisis of intelligibility that the fact-value divide creates for their thought and hear it as a call to engage in pragmatic self-reflection upon the worldly conditions and communal habits with respect to which alone Jewish and Christian claims are intelligible.

III. Symptoms of the Fact-Value Divide In this section I offer a more detailed discussion of the symptoms manifest in a thought system impacted by the fact-value paradigm and of the different ways Jewish and Christian thinkers have appropriated this paradigm throughout the modern period. Nature and Norm’s working hypothesis emerges from a diagnostic analysis of theopolitical claims in a substantial sample of modern Jewish and Christian thought projects. In the preliminary case study discussed above, it became apparent that neither Rosenzweig nor Kant was able to provide an account of the intelligibility of theological and ethical discourse. This failure, I hypothesized, is best explained by their shared appropriation of the fact-value account of logical validity. So understood, it became clear that meaninglessness is a key symptom of the arbitrary anchoring that one finds in Jewish and Christian thinkers who appropriate the logical standards of the fact-value divide. There are, however, three other symptoms of arbitrary anchoring besides meaninglessness: acosmism, tragic ineffectiveness, and polemicism. To determine that a claim is meaningless because it cannot be rendered intelligible in relation to any standards of logical validity entails that it holds no determinable relation to the knowledge we do have about our world. For this reason, arbitrarily anchored theopolitical claims frequently exhibit what I label a fundamental acosmism. By “acosmism” I do not

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mean that theopolitical claims affected by the fact-value paradigm refer to a supersensible reality. Rather, I mean that we can offer no account of their truth conditions in relation to the other knowledge claims we make about our world, since from the perspective of the fact-value divide, only fact claims function as intelligible statements about how the world really is. Below, I will discuss Martin Buber’s account of the theopolitical work of the prophet as a second example of this characteristic acosmism, insofar as Buber does not provide an account of how the prophet’s actions respond to the worldly conditions within which the prophet works. Hegel’s description of the practical paralysis of the “beautiful soul” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, discussed in chapter five, offers another instance of this acosmism, insofar as the beautiful soul grounds its convictions in the self-certainty of its inner divine voice but remains unwilling to submit these convictions to the test of worldly challenges. Since it is not possible to offer accounts of the grounds on which acosmic theopolitical claims are true or false, they cannot operate as models or effective road maps for action. Efforts to deploy them as such result instead in either a tragic theopolitical stance doomed to be ineffective or a dogmatic polemicism that defends its stance through other than rational means. Tragedy and polemicism therefore constitute two additional symptoms of arbitrarily anchored claims. As I will discuss in chapter three, the former is evident in Buber’s work, which is driven by a deep and authentic concern to overcome human suffering and instantiate a democratic theopolitics of care. As honorable as Buber’s ideals may be, his unconscious appropriation of the fact-value divide guarantees the ineffectuality of his theopolitical aspirations. By contrast, we find a good example of the latter in the work of Carl Schmitt, whose undying commitment to his own arbitrarily anchored ideals translates into a program of polemical engagement with the world he seeks to change, but cannot rationally engage. These four symptoms of arbitrary anchoring—meaninglessness, acosmism, practical ineffectuality, and polemicism—appear frequently in the thought-systems of modern Jewish and Christian thinkers and constitute the primary evidence that these thinkers continue to suffer negative effects from taking the fact-value divide for granted. As symptoms of the arbitrariness that afflicts a system, these symptoms are also a useful gauge of the probable success or failure of a system of thought. Ultimately, the goal of Nature and Norm is to call attention to a crisis of intelligibility affecting contemporary Jewish and Christian thought

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systems in order to identify a viable philosophical way forward. However, one interesting byproduct of this hypothesis is that it challenges the wellworn story of the rise of eighteenth-century liberal theology and its demise through the critique posed by twentieth-century post-liberalism. For example, while scholars of modern religious thought frequently note the dramatic difference between the Enlightenment self presupposed by thinkers like Locke, Kant, Mendelssohn, and Schleiermacher and the theological challenge to this self characteristic of twentieth-century theologians like Barth, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, appreciation for the symptoms of arbitrary anchoring introduces a new way of understanding the relationship between the thought systems of these canonical figures. As suggested by the comparison between Kant and Rosenzweig in chapter one and demonstrated in the four case studies at the heart of this book, this new hermeneutical lens complicates the binary opposition between ideas that accompany the binary classification of liberal and post-liberal thinkers, such as reason vs. revelation, law vs. ethics, and messianic utopianism vs. this-worldly political theology. Apparently opposed ideas are different manifestations of the same underlying arbitrariness. Any recognition of the negative effects of the fact-value divide must also be accompanied by an appreciation for the varied forms or shapes this appropriation takes in different Jewish and Christian thinkers. If the characteristic sign of Jewish and Christian appropriation of the fact-value divide is the arbitrary anchoring of knowledge claims, one can identify at least three different forms this appropriation takes. While all exhibit arbitrary anchoring, the development of each form represents an increasing awareness of the problems generated by the fact-value divide for Jewish and Christian thinkers. I will label these three forms acceptance, redescription, and external critique. By “acceptance,” I mean presupposing the self-evident validity of factual claims over and against theopolitical (value) claims. By “redescription,” I mean positing a theopolitical reality that cannot be reduced to the terms of factual knowledge claims while nonetheless recognizing the latter as the standard of logical validity. This theopolitical reality is invoked as an irreducible “more,” but this appeal to the “more” functions only to redescribe the fact-value paradigm rather than contest it. Lastly, by “external critique” I mean critiquing the logical self-evidence of fact discourse but failing to provide an alternative account of logical validity, without which theopolitical claims remain susceptible to arbitrary anchoring.

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In the chapters that follow, I will continue to illustrate the pragmatic value of the hypothesis presented here by examining four additional case studies. Like the comparison between Rosenzweig and Kant above, each of these case studies offers an analysis of two thematically different but logically similar thinkers. In chapter two, I discuss the work of Spinoza and Hobbes, thinkers who accept the fact-value divide. In chapter three, I discuss the work of Martin Buber and Carl Schmitt as examples of thinkers who redescribe the fact-value divide by appealing to an irreducible “more” beyond reason. In chapter four, I discuss the thought of Leo Strauss and Karl Barth as examples of thinkers who undertake an external critique of the fact-value divide. Finally, in chapter five, I turn to a review of the logical overlap between contemporary Jewish and Christian theologians, Peter Ochs and Nicholas Adams. Each case study illustrates the diagnostic value of my hypothesis and therefore illuminates the pressing need for Jewish and Christian thinkers to engage in thought practices that move beyond it.

Chapter Two

Acceptance and the Theopolitical Problem

In his now classic work, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer states that, in estimating the importance of natural science in the genesis and formation of the modern picture of the universe, we must not confine ourselves to a consideration of individual features which science has added to  .  .  .  the world around us. . . . [We must also recognize] the new concept of truth [it presents]. . . . This truth is revealed not in God’s word but in his work; it is not based on the testimony of Scripture or tradition but is visible to us at all times. But it is understandable only to those who know nature’s handwriting and can decipher her text. . . . Revelation by means of the sacred word can never achieve such brightness and transparency, such precision, for words as such are always varicolored and ambiguous . . . their meaning must always be given them by man and must therefore be fragmentary. In nature, on the other hand, the whole plan of the universe lies before us . . . in its undivided and inviolable unity, evidently waiting for the human mind to recognize and express it.1

Cassirer’s recognition of the impact of scientific knowledge on modern conceptions of truth and validity is echoed by a long list of historians and theorists of modernity including Jonathan Israel, Timothy Reiss, Peter Harrison and Margaret Jacob. With the rise of scientific knowledge, truth is 1 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 37, 42–43.

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sought in facts of nature, and, as Cassirer explains, to develop this knowledge, “we must not project our own ideas and subjective imaginings into nature; we must rather follow nature’s own course and determine it by observation and experiment, by measurement and calculation.”2 Through the scientific revolution, scientific knowledge came to be identified as an objective and self-evident standard of truth, distinct from human interests, needs, or values. In Cassirer’s words, the scientific revolution is tantamount to the idea that, “the correlation between nature and human knowledge has now been established once and for all and the bond between them is henceforth inseverable.  .  .  .  [B]y this basic conception is to be explained the almost unlikened power which scientific knowledge gains over all the thought of the Enlightenment.”3 The fundamental insight of Nature and Norm is that modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers have been as influenced by this tendency to treat scientific facts as paradigms of logical validity as other thinkers, even though accepting this paradigm undermines the logical validity of their theopolitical claims. Notwithstanding the difference between the more materialist and atheistic “radical Enlightenment” thinkers like Spinoza and Hobbes and the more theologically conservative “moderate Enlightenment” thinkers like Locke and Newton, there is little doubt that modernity’s reverence for natural science resulted in a logical demotion of theology. If, as Cassirer argues, the whole eighteenth century is permeated by this conviction  .  .  .  that in the history of humanity the time had now arrived to deprive nature of its carefully guarded secret . . . to do this, it was above all necessary to sever the bond between theology and physics once and for all. . . . .For the first time a physical account of the world had been outlined which avoided religious dogmatism and claimed as its sole basis the observable facts and general principles of natural science.4

In light of the inevitable demotion of theology generated by the increasing cultural reverence for scientific knowledge, it might appear surprising to assert that Jewish and Christian thinkers accepted the identification of natural scientific criteria with logical validity. Nonetheless, the failure of Jewish and Christian thinkers to provide an alternative account of the 2 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 45. 3 Ibid., 44–45. 4 Ibid., 47–49.

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logical validity of theopolitical knowledge is powerful evidence of their tacit acceptance of natural scientific criteria, and hence of the fact-value divide. In what follows, I will detail the acceptance model of the appropriation of the fact-value divide and present a case study of this model in the work of Benedict Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes.

I. Acceptance In his The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, Peter Harrison argues that Protestant scriptural hermeneutics set the stage for the idea of natural scientific fact by introducing the idea of immediate interpretive access to the text. In contrast to long-standing Catholic accounts of the symbolic or allegorical meaning of the Word, Protestants maintained a “two books metaphor”5 whereby one could have unmediated access to the truth of the Word and to the truth of the World. In his own discussion of Harrison’s view, Menachem Fisch explains that, according to Harrison, “by virtue of its new understanding of the two books metaphor . . . Protestantism was responsible for rendering nature, for the first time, purely factual.”6 In this way, Harrison’s theory provides a helpful intellectual backdrop for an account of the fact-value divide. Nonetheless, the real intellectual force of the fact-value divide does not emerge until the mid-seventeenth century. According to Jonathan Israel, “despite the profound disarray and distress generated by the Reformation and the sporadic wars of religion, by the late sixteenth century a generally stable and imposing façade of spiritual and intellectual unity had been restored. . . .”7 Moreover, while Protestantism’s own internal divisions compromised the earlier unity of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, each of the four “confessional blocs [namely,] the Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican,”8 nonetheless shared common metaphysical commitments inherited from scholastic Aristotelianism. According to this metaphysical consensus, as Margaret Jacob explains, “bodies move in a filled universe

5 Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 216, quoted in Menachem Fisch, The Rationality of Religious Dispute (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2016), 527. 6 Fisch, The Rationality of Religious Dispute, 527. 7 Israel, The Radical Enlightenment, 16. 8 Ibid.

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because of tendencies inherent in their God-given nature.”9 In Israel’s words, scholastic Aristotelianism maintained that, “behavior and function arise, and are determined by, the soul or essence of things . . . there is a conceptual but no observable or measurable dividing line between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural.’”10 As Israel and Jacob demonstrate, the shift away from scholastic Aristotelianism towards what would be called the New Science began in the work of the empiricist Francis Bacon, on the one hand, and the rationalist Descartes, on the other hand. According to Jacob, “Bacon called for a systematic and empirical examination of nature,”11 which, in his own estimation, could and should constitute the primary focus of all human learning, even if “his writings about the social meaning of scientific inquiry made their greatest impact [only] after his death.”12 Similarly, notwithstanding Descartes’s emphasis upon the priority of geometry over physics, “his philosophy [nonetheless] possessed distinctly materialistic implications,”13 particularly since he maintained that, “the world around us . . .is composed of matter in motion . . . filled with atoms whirling in space governed by mechanical laws.”14 When coupled with Descartes’s failure to adequately explain his mind-matter dualism, his materialistic account of matter “left open the possibility, eagerly exploited by those searching for new and unchristian explanations of nature, that all reality, including humanity and human thought, could be explained through purely materialistic philosophy.”15 Still, Baconian and Cartesian interventions into early seventeenth-century thought constituted only the first steps in what would be a far more substantial withdrawal from the metaphysical assumptions of scholastic Aristotelianism. In his groundbreaking work, La Crise de la Conscience Européenne, Paul Hazard argued that a truly revolutionary shift in intellectual orientation would have to wait for the 1670 publication of Spinoza’s Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus and the posthumous 1677 publication of his Ethics. “The daring utterances of the Aufklarung” Hazard argued, “pale into insignificance before the aggressive audacities of [the Tractatus] and the amazing declarations of Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (Lafayette: Cornerstone Book Publishers, 2006), 1. 10 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 17. 11 Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 13. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 15. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 16. 9

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the Ethics.”16 According to Israel, Hazard rightly recognized Spinoza’s role in introducing a new philosophical standard of truth on account of which, “the cohesion and unity of the confessional outlook, the ascendancy of theological orthodoxy and scholastic Aristoelianism, frayed.”17 In the Introduction, we discussed Spinoza’s unique role in inaugurating the fact-value divide. As Israel says, Spinoza insisted on the “centrality of scientific criteria . . . [as] the only certain and reliable criterion of truth we possess . . . [since from Spinoza’s perspective] Nothing happens or exists beyond Nature’s laws.”18 Jacob echoes this point when she attributes to Spinoza the view that “humans [are] a part of nature, [insofar as] Spinoza abolished the dualism between God and the world, between the immaterial and the material.”19 Spinoza, she continues, “identifies God with the wholeness of nature, and in abolishing the dualism of traditional Christian thought his purpose was not to abolish the materiality of the world, but rather to abolish the immateriality of God. . . . Spinoza provided the metaphysical foundations for rendering nature into the totality of existence.”20 Often intellectual historians point to the publication of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica) as the founding event of the paradigm shift to the New Science. In his Philosophy of the Enlightenment, for example, Cassirer argues that unlike Descartes and Spinoza before him, Newton’s approach to the natural world epistemologically prioritizes empirical phenomena over a priori conceptual or hypothetical constructions. Newton’s emphasis on observation and experimentation trumps Spinoza’s commitment to an a priori “method of proof and rigorous inference, which added other propositions to the first original certainty and in this way pieced out and linked together the whole chain of possible knowledge.”21 However, Israel argues that Spinoza would have been horrified by any suggestion that he and his philosophy are remote from modern science . . . because he spent much time experimenting, studying experiments, and discussing experimental results with scientists, as well as assembling microscopes and telescopes . . . [and] because it was basic to his 16 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 20. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 243. 19 Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 21. 20 Ibid. 21 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 6–7.

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conception of his philosophy that his thought should be firmly anchored in the rules and procedures of mathematics and science.22

In any case, most relevant for my purposes is the philosophical impact of both the Spinozistic and Newtonian identification of knowledge of nature with knowledge itself. Unlike Descartes, who retained an epistemological and metaphysical distinction between mind and matter, English empiricists and Spinoza both understood that, “nothing happens or exists beyond Nature’s laws . . . [meaning] the laws science demonstrates through experiment and mathematical calculation are universally valid and the sole criterion of truth.”23 By the eighteenth century, as Cassirer says, “the correlation between nature and human knowledge ha[d] . . . been established once and for all.”24 The impact of the New Science and its naturalistic criteria of truth upon the modern study of religion is also widely recognized. Many take David Hume’s Natural History of Religion as the symbolic beginning of what becomes the explanatory approach to religion.25 While Hume showed more interest in providing an empirical account of human nature in general, he nonetheless maintained that philosophical truths about human nature could be used to explain what he took to be the second order phenomenon of religious belief. As attested by scholars such as J. Z. Smith and Samuel Preus,26 Hume’s naturalistic, explanatory approach to the study of religion spawned a number of similar reductive attempts to account for the reality of religious belief and experience by explaining them in the discourse of scientific facts. In Explaining Religion, Preus expands the list of to include Bodin, Vico, and Fontanelle. Preus’s study and more recent works like Russell McCutcheon’s The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion powerfully illuminate the direct impact of the fact-value divide upon the emergence of the modern discipline of religion. However, Preus and McCutcheon intentionally focus on thinkers who were self-consciously critical of Christianity and sought scholarly positions independent of orthodoxy or apologetic concerns. Consequently, neither directly addresses 22 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 242–243. 23 Ibid., 243–244. 24 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 44. 25 J. Z. Smith makes this argument in his essay, “Religions, Religious, Religion,” in Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), 184. 26 Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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the influence of the fact-value divide on Jewish and Christian thinkers committed to the ongoing vitality of their own religious traditions. One explanation for this oversight is the extent to which accounts of the European Enlightenment have largely focused on Jewish and Christian thinkers now identified with what is known as the “moderate Enlightenment.” This category includes thinkers like Kant, Locke and even Newton who apparently strove to balance their commitment to the New Science with their desire to preserve theopolitical claims and thereby resist the hegemony of the fact-value divide. However, cracks in that story have begun to appear, not only because scholars like Israel and Jacob have drawn our attention to the emergence of a “radical Enlightenment” in the mid-seventeenth century, but also because, as I have begun to show, even the so-called moderate Enlightenment thinkers inadvertently fell prey to the influence of the fact-value standard of truth. The following discussion of Jewish and Christian thinkers associated with both the radical and moderate Enlightenments will demonstrate how thoroughly early modern Jewish and Christian thinkers had accepted the fact-value divide. The first of the three forms of the appropriation of the fact-value divide, acceptance of the fact-value divide means that a thinker immediately identifies the criteria of knowledge in general with the criteria of scientific knowledge of nature. As a result, such thinkers take nature to be the sole subject matter of genuine knowledge, the “really” real. Acceptance has two characteristic features: 1) the translation or reduction of Jewish and Christian claims into claims about the natural world, and, 2) the determination by the thinker that untranslated theopolitical claims are arbitrarily anchored or vulnerable to skepticism. It is important to note that of the three forms of the Jewish and Christian appropriation of the fact-value divide (acceptance, redescription, and external critique), acceptance is not only the philosophically least self-reflective, but also the oldest. Generally speaking, early Jewish and Christian thinkers adopted a philosophically conservative response to the dominance of the fact-value standard. Like other modern Western philosophers, their default position was to accept it and attempt to translate or reduce Jewish and Christian claims into knowledge claims about the objective, material world. And to whatever extent they recognized problems with it, their first response was to offer new applications or redescriptions of it. Thus as will become clear in what follows, one can discern an historical line of development that moves from an uncritical acceptance of the fact-value divide in the

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seventeenth–early nineteenth centuries, to mid-and late nineteenth-century redescriptions that critique its relevance for theopolitical discourse and attempt to make room for an irreducible sacred reality alongside the objective world of knowledge, to the more thoroughgoing external challenges to the fact value-divide characteristic of twentieth-century Krisis theology, which nevertheless remain arbitrarily anchored because they fail to account for the criteria to which those external critiques appeal. Appreciating the generally conservative orientation of Jewish and Christian authors, however, illuminates several noteworthy points of analysis. First, early modern Jewish and Christian thinkers who accepted the fact-value divide did so because they believed its pragmatic benefits outweighed its negative costs. Second, nineteenth-century redescriptions signal a growing concern for the damaging consequences of this logical paradigm together with a sustained appreciation for it. Finally, the more a thinker recognizes the problems of the fact-value divide for theopolitical claims, the more thoroughgoing her philosophical reflection upon its logic will be. This is why, as I will argue in chapter five, recognizing the crisis posed by the fact-value divide for contemporary Jewish and Christian thought invites a philosophical investigation into the conditions of the possibility of the particular knowledge claims held by particular communities in a particular time. It is not difficult to identify examples of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Jewish and Christian thinkers whose thought displays the characteristic features of the acceptance mode of fact-value appropriation. It is the fundamental hypothesis of Nature and Norm that a large swath of modern Jewish and Christian thinkers conform to the fact-value standard and many exhibit the acceptance mode of conformity. To demonstrate the point, we can return to the work of Benedict Spinoza on the one hand and examine Thomas Hobbes’ reduction of religion to material nature on the other.

II. Case Study: Spinoza and Hobbes Spinoza Among modern Jewish thinkers, Benedict Spinoza’s work offers one of the most explicit examples of the acceptance form of the fact-value standard.27 27 For a helpful defense of the designation of Spinozas as a “Jewish thinker” see Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman ed., Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). There they explain that, “Many readers

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As detailed in the Ethics, truth in Spinoza’s analysis is tantamount to the adequate understanding of natural causality as it operates with regard to eternal Substance (which Spinoza identifies with nature itself). All philosophical reflection must begin with the category of substance, which Spinoza defines as that which “must be in itself and be conceived through itself (Def. 4).”28 As things that are in and conceived through themselves, substances ground their own attributes, which in turn determine the “what” or nature of any substance (Def. 4). However, for Spinoza, reality is exhausted by one and only one substance. If there were two substances, these two would have to consist of different attributes, that is, attributes that have nothing in common with one another. But, Spinoza reasons, substances with nothing in common cannot be the cause of each other, and therefore a substance can only cause itself (P6). Moreover, substance must be infinite, because to be finite would entail that one substance was limited by another substance of the same nature, but as he has already shown, two substances of the same nature cannot exist (P8). Indeed, substance must have infinite attributes—that is, there must be an infinite number of ways for substance to be or express itself in reality (P11). As infinite and constituted by an infinite number of attributes, substance not only necessarily (P11) exists but is eternal, and no other substance can exist. Spinoza identifies this one substance with both God and Nature (Part 1 Def. 6). Of course, Spinoza recognizes the existence of particular things. To account for their mode of being, he posits a difference between natura naturans (naturing nature or the active aspect of God/nature) and natura naturata (natured nature or that which is acted upon or preserved by the former). The former includes God’s essence as determined by infinite attributes. The latter consists of the infinite modalities or “affects” through which these attributes are expressed, modalities that produce particular realities that come in and out of existence. Despite nature’s infinite activity of self-expression, however, Spinoza argues that nature “has no fixed

may be familiar with Julius Guttman’s claim that Spinoza’s philosophy belongs more to European than to Jewish thought. But we think this is a false dichotomy. For Jewish philosophy and Jewish thought in general, in every period have been actively engaged with the ideas of the surrounding environment, and have critically and creatively engaged those ideas” (Ravven and Goodman, Jewish Themes, 4). 28 Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, in The Essential Spinoza: Ethics and Related Writings, ed. Michael Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), 4.

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goal  .  .  .  all things in nature proceed from all eternal necessity and with supreme perfection.”29 What then of human beings? According to the Ethics, human beings are modalities of two divine attributes: thought and extension. On the one hand, the human is a modality of divine thought, that is, one of the ways divine thought thinks. On the other hand, divine ideas have corresponding extended (material) objects because God’s essence is always existence. Therefore the “idea of the human mind”30 has an object, “an actually existing thing” (Part 2 P11),31 which he identifies with the body. The human mind is the sum total of the ideas corresponding to the affections the body feels, and for this reason, the material body determines the range of human knowledge (Part 2 P26). Spinoza identifies three levels of human knowledge: sensory knowledge, reason through common notions, and intuition. At the first level of sensory knowledge, the mind receives sensory affections and relates them through memory and imagination. This knowledge, reliant on external forces working on the affections, is confused and inadequate. At the second level, reason, the mind actively generates common notions and clarifies the causal relations between them. Whereas sensory knowledge is passive and confused, reason actively identifies commonalities or real agreements between things in nature and can therefore generate adequate ideas of its objects. The third and highest level of knowledge is the intuition, which “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.”32 As Sanem Soyarslan explains, “it would seem that intuitive knowledge is both more immediate as it grasps adequate ideas in ‘one glance’ and attends unlike reason to the ‘essences’ of things and not only their causal relations. . . . As we see here, the starting point of intuitive knowledge is adequate knowledge of the eternal necessity of God’s nature.”33 In Spinoza’s view, intuition is the highest and rarest form of knowledge, the key to human tranquility in nature and the antidote to the perpetual limits of the human body and 29 Spinoza, Ethics, 26. 30 Ibid., 45. 31 Ibid., 35. 32 Ibid., 51. 33 Sanem Soyarslan, “From Ordinary Life to Blessedness: The Power of Intuitive Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics,” in The Moral Philosophy of Spinoza, ed. Andrew Youpa and Matthew Kisner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 17.

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mind within a world of external forces it cannot control. It is synonymous with the intellectual love of God. For our purposes, it is important to note the relation of reason and intuition to the human person who lives with her emotions in a world she experiences as changing and temporal. For both reason and intuition, knowledge is sub species aeternitatis, under the perspective of eternity. More specifically, “it is the nature of reason to perceive things as  . . . necessary (Part 2 P44),”34 and “in the light of eternity . . . and without any relation to time . . . (Cor. 2).”35 By employing common notions that regard things as necessary, reason knows things “truly—namely, as they are in themselves.”36 As Soyarslan states, “such an understanding allows us to attain a general scientific knowledge of Nature and our place in Nature, obtain a detached and objective viewpoint from which we can rise above our imaginative knowledge of things (including ourselves), and thereby, remove our errors.”37 However, this means that adequate knowledge does not include or reflect the affective reality of the human knower or subject in time. Rather, through reason the individual becomes “objective” to herself. This is all the more the case with respect to intuition, for which one’s detachment from subjective experience is even more absolute. For here, “I see—in one single intuition”38 that I am in God and conceived through God. Consequently, Spinoza insists, “reason demands nothing contrary to Nature.”39 First and foremost, reason is a theoretical power of cognition or explanation and not, as Daniel Rutherford says, “a practical precept”40 or a practical capacity to determine ends for action. However, to say that reason is not a practical capacity is not the same as saying that cognition has no practical effects. Reason exercises power—in particular the power of a natural thing to survive or perpetuate itself—because reason affords an understanding of causality. As Donald Rutherford argues, “when Spinoza uses the expression ‘dictate of reason,’ he is making a general claim about reason as a causal power; namely, that insofar as the mind is determined by reason, or adequate ideas, it necessarily promotes what is truly useful to 34 Spinoza, Ethics, 53. 35 Ibid., 54. 36 Ibid., 53. 37 Soyarslan, “From Ordinary Life to Blessedness,” 12. 38 Spinoza, Ethics, 52. 39 Ibid., 112. 40 Donald Rutherford, “Spinoza and the Dictates of Reason,” Inquiry 51, no. 5 (October 2008): 495.

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it.”41 This is why Spinoza maintains that, “only instances of adequate causation count as genuine cases of acting.”42 By contrast, actions motivated by the effects of the external world upon a self do not constitute genuine actions because they do not arise from the power of cognition to effect action in accordance with the necessary character of reality. Passive reactions, which include the evaluation of external effects as good or bad “for me,” are nothing other than signs that I do not have an adequate grasp of how nature operates. If I did, my cognition would determine corresponding actions, and I would understand that neither the world nor my actions are either good or bad but simply the way things are. I only attribute a value to events when I do not understand them and cannot explain them. Explaining them allows me to see them as part of the natural order and connection of things within eternal Substance, that is, as objectively true regardless of their apparent “affect” on me. Genuine action therefore is not motivated by a determination of what I consider to be good. Determinations of “good” or “bad,” “just” or “unjust,” are relative to individuals, and so their content does not reflect the objective order of nature sub species aeternitatis. There is no value in nature adequately understood. Similarly, Spinoza argues in the Theologico-Political Treatise that justice is a product of the social contract, arising only in relation to the state, which Spinoza regards as the primary sphere of value or normativity, a sphere developed as a direct result of our inability to exercise adequate knowledge or power over the external environment of nature and other people. If, however, genuine action is only an entailment of objective understanding, it must also be the case that ethical action is genuine only when it follows from the dictates of reason. As Donald Rutherford explains, the exercise of reason does not determine ethical norms; rather, it causally determines ethical action. As Spinoza writes, “He who lives according to the guidance of reason, desires for the other, too, the good he wants for himself,”43 that is, he simply does desire this. Elsewhere he says that “a free man  . . . who lives solely according to the dictates of reason alone, is not guided by the fear of death,”44 strives as far as possible to avoid the favors

41 Rutherford, “Dictates of Reason,” 496. 42 Ibid., 497. 43 Spinoza, Ethics, 128. 44 Ibid., 135.

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of the ignorant45 and always acts honestly, not deceptively.46 As Michael Rosenthal puts it, “a common procedure to address questions of value is to first define the meaning of the good, then develop a normative ethical theory based on this idea (and apply it to ethics). . . . Spinoza seems to have reversed the order. He thinks that there is no truly independent basis of the good. . . . Spinoza’s own idea of natural law is value neutral.”47 If, however, genuine action is not a product of prescription, but only an effect of human beings’ cognitive power, it is also the case that not all people exercise this cognitive power. Indeed, God alone possesses a fully adequate cognitive power, since only God can have an absolutely adequate apprehension of the order and connection of things. Inevitably, then, human beings will at least on some occasions (and for some people on many or even most occasions) focus on how external forces affect them and react on the grounds of whether they feel good or bad, that is, they will evaluate these forces and determine their action on the basis of these evaluations. Of course, since each individual is affected by external forces differently, each individual will determine good and bad differently. Value determinations are, in Spinoza’s account, entirely relative to subjective experience. Conflict between individuals inevitably ensues since what is good for one is not good for another, and one will regard as an enemy whomever wants to prevent him from doing what he intends to do.48 However, given each individual’s natural drive for self-preservation, people generally regard social conflict as bad and agree to give up their free and individual determinations of value to a state or political authority. Acquiescence to a political authority, however, does not result in the forfeiture of all subjective value since, in order to keep its power, the state must legislate laws that reflect the affective determinations of most people, even if these laws sometimes conflict with the idiosyncratic desires of particular citizens. Consequently, the state issues laws for the sake of individuals’ relative evaluations of the good, and in turn, individuals obey these laws because they reflect what they want or hold as good. In this way, the state is an instrument designed to manage finite persons’ desires and the affections which give rise to them. Since human values are a product of their failure to adequately apprehend the way things are naturally, the state and its 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Rosenthal, “Politics and Ethics in Spinoza,” 100. 48 Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 200–213.

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normative prescriptions are fictions designed to offset the limits of human persons in their finitude. Neither reflects the way things really are and neither count as “essential” or objectively true. Consequently, there is no objective standard by which the state and its laws could be evaluated. States and laws are good only to the extent to which they speak to the subjective affections of their citizens. While the existence of both politics and normativity could be explained in terms of an analysis of human nature, any such explanation results in the evaluation of their objective significance. Religion fares no better in Spinoza’s work. On the one hand, Spinoza’s account of divine law as the necessary law of eternal Substance undermines and demythologizes any religious account of God as a person issuing laws. In the Tractatus Spinoza explains that, the affirmations and the negations of God always involve necessity or truth; so that, for example, if God said to Adam that He did not wish him to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it would have involved a contradiction that Adam should have been able to eat of it.  .  .  .  But since Scripture . . . narrates that God did give this command to Adam . . . we must perforce say that God revealed to Adam the evil which would surely follow if he should eat of the true, but did not disclose that such evil would of necessity come to pass. Thus it was that Adam took the revelation to be not an eternal and necessary truth, but a law—that is, an ordinance followed by gain or loss, not depending necessarily on the nature of the act performed, but solely on the will and absolute power of some potentate, so that the revelation in question was solely in relation to Adam, and solely through his lack of knowledge a law, and God was, as it were a law-giver and potentate.49

Theology as adequate knowledge of God qua Substance concerns only truths that necessarily will come to pass and reduces all normative claims to empirical predictions. In short, theology is essentially non-normative. On the other hand, religion can contribute to the success of the state, but in this capacity it contains no more truth than the state that it serves. “Religion acquires its force as law solely from the decrees of the sovereign . . . the rites of religion and the outward observances of piety should be in accordance with the public space and well-being, and should therefore be determined by the sovereign power alone. . . .”50 Like politics, religion 49 Ibid., 63. 50 Ibid., 245.

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operates in and for the sphere of value. Its claims and norms are strictly stipulative and useful only for managing finite persons impacted and led by their affections. Both rest on human prejudice, opinion, or desire and can be evaluated only relative to them. From the above we can appreciate how Spinoza prioritizes the knowledge of nature and translates or reduces theopolitical claims into naturalistic terms. But Spinoza’s application and acceptance of the fact-value divide also extends into his analysis of biblical Judaism and the biblical God. Since in his estimation, neither can be adequately translated into the discourse of philosophically valid claims, biblical Judaism stands outside of the sphere of objective knowledge claims and is not considered rational. Spinoza maintains that like the modern state, the biblical state operates in service of subjective human interests. The primary difference between the former and the latter is the role of God as the state sovereign since the Jews of the Mosaic covenant pledged their natural rights to him. Still, Spinoza maintains, they did not do so on rational (necessary and eternal) grounds, but because the God who redeemed them from slavery demonstrated a concern with their security and welfare and promised to aid them now and in the future. As Spinoza says, “God did not enter into [the covenant] until the Jews had had experience of His wonderful power by which alone they had been, or could be, preserved in a state of prosperity.”51 Israelite society is rooted in and ultimately governed by the desires and needs of the people. Spinoza also asserts that the events described in the biblical narrative are purely fictional. The God of the Jews is not the God of Substance and the description of this God in the Hebrew Scriptures is not philosophically accurate. Judaism, its politics, and its theology are relegated to the sphere of subjective desire. This is not to deny that, in Spinoza’s view, they make a contribution to philosophical analyses of politics and religion, but in and of themselves they do nothing to alter the fundamental status of politics and religion as contingent upon the dynamics of human need over and against objective reason.

Hobbes Like Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes was a materialist whose thought displays the characteristic features of the acceptance mode of appropriating the 51 Ibid., 219.

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fact-value divide. Writing some twenty years prior to the publication of Spinoza’s Tractatus, Hobbes was, in Douglas Jesseph’s words, “a devotee of the new mechanical philosophy,”52 and any narrative of the New Science and the fact-value divide needs to reference the influence of his thought. If Nature and Norm pays particular attention to Spinoza’s thought as exemplifying the new criteria of truth introduced in and through the New Science, this is because the Tractatus presents a particularly clear and complete presentation of the fact-value divide and because of the undeniable impact of Spinoza’s philosophy on western European thought. Nonetheless, as noted earlier, Spinoza was not the first European thinker to present a systematic expression of the fact-value divide. In fact, as Jonathan Israel argues, “radical deism in the English Enlightenment is generally considered . . . an essentially home-grown product, rooted in Hobbes. . . . [E]ven in the late seventeenth century, there were claims that English philosophical incredulity . . . and its intellectual roots were to be found far more in Hobbes than Spinoza.”53 Consequently, Hobbes’s work offers a useful example of the acceptance mode of the fact-value divide by a Christian thinker.54 Like Spinoza, Hobbes identifies genuine knowledge with the knowledge of nature, so that theopolitical discourse attains logical validity only when translated into naturalistic terms. Hobbes associates logical validity with a causal understanding of nature as “the conflict of bodies pressing each other mutually with their motions.”55 If Hobbes inherited an Aristotelian account of knowledge as the determination of causes, he rejected Aristotele’s metaphysics with its formal and final causes, replacing it with a strictly materialist and mechanical metaphysics. Unfortunately, Hobbes offers no justification for identifying matter in motion as the “really real.” As Nicholas Dungey puts it,

52 Douglas Jesseph, “Hobbes and the Method of Natural Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Thomas Sorrel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 86. 53 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 601. 54 See Michael Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” in Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 1-79. For a robust defense of the designation of Hobbes as a Christian thinker, see A. P. Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 55 Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus, quoted in Jesseph, “Hobbes and the Method of Natural Science,” 86.

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Hobbes believes that a few basic principles are fundamental for all accounts of reality and a basic understanding of these principles is essential to the proper building of any moral and civil philosophy.  .  .  .  For Hobbes, these physical and mechanical concepts are body, extension, and motion, all of which are self-evident and are not reducible to, or explained by, any other concepts.56

Hobbes, as Richard Peters asserts, “is to be regarded as the metaphysician of the new scientific movement”57 since he takes it as self-evident that only propositions about mechanistic causes of material bodies possess logical validity. Hobbes’s commitment to the discovery of the causes and dynamics of bodily motion led him to revere geometry as the perfect science, since the geometer alone has certain knowledge of the causes and processes of motion that produce geometrical figures. And he says that, “all demonstrations are flawed unless they are scientific, and unless they proceed from causes, they are not scientific . . . [but] every drawing of a line is motion.”58 Physics, by contrast, is a mixed science. While like geometry, it pursues knowledge of natural causes, it must do so through the rational construction of hypotheses rather than demonstrations, since the data of physics are given to us empirically rather than produced by the mind and we cannot have the same certainty about their causes. In Hobbes’s view, science and reasoning presuppose language because we use names to call to mind the things we name, and we develop propositions to express the relation between these names. It follows that truth and falsehood are characteristics of propositions, since they are the means by which causal relations are expressed. In sum, as Douglas Jesseph explains, “Hobbes held that the aim of science is to uncover the mechanical causes of natural phenomena”59 and this goal constitutes the organizing principle of his systematic and unified account of knowledge. Hobbes’ taxonomy of the sciences illustrates this organizing principle and his assumption that the criteria of its knowledge claims are self-evidently valid. In article 6 of De corpore, Hobbes introduces readers 56 Nicholas Dungey, “Thomas Hobbes’s Materialism, Language, and the Possibility of Politics,” The Review of Politics 70, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 193. 57 Richard Peters, Hobbes (London: Pelican Books, 1956), 76. 58 DPRG, 12; OL IV, 421, quoted in Jesseph, “Hobbes and the Method of Natural Science,” 88. 59 Jesseph, “Hobbes and the Method of Natural Science,” 100.

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to what he calls the “chain” of scientific discourses. Each discourse offers causal analyses of the motion of bodies and each discourse can be deduced from the principles of geometry and physics. As Tom Sorrell explains, after geometry . . . or the science that demonstrates the effects of simple motion, mechanics, or the demonstration of the effects due to whole bodies working on one another comes next, followed by, physics, the study of the invisible motions of the particles of bodies . . . [even] moral philosophy has to do with the internal effects of sense in the form of passions and voluntary motions.60

Scholarship on Hobbes’s taxonomy of the sciences frequently addresses what appears to be an internal inconsistency in Hobbes’s placement of moral and civil philosophy. In article 6, Hobbes connects moral and civil philosophy to the chain of sciences that starts with geometry and continues through physics. However, in article 7, Hobbes suggests that, civil and moral philosophy do not so adhere.  .  .  .  For the causes of the motions of the mind are known, not only by ratiocination, but also by the experience of every man that takes the pains to observe these motions within himself . . . and therefore not only they that have attained the knowledge of the passions  .  .  .  by the synthetical method  .  .  .  [but also] they that have not learned the first part of philosophy, namely, geometry and physics, may notwithstanding, attain the principles of civil philosophy, by the analytical method.61

There are, in Hobbes’s view, two methods of reasoning to causes: synthetic and analytic. Since the synthetic method relies on the deduction of principles from more fundamental claims, it derives principles of moral and civil philosophy from the more fundamental sciences of geometry and physics. However, Hobbes asserts, one may also identify the causes of human moral and political life through the analytical method, which begins with concepts derived from experience or personal introspection and then dissolves these concepts into their parts and hypothesizes about the causes of these parts. Hobbes believes this approach is available even to ordinary people because it does not derive these sciences by demonstration from the more fundamental analyses of matter in geometry and physics. 60 Thomas Sorrel, “Hobbes’ Scheme of the Sciences,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Thomas Sorrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48. 61 Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, “I First Section Concerning the Body,” 73–74, quoted in Sorrel, “Hobbes’ Scheme of the Sciences,” 55.

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A clear analysis of these two approaches to moral and civil philosophy is important for the discussion here because Hobbes’s appeal to the analytical method appears to call into question his application of the fact-value divide. In an article entitled, “Hobbes: The Twofold Grounding of Civil Philosophy,” Gayne Nerney argues that there are two schools of scholarship on Hobbes’ account of the relationship between moral and civil philosophy and the natural sciences. On the one hand, the so-called “naturalists” argue that Hobbes’s account of both moral and civil philosophy is inevitably dependent upon the same materialism that provides the criteria for the validity of knowledge claims in geometry, mechanics, and physics. On the other hand, the “humanists” “believe that Hobbes was a great moralist and that a genuine moral theory is possible only on the assumption that, at some level, human actions are free from natural necessity.”62 On this humanist reading, Hobbes’s separation of moral philosophy from natural science would free moral discourse from the logical dominance of the factvalue divide. However, the possibility of this humanist reading emerges from the fact that as Michael Oakeshott shows, Hobbes’s writings operate on both an exoteric and an estoeric level. While he offers an exoteric account of moral philosophy for ordinary readers unable to synthetically deduce moral and civil discourse from the fundamental principles of geometry and physics, the esoteric account of moral and civil discourse shows that their principles derive from material causes.63 As Nerney argues, “the true Hobbes, the philosophically interesting Hobbes is the esoteric Hobbes, the Hobbes of the system, who believes that the teleological features of ordinary practical life can ultimately be reduced to the scientific principles of material and efficient causality.”64 The truths of moral and civil philosophy follow from the truths of natural science, even if methodologically, one need not necessarily discover moral or political truths by deducing them from material first principles. As David Gauthier puts it, “had Hobbes succeeded in his grand design for a unified science, questions of morality and politics would be treated in a purely synthetic manner by derivation from the supreme

62 Gayne Nerney, “Hobbes: The Twofold Grounding of Civil Philosophy,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1985): 395. 63 See Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association. 64 Nerney, “Hobbes: A Twofold Grounding of Civil Philosophy,” 406.

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relations or principles established through analysis of the body.”65 The humanist reading thus cannot be sustained In Hobbes’s materialist account, moral judgments are products of and ultimately constrained by the natural, human drive for self-preservation. Simply stated, Hobbes views human life from the perspective of matter in motion. On the one hand, human life consists in the bodily motion of limbs, breath, and pulse. On the other hand, human beings initiate voluntary motions in response to the external world as causally mediated by the senses. In Leviathan, Hobbes explains that, The cause of sense is the external body, or object which presseth the organ proper to each sense, either immediately, as in taste and touch or mediately, as in seeing, hearing, and smelling, which pressure, by the mediation of the nerves,  .  .  .  continued inwards to the brain and the heart, causeth there a resistance . . . or endeavor of the heart.66

Human beings retain sense experiences of external bodies through mental images which, as the instruments of our experience of external objects, either positively or negatively affect our “heart,” which Hobbes identifies as the seat of our “vital motions,” and therefore either help or detract from our individual attempts to preserve our bodies in the material world. As such, voluntary motions are products of our “passions”—of what we want and what we want to avoid. For Hobbes, these passions are the source of values. However, because each person’s sense experiences are different, each person values different objects in the world. Values exist only relative to an individual’s singular and subjective experience. Nothing is good or bad in itself, an absolute or objective property of the natural world. As Hobbes explains, whatsoever is the object of any man’s Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good; And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evil.  .  .  .  For these words of Good, Evil, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.67 65 David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2011), 3. 66 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1886), 23. 67 Ibid.

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In Hobbes’s view, no individual voluntary action is moral or immoral in itself. However, Hobbes does hold that individuals are motivated by their passions to “deliberate” or reason about whether objects do or do not promote self-preservation. As Gauthier explains, Hobbes holds an instrumentalist account of practical reason whereby, what is “against reason . . . [is] against . . . benefit”68 and consequently, persons cannot exercise practical reason without being exclusively interested in their own self-preservation. Therefore, as Gauthier explains, “that persons are conceived to take no interest in one another’s interests is implicit in Hobbes’s account of the value of a man.”69 The natural condition of human beings inevitably pits them against each other. Hobbes also maintains that we each have a “right” to pursue actions commensurate with our individual self-preservation. Each person is entitled to “use his own power, as he wills himself, for the preservation of his own Nature.”70 His use of the term “natural right” is confusing, however, since normally the determination of an individual right implies that others have a correlative duty. This is not the case here; the sort of “right” each has actually precludes any corresponding duty on the part of another since they too are at liberty to pursue their own interests exclusively. Because natural right so construed does not generate any shared or mutual obligations, it is not a moral principle. Nor is it even a productive or useful principle since, practically speaking, it leads to Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” our natural condition of war which actually undermines individuals’ desire for self-preservation. Natural right works at cross purposes with its own objective. Hobbes therefore maintains that it is rational for individuals seeking self-preservation to “lay down this right to all things”71 and instead submit to what Hobbes calls a “law of nature.”72 By law of nature, Hobbes means a “precept, or general Rule, found only by Reason, by which man is forbidden to do, that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same.”73 In other words, the concept of the law of nature refers

68 Hobbes, Leviathan, 65. 69 David Gauthier, Moral Dealing, Contracts, Ethics and Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 13. 70 Hobbes, Leviathan, 58. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 TK

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to an individual’s willingness to limit one’s own natural right for the sake of one’s primary concern for self-preservation. Hobbes argues that the fundamental law of nature states that an individual should “seek peace and follow it,”74 that is, individuals ought to pursue peace as the primary means of advancing their self-preservation. To do so requires that they forfeit other natural rights, such as the right to kill or steal from others, opting instead to “be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.”75 In this way, the first two laws of nature introduce principles that constrain the absolute freedom characteristic of person’s natural condition. Individuals voluntarily obligate themselves to adhere to these imperatives because doing so is in their own best interest. However, individuals’ willingness to adhere to these rational imperatives is always contractual. They willingly forfeit their natural liberty only if and when others promise to do likewise. In other words, individuals commit to a social contract, adherence to which constitutes “justice” and violation of which constitutes injustice or injury. In this way, Hobbesian morality is always contractual and conventional. As Laura Bagby says, “only after this contract has been made can there be such a thing as injustice.”76 Hobbes’s account of moral philosophy presents scholars with a range of philosophical questions including whether or not his laws of nature properly constitute moral principles, whether they comport with divine commands, and whether or not it is rational to be “just” when doing so requires forfeiting the more basic rational right to liberty. My primary concern here is to appreciate the limits of Hobbes’ moral philosophy and the extent to which these limits are determined by his embrace of the factvalue divide, resulting in an impoverished portrait of moral life. In David Gauthier’s opinion, the morality that Hobbes establishes is minimal; it represents the weakest of constraints on natural maximizing behavior—that set by considerations of mutual advantage. It is only because each person has an interest in peace that each has grounds to accept the conventional reason and morality which

74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Laura Bagby, Hobbes’ Leviathan: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2007), 33.

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together override the straightforward maximization of subjective value. Much of traditional morality will not be accommodated by Hobbes’s theory.77

Driven by his acceptance of the fact-value divide (the identification of logically valid knowledge claims with knowledge about the material, natural order), Hobbes’s moral philosophy reduces moral discourse to the terms of natural science. As a result, he dismisses whole areas of moral consideration taken up by a range of traditional Western moral theories, including virtue ethics, deontology, divine command, and the ethics of care. Hobbes’s civil philosophy is equally impoverished. For while people can rationally opt to commit to the social contract in order to secure their self-preservation, the social contract stands in some tension with their individual impulses and needs enforcement by a third power, a sovereign agreed upon by those who enter into the social contract. Such a political philosophy can offer no account of the state’s role in advancing goods like human liberty, friendship, or community. Most important for our purposes here, however, is to illuminate the impact of Hobbes’s acceptance of the fact-value divide on his account of Christian theology. Hobbes’s religious views provoked a good bit of ire in his own time. As Samuel Mintz argues, “Hobbes was the bête noir of his age  .  .  .  the apostle of infidelity.  .  .  .  Hobbes’ critics viewed his denial of spirit and his ethical relativism as  .  .  .  heresies with the most dangerous consequences for religion.”78 By the same token, as Devin Stauffer argues, “no-one would deny that theological arguments play a crucial role in Leviathan.”79 Some scholars like Timothy Fuller go so far as to maintain that, “in Leviathan Hobbes has worked out a detailed version of Reformed Christianity that is his own, based on his own reading and interpretation of the Scriptures but also informed by his familiarity with the major theological issues of his era.”80 A. P. Martinich goes even further and declares that, “Hobbes was a sincere and relatively orthodox Christian.”81 77 Gauthier, Moral Dealing, 22. 78 Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1. 79 Devin Stauffer, “‘Of Religion’ in Hobbes’ Leviathan,” Journal of Politics 72, no. 3 (July 2010): 869. 80 Timothy Fuller, “The Idea of Christianity in Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan,’” Jewish Political Studies Review 4, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 139. 81 Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan, 1.

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It is clear that a substantial portion of Leviathan consists of a discussion of Christianity and its role in the commonwealth. Part 3 discusses key topics in Christian thought including the meaning of prophecy, scripture, divine law, the Kingdom of God, and miracles, though Hobbes’s discussion of these topics sows the very seeds of skepticism that worried so many of his contemporaries. For while Hobbes devotes considerable energy to Christian thought, his acceptance and application of the fact-value divide leads him either to translate key Christian claims into reductive naturalistic terms or dismiss them as meaningless. Hobbes’s work is replete with examples of a naturalist reduction of Christian ideas. I will discuss three in particular: his analyses of God, prophecy, and scripture. Historically speaking, Hobbes’s analysis of God has proven to be the most provocative example of this naturalist reduction. While Hobbes never shied away from speaking about God, both during and after his life Hobbes has been widely reviled as an atheist. Clearly, whether Hobbes was, in fact, an atheist depends on what one takes to be the criteria of an acceptable theological view. More important for our purposes is to see how Hobbes applies the fact-value divide to questions about God, leading him to produce a theology that leaves out a long list of attributes which many Christian theologians see as essential. Hobbes’s controversial account of God appears in chapters 11 and 12 of Leviathan. In a discussion that anticipates David Hume’s Natural History of Religion, Hobbes argues that the “seed of religion”82 lies in human nature. People anxiously anticipate the future, and this “anxiety for the future time, disposeth man to inquire into the causes of things because the knowledge of them, maketh men the better able to order the present to their best advantage.”83 This leads him to investigate the chain of causes of “natural bodies” in motion, leading ultimately to the idea of a “First Mover,” that is, “some cause, whereof there is no former cause, but is eternal; which is it men call God.”84 In this way, Hobbes incorporates a notion of God into his materialist account of knowledge. However, Hobbes concedes that philosophical knowledge of this first cause is impossible, since scientific knowledge is knowledge of causes and it is impossible to know the cause of a first mover. In sum, Hobbes states that, 82 Hobbes, Leviathan, 48. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid.

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[while] it is impossible to make any profound inquiry into natural causes, without being inclined thereby to believe there is one God eternal . . . [people] cannot have any Idea of him in their mind, answerable to his nature. . . . [By] the visible things of this world, and their admirable order, a man may conceive there is a cause of them, which men call God; and yet not have an Idea, or image of him in his mind.85

This account of God relegates most Christian theological ideas to the status of mere opinion.86 This is why Hobbes unapologetically excludes theology from his taxonomy of science. In De corpore, he states that, The Subject of Philosophy, or the matter it treats of, is every Body  .  .  .  of whose Generation or Properties we can have any knowledge. . . . [W]here there is no Generation nor Property, there is no Philosophy. Therefore it excludes Theology, I mean the doctrine of God, Eternal, Ingenerable, Incomprehensible, and in whom there is nothing neither to divide nor compound, nor any Generation to be conceived.87

From this perspective, most Christian theological claims are dismissed as outside the bounds of rational knowledge and vulnerable to skeptical doubt since they do not directly relate to knowledge claims about the material world. Hobbes even proclaims that we can look forward to the day when, “scientific explanation  .  .  .  eventually replaces the ignorance of natural causes [which] dispose a man to credulity,”88 and hence, Hobbes implies, to orthodox religion. Until then, however, it is important to appreciate the difference between faith and science and between biblical metaphors about God and the philosophical account of God as first mover. As Benjamin Milner explains, Hobbes’s 85 Ibid. 86 In an article entitled, “Hobbes and Religion Without Theology,” Agostino Lupoli explains the relationship between Hobbes’s postulate of God as the prime mover and his insistence in De corpore and elsewhere that theology is not a science. He asks, “Does the epistemological exclusion of theology from knowledge contradict Hobbes’s demonstration of God’s existence? No, because when the demonstration is fully deployed in De corpore, it clearly appears to be a fundamental postulate of mechanistic physics that it necessarily demands a First Mover. For all its possible religious use, this notion is a physical one peculiar to Hobbes’s mechanicism.” Agostino Lupoli, “Hobbes and Religion without Theology,” in Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. A. P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 458. 87 Thomas Hobbes, De corpore, ed. Karl Schuhman and Martin Pechaman (Paris: J. Vrini, 1999), 1.8, 7–8, quoted in Lupoli, “Hobbes and Religion Without Theology,” 455. 88 Hobbes, Leviathan, 47.

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position commits him to a free, full use of all biblical language, but we must not mistake that for significant usage. Able to affirm literally only the fear of God [as a first Mover], he is forced to deny the meaningfulness of virtually all other distinctive attributes of God. They are beyond reason, beyond all rational discourse. . . . [H]is real allegiance is to his natural theology: that is the grail of which the disposable content is his biblical theology.89

Hobbes’s treatment of prophecy offers a second example of his naturalistic reduction of Christian ideas. In Hobbes’s view, the claim that God speaks directly to any individual person can only be an object of faith since his account of God precludes justifiable use of the idea of divine speech. Hobbes also claims that prophetic experiences arise, like dreams, from natural causes. As he puts it, “to say that God hath spoken to him in a Dream is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win belief from any man, that knows dreams . . . are natural.”90 While Hobbes concedes that prophets can communicate knowledge about God, this does not mean that their insights have a supernatural origin. Ultimately, as Laura Bagby says, “Hobbes wants his readers to be very wary when it comes to prophecy . . .”91 For a third example of Hobbes’s application of the fact-value paradigm to Christian ideas we may consider his account of scriptural authority and law. Readers may initially miss the influence of the fact-value paradigm on his account of these ideas since, in chapter 33, Hobbes asserts that scriptural laws are reducible to the laws of the sovereign. By the books of Holy “Scripture”, are understood those which ought to be the “canon”, that is to say, the Rules of Christian life. And because all rules of life, which men are in conscience bound to observe, are Laws; the question of the Scripture is the question of what is Law throughout all Christendom both Natural and Civil. . . . Seeing therefore I have already provided, that Sovereigns in their own Dominions are the sole Legislators.92

Nonetheless, insofar as civil laws and the social contract within which they are forged are derived from the individual’s natural drive for self-preservation, this identification of scriptural rules with civil rules 89 Benjamin Milner, “Hobbes: On Religion,”  Political Theory  16, no. 3 (1988): 415. Emphasis added. 90 Hobbes, Leviathan, 159. 91 Bagby, Hobbes’ Leviathan, 82. 92 Hobbes, Leviathan, 162.

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does amount to an application of the fact-value divide. This is why Hobbes maintains that, “the laws of Scripture can be said to be God’s laws as far as they differ not from the Laws of Nature . . . and carry their authority with them, legible to all men that have the use of natural reason.”93 Hobbes also maintains that scriptural rules or Christian ways of life that are not reducible to the laws of nature are fundamentally groundless, except to those who claim to have them “obtrude upon [them] . . . [meaning,] in such a number of men, that out of pride, and ignorance, take their own Dreams and extravagant Fancies and madness, for testimonies of God’s Spirit.”94 Taken together, Hobbes’s commentary upon central Christian ideas and theological positions waxes skeptical at best and dismissive at worst on account of his thoroughgoing application of the fact-value divide. Applying his naturalistic account of reason to scriptural language and Christian doctrine leads Hobbes more frequently than not to identify core terms as meaningless and central beliefs as ecclesiastical superstitions. Not every biblical term or Christian idea can be redeemed through the labor of reasoned review. Therefore, as he states, when any thing therein written is too hard for our examination, we are bidden  .  .  .  not to labour in sifting out a philosophical truth by logic, of such mysteries as are not comprehensible, nor fall under any rule of natural science. For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick; which swallowed whole, have the virtue of cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.95

And as Laurie Johnson Bagby suggests, he “chew[s] his way through various religious beliefs and biblical teachings and reason[s] about them until some of them are eliminated and others are changed almost beyond recognition for the traditional believer.”96 If Hobbes’s Leviathan is in equal measure a philosophical foundation for the modern state and an exercise in modern scriptural hermeneutics, nevertheless the latter interest serves the former and remains wholly subject to its materialist criteria of logical validity. The acceptance mode of the fact-value appropriation by seventeenthand eighteenth-century Jewish and Christian thinkers can be recognized in a long list of both radical and moderate Enlightenment thinkers 93 Ibid., 167. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 159. 96 Bagby, Hobbes’ Leviathan, 73.

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including John Toland, Matthew Tindale, John Locke, Voltaire, Isaac Newton, Christian Wolff, and others. In addition, it can be found in the nineteenth-century turn to historicism. In historicism, acceptance of the fact-value divide leads to the reduction of Jewish and Christian knowledge claims to the discourse of historical fact, which is, however, simply an extension of the logic of natural science.97 In Friedrich Beiser’s words, historicism refers to the idea that, “the essence, identity or nature of everything in the human world is made by history . . . [even when] . . . what gives historicism all its power and plausibility is its source in modern science.  .  .  .”98 These eighteenth- and nineteenth-century approaches to religious thought demonstrate a materialist commitment to the reduction of theopolitical claims and a deep skepticism of claims that cannot be recovered in this way.

97 The nineteenth-century Jewish movement known as Wissenschaft des Judentums presents an illustrative example of the historicist application of the fact-value divide. Largely identified with the work of Moritz Stenschneider, Isaak Markus Jost, Leopold Zunz, and, later, Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow, proponents of Wissenschaft des Judentums invested the study of the Jewish past with the authority to determine the truth about Jewish ideas and Jewish values. Wissenschaft des Judentums was, as Ismar Schorsch asserts, “a new way of thinking about Judaism” (Ismar Schorsch, Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism [Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2003], 153). Inspired by Spinoza’s attempt to “transfer the method of science from the scrutiny of God’s handwork to His word” (ibid., 168), nineteenth-century Jewish historians inquired into the historical facticity of Jewish texts, ideas, and values while freely dismissing those that did not lend themselves to this historical translation. Like the devotees of the New Science before them, thinkers like Jost and Zunz insisted on bracketing any subjective element in the empirical review of historical facts. In Jost’s own words, “no prejudice should blind the historian; . . . no apprehension should intimidate him from revealing the truth as he sees it” (Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, vol. 4, “Vorword,” iii, quoted in Schorsch, Text to Context, 169). Common to these thinkers is the notion that the logical validity of historical knowledge derives from the “weight of the [historical] evidence” (Schorsch, Text to Context, 169) and never from the subjective interests of the historian herself. Driven by a “fear of error, no matter how insignificant,” Jewish Wissenschaft historians were, as Schorsch argues, compelled by nothing less than a “moral fervor to demythologize” Jewish texts, ideas, and values (ibid., 170). 98 Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2–3.

Chapter Three

From Redescription to External Critique

In God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars, Benjamin Lazier argues that twentieth-century Jewish and Christian post-liberalism, begin[s] with the death of an ideal. For many Europeans, the First World War drove a stake through the heart of liberal civilization. . . . The war in particular dealt a deathblow to a faith in the progressive moral perfection of man, and in its wake came a post-liberal ethos more at home in crisis than calm. This was the case in politics, in cultural circles, in philosophy, and not least in theology.1

Shaken by the widespread destruction brought by the war, Jewish and Christian theologians bonded together in their shared rejection of the modern focus on the self ’s reason, imagination, and political ideals, and in their urgent call to attend to a wholly other God and his wholly other ways. Lazier’s narrative is familiar to students of modern Jewish and Christian thought. However, it is the central contention of Nature and Norm that this account of modern west religious thought as a tug of war between liberal subjectivity and neo-orthodoxy needs to be supplemented by a parallel story about the relationship between Jewish and Christian thought, the scientific revolution, and the fact-value paradigm of logical validity.

1 Lazier, God Interrupted, 5.

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Thus far, I have argued that the influence of the fact-value divide on Jewish and Christian thinkers derives from the powerful effects of the scientific revolution on modern European thought in general and Jewish and Christian thought in particular. I have also maintained that the more a Jewish or Christian thinker shows concern for the negative impact of the fact-value divide on her claims, the more she reflects upon this standard and the less she takes it for granted. I laid out three forms of Jewish and Christian appropriation of the fact-value divide corresponding to increasing levels of concern over its impact on Jewish and Christian thought: acceptance, redescription, and external critique. In the previous chapter, I examined the first of these forms. In this chapter, I will describe and provide examples of the second form, what I call redescription or the turn to the “more.” Moreover, chief among the central outcomes of this analysis is an appreciation of how the history of modern Jewish and Christian thought is less a story about the rise and fall of modern, liberal subjectivity than of Jewish and Christian attempts to apprehend the relationship between their theopolitical claims and scientific knowledge. This account of the fact-value divide on Jewish and Christian thinkers challenges the dominance of the liberal/post-liberal story by exposing key points of overlap between Jewish and Christian thinkers whose work is frequently associated with opposite positions on the liberal/post-liberal spectrum. In chapter one, I presented the first of four case studies in a comparison between Franz Rosenzweig’s post-liberal theological realism and the theological reduction to the practical self in Kant’s thought. This chapter illustrates this point through a case study of the political theology of the conservative Catholic theologian and juridical thinker Carl Schmitt and the theopolitics of the liberal, antinomian Jewish theologian Martin Buber.

I. Redescription or the Turn to the “More” As I showed in thapter Two, the fact-value standard of knowledge seized the philosophical imagination of a wide range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jewish and Christian thinkers, despite the fact that it dramatically undermined central Jewish and Christian values, laws, and ideas. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, cracks in the immediate acceptance of the fact-value paradigm began to appear for Jewish and Christian thinkers who recognized some of the negative effects of this

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naturalist and historical reduction of Jewish and Christian claims. In their efforts to counter this reduction, thinkers like Friedrich Schleiermacher, Abraham Geiger, Rudolph Otto, and others pointed to what they took to be the unique and irreducible sphere of religious experience. Unlike their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, these thinkers did criticize the immediate translation of Jewish and Christian claims into strictly scientific terms. Nonetheless, the introduction of an irreducible sphere of religious reality, a sacred “more,” does little to alter the fact-value paradigm and the arbitrary anchoring of theological claims. For instead of challenging the logical hegemony of factual claims, these appeals take it for granted and only supplement it by identifying religion with a non-logical sphere of reality. The result is to redescribe the fact-value divide without moving beyond it. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s account of religion in his 1799 On Religion: Speeches to the Cultured Despisers offers an influential early example of the appeal to a religious “more.” In this work, Schleiermacher attempts to persuade readers of the ongoing importance of religion. Central to his strategy is his forceful rejection of the notion that religion is reducible to any sphere of knowledge. Instead, religion points us to a reality that cannot be known. Religion does not make factual claims, and all, “ideas and principles . . . belong to knowledge, which is a different department of life from religion.”2 Schleiermacher famously maintains that religion is a “sense and a taste of the Infinite,”3 an immediate and conceptually indescribable feeling for “the infinite nature of the whole.”4 As such, religion signals a “more” that, “you always experience yet never experience  .  .  .  it can scarcely be described . . . so little does it properly exist.”5 To gain awareness of it, one must get behind cognitive processes of perception and argument to experience the “immediate union” of individual feeling and universal life. This experience of the infinite is undoubtedly real, adding something to the world even if it is not “of ” the world and all attempts to objectify it inevitably negate the very reality they seek to convey. Widely admired as a bold attempt to chart a new course for religious thought over and against seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translations 2 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to the Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubnes & Co., 1893), 46. 3 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 39. 4 Ibid., 36. 5 Ibid., 43.

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of religious claims into scientific discourse, Schleiermacher’s appeal to an irreducible “more” nonetheless sustains the fact-value standard of knowledge. Not only is his account of religion arbitrarily anchored, but it is particularly vulnerable to charges of skepticism and acosmism. We may turn to Wayne Proudfoot’s analysis of Schleiermacher’s thought in his volume, Religious Experience, to substantiate this conclusion. Proudfoot identifies a debilitating antinomy at the heart of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion that reveals its fundamental unintelligibility. On the one hand, Schleiermacher insists that religious experience is not conceptualizable and cannot be reduced to or explained by any other terms. On the other hand, Schleiermacher also insists that religious affection or feeling “intends” an object that Schleiermacher identifies and conceptualizes as the “infinite.” The problem is that Schleiermacher’s religious moment cannot be specified without reference to God, the infinite or the Whole . . . and this despite Schleiermacher’s insistence that religious ideas be restricted to descriptions of religious affections and his claim that explanations have nothing to do with the childlike intuition that informs those affections.6

Schleiermacher’s need to designate the specificity of religion conflicts with his insistence on its irreducibility. If Schleiermacher is committed to the notion that religion is a feeling and not a kind of knowledge, in order to identify its meaning, Schleiermacher must make a claim about the nature of this feeling and the object to which it refers. Since, however, religion is an affection and not an idea, this determination of it cannot correspond to what he claims religion really is. Neither pole of the antinomy presents an intelligible picture, and it is unclear how the notion of religion retains any meaning here at all. Schleiermacher’s confusion on this matter shows that his account is vulnerable to skeptical challenge. The problem arises because Schleiermacher wants to make a conceptual claim about religion but refuses to identify its subject matter as an object of knowledge, because he takes for granted the fact-value standard of truth. According to Schleiermacher, knowledge claims are strictly about the objective world and the infinite is not a spatio-temporal object within it. As such, the subject matter of religion stands 6 Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 12, 15.

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outside of the bounds of justifiable knowledge and remains arbitrarily anchored. His willingness to concede that theological propositions about a supernatural reality cannot withstand the challenge of scientific knowledge constitutes further evidence of his acceptance of the fact-value divide. Like his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment teachers, Schleiermacher recognizes that science calls metaphysics into question. In fact, as Andrew Dole argues, Schleiermacher’s work . . . was premised upon the possibility of the completion of scientific knowledge about the natural world  .  .  .  Schleiermacher anticipate[d] that as the sciences challenge Christianity’s traditional claims, later generations will need to learn to do without what many are still accustomed to regard as inseparably bound to the essence of Christianity.7

This explains why, when speaking of what he refers to as the “dogmas and doctrines  .  .  .  that many consider the essence of religion [such as] miracle inspiration, revelation, supernatural intimations,” Schleiermacher nonetheless insists that “they are all a result of that contemplation of feeling [but] . . . are not necessary for religion itself. . . .”8 Like a long list of Jewish and Christian thinkers who appeal to the reality of an irreducible religious “more,” Schleiermacher’s approach to religion cannot establish the justifiability of theopolitical claims, but continues to take for granted the philosophical self-evidence of scientific standards of logical validity. His attempted criticism of the limits of the reduction of religious discourse to natural and historical facts amounts only to a redescription of the fact-value divide which simply tacks on an extra-rational sphere of a sacred “more” to a materialist account of reality It is not difficult to find other examples of the appeal to the irreducible “more” in modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought. As noted earlier, Rudolph Otto’s phenomenological account of the numinous offers one such instance. While as scholars like Andrew Dole have noted, Otto’s account of the numinous leaves more space for the supernatural than Schleiermacher’s, Otto too determines the wholly other by its opposition to natural and historical facts, consequently, his account remains as indebted to the fact-value paradigm as Schleiermacher’s. Both identify religion with a dimension of reality irreducible to the terms of scientific knowledge 7 Andrew Dole, “Schleiermacher and Otto on Religion,” Religious Studies 40, no. 4 (December 2004): 401–402. 8 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 87.

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precisely because each accepts the self-evidence of scientific criteria. Neither offers a different account of the logical validity of knowledge itself. I maintain that this is characteristic of all Jewish and Christian thought systems rooted in the appeal to an irreducible “more.” As Proudfoot argues, “Schleiermacher’s approach continues to inform much contemporary religious thought and philosophy of religion, even among those who think of themselves as having broken with that tradition. . . . [T]hey employ similar arguments to defend the irreducible character of religious experience.”9 They do so, I maintain, as an expression of their continued appropriation of the fact-value standard of logical validity. The redescription of the fact-value divide by appeal to a religious “more” not only appears in Jewish and Christian thinkers critical of a natural reduction of Jewish and Christian claims, however, but in thinkers concerned with the limits of historical reduction as well. One finds a good example of this in the work of the nineteenth-century Jewish reform thinker Abraham Geiger. Sympathetic to the scholarly advances made possible through the Wissenschaft approach to Jewish thought, Geiger nonetheless recognizes that identification of the historical objectivity of Jewish ideas cannot provide criteria to help contemporary communities determine how to reform Jewish ideas and practices in the current moment. While history undoubtedly establishes the nature of Jewish reality in the past, it cannot determine what ought to be the nature of Jewish reality in the present or in the future. To make such determinations, the Jewish community has to look beyond the facts of Jewish knowledge and consult the “religious genius” of the people as their guide in the process of reform.10 Nonetheless, like other appeals to an irreducible religious reality, Geiger’s notion of Israel’s “religious genius” devolves into meaninglessness and cannot provide criteria for the ongoing reform of Jewish laws and ideas, since neither does he recognize it as an element of the objective world, nor does he explain how it sustains meaning in any other way.

9 Proudfoot, Religious Experience, xv. 10 For a detailed examination of Geiger’s notion of the “religious genius” of the people of Israel, see Harvey Hill, “The Science of Reform: Abraham Geiger and the Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Modern Judaism 27, no. 3 (October 2007): 329–349.

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II. Case Study: Martin Buber and Carl Schmitt Frequently, one finds the appeal to an irreducible more and the concomitant appropriation of the fact-value divide in thinkers who otherwise hold dramatically different positions. A case study of the work of Martin Buber and Carl Schmitt presents a useful example. Martin Buber and Carl Schmitt advanced diametrically opposed portraits of political theology.11 Schmitt’s political theology developed out of his account of the theopolitical representationalism of the Catholic Church whereas Buber’s theopolitics focused on the anti-clerical figure of the prophet. Schmitt’s political theology is associated with the rise of twentieth-century fascist movements and Buber’s theopolitics with left-wing liberal Zionism. Nonetheless, a comparison of the two thinkers’ response to what each took to be the rising influence of a gnostic impulse on theological reflection dissolves any substantial difference between Buber’s prophet and Schmitt’s cleric and thereby calls into question the traditional narrative of their thematic opposition. Both thinkers appeal to an irreducible theopolitical “more” that, despite making claims on worldly political systems, remains arbitrarily anchored and displays the characteristic symptoms of the fact-value paradigm.

Schmitt It may seem odd to post-Nag-Hammadi scholars of religion to hear about the gnostic challenge of modern religious thought. But as Lazier and others have documented, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wave of Christian theologians including Adolph von Harnack, Ferdinand Christian Baur, Karl Barth, and Friedrich Gogarten invoked the idea of gnosticism, less as an historical movement and more as a theological position asserting the radical transcendence of God and the sin-soaked character of human beings and the world. While much ink has been spilled describing the surge of gnosticism in Germany during the Weimar period, however, much less attention has been paid to critical reactions to it. 11 For detailed comparisons between Buber and Schmitt see, Samuel Brody, “Is Theopolitics an Antipolitics: Martin Buber, Anarchism and the Idea of the Political,” in Dialogue as a Trans-disciplinary Concept: Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue and Its Contemporary Reception, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 61–88. See also Gregory Kaplan, “Power and Israel in Martin Buber’s Critique of Carl Schmitt,” in Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology, ed. Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 155–177.

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Lazier’s God Interrupted tells this story of how the Weimar nexus between Protestantism and gnosticism provoked strong reactions from Jewish and Catholic thinkers alike. Noteworthy among its Catholic critics was Carl Schmitt who, as Lazier notes, was “haunted by interwar gnosticism and/or the ‘Marcionite eitheror.’”12 Schmitt took up his fight against gnosticism in two early essays: “The Visibility of the Church: A Scholastic Consideration” (1917) and “Roman Catholicism and Political Form” (1923). If, as G. L. Ulman states, both essays attempt to tackle what Schmitt saw as “the problem of inwardness and worldly asceticism,”13 only the latter advanced the notion of theopolitical representation that would come to constitute the centerpiece of Schmitt’s more mature political theology and the key to understanding his appropriation of the fact-value standard of logical validity. In many respects, the argument of “Roman Catholicism and Political Form” is a standard example of an appeal to an irreducible theological “more” that is critical of attempts to translate theopolitical discourse into the terms of natural or historical fact. Like Schleiermacher and Otto, Schmitt rejects the modern tendency to reduce theology to materialistic terms. As he explains, in almost every discussion one can observe the extent to which the methodology of the natural-technical sciences dominates contemporary thinking. For example, the God of traditional theological evidence—the God who governs the world as the king governs the state—subconsciously is made the motor impelling the cosmic machine.14

Schmitt is particularly concerned with attempts to reduce theological ideas to economic facts. A child of the New Science, “economic thinking has its own reason and veracity in that it is absolutely material and concerned only with things.”15 As Schmitt sees it, when viewed from the perspective of economic materialism, religious ideas have meaning only in relation to matter. They must either, reflect [or] radiat[e] [out of or] denote various aggregate states of the same material substratum. With such images one makes something existing as 12 Lazier, God Interrupted, 81. 13 G. L. Ulman, “Introduction,” to Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulman (Westport: Praeger, 1996), xiii. 14 Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 12–13. 15 Ibid., 16.

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idea understandable by incorporating it into one’s own material thinking. For example, according to the famous “economic” conception of history, political and religious views are the ideological “reflex” of relations of production.16

Schmitt virulently rejects attempts to absorb theopolitical discourse into economic terms. Catholicism cannot be dismissed as recreational relief from the necessary laws of economic operations, “a hygienic institution for enduring the rigors of competition, a Sunday outing or a summer sojourn of big-city dwellers,”17 nor may its ideas be interpreted as ideological expressions of particular economic systems. According to Schmitt, theological ideas in general and Catholic theological notions like the incarnation in particular refer to something other than material facts since, “Catholicism is eminently political.”18 By “political,” Schmitt means that Catholicism’s concepts of God and Christ concern the non-material reality of how human beings live together as members of lawfully governed societies. In “Roman Catholicism and Political Form,” Schmitt asserts that “every order is a legal order”19 and consequently, economic principles alone cannot adequately account for how societies operate. Societies are social phenomena that operate according to ideas reflecting the value of human beings and that need rules and norms to govern how human beings relate to one another. “No great social antithesis can be solved by economics”20 since laws that govern supply and demand do not presuppose the moral worth or value of persons. As Schmitt explains, when the employer says to the workers, “I support you,” the workers answer, “We support you.” That is no struggle of production, consumption, in no sense something economic; it derives from different convictions about what is moral or lawful. It concerns the ethical or legal determination of who is actually the producer . . . [and who is the consumer].21

If, however, all societies are governed by laws, it is also true that laws must be interpreted. In Schmitt’s view, legal systems presuppose a “juridical

16 Ibid., 20–21. 17 Ibid., 12. 18 Ibid., 16. 19 Ibid., 25. 20 Ibid., 17. 21 Ibid.

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person,”22 a sovereign with the authority to decide how laws correlate with concrete situations. As Miguel Vatter puts it, “Schmitt’s argument rests on the jurisprudential thesis that norms connect to social reality (existence) at the point of their application, for he posts that every ascription to a law is based ‘on a command.’”23 Those who make these decisions inevitably possess substantial power and need to be trusted as an interpretive agent by the “whole people” on whose behalf they make these legal decisions. The juridical person can neither be identified with any particular interest group or association, nor can she be replaced by processes of consensus formation, since neither guarantees that the interpretive decision adequately represents the welfare of the “whole people.” As Schmitt explains, political representation entails, “the personification of the people . . . and implies the idea of complexion oppositorium, that is, the unity of the plurality of interests and parties.”24 Consequently, as representative, the sovereign wears two hats. On the one hand, she is one of the people. On the other hand, she can exercise decisive authority over the legal system because she transcends the particular interests that circulate throughout the political community or civitas humana. Legal orders therefore presuppose a transcendent representative. This is why Schmitt maintains that, “Catholicism represents something other than secular jurisprudence—not only the idea of justice, but also the person of Christ.”25 As divine, Christ is transcendent, but as human, Christ also represents the civitas humana. Since the Catholic is Christ’s body in the world, the Church—and particularly the pope who is the “Vicar of Christ”26—is the “consummate agency of the juridical spirit” because its political “power rests neither on economic nor military means but on an absolute realization of authority.”27 In short, economic systems presuppose legal order and legal systems presuppose theological authority. This is why Schmitt maintains elsewhere that, “all significant concepts

22 Ibid., 29. 23 Miguel Vatter, “The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt,” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, ed. Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 249. 24 Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 26. 25 Ibid., 30. 26 Ibid., 14. 27 Ibid.

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of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”28 In this way, political theology identifies a theopolitical “more,” a theopolitical aspect of human life that cannot be reduced to the economic and materialist terms of the New Science. Like Schleiermacher, Geiger, and Otto before him, Schmitt’s political theology challenges the adequacy of scientific terms for explaining theopolitical claims and asserts the reality of a religious “more.” Nonetheless, Schmitt’s appeal to a theopolitical “more” not only challenges the adequacy of scientific discourse with respect to theopolitical claims. It also challenges the inevitable gnosticism or diassociation of the sacred from the profane that theologians of the “more” before him posited as an adequate account of theopolitical discourse, leading him to articulate a more thoroughgoing critique of the adequacy of scientific discourse in general. While earlier appeals to the sacred “more” left the self-evidence of naturalistic criteria for making fact claims unchallenged, “Roman Catholicism and Political Form” develops a more robust transcendental analysis that shows how economic and materialist thinking is conditioned by theopolitical discourse. In this way, Schmitt’s appeal to the “more” leads to an external critique of the factvalue divide. Recall Schmitt’s claim that economic and social relations presuppose a legal order together with his claim that legal systems are conditioned upon an absolute authority that represents theological transcendence. Implicit in these judgments is the notion that economic criteria are not self-evident, but limited by and ordered within theopolitical systems of juridical normativity. Economic thinking requires a theopolitical discourse that is itself justified by its relation to human societal needs. This diagnosis of the social limits of economic thinking presents a seemingly pragmatic justification of the rationality of theopolitical discourse over and against the strictly materialist account of knowledge characteristic of scientific claims. In this way, Schmitt goes beyond other “more” theologians by advancing a critique of the self-evident rationality of economic thinking alone. The tendency to “rationalism with the natural sciences,” he says, “overlooks the fact that Catholic argumentation is based on a particular mode of thinking whose method of proof is a specific juridical knowledge and whose focus of interest is in the human normative social life.”29 28 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36. 29 Ibid., 12.

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If political theology identifies the transcendental condition of materialistic science, accounts of the sacred that disassociate it from the empirical world fail to identify the relationship between theopolitical discourse and scientific knowledge. This is why Schmitt argues against what he takes to be the rising tide of gnosticism in modern Protestant thought. In dramatic contrast to what the wholly other God of the Krisis theologians who stands outside of the sin-soaked reality of the human world, Schmitt’s God is the Absolute made man who authorizes the Church to apply and interpret normative principles that order the good society through history. For this reason, unlike Protestantism’s privatized and anti-clerical church community, the Catholic Church is a complexio oppositorum whose theopolitical structure allows it to take up the complex interests of the social unity whose normative existence it grounds and to do so as the authorized interpreter of social norms in the midst of concrete historical change. As such, “this complexion oppositorium holds sway over everything theological . . . the Marcionite either-or is answered with an as-well-as.”30 The Church’s authority derives from its hermeneutical ability to negotiate antithetical ideas. In this way, Schmitt’s political theology launches a more extensive critique of the negative impact of the fact-value paradigm on theopolitical discourse than prior Jewish and Christian appeals to an irreducible sacred “more.” Such appeals, Schmitt insists, are shadowed by modern thought’s failure to appreciate the apparently mediated relationship between economic thinking and political theology. As he states, “every sphere of the contemporary epoch is governed by a radical dualism.”31 However, does Schmitt’s assertion of the superior rationality of Roman Catholic political theology effectively address the arbitrary anchoring of theopolitical discourse? At first glance, Schmitt’s rejection of gnosticism and his transcendental critique of scientific and economic thinking would seem to undermine charges of skepticism or acosmism. Nonetheless, Schmitt’s vulnerability to skepticism becomes apparent in light of the fourth characteristic symptom of arbitrary anchoring: the polemicism in Schmitt’s analysis of the relationship between political theology and economic thinking. Despite Schmitt’s rhetorical antipathy to modernity’s dualisms, he repeatedly 30 Ibid., 12. 31 Ibid., 9.

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opposes the rationalism of political theology to the logic of modern economic thinking: “an alliance of the Catholic Church with the present form of industrial capitalism is not possible.”32 On the one hand, Schmitt’s view that economic thinking presupposes social needs implies that economic thinking and theopolitical discourse relate to one another within the shared framework of human social interests. On the other hand, Schmitt posits the absolute superiority of theopolitical discourse over and against economic thinking: economic rationalism is so far removed from Catholic rationalism that it can arouse a specific Catholic anxiety. . . . Economic thinking is totally incapable of apprehending this Catholic anxiety. . . . Economic thinking knows only one type of form, namely technical precision, and nothing could be further from the idea of representation.33

Over and over again, Schmitt’s rhetorical account of the relationship between economics and theology waxes polemical. A tendency towards polemicism signals arbitrary anchoring because by simply asserting an antagonistic divide between theopolitical claims and other knowledge claims, a thinker refuses to provide a justificatory account of theopolitical discourse in relation to those claims. By declaring the rational superiority of theopolitical discourse over and against economic materialism, Schmitt suggests that he is unable to justify his theopolitical claims. While Schmitt offers a transcendental critique of economic thinking rooted in a proto-pragmatic account of the socio-normative conditions of scientific materialism, he does not extend this same transcendental analysis to his own account of political theology. Instead, he merely asserts the absolute and unfalsifiable meaning of theological representation, since the Catholic Church’s “political power rests neither on economic nor military means but on the absolute realization of authority.”34 As the transcendental condition of economic materialism itself, political theology provides the absolute ground of an external critique, but it is not itself subject to reflective consideration. As a result, Schmitt’s political theology remains arbitrarily anchored. Schmitt’s polemicism also unmasks an acosmism implicit in his position. This is because, despite his claims to the contrary, Schmitt is 32 Ibid., 24. 33 Ibid., 20. 34 Ibid., 18, emphasis added.

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unable to provide a persuasive account of how political theology in general or the Catholic Church’s form of political representation in particular offers an effective repair of the broken relationship between the socio-political will of peoples and market forces characteristic of modern Western societies. What is supposed to be an account of a new mediated relationship between theology and the world collapses into a polemical conflict between the sacred and the profane reminiscent of the very gnosticism that he himself so eagerly sought to depose and a dualistic appeal to the irreducible “more” heralded by his predecessors.

Buber I am not the first to recognize the failure of Schmitt’s political theology to adequately overcome the challenge posed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century gnosticism. Indeed, Schmitt’s response to gnosticism already came under fire by a number of Jewish and Christian thinkers, including Martin Buber. As Paul Mendes-Flohr explains, Buber had Schmitt’s political theology in mind when developing the journal he launched in 1926, appropriately named Die Kreatur. Buber advanced a more explicit attack on Schmitt’s political theology in his 1936 essay, “Question on the Single One.” Similar to my analysis above, Buber highlights the clerical sovereign’s failure to contribute positively to the social needs of the body politic and the unjustified character of her political power. By contrast, Buber centers his theopolitics on the figure of the prophet who hears the cries of others and performs God’s will in responding to them. In Buber’s estimation, Schmitt’s cleric pits theopolitical action against the needs of individual human beings in the world and remains mired in a gnostic divide whereas the prophet integrates theopolitical action with the needs of the body politic and repairs this divide. Nonetheless, Buber’s theopolitics faces analogous difficulties since Buber cannot explain how the prophet’s theopolitical decisions are justified in caring for political community. For this reason, he cannot demonstrate how the prophet’s decisions wield any more legitimacy than those of Schmitt’s cleric. This surprising result, I argue, derives from their shared appropriation of the fact-value paradigm. Like Carl Schmitt, Martin Buber engaged in a long-term struggle against gnosticism. Both were arguably responding to what Mendes-Flohr refers to as the “‘neo-gnostic spirit’ [that] swept through the intellectual

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landscape of the fledgling Weimar Republic.”35 As is well documented by Lazier, Mendes-Flohr, and others,36 the chief catalyst of this neo-gnostic spirit was the 1921 publication of Adolf von Harnack’s Marcion: Das Evangelium von dem fremdem Gott, his recovery of the work of the early Marcion of Sinope that challenged both the attempt to “harmonize the essence and nature of faith, its ground and its hope, with the ‘world’”37 and Christianity’s long-standing use of the Old Testament as a canonical book. Buber and Rosenzweig undertook their translation of the Hebrew Bible as part of their effort to resist the simultaneously anti-Hebraic and anti-worldly spirit of gnosticism that rose up in the midst of Harnack’s work. However, Buber’s fight against gnosticism involved more than a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible. It required an explicit theological affirmation of the “hallowed” nature of the whole created order, an affirmation that, as Mendes-Flohr says, “the world is not something which must be overcome. It is a ‘[divinely] created reality—[whose holiness] requires human partnership in God’s work . . . to fulfill the meaning for which it was created.’”38 As Maurice Friedman argues, Buber’s concern to affirm the created order unites his interpretation of Hasidism, his interpretation of biblical Judaism, and his dialogical philosophy of religion.39 Below we will see how all three of these areas ultimately converge in Buber’s notion of the theopolitical work of the prophet. In an article entitled, “Martin Buber’s Theopolitical Hour—Against Carl Schmitt and Friedrich Gogarten,” Christopher Schmitt states that, “from 1932 on, Martin Buber tried to expand his dialogical thought politically and ethically through the idea of theopolitics.”40 In so doing, Buber consciously opposed what he took to be the “instrumentalization of 35 Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Gnostic Anxieties: Jewish Intellectuals and Weimar NeoMarcionism,” Modern Theology 25, no.1 (January 2019): 72. 36 See Remi Brague, “How to Be in the World: Gnosis, Religion and Philosophy,” in Martin Buber. A Contemporary Perspective, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 133–147. See also Yaniv Feller, “From Aher to Marcion: Martin Buber’s Understanding of Gnosis,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 20, no.4 (November 2013): 374–397. 37 Lazier, God Interrupted, 30. 38 Mendes-Flohr, “Gnostic Anxieties,” 76. 39 Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (New York: Routledge, 2002). 40 Christopher Schmitt, “Martin Buber’s Theopolitical Hour: Against Carl Schmitt and Friedrich Gogarten,” trans. Samuel Brody, accessed May 10, 2020, https://www. academia.edu/9467334/Martin_Bubers_Theopolitical_Hour_-_Against_Carl_ Schmitt_and_Friedrich_Gogarten, 1.

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conceptions of God for a theory of the authoritarian state”41 characteristic of Carl Schmitt’s theology of political representationalism. Buber’s response to Schmitt appears in his essay, “The Question on the Single One.” Here Buber makes it clear that not all versions of theopolitics successfully answer the challenge of theological gnosticism. While Schmitt’s concern to wed theology and politics parallels Buber’s own, Buber argues that Schmitt’s account of the relationship between theology and politics divinizes the political rather than putting politics in the service of God. Theology implies politics because “I cannot answer the lifelong address of God to me without answering at the same time for the other. . . .”42 To be bound and grasped by God is to assume ongoing responsibility for God’s creatures. By contrast, Schmitt’s sovereign acquires his/her authority in the exceptional situation of a confrontation with a political foe rather than by exercising and encouraging an ongoing review of the particular and changing needs of the body politic. This model of the sovereign’s authority Buber argues, “does not include the whole lability of the political formation.”43 It does not successfully address the “inner”44 concerns of the body politic or its “rebels”45 who, unlike the “outer foe,”46 do not seek to destroy but rather to change the political formation into something that they believe more directly speaks to the needs of those within it. Only the outer foe “is radical enough to establish the import of the formula. The friend-foe formula comprehends therefore only one side of lability and cannot be stretched to include the other.”47 By extending the sovereign’s authority in the exceptional situation provoked by an outer foe to the non-exceptional situations of ordinary political life, Schmitt illegitimately grants him an absolute and unfettered power disconnected from the changing needs of the political community he is said to represent. He neither services the needs of the body politic nor exercises a productive “reconciliation . . . [or] mediation . . .”48 between the divine will and worldly situations that alone can offer an effective theopolitical antidote to gnosticism. 41 Christopher Schmitt, “Martin Buber’s Theopolitical Hour,” 1. 42 Martin Buber, “The Question on the Single One,” in Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Routledge, 2002), 97. 43 Buber, “Single One,” 113. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 112.

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Throughout his career, Buber instead identified the prophet or nabi as the agent of theopolitical work. Buber’s focus on the prophet appears in two major works, The Kingship of God and The Prophetic Faith, as well as in a less widely read later essay entitled, “Symbolic and Sacramental Existence.” In the latter, Buber identifies secular modernity as the culmination of a crisis with roots in a quasi-mythic turn towards the profane and away from an original “pansacramentalism.”49 Secular modernity constitutes the “critical phase in which the world threatens to become neutralized and  .  .  .  deny itself  .  .  .  holy contact.”50 Faced with a materialist “province that steadily enlarges itself,”51 however, people of faith tend to over-react in their effort to rescue the holy by positing an ontological divide between the sacred and the profane. Modern religion “celebrates”52 a sacred reality. It claims that its practitioners “experience”53 a non-profane “more” here and now, in this object or in this ritual. Ironically, these efforts only deepen the “crisis of sacramentalism . . . and mislead . . . the faithful into feeling secure in a merely ‘objective’ consummation, . . .”54 which reinforces the ontological priority of the profane that the appeal to this religious “more” was deployed to repair. Buber’s appeal to the prophet arises in this context. According to his account, the prophet is the person whose very historical existence provides a concrete site for the meeting between the divine and the human. In the prophet, we find “the real existence of a human person [that] can itself be sacrament”55 when the prophet hears God’s “primal call” to take responsibility for the “cry from the heart of the creature.”56 As the mediator between the divine and the human, the prophet performs a critical role in the “real sacred drama”57 of God’s intervention into the world of human history and human need. Unlike ecclesiastical attempts to localize the sacred in an object or secure it in ritual, the nabi neither possesses the divine nor positions

49 Martin Buber, “Symbolic and Sacramental Existence,” in Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 167. 50 Buber, “Symbolic and Sacramental Existence,” 168. 51 Ibid., 167. 52 Ibid., 166. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 169. 55 Ibid., 152. 56 Ibid., 155. 57 Ibid., 163.

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himself or his theopolitical work over and above the needs “of the hour.”58 He executes God’s will by working tirelessly on behalf of others, a theopolitical task that authentically challenges gnosticism’s neglect of God’s worldly presence. His is the endless labor of bringing God’s word into the world as a response to the unique “historical situation,”59 relying on no prior knowledge or bodies of law, no set of preordained moral principles. Laws and moral principles are by definition fixed or “unalterable,”60 and thus unsuitable for the changing needs of the body politic whose cries the prophet is called to hear. Here “nothing is fixed or set down . . . to the man of sacramental existence no kind of acquired rules and rhythms, no inherited methods of working avail, nothing ‘known,’ nothing ‘learned,’ . . .”61 since no collection of laws or body of norms can adequately accommodate the needs of the situation at hand. Seized by the twin demands of God’s call and the exigencies of the moment’s needs, the prophet must, give the word of [his/her] answer by accomplishing among the actions possible that which seems to [his/her] devoted insight to be the right one  .  .  .  [with] choice, decision and action  .  .  .  answer the word however inadequately . . . [ without] the slightest assurance that [his/her] decision is right in any but a personal way.62

Contrary to Schmitt’s investment of divine authority in a privileged representational site, Buber exposes his own liberal tendencies and argues that all people can lead sacramental existences and function as prophets. Theocracy and democracy move seamlessly together since, “God can spare some real power for the moment of the creature.”63 By extension, Buber holds that no prophet can be a dogmatician since prophets require a heightened awareness of the historical context and the needs of others. Unlike those of the cleric, the nabi’s decisions are open to falsification, and unlike Schmitt, Buber recognizes that this openness is a necessary condition of authentic engagement with the world. To operate in the world requires a willingness to be affected by the world. One must allow one’s decisions to be questioned in relation to something or someone 58 Ibid., 159. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 171. 62 Buber, “Question to the Single One,” 106–107. 63 Buber, “Symbolic and Sacramental Existence,” 159.

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outside of oneself, lest one reinstall the binary logic of the sacred/secular divide. One overcomes gnosticism not simply by asserting that the divine is present in some privileged site of representation, but rather by engaging in a (transcendental) reflection that can take account of how theopolitical claims work in the world. Thus we might say that Buber offers a theopolitics but not, like Schmitt, a political theology. Samuel Brody has shown that “Buber uses ‘theopolitics’ only to define the proper relationship of the religious to the political, while ‘political theology’ describes what theopolitics becomes if it betrays its proper task.”64 Still, it is one thing to credit Buber with this distinction and another to convince readers that it identifies a real difference between the two. In her, “Reply from the Single One: Soren Kierkegaard to Martin Buber,” Gillian Rose casts doubt on Buber’s self-understanding of theopolitics and on the adequacy of the opposition between Buber’s prophet and Schmitt’s cleric. Rose’s work is frequently associated with her scathing critique of the antinomian, apolitical utopianism of contemporary Jewish thinkers like Rosenzweig and Levinas. In her “Reply from the Single One,” Rose extends this attack against Buber’s self-proclaimed worldliness. Of all three thinkers she says: the separation of their work of the lesson of love or perficient commandment from the actualities of law or coercion  .  .  .  suffuses their ethics with an originary violence that has been borrowed from the political modernity which they refuse to historicize.65

While Buber pits his personal decisionism over and against Kierkegaard’s singularity, he does so only by indulging a utopian and uninterrogated claim to the political. In Rose’s estimation, Buber’s gestures towards the political lack justification since he denies the prophet’s vulnerability to power politics and the need for his decisions and authority to undergo review. If Buber recognizes the alliance between power and decision, Rose also maintains that he distances the life of the prophet from the evils of the “‘will to power’ . . . [a] power hysteria that is evil.”66 While “redefined by Buber, the Single One is true to the ‘historico-biological hour’, [his] word [nonetheless 64 Samuel Brody, “Is Theopolitics Antipolitics?,” 65. 65 Gillian Rose, “Soren Kierkegaard to Martin Buber—Reply from ‘the Single One,’” in Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (London: Blackwell, 2017), chapter 11. 66 Rose, “Reply from ‘the Single One.’”

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sustains] priority over the world and is not developed into an account of how that world might be transformed.”67 Rose’s critique calls into question the success of Buber’s prophetic politics as a response to the crisis of gnosticism. What is more, it casts suspicion on the extent to which Buber’s prophetic politics affords a mechanism for a non-polemical political process capable of exposing its claims to criticism, which constitutes a necessary condition for genuine engagement with the world. Buber’s theo-democracy may authorize the many to exercise political power ethically, but it still enlists them in the polemical work of overcoming the non-sacred in the inevitable political realities of coercion, violence, and self-interest. While Buber denies the polemical character of the task of holiness, his understanding of the task perpetuates the dichotomy between the so-called responsible individual and the non-sacred political world— indeed, it actually reinforces his blindness to its polemicism. Like Schmitt’s representational theopolitics, Buber’s sacramental democracy is limited by its insistence upon the purity and exclusivity of the representational site. Rose’s “Reply” demonstrates that the purity of the prophet’s theopolitical decision insulates it from any challenges to its legitimacy and from demands for an explicit account of its positive effects on the body politic in a given situation. Moreover, Rose’s response shows how the prophet’s authority is as baseless as the cleric’s since neither submits his decision to social-pragmatic review. Since, however, the ability to engage with the body politic constitutes Buber’s own criteria for distinguishing between the two theopolitical agents, Rose’s demonstration of the prophet’s arbitrary authority unveils the surprising similarity of the two theopolitical figures. Rose’s critique of Buber’s failure to account for the rationality or falsifiability of the prophet’s decisions gains support when we recognize that Buber’s portrait of the prophet inscribes an inevitable forfeiture of legitimization. As discussed earlier, Buber insists that the prophet acts without appealing to the wisdom of established principles, law, or norms since each new moment he faces differs from the next. But because the prophet’s decisions are charismatic, his ongoing authority cannot be dependent upon his success or failure to meet the needs of the community. The fact that the prophet succeeds or fails in one moment provides no grounds for predicting whether he will succeed in any future moment since the ground of his decision is limited to the particular contingencies of that singular moment. 67 Ibid.

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Since community members lack the necessary conditions for verifying the social utility of the prophet’s practical decisions, they also lack grounds for rationally endorsing his theopolitical authority. This is why, as noted above, Buber says that that the prophet must act “without the slightest assurance that [his] decision is right in any but a personal way.”68 No grounds can be offered to justify the choice of the prophet’s actions since the rightness of his decision derives only from his personal promise that he intends to work on behalf of the body politic and from others’ willingness to trust him. Like Schmitt’s cleric or sovereign, the prophet’s authority is arbitrarily anchored because it cannot be tested or justified. Consequently, neither Buber’s theopolitics nor Schmitt’s political theology offer adequate solutions to the crisis of gnosticism. Both programs remain fundamentally acosmic. While Schmitt’s sovereign cleric stands polemically against the world and Buber’s prophet tragically and ineffectually reaches towards it, polemicism and tragic ineffectiveness constitute two sides of the same symptomatic coin of the fact-value divide. Indeed, Buber’s theopolitics displays the classic features of a thinker who takes for granted the self-evident logical validity of scientific or historical fact but appeals to a sacred “more” to make room for ethics and theology. His acceptance of the logical validity of natural and historical facts and his appeal to something “more” is already evident in his account of the I–You relation in his 1923 classic, I and Thou. There he tells us that, It is said that man experiences his world. . . . Man travels over the surface of things and experiences them. He extracts knowledge about their constitution from them. But the world is not presented to man by experiences alone. . . . If I face a human being as my Thou and say the primary word I–Thou to him, he is not . . . a specific point in space and time within the net of the world; nor is he a nature able to be experienced and described . . . he is Thou and fills the heavens. . . . So long as the Thou is spread out over me the winds of causality cower at my heels . . . the Thou is more than the It realizes.69

Echoing Kant’s division between theoretical knowledge of the objective world of space and time and practical knowledge of the moral law outside of these objective limits, Buber’s I–Thou relation does not challenge the rational validity of objective knowledge, but only points to the 68 Buber, “Question to the Single One,” 106–107. 69 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 9.

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incompleteness of such a picture with respect to how humans live and relate to each other. As Steven Katz argues in his much-discussed essay, “Martin Buber’s Epistemology: A Critical Appraisal,” “the general specifications provided by Kant for what constitutes phenomenal knowledge is almost explicitly duplicated by Buber in his description of the It.”70 And, as we may recall from chapter one, Kant himself takes natural science as the paradigm of objective knowledge. Moreover, Katz identifies a resemblance between Buber’s divide between the I–Thou and theoretical knowledge and Kant’s divide between theoretical and practical reason, a divide which I have shown derives from the fact-value paradigm of logical validity. As Katz puts it, Likewise, Buber’s epistemology is built around the asserted “intuitive” apprehension possible of an “other” as Thou  .  .  .  [whereby] awareness of the “other” is not subject to any of the ordinary epistemic conditions which operate in the domain of objective knowledge.  .  .  .  Buber following Kant argues that the “knowledge” gained in such epistemic situations . . . is subject to altogether different rules from that gained in It/phenomenal matrices but that it is also subject to altogether different rules of meaning and criteria of verification, if indeed one can legitimately speak of verification in these altered circumstances at all.71

Katz’s astute suggestion here that one cannot “legitimately speak of verification in these altered circumstances at all,” or that, as Martin Kavka says, Buber’s I–Thou relation waxes philosophically unintelligible,72 offers further grounds for concluding that Buber’s theology appropriates the factvalue divide. While a detailed examination of Buber’s I and Thou exceeds the scope of this discussion, further evidence of Buber’s acceptance of the self-evidence of scientific criteria of logical validity and his identification of value judgments and theopolitical decisions as beyond the bounds of justifiable knowledge appears in the works we have discussed above. For example, Buber’s profile of the prophet’s theopolitical decisions presented in, “On 70 Steven Katz, “Martin Buber’s Epistemology: A Critical Appraisal,” in Katz, PostHolocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 139. 71 Katz, “Martin Buber’s Epistemology,” 139, emphasis added. 72 See Martin Kavka, “Verification (Bewahrung) in Martin Buber,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 20, no. 1 (January 2012): 71–98.

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the Single One” and “Sacramental and Symbolic Existence,” displays the symptoms of arbitrary anchoring, which follows from his lack of confidence in the rational adaptability of law and moral norms to changing circumstances. The inflexibility of laws not only derives from his appropriation of the fact-value divide but also leads to his insistence upon the moment-tomoment charismatic nature of theopolitical decisions. Neither political law nor moral norms permit the operation of a viable form of practical reason. Consequently, despite the opposition between the liberal emphasis of Buber’s theo-democratic profile of the prophet and Schmitt’s reactionary clericalism, Buber’s account of the prophet, like Schmitt’s account of the arbitrarily anchored decisions of the sovereign constitute an appeal to an unjustified theopolitical “more” which reinscribes the fact-value account of logical validity rather than challenging it.

Chapter Four

From External Critique to the Crisis of Skepticism

I. External Critique In the previous chapters, I provided an account of the first two forms of the fact-value divide (acceptance and redescription). In this chapter, I will describe and provide examples of the third form, or what I call external critique, by comparing the Word of God theology of Karl Barth and Leo Strauss’s polemical account of philosophy and revelation. Like the previous case study of Schmitt and Buber, this case study illuminates a surprising point of overlap in the theological work of each thinker which can best be explained in terms of the impact of the fact-value divide on each thinker. As I have argued throughout, the arbitrary anchoring of theopolitical claims constitutes the signature feature of a thinker’s appropriation of the fact-value divide. This is not to say however, that thinkers whose theopolitical judgments are arbitrarily anchored do not often hold different perspectives on the relationship between theopolitical judgments and natural or historical knowledge. For example, there is a difference between Hobbes’s account of God as first cause of the material order and Schleiermacher’s appeal to a sense and taste for the infinite. The former reduces theology to materialism whereas the latter supplements natural science with an appeal to a religious “more”. Similarly, one finds a subtle difference between Buber’s account of the relationship between the sacramental existence of the nabi

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and the “not-yet holy” world and Schmitt’s more critical assessment of secular materialism and its relation to political theology. Buber’s sacramental existence, like Schleiermacher’s infinite or Otto’s wholly other, presupposes the self-evident validity of scientific and historical claims about the so-called objective world, whereas in Schmitt’s view, materialist claims are valid only so far as they service the higher purpose of human political life. Schmitt’s appeal to political theology constitutes a transition from the appeal to a sacred “more” to a full-scale critique of the adequacy of “facts” discourse. Yet as we saw, Schmitt’s political theology remains arbitrarily anchored because he does not subject his own theological criteria to justificatory review. His work exemplifies a more general problem: external critiques of the view that factual claims alone possess logical validity cannot overcome the theopolitical problem since they do not identify a strategy for reflecting upon the logical justification of their own critical standards. Thinkers who launch external critiques of the fact-value divide leave their own positions vulnerable to the very charges of skepticism they use to attack the fact-value paradigm itself. One finds a clearer example of this problem in Leo Strauss’ writings. Strauss maintains that attempts to discredit the logical validity of fact claims by philosophically unreflective or dogmatic appeals to theological or theopolitical foundations are self-contradictory. External critiques of the fact-value divide that invoke new sites of self-evidence but do not expose the arbitrary anchoring of these sites themselves simply move the goal posts of the factvalue divide instead of addressing its underlying logical assumptions head on. To do so, Strauss argues, one must apply the power of philosophical skepticism to both fact and value discourses. Undoubtedly, Strauss’s analysis of the fact-value paradigm is the most critical and philosophically self-conscious of all the positions we have reviewed thus far. Nonetheless, as I will argue below, Strauss’s response to the fact-value divide does not advance beyond external critique, since while it identifies the arbitrary anchoring of theopolitical claims, it nevertheless leaves these arbitrary claims intact. This problem becomes especially clear when Strauss’s philosophical skepticism is compared to Karl Barth, whose robust theology of the Word of God launches an external critique of the fact-value divide from the standpoint of revelation rather than philosophical skepticism. Despite the thematic difference between their accounts of the relationship between philosophy and revelation, both thinkers exhibit a similar problem. Neither recognizes the need to engage in reflection upon the justificatory conditions of knowledge claims or

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arrive at a philosophical apprehension of the relationship between scientific and theopolitical (value) claims.

II. Case Study: Karl Barth and Leo Strauss It is common knowledge among scholars of the Jewish-American philosopher Leo Strauss that he was a tireless champion of classical philosophy. Some like Heinrich Meir have even argued that the recovery of classical philosophy constitutes the central theme governing a substantial portion of Strauss’ body of work. As Meier states, common to all the writings that follow upon Philosophie and Gesetz . . . is that in them, Strauss makes the theological and the political challenge theoretically as strong as he possibly can. . . . [However,] Strauss’ theologicalpolitical enterprise is wholly in the service of self-examination and the justification of the philosopher.1

When, by contrast, one dips into the vast ocean of academic scholarship on the twentieth-century Protestant theologian Karl Barth, the opposite seems to be the case. According to commentators as diverse as Maurice Blondel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, and John Hicks, “Barth is an impassioned irrationalist who reveled in being anti-philosophical.”2 In short, if Strauss proclaimed an unapologetic and nostalgic call to restore philosophy and reason to their pre-scientific heights, Barth issued an unapologetic “Nein!” to the labor and products of human reason. So interpreted, Strauss and Barth appear to occupy contrary positions in the centuries-old debate regarding the relationship between philosophy and theology. This common narrative has not gone uncontested. Scholars like Kenneth Green and Leora Batnitzky have challenged tendencies to overstate Strauss’s regard for philosophy and his apparent indifference to theology. By the same token, a long list of scholars including Bruce McCormack, Paul Nimmo, Richard Burnett, and most recently Derek Woodard-Lehman, have offered rigorous examinations of Barth’s appreciation of philosophy. However, few studies have demonstrated specific points of overlap between Strauss and Barth. Samuel Moyn’s essay, “From Experience to Law: Leo 1 Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 14–15. 2 Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.

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Strauss and the Weimar Crisis of the Philosophy of Religion,” constitutes one key exception to this rule. Moyn demonstrates Barth’s and Strauss’s parallel regard for, and then abandonment of, the discourse of religious experience. Though initially attracted to this common nineteenth-century strain of Christian theology, both Strauss and Barth came to recognize the theological inadequacy of this turn to the modern subject and sought out more adequate approaches to a discourse of revelation. Most notably, Moyn argues that Barth and Strauss assume a similar position in the common narrative that modern theology proceeds from liberalism to post-liberalism. It was Barth’s invention . . . of radical “crisis theology” that made the earlier search for the objectivity of the divine through subjective experience seem a partial criticism of Kant’s program that needed to be made total. . . . [A]s his review of Otto’s book . . . graphically and indispensably shows, Strauss absorbed the lesson of the crisis theologians on these issues . . . following Barth, it suggests the need to rescue Otto’s insight from his error: for Strauss, Otto’s experiential premises interfered with his post- experiential insight into the need for a God “wholly other” than the self. As he put it, “religion lies not in the depths of the subject but precisely in the depths of the object. Hence we have no need of the romantic ‘philosophy of religion’”. The break with Schleiermacherian experientialism now had to be total, for, as Strauss noted in a pithy affirmation, “God is a being beyond experience.”3

Moyn’s identification of both Strauss and Barth as post-modern or post-liberal theologians is unconventional. Moyn’s insight is possible in large measure because he focuses less on Strauss’s classically liberal political thought and more on his generally neglected account of Jewish theology. From this perspective, it becomes apparent that both he and Barth posit the wholly otherness of God and maintain a similar critique of natural theology.4 However, Moyn does not identify the deeper point of overlap between them in the shared way that their thought inadvertently exposes the crisis, rather than success, of post-liberalism. As Leora Batnitzky argues, one 3 Samuel Moyn, “From Experience to Law: Leo Strauss and the Weimar Crisis of the Philosophy of Religion,” History of European Ideas 33, no. 2 (January 2007), 187. 4 For Strauss’s critique of natural theology see his Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988); and idem, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and his Predecessors, trans. Eve Adler (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). In many respects, Barth’s entire Epistle to the Romans II can be read as an assault on natural theology.

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does not fully understand Strauss’ work on philosophy and theology unless one realizes that, “for Strauss, rationalism—philosophical, religious and political . . . entails an affirmation of philosophical skepticism.”5 In Strauss’ mind, neither philosophy nor theology can be rationally grounded: “all arguments in favor of revelation seem to be valid only if belief in revelation is presupposed and all arguments against revelation seem to be valid only if unbelief is presupposed.”6 Below, I will argue that notwithstanding his insistence to the contrary, Barth’s Krisis theology also succumbs to skepticism since in his account, human confidence in God’s Word as the originary determination of all logical validity is predicated on a faith in revelation that cannot be rationally defended to a non-believer. In the end, both Strauss and Barth demonstrate the crisis affecting post-liberal appeals to revelation and the inability of these appeals to offer a justificatory account of theological claims. This inability, I will argue, arises from the shared way they appropriate and respond to the fact-value paradigm through an external critique that cannot help but reinscribe it.

Strauss Strauss’s analysis of the relationship between philosophy and theology is the culmination of his extensive diagnostic review of modern European philosophy, political thought, and religious thought. Like Nature and Norm, Strauss’s diagnosis focuses on the negative effects of the fact-value standard of logical validity. More than any other thinker discussed thus far, Strauss expresses concern over the deterioration of theopolitical discourse characteristic of modern European thought caught in the wake of the scientific revolution. Throughout his writings, Strauss explicates what he takes to be the dangerous and philosophically illegitimate erasure of values discourse rooted less in natural science itself and more in the fact-value paradigm, which emerges by drawing overly general philosophical conclusions from natural science. In his estimation, the negative footprint of this philosophical over-reach appears most dramatically in modern Western political thought, on the one hand, and modern Western religious thought, on the other, and an appeal to a proper understanding of philosophy constitutes the key to repairing both. 5 Leora Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 129. 6 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 75.

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Upon closer inspection, however, Strauss’s appeal to classical philosophy is only a penultimate foundation for his critique of the fact-value divide since, in Strauss’s view, philosophy itself is a way of life rooted in an “unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision,”7 which stands in irreconcilable conflict with a religious believer’s decision for a life of obedience to a revelatory God. By pitting revelation and philosophy against one another, Strauss’s skepticism signals the arbitrary anchoring of each. For this reason, while Strauss’s critique of the fact-value paradigm is more extensive and coherent than that of someone like Schmitt, who insists upon the self-evident rationality of his own alternative criteria, Strauss’s analysis, nevertheless, does not move beyond external critique or overcome the arbitrary anchoring of theopolitical discourse, since it permits skepticism to have the final word and does not provide an account of how theopolitical discourse can be justified. Strauss’s concern for the negative impact of the fact-value divide upon theopolitical discourse spans the course of his career. He first addressed the issue in his critique of Spinoza’s naturalist dismissal of revelation and divine miracles in his 1930 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. In the “Preface” to this work Strauss explains that even though, “the great revolt against traditional thought or the emergence of modern philosophy or natural science was completed prior to Spinoza . . . [nonetheless] Spinoza restored the dignity of speculation on the basis of modern philosophy or science, [and thereby developed] a new understanding of nature,’”8 which he then used to challenge the traditional belief in miracles and revelation. By way of critical response, Strauss argues that Spinoza’s scientific denial of the possibility of miracles only succeeds if one takes for granted the exclusive logical validity of scientific knowledge. To be convincing, Strauss explains, Spinoza’s critique of miracles would need to “depend on metaphysical support”9 or an account of how scientific knowledge alone adequately refers to how things really are. Spinoza, however, does not provide such a metaphysical account, but merely assumes the self-evidence of naturalistic criteria. As a result, Spinoza cannot legitimately rule out the possibility of miracles. “Even if all the reasoning adduced by Spinoza were compelling,” Strauss concludes, “only this much would have been proven: that on the basis of unbelieving science, one could not but arrive at Spinoza’s results. But would this basis 7 Leo Strauss, Natural Right, 75. 8 Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 15. 9 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 136.

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itself be justified?”10 Strauss’s critique of Spinoza strikes at the heart of the fact-value divide. Throughout his writings, Strauss frequently revisits this critique of the fact-value divide. In an essay entitled “What is Political Philosophy?,” he examines the negative effects of the fact-value divide on modern political thought.11 As a product of the European infatuation with scientific knowledge and its erasure of values discourse, Strauss argues, the bulk of modern political thought reduces the idea of the human to the terms of a “philosophic or scientific analysis [that seeks] to objectify something that is incapable of being objectified.”12 Whatever the significance of modern natural science may be, it cannot, “affect our understanding of what is human in man . . . natural science . . . understand[s] man in the light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible. . . .”13 Instead, Strauss insists, any political science that overlooks the nature of human beings, their purpose, and their common good is a contradiction in terms. All political action, he explains, “aims at either preservation or change,”14 and therefore presupposes value judgments about what is “better and worse”15 or what constitutes “the good life”16 for a society. Theoretically speaking, political knowledge is, not different from that of the knowledge possessed by the shepherd, the husband, the general, or the cook. Yet the pursuits of these types of man do not give rise to . . . philosophy because their ultimate goals are sufficiently clear and unambiguous. The ultimate political goal, on the other hand, urgently calls for coherent reflection  .  .  .  the goal of the statesman is the common good  .  .  .  but the meaning of the common good is essentially controversial.17 10 Ibid., 240 11 Leo Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 3–58. Strauss was also concerned with the negative effects of the fact-value divide on social science and in the work of Max Weber in particular. For Strauss’s particular argument against Weber’s “value-neutral” approach to sociology see Strauss, “Natural Right and the Distinction between Facts and Values,” in Strauss, Natural Right and History, 35–80. 12 Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?,” 26. 13 Ibid., 37. 14 Ibid., 3. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 11.

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Unfortunately, Strauss laments, “we hardly exaggerate when we say that today political philosophy does not exist any more, except as material for burial,”18 and this is a result of a “present day positivism”19 that “reached its final form by realizing or decreeing that there is a fundamental difference between facts and values, and that only factual judgments are within the competence of science.”20 In Strauss’s account, the first fruits of the scientific disregard for values discourse appear in Machiavelli, who argued that “virtue is nothing other than civic virtue . . . or collective selfishness”21 and that the best statesman is the individual whose ego inclines him to find pleasure or glory “[in compelling] other bad men to become good men.”22 If, as Strauss claims, “the traditional approach was based on the assumption that morality is something substantial,”23 Machiavelli “rejected the view that man must take his bearings by virtue, by his perfection, by his natural end,”24 and he did so, Strauss argues, with the support of the “new natural science.”25 Moreover, Strauss maintains, a direct line runs from Machiavelli’s rejection of a link between virtue and political power, through Hobbes’s account of the sovereign’s power, Locke’s focus upon the interests of all citizens secured through the freedom to own property, Hegel’s historicism that flattens the “ought” into the historical “is,” to Nietzsche’s celebration of the individual who, rising from the ashes of political relativism, neglects the idea of the common good altogether and “gives a new law unto himself and subjects himself to all its rigors.”26 In the end, modern political science pays a hefty price for its failure to engage with moral discourse. Instead of establishing its scientific validity by its autonomy from value judgments, political science makes itself irrelevant and ultimately disappears. The dissolution of value-free political science signals the essential role of values in political life and the importance of the philosophical quest to gain rational knowledge of them. In sum, Strauss’s incisive diagnosis of the problem of the fact-value dichotomy not only undergirds his critique of the modern 18 Ibid., 12. 19 Ibid., 35. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 42. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 41. 24 Ibid., 48. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 56.

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political tradition, but it also offers a philosophical justification for the return to a classical conception of philosophy as the “quest for wisdom,” and in the case of political philosophy, as rational inquiry into the nature of the good. Nor is modern political thought the only arena monopolized by the fact-value divide. Of equal concern to Strauss is its stranglehold over modern religious thought and its attempt to reduce theological discourse to the terms of modern philosophy and natural science, on the one hand, and to the contents of subjective religious experience, on the other hand. Like Nature and Norm, Strauss recognizes the indebtedness of both strategies to the fact-value divide and their utter failure to redeem the validity of a “pre-scientific” theopolitical discourse. Strauss’s 1935 Philosophy and Law offers a provocative analysis of how modern religious thought succumbs to the power of the fact-value divide and delegitimizes theopolitical discourse. Here Strauss argues that, in concert with the philosophical self-certainty of modern natural science, modern religious thought constructed a self-enclosed and self-validating portrait of reality that dismissed the possibility of key elements of orthodoxy, including the notions of divine creation, revelation, and miracles. From the vantage point of modern Enlightenment thought, “science stood firm as the single way to truth . . . the assertion of miracles is [from this perspective] relative to the pre-scientific stage of mankind and thus has no dignity.”27 Like Nature and Norm, Strauss recognizes the pragmatic limits of the application of the fact-value divide on religious thought. The success of the fact-value paradigm, however, derives from its ability to present a convincing portrait of people’s ability to control nature and to contend with the absence of a discourse of “ends and values . . . [and] as long as [the modern religious portrait] . . . did seem to prosper, it was believed that no further proof was needed”28 to justify its validity and its correlative dismissal of the logical validity of key theopolitical concepts. Needless to say, and as we have also discussed in chapter three, cracks in the radical Enlightenment appropriation of the fact-value paradigm began to appear once religious thinkers became more conscious of its reductive implications for key religious ideas. Beginning in the nineteenth century, religious thinkers took up a new strategy that I identify as the appeal to 27 Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 33. 28 Ibid., 32.

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the “more” and that, following Julius Guttman, Strauss calls the turn to “religious consciousness.”29 Echoing the analysis presented here, Strauss appreciates how, despite their claims to salvage the authentic meaning of biblical religion by deriving it from the personal piety of religious believers, modern appeals to a subjective experience of God do little to reestablish the legitimacy of traditional theopolitical discourse since they “surrender beforehand the belief in revelation”30 and posit an account of a “religious consciousness . . . in its autonomy over and against knowledge”31 altogether. Despite their superficial attempts to reenliven “central religious ideas”32 like faith in and dependency on God, these concepts inevitably “change their meaning from the ground up if one understands them no longer as given by God, but as produced by the ‘religious consciousness’ of man”33 rather than as objects of justified knowledge. Consequently, from Strauss’s perspective, there is no philosophical difference between the attempt to “internalize . . . concepts like creation, miracles, and revelation”34 and the more apparently destructive eighteenth-century reduction of these same ideas to scientifically acceptable terms. Like the latter, the internalization of these concepts into the sphere of human consciousness, robs them of their whole meaning . . . [and] differs from the disavowal of their meaning only in the well-intentioned, if not good, purpose of [their] authors. If God did not create the world in the “external” sense, if He did not really create it, if the creation therefore cannot be affirmed theoretically—as simply true, as the fact of creation—then one must in all probity disavow the creation, or at the very least avoid any talk of creation.35

And the same goes for all other major concepts of theopolitical discourse as well. Both chapters in modern religious thought take for granted the philosophical self-evidence of the scientific dismissal of central religious ideas and both are products of modern philosophy and natural science’s unjustified self-certainty. 29 Ibid., 53. 30 Ibid., 45. 31 Ibid., 42. 32 Ibid., 52. 33 Ibid., 53. 34 Ibid., 24. 35 Ibid.

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As noted, the narrative of modern religious thought offered in Philosophy and Law bears a striking resemblance to the account presented here in Nature and Norm. If, as I will argue, Strauss’s response to the factvalue divide stops short of demanding pragmatic review of the conditions of the justifiability of theological claims for particular communities at particular times and places, he is nonetheless keenly aware of how recognizing the impact of the fact-value paradigm on Jewish and Christian thought calls into question the dominant narrative of liberalism and post-liberalism. We can see an example of Strauss’s reshaped narrative in his treatment of Rosenzweig’s apparent return to traditional Jewish thought. As is well known, Strauss dedicated his first publication to Rosenzweig and clearly admired his commitment to restoring the primacy of revelation for, as Strauss grants, “the situation of Judaism has changed as a result of the return movement  .  .  .”36 energized by Rosenzweig and his teacher Hermann Cohen. Nonetheless, Strauss’s admiration for Rosenzweig is not without concern, since even “Rosenzweig . . . left no doubt that he could adopt neither the traditional belief in immortality nor the view of the Law allegedly peculiar to contemporary German orthodoxy,”37 and this because Rosenzweig’s primary commitment was to a radical empiricism that pits the self-certainty of religious experience over and against the objective validity of theopolitical claims. As Strauss puts it in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Rosenzweig’s return [to revelation] was not unqualified.  .  .  .  The New Thinking is “experiencing philosophy.” As such, it is passionately concerned with the difference between what is experienced, or at least capable of being experienced, by the present-day believer and what is merely known by the tradition; that difference was of no concern to traditional Judaism.38

In sum, Strauss’s critique of the self-evidence of the fact-value divide as it derives from the alliance between natural science and modern philosophy calls for the restoration of values discourse in political philosophy and the reassertion of central ideas of the traditional Jewish world-view; and a proper account of philosophy is the key to both. In Natural Right and History, Strauss points to Socrates as the originator of philosophy, which Strauss maintains rests upon the distinction between nature and convention. Nature and convention constitute two 36 Ibid., 27. 37 Ibid. 38 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 13.

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accounts of how things are. Convention’s questions regarding “the right way are answered before they are raised. They are answered by authority.”39 Philosophy, by contrast, determines the way things are through rational discernment of how they have always been in nature. Socrates’s primary concern was to ask “what is” in nature in general and “what is” with respect to human nature in particular. However, this requires appreciating the fact that while each thing is different from other things, all things participate in a shared totality. Philosophy therefore is a “comprehensive study of all things,”40 a “quest for knowledge of the whole.”41 Philosophy, properly recognized as the pursuit of natural right, grounds political philosophy, the investigation into the common good of the politeia or ideal political regime. As such, “political philosophy is the attempt truly to know both the nature of political things and the right or the good, political order.”42 Political philosophy presupposes philosophy in general since, in order to “determine what is by nature good for man or the natural human good, one must determine what the nature of man, or man’s natural constitution is.”43 From this perspective, reason functions as the guide and gateway for the development of normative political ideas or value judgments. A proper conception of philosophy is also the key to overcoming modern philosophy’s encroachment upon theopolitical discourse. As discussed above, philosophy, properly understood, cannot refute the possibility of revelation. An exhaustive refutation of revelation or miracles presupposes the absolute truth of the scientific world-view, but no justification for such a determination can be offered. As Strauss states, “it is only under the premise of modern natural science that miracles are unknowable as such.”44 If anything, Strauss argues, history shows that the unquestioned appropriation of the fact-value divide was a convenient ideological justification for a modern conception of human freedom in terms of dominance over the world of facts. Over time, doubts arose concerning the picture of “man . . . as master of the world and master of life,”45 and what appeared to be an airtight 39 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 84. 40 Ibid., 122. 41 Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?”, 4. 42 Ibid., 16. 43 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 27. 44 Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 33. 45 Ibid., 31–32.

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system secured by the marriage between natural science and modern philosophy was laid bare as a product of history and human ideological interest. In sum, philosophy, properly understood, seems to function as Strauss’s antidote to the fact-value paradigm. It underwrites political value judgments and leaves room for theological ones, thereby relegitimizing the two primary discourses of the good. Philosophy seems to pave the way for two independent and legitimate sources of value judgments. Upon closer examination, however, this is not the case. If, as Strauss argues, philosophy overreaches when it takes its own logical validity as self-evident, for philosophy to work within its proper limits it must concede the possibility of revelation. The implications for the validity of philosophical claims are clear: either philosophical claims can be justified with respect to some higher condition, or they cannot be, in which case philosophy is arbitrarily anchored. Strauss clearly holds the latter position. He repeatedly insists upon the irreconcilability of philosophy and revelation and argues that, “in every attempt at harmonization, in every synthesis however impressive, one of the two opposed elements is sacrificed . . . to the other: philosophy, which means to be the queen, must be made the handmaid of revelation or vice versa.”46 Moreover Strauss maintains that, “philosophy cannot justify itself as a rational necessity  .  .  .  hence philosophy is based, not on evident or rational necessity, but on an unevident, a fundamentally blind decision.”47 What initially looks like a relationship of equal legitimization and freedom turns out to be a stand-off between two incommensurable and arbitrarily anchored discourses incapable of defending themselves to the proponents of the other. Stated otherwise, the fact that philosophy cannot refute revelation does not entail that philosophy can justify revelation or demonstrate its logical validity. If philosophy cannot disprove revelation neither can it prove it. Revelation, Strauss insists, is simply a given. The Bible, he says, rejects the principle of autonomous knowledge. . . . The mysterious God is the last theme and highest theme of the Bible. Man is not master of how to begin; before he begins to write he is already confronted with writings, with holy writings, which impose their law on him.48 46 Ibid. 47 Leo Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” quoted in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 175. 48 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 6.

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Consequently, as Leora Batnitzky explains, for Strauss “coercion is an [inevitable] aspect of Jewish law.”49 If Strauss restores the legitimacy of theopolitical discourse, he does so only for those “for whom the belief in revelation is presupposed.”50 But philosophy ironically faces a similar problem, since it too cannot appeal to a standard in relation to which it can defend itself to believers of revelation. Nor does Strauss hide philosophy’s susceptibility to the skeptic’s challenge, admitting rather that it “rest[s] on an unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision.”51 Neither philosophy nor revelation are able to point to a standard of measure by means of which they can fend off skeptical doubt. The fact that philosophy presents this skeptical challenge to revelation and revelation presents this challenge to philosophy only means that each guarantees the epistemological siloization of the other. Even if, as Batnitzky suggests, philosophy and revelation coexist in their limited functions in the political state that needs them both for practical purposes, this practical coexistence offers neither philosophy nor revelation a way to present their claims as justifiable beyond their own domain. It is one thing to concede that philosophy and revelation have instrumental value; it is another to recognize their potential logical validity. Since believers and philosophers cannot justify their claims to one another, both risk the full range of negative effects characteristic of arbitrarily anchored discourses (for instance, meaninglessness, acosmism, practical ineffectuality, and dogmatism). Strauss’s apparent resolution of the theopolitical problem has only reinscribed it. Viewed from the pragmatic perspective of the history of modern European Jewish and Christian thought presented here, it is clear that, of all the thought systems thus far examined, Strauss’s skepticism offers the most dramatic expression of the negative impact of the fact-value divide upon theopolitical discourse and therefore comes closest to describing the crisis situation Jewish and Christian thinkers currently face. By contrast with the two other modes of appropriation of the fact-value divide, that is, reduction and redescription, Strauss’s diagnosis of modern European thought not only calls into question the self-evidence of natural scientific criteria but also appeals to self-evident knowledge claims of any kind, be they Schmitt’s idea of political representation or Rosenzweig’s divine-human encounter. In this way, Strauss’s account sits on the border between external 49 Batnitzky, Strauss and Levinas, 193. 50 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 75. 51 Ibid.

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and immanent critique of the fact-value divide. However, to the extent to which Strauss rests satisfied with his account of the polemical relationship between philosophy and theology, permitting the voice of absolute skepticism to have the final word, his critique is strictly external. As its arbitrary anchoring shows, it remains mired in the fact-value divide. Simply stated, the claim that there is an irreconcilable opposition between philosophy and theology is itself a philosophical claim lacking validity by its own standards of critique. Strauss never resolved the antinomy afflicting his own theopolitical conclusion. As Daniel Tanguay puts it, “Strauss saw very clearly the danger that the introduction of this kind of decisionism posed for philosophy [yet] he did not succeed in giving a satisfactory response to the decisionist objection that he himself raised.52 Perhaps this is because Strauss was convinced that skepticism itself serves a non-arbitrary productive function. Skepticism need not be diagnosed as self-defeating if, rather than being taken as a self-evident point of departure for external critique, it is understood as conditioned by and in the service of a larger purpose, namely, the needs of the polis or the community. This is Batnitzky’s reading. “Strauss’ kind of skepticism also is skeptical of itself. Politics as the formal coordination of philosophy and revelation  .  .  .  imposes a limitation on both,”53 and thereby constitutes the criterion by means of which the exercise of this skepticism is judged and validated. For Strauss, she asserts, politics is the formal coordination of these competing goods. And a proper political coordination is rational when it continually delimits the scope of each competing good while at the same time recognizing the need for a continual conversation between them. . . . This is a skepticism that invites rather than dismisses competing conversations about the good life.54

According to Batnitzky, Strauss appreciated skepticism as a tool in the service of a community’s pragmatic need to sustain conversation in pursuit of justifiable knowledge claims. Ultimately, it remains unclear whether Batnitzky’s interpretation of Strauss is correct. On the one hand, it is difficult to believe that Strauss could have rested satisfied with the undeniably self-contradictory character 52 Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 147. 53 Batnitzky, Strauss and Levinas, 131. 54 Ibid., 132.

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of his own skepticism. On the other hand, Strauss’s contention that theology and philosophy constitute irreconcilable ways of life challenges Batnitzky’s assertion that “modern rationalism for Strauss depends on [a] healthy skepticism”55 that supports “a continual conversation”56 between these two ways of life since, as noted earlier, neither can recognize in principle the intelligibility of the claims of the other. Neither theology nor philosophy can give an account of the conditions of their logical validity, and for this reason, both remain arbitrarily anchored. What is certain is that, whatever its function, Strauss’ skepticism has the last word and as a result, his position offers just another example of an external critique of the fact-value paradigm that fails to provide a viable account of the justificatory status of knowledge claims.

Barth There are few more significant milestones in the history of modern Christian thought than the 1922 publication of Karl Barth’s second edition of the Epistle to the Romans. According to Bruce McCormack, it is impossible to deny that “the theology of Romans II is one-sided, and sometimes extremely so.”57 More pointedly, McCormack continues, “Barth’s thinking [in Romans II]  .  .  .  was strictly ‘anti-metaphysical’.  .  .  .  ‘Metaphysics’, as Barth understood it, refers to the classical attempt to provide an account for the order which a human subject observes in the world around her.”58 McCormack’s characterization of Barth’s anti-metaphysical posture stands in dramatic juxtaposition to Strauss’s celebration of classical philosophy. If, as Strauss argues, “the human faculty that with the help of sense-perception, discovers nature is reason or understanding,”59 with his infamous “Nein!” to all metaphysical knowledge, Barth apparently denies the relevance of human reason and knowledge in the quest for truth. Human beings, Barth argues, “became vain in their reasonings . . . the barrier is now indeed a barrier, and the ‘No’ of God is now indeed negation. Bereft of understanding and

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 244. 58 Ibid., 246. 59 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 92.

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left to themselves, men are at the mercy of the dominion of the meaningless powers of the world.”60 Barth goes on: Fugitive is the soul in this world and soulless is the world when men do not find themselves within the sphere of the knowledge of the unknown God, when they avoid the true God in whom they and the world must lose themselves in order that both may find themselves again.61

This kind of language prompts scholars like Benjamin Lazier to associate Barth’s theology with a twentieth-century “gnostic return.”62 However, Bruce McCormack introduces a note of caution about what he maintains are exaggerated caricatures of Barth’s thought as a form “epistemological nihilism [or] anti-theology.  .  .  .  [I]n the face of all the critical negations, we will all too easily miss the highly positive element . . . [or] quite coherent theological epistemology”63 in both Romans II and throughout Barth’s work. In its place, McCormack calls for a wider perspective that recognizes how in Romans II and elsewhere, “Barth intended not only to negate every attempt to make the knowledge of God a human possibility, but also to establish the knowledge of God as a divine possibility.”64 McCormack’s more nuanced account of Barth’s dialectical theology in Romans II chips away at the scholarly tendency to identify his thought as a “thoroughgoing skepticism with regard to the possibility of a real knowledge of God.”65 Moreover, in this light, the stark opposition between Barth’s theology and Strauss’ philosophy starts to fade away. Barth’s theology begins to look less philosophically nihilistic, while as we have discussed above, Strauss’s political thought pulls back from the self-certainty of modern philosophy and recognizes its own lack of self-evidence. This surprising overlap, I suggest, reflects their shared response to and critique of the factvalue paradigm. As we saw earlier, modern philosophy’s unjustified encroachment upon and delegitimization of theopolitical discourse provoked Strauss’s call to restore a more humble profile of philosophy as “the quest [but] not 60 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 2nd edition, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 48. 61 Ibid. 62 Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted, 10. 63 McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 245.. 64 Ibid., 264. 65 Ibid., 262.

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possession of the truth”66 that leaves room for theology and does not explain it away. Similarly, Barth’s response to the dominance of the fact-value paradigm of knowledge prompted him to provide a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between theology and human knowledge than what common caricatures of his theology suggest. Like Strauss, Barth’s hybrid account of the relationship between theology and philosophy functions to critique the hegemony of facts discourse endorsed by modern philosophy. To be sure, Barth critiques the rational self-evidence of facts discourse from the vantage point of what McCormack terms a “critically realistic theology”67 whereas Strauss’s challenge to the fact-value paradigm derives from his thoroughgoing philosophical skepticism. Barth is committed to theology as the exclusive grounds of human knowledge whereas Strauss skeptically dismisses such a position. Nevertheless, despite his theological aspirations, Barth cannot justify his appeal to theology as the ultimate condition of the possibility of the logical validity of human knowledge of fact and value alike because he cannot demonstrate the difference between knowledge claims that achieve logical validity through an act of God’s self-determination and those that are unaided by God’s act. Like Strauss, he cannot show how believers and non-believers can mediate their claims to each other. For this reason, both projects expose the dramatic threat posed by an unchecked skepticism to all knowledge claims, facts and values alike, leading to what I refer to as the “forced option” facing Jewish and Christian thinkers. Ever since the publication of Bruce McCormack’s Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, a long list of accomplished Barth scholars including Gerald McKenny, Paul Nimmo, Richard Burnett, and, more recently, Derek Woodard-Lehman have attested to the positive implications of Barth’s theology for the knowledge of science, ethics, and scripture. Barth’s analysis of the relationship between human knowledge and theology is, I will suggest, a product of Barth’s analysis of the fact-value paradigm, which was filtered through that of Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Herrmann, his teachers at Marburg, where Barth transferred towards the end of his university studies. The relationship between religion and the sciences became particularly complex in the first half of the twentieth century. Throughout this period, 66 Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy,” 5. 67 McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 328.

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religious thinkers such as Cohen and Barth were concerned not only with salvaging religious meaning, but also with the challenge of disorder and violence emerging from the technological products of the natural sciences, whose positive value these thinkers could no longer take for granted.68 Failure to consider how people were using scientific findings could become matters of life and death, as events demonstrated. Confronted with such disorder, thinkers like Barth and Cohen began to ask about the purposes or values implicit in scientific explanations and about the rules, laws, and practices needed to realize them. For this reason, Cohen and other Marburg neo-Kantians advocated a return to Kant and to a mode of transcendental reflection that investigated the logical and ethical rules by which human beings have knowledge of the world. In his encounter with them, Barth learned to seek a deeper level of logical and ethical intelligibility. Before further examining this transcendental turn in Barth, however, it is worth noting the influence of Wilhelm Herrmann’s response to the factvalue paradigm on the young Barth. Like Schleiermacher, Otto, and others, Herrmann’s thought displayed the characteristic features of the second mode of Jewish and Christian appropriation of the fact-value divide, the appeal to the “more.” This is not surprising, since Schleiermacher was one of Herrmann’s chief theological influences. As discussed earlier, Schleiermacher argued that religion does not have the same object as natural science or morality, but nor is it incompatible with these sciences. Religion is “a sensibility and a taste for the infinite,”69 whose object is beyond rational cognition but available within the individual’s inner experience. Nevertheless, religion and science work in tandem. Religion without science is mere confusion, and science without religion lacks meaning and orientation. Like Schleiermacher, Herrmann sought to rescue religion from the fires of explanatory reduction. He argued that religion’s uniqueness derives from an encounter between an unobservable self and a supernatural revelation of God which served to existentially and morally affirm this self and which was more real than any observable fact.70 While as Bruce McCormack comments, “Herrmann was happy to grant the validity of the neo-Kantian 68 See Steven Schwarzschild, The Tragedy of Optimism: Writings on Hermann Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1956); and George Hunsinger, Karl Barth and Radical Politics (Westminster: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976), 134. 69 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 23. 70 For a detailed review of Herrmann’s position see, McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 49–69.

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epistemology in so far as it touched upon the knowledge gained in natural science, ethics, etc.,”71 Herrmann located the object of religion outside the confines of this epistemological structure. Beyond Schleiermacher, Herrmann also considered revelation to be an historical fact, albeit a unique and saving fact available only to individuals who experienced its affirmative power. Barth’s early essays offer evidence of his deep engagement with the issue of the uniqueness or “more” of religion. Like Herrmann, Barth took for granted the validity of the Marburg neo-Kantian epistemological account of the sciences but maintained that the object of religion was not subject to this epistemology but known only through an individual experience of Jesus. In addition, Barth shared Herrmann’s assessment of the “inner historical” meaning of the event of revelation.72 Nonetheless, Barth’s later work offers a different response to the question of the religious “more,” and this response bears the characteristic features of the transcendental turn that is evident in the work of Hermann Cohen, the second primary influence over Barth’s thinking during his education at Marburg.73 Both Barth and Cohen felt a sense of urgency over what they took to be the paradox of the explanatory sciences. If the sciences successfully explain and make sense of our world, how, they he asked, could these same sciences be commensurate with an increasingly disordered and potentially violent reality? Clearly the intelligibility afforded by the explanatory sciences was not exhaustive. Causal accounts alone could neither explain nor contend with the social and political crises emerging in the early decades of the twentieth century. The significance of facts, as Cohen, Barth, and others began to realize, is relative to their use. The apparent neutrality and self-evidence of facts is quickly nullified when facts are taken up by people who abuse them. Both thinkers realized that a full account of the intelligibility of the natural sciences requires a reflection not only on the conditions for the possibility of experience but also on the judgments that people make with respect to the facts with which they live. Consequently, Cohen and Barth both rejected the regard of Schleiermacher and Herrmann for religious experience as the source of the 71 Ibid., 56. 72 Karl Barth, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 22 (Zürich: TVZ, 1971), 149–212. 73 For a detailed analysis of Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantianism as a response to the rise of twentieth-century scientific materialism see Paul Nahme, Hermann Cohen and the Crisis of Liberalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

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unique religious “more.”74 Barth’s early regard for religious consciousness notwithstanding, he soon came, like Cohen before him, to categorize religious experience or religious consciousness in the same terms that were used to understand any other object of empirical analysis. Most significantly, both Cohen and Barth took religious experience as something in need of proper handling and lawful determination, the neglect of which handling and determination could easily result in its giving rise to disorder and even violence. Moreover, both rejected the identification of a religious “more” with a meta-rational reality, and sought instead to identify their respective conceptions of the “infinite” with a higher rational order, since only an inquiry into the proper ways of approaching our knowledge could offset the prospect of perpetual chaos. The fundamental framework of logic as transcendental reflection on the categories of thought was set out by G. W. F. Hegel in his Science of Logic. If, as Hegel argued, modern thinking tends to separate logical form from what it deems the worthier “content” of facts, accepting facts as “given” in abstraction from the role of judgment in determining their intelligibility leads to the de facto reign of sentiment and opinion. “As impulses the categories are only instinctively active . . . the loftier business of logic . . . is to clarify these categories and in them to raise mind to freedom and truth.”75 To undertake this “loftier business,” however, is to admit what are apparently fixed claims into the continuum of infinite reflection upon the logical structures for ordering knowledge. It is this account of infinite transcendental reflection that Cohen and Barth appropriate. Like Cohen, Barth’s post-Herrmannian theology offers a blueprint for the ongoing labor of an infinite reflection that issues judgments regarding the intelligibility of the facts of religion and the sciences. It is no secret that Barth often opposed his theology of the Word to what he understood to be Hegel’s grand synthesis of God and human reason. However, in an early essay, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” Barth argues that, “Idealism means the self-reflection of spirit. . . . It discovers a correlation between thinking and truth.”76 Indeed, Barth’s identification of the intelligibility of divine action 74 Andrea Poma, The Critical Philosophy of Herman Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 201. 75 G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Humanity Books, 1969), 37. 76 Karl Barth, “Fate and Idea in Theology,” in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth, ed. H. Marin Rumscheidt (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1986), 43.

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constituted a continuation of his attempt to tackle the problem of religion and its relation to the sciences. We can begin to appreciate the Hegelian-inflected character of Barth’s theology in relation to his more mature criticism of Herrmann’s emphasis on religious experience. This critique was partly prompted by Herrmann’s willingness to sign a 1914 manifesto in support of the German effort in the First World War. In response, Barth writes the following in a letter to Herrmann: Especially with you, Herr Professor  .  .  .  we learned to acknowledge “experience” as the constitutive principle of knowing and doing in the domain of religion . . . Now however . . . an “experience” which is completely new to us is held out to us by German Christians, an allegedly religious war “experience”.77

As McCormack remarks, Barth’s “primary difficulty at this point in time had to do with what he saw as the manipulation of religious experience to legitimate the most sinful and catastrophic of human actions.”78 Religious experience, Barth suggests, is not neutral. It takes on the values implicit in the habits for which it is appropriated and through which it is used. Increasingly, one might say, Barth came to view religion itself as a fact or domain of facts capable of linguistic expression and susceptible to transcendental logical reflection. If, like his teachers, Barth had assumed the difference between scientific fact and an irreducible “more,”, he now differed from them with respect to the status of religious experience. Accordingly, he notes in his 1915 essay “Religion und Sozialismus” that “the object [Sache] I am concerned with—and to which, to be sure, religion as feeling points us—is something greater and clearer.”79 Already in this essay, Barth had identified the “more” with divine self-determination: “I have spoken of a Kingdom of God. . . . I mean thereby simply that God is living, that God rules and will rule.”80 God, Barth argues, has a transcendental function. God’s habitus orders and accounts for the ideal functioning of the world, 77 Karl Barth, Karl Barth—Martin Rade: Ein Briefwechsel, 115, quoted in McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 113. 78 McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 113. 79 Karl Barth, “Religion und Sozialismus” (lecture delivered to the Soizalistische Partei der Schweiz (SPS) in Baden, December 7, 1915), quoted in McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 131. 80 Ibid., 216.

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providing transcendental conditions for human beings to act properly and dwell salvifically in the world. Precisely how God provides rules for human life Barth had not yet detailed. Nonetheless, the transcendental turn had already been made. The key to Barth’s more mature account of God’s transcendental function is Barth’s account of God’s self-positing or being-in-act. In Hegel’s Idealism, Robert Pippin indicates how transcendental reflection, generally speaking, presupposes what Kant referred to as the “‘identity, unity, and self-consciousness’ of the subject or self.”81 Since knowledge depends on transcendental categories of judgment applied by a unified subject, the exercise of these categories is tantamount to a self-conscious act of rule-application. Knowledge inevitably implies, according to Pippin, that “I apply a certain determinate concept and judge that I am in such a state, something I must do and be able to know that I am doing.”82 For this reason, the activity of self-positing implicit in our scientific claims is an epistemological activity of self-positing and, in particular, the self-conscious enactment of the rules of judgment. Indeed, knowing is the act of self-positing that constitutes the ratio or intelligibility of the facts we claim to know. One can identify the same features of transcendental reflection in Barth’s description of God’s self-determination through an infinite praxis of divine normativity. When describing what he refers to as Barth’s turn to a “critically realistic dialectical theology,” McCormack states that, “Barth’s concern . . . was to safeguard his realistic starting point in the Self-positing God who objectively places humankind in relation to Himself.”83 Barth had long maintained that there is no route to theology from the position of human knowing. Still, as early as the first edition of his commentary on Romans, Barth also maintained—in McCormack’s words—that, “the human knower is made a participant in God’s knowledge of Himself.”84 In short, God’s self-knowledge is his self-positing, a connection that reaches fullest expression in Barth’s account of God in the Church Dogmatics as “who He is in the act of His revelation.”85 If revelation is the event of God’s 81 Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 19. 82 Ibid. 83 McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 158. 84 Ibid., 159. 85 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of God, vol. 2, part 1, trans. Thomas Henry Louis Parker et. al., ed. Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 262.

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knowing Godself, this event is also the act by means of which God is what he is. But for Barth, this is not just any act. It is the one unique act of God’s gracious election of humankind in Jesus Christ. But if, as Barth maintains, this unique act determines God’s objective reality, it must be because this act abides by or applies the unique rule or habitus of God’s self-determination. Borrowing from Kant’s account of the norms operative in human knowing, Barth refers to God’s election in Jesus Christ as the “regulative principle” that governs divine knowing and self-determination.86 A critically realistic theology is thus a transcendental theology of God’s self-knowing and self-determination as the enactment of divine normativity. However, since God’s self-determination as covenantal decision is the divine determination of all that God does, then this unique and eternal rule determines all moments of salvation history: creation, reconciliation, and redemption. All that God has created, including the human creature, is taken up and grasped in the rule-determined act of divine self-determination in Jesus Christ. As such, one might say that the Cohenian correlation between transcendental idea and explanatory fact receives a Barthian form. God’s Word, Barth writes in the Göttingen Dogmatics, [is] a revelation of reason, and our being addressed by God is, in the most pregnant sense, knowledge.  .  .  .  No modern anti-intellectualism or antimoralism should cause us here to put life, the irrational, the holy, etc., in place of the Word. . . . Its real content . . . is the truth.87

Like Cohen, Barth identified infinite self-reflection—God’s self-reflection— with the enactment of the conditions of the possibility of the logical intelligibility of reality. And also like Cohen, Barth recognized the necessary connection between logical and ethical intelligibility. God’s Logos saves, and as McCormack observes, “the ‘logic of God’ is the logic of reconciliation.”88 Rather than theology deriving its standards of validity from the natural sciences, then, facts and values both acquire a new, shared source of logical validity. It is time, Barth maintained for

86 See McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 460. 87 Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 62, cited in McCormack, Barth’s Critically Realistic, 341. 88 Ibid., 160.

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theology  .  .  .  to regain the outrage to face up to concrete objectivity (Sachlichkeit), the courage to bear witness to the Word of revelation, of judgment and of God’s love . . . [so that] “science in general” would have to seek “strong ties and a blood relationship” with theology instead of the other way around . . . if theology allows itself to be called, or calls itself, a science, it cannot in doing so accept the obligation of submission to standards valid for other sciences.89

Still, an obvious difference persists between the accounts in Cohen and Barth of the logos of science. Cohen’s transcendental logic applies directly to human knowers, while in Barth transcendental reflection upon worldly facts operates as an exercise in divine wisdom. For human beings to participate in the logical and salvific intelligibility of God’s self-determination in Jesus Christ and relate this ratio to the contents of our historical and natural knowledge, they must encounter God’s Word. But where and how can they do so? For Barth the primary site of the revelation of God’s self-determination is the passion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the Göttingen Dogmatics of 1924–1925, Barth argues that God also enacts God’s self-determination by means of human language in general and the scriptural witness to the cross in particular. God’s self-determination becomes the subject matter (Sache) of Scripture. Like his teacher Herrmann, Barth understood “the thundering summons to the subject matter itself.”90 However, in a manner reminiscent of Cohen, Barth identified this Sache with a self-determining transcendental ratio—more specifically, with the divine wisdom and command. But how can people access this wisdom and respond to this command? How can people become oriented in and by God’s self-determined purposing of all that is? Any discussion of human access to the divine rule in Barth’s theology must begin by announcing human beings’ inability to grasp or apprehend it. For Barth, God’s transcendental self-determination is always an expression of God’s freedom, which cannot be determined by or apprehended in general human concepts. As Robert Willis puts it,

89 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Doctrine of the Word of God, vol. 1, part 1, trans. Geoffrey William Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance (London: T&T Clark, 1975), 90 Richard Burnett, Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis: The Hermeneutical Principles of the Römerbrief Period (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 71.

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it is precisely this emphasis on the command of God as an event that eliminates entirely the possibility of translating it into universal or particular moral principles or rules. The upshot of this development, however, is that Barth’s understanding of command does not permit its being given direct propositional expression.91

Or, as Richard Burnett explains, there is no knowledge of God’s being which human beings have as an a priori or an a posteriori possession or deposit. Knowledge of God’s being is always, first and last, a gift . . . to presuppose such knowledge, Barth discovered, was ipso facto, to deny the freedom of God’s being, and the freedom of God’s being is what he had discovered as a result of hearing God speak through the Scriptures.92

If, however, human beings cannot develop a transcendentally normative hermeneutics of Scripture, religion, or science, they can nonetheless be grasped by God and participate in the circle of God’s Being-in-Act, which is the circle of God, Christ, and humanity. Participation in this circle, Barth claimed, was the defining difference between his account of biblical exegesis and that of his contemporaries, since, “The decisive prerequisite for the interpretation of a text is participation in its subject matter.”93 Moreover, Barth insisted that participation in this circle implied more, not less, scientific rigor than the so-called “scientific” approaches to exegesis, since the divine logos would enable a higher degree of rational intelligibility. Like Hegel and Cohen, Barth maintains that without proper rational ordering, facts could become the playthings of opinion and sentiment. And so he writes: “There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting . . . disposition for true exegesis because it guarantees a complete absence of prejudice . . . we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.”94 What, however, does it mean to be grasped in this way and how does it enable a kind of material conformity to the formal rule or habitus revealed in the act of God’s election of Jesus Christ? In the first instance, it means only to approach Scripture and accept it as witness of God’s regulative self-determination in Jesus Christ. It is, as Paul Nimmo suggests, to have 91 Robert E. Willis, “Some Difficulties in Barth’s Development of Special Ethics,” Religious Studies 6, no. 2 (June 1970): 148. 92 Burnett, Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis, 42. 93 Barth, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, 591. 94 Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, part 2, 469.

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faith that in this word of Scripture we can find God’s own Word. However, Christian faith is already an event of being taken up into the eternal divine ratio through the Holy Spirit, by whom we are brought into the circle of God’s self-relating. If as being-in-act God operates transcendentally and if God’s unique act or rule is the gracious election of all people in Christ, then all achieve “objective validity” in God’s action, first Jesus and then all else that God has made. This is why, as Nimmo states, Barth identifies the imago Dei with participation in God’s own self-determination and “participation in the imago Dei . . . is exclusively the affair of God Himself.”95 Faith is the Christian willingness to be led that links the believer to the transcendental ratio. Faith is therefore the cognitive dimension of hearing the Word as the Word by which people are led into the circle of God’s eternal decision. Obedience is the active conformity to God that happens in this participation. When, in other words, we are led to hear and accept the Sache of Scripture, we are led to be ruled by this Word. Our actions are made wise in the act of God’s gracious decision. That such actions may be made wise does not, however, negate the freedom with which we perform them, for to be ruled by the divine decision is to be made freely obedient. Human freedom is the inevitable outcome of the divine ratio. But how can we act when we are made able to act by and in another? On the one hand, Barth maintains that we do not truly act. Actions are constituted by norms and rules, but we cannot grasp the rule of our own obedience. If, however, we cannot act in the conventional sense, we can nonetheless position ourselves to be acted upon. We can assume an attitude and perform a posture of waiting to receive God’s own decision of us. We can, according to Barth, “live with no other purpose than that with which God acts in Jesus Christ,”96 that is, we can offer ourselves in prayer and repentance, not as prompts for God’s action but strictly to make room for God’s miraculous act in and with us. On the other hand, Barth maintains that, as Nimmo says, “the objective reality [of God’s act] is not without its effects in Christian life as a beingin-action.”97 God’s gracious election is effective in human ethical activity as 95 Paul Nimmo, Being in Act: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 91. 96 Karl Barth, “The Christian Life” in Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, part 4: Lecture Fragments (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), 266. 97 Nimmo, Being in Act, 152.

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believers are empowered to perform actions in response to God’s command that they hope will display their having been made obedient. Like children seeking to imitate parental actions that they nonetheless do not understand, Barth observes, believers may also attempt to “look only where they see God looking.”98 What they see is Jesus “in His unpretentiousness . . . in His corresponding partnership of those who are lowly in this world.”99 This provides the “prominent lines” or the “‘formed’ reference”100 for believers’ own efforts. While their efforts are inevitably provisional, believers nonetheless ought to be committed to them as probable enactments of God’s wisdom as it establishes the logical and ethical intelligibility of all things. Moreover, if God’s objective revelation in Christ grasps us into practical conformity, it also ought to grasp us into hermeneutical conformity in the context of scriptural interpretation. God’s self-positing is the Sache of the text and the subject matter of all that God has created. As Nimmo states, “underlying the construal of the imitatio Christi there thus lies a crucial epistemological directionality—from the act of following Christ to the interpretation of the Scripture.”101 We can, according to Barth, aspire to a measured, scientific understanding of the biblical word. While this theological understanding is not the same as that which one gains through historical-critical analysis, it does not negate the historical-critical approach. In Analogy of Grace, Gerald McKenny illuminates the logical link between special ethics and scriptural hermeneutics in Barth.102 While neither ethics nor hermeneutics can operate casuistically by way of direct apprehension of divine law, those grasped by the divine Word are grasped into the history of God’s regulative action and can glimpse aspects of this history in worldly sites of God’s elective and commanding activity. Even if we cannot apprehend norms directly, we can use these sites as launchpads to engage in an ongoing communal conversation about the measure of God’s self-determination, thereby sustaining a tradition of reasoned scriptural wisdom. In fact, despite his reputation for irrationalism, Barth never rejected the sciences in general. Like Cohen, he advocated retaining them when included within the ongoing effort to understand and enact the scriptural 98 Barth, “The Christian Life,” 266. 99 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, part 2 (Edingburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 248–249. 100 Nimmo, Being in Act, 143. 101 Nimmo, Being in Act, 144. 102 Gerald McKenny, Analogy of Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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ratio. In the spirit of the Cohenian correlation of idea and fact, Barth maintained that while one cannot take one’s orientation from the sciences but only from the wisdom of divine normativity, human knowledge permits an ongoing review and interpretation of the former in and with the latter. In many respects, Barth’s account of God’s being-in-act as the transcendental condition of the possibility of the objective validity of all knowledge parallels Carl Schmitt’s appeal to theology as the transcendental condition of knowledge claims (discussed in chapter three). Both appeal to theology to launch a critique of the self-evidence of natural scientific criteria. Both challenge the reduction of theopolitical discourse into natural scientific or materialist terms or the assertion of a logically neutral sacred “more.” And like Schmitt, Barth identifies logical validity with God’s revelation in Christ. However, unlike Schmitt, Barth does not identify God with a particular knowledge claim or, in Schmitt’s case, principle of political authority. As we have seen, Barth insists that we cannot grasp the divine ratio, but rather are grasped by it. The most we can do is to position ourselves to be grasped by it in prayer and repentance. Although we are grasped into the history or continuum of God’s regulative action and can glimpse aspects of this history in the sites of God’s electing and commanding activity, we cannot apprehend determinate norms from these locations nor can we ever rest secure in the knowledge of what we glimpse. In chapter three I showed that because Schmitt posits that theological truth manifests itself directly in its political representation, his political theology takes a polemical stand against secular, proceduralist accounts of political authority, exposing the arbitrary anchoring of his own supposed standard of rationality. By contrast, even if Barth’s Christian believer maintains that her theological claims are justified in and through God’s regulative self-determination, as the condition of the possibility of the justification of her positions God’s freedom denies her the ability to know which of her claims are intelligible, or indeed if any of them are. This is why, as I have argued elsewhere,103 Barth’s account of Christian witness is decidedly non-polemical. The believer’s articulation of the gospel is always justified only within the order that differentiates between God’s own speaking of the Word and my reception of this Word through God’s electing love. Therefore, the believer cannot de facto defend the rationality of her own claims. She may freely present her claims in the hope and faith that 103 Rashkover, Freedom and Law, 271.

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they are logically ordered in God’s free self-determination, but she cannot polemically defend them against another person’s claim. This is equally true with regard to other believers and non-believers alike. Certainly, as Derek Woodard-Lehman argues, we are in Barth’s account commanded to be God’s witnesses, and the Church is the community of those “constituted by a common hearing and receiving” such that “this commonality becomes concrete precisely in ecclesial confession and . . . in common deliberation.”104 But because the community’s hearing and receiving presupposes the dynamism (freedom) of God’s revelatory Word, there are clear limits to the authority of the Church’s own tradition of confession. It is not immune from ongoing revision nor does it “preclude [the] self-determination”105 of individuals who may attest to receiving God’s speech in ways that depart from the ecclesial consensus. While we must, as Woodard-Lehman explains, “go in the same way that is indicated by the Confessions, we must go on our own way. We must not allow ourselves to be dictated by the Confession. . . .”106 In Woodard-Lehman’s estimation, the dialectic between the communal consensus and the individual suggests a neo-Hegelian process of reasoned deliberation, which he argues is part of Barth’s thick description of practical reason. However, Woodard-Lehman fails to mention that the reason why neither the community nor the individual sustains ongoing authority over the contents of ecclesial confession is because neither possesses the justificatory capacity to be certain about the validity of their theological claims nor to defend the validity of their claims to other believers. The same is true a fortiori for the believer’s relationship to a non-believer. It is here where we find the deepest point of overlap between Barth and Strauss’s positions insofar as both expose the logical crisis implicit in revelation-based theological claims. Although Barth witnesses to the absolute truth of God’s revelation in and through Christ and posits that this constitutes the transcendental condition of the possibility of all being and knowledge, Barth’s believer cannot justify this commitment to a non-believer, any more than the Straussian philosopher can justify his philosophical stance to the religious person. Stated in Straussian terms, the theologian cannot refute the logical validity of the philosopher’s claims 104 Derek Woodard-Lehman, “Reasons After Revelation: Karl Barth on Divine Word and Human Words,” Modern Theology 33, no. 1. (January 2017): 102. 105 Derek Woodard-Lehman, “Reasons After Revelation,” 113. 106 Ibid.

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regarding the good. This is because for Barth, as for Strauss, the theologian’s alternative standard of logical validity is a product of faith. Barth’s theologian faces an additional obstacle, however, in that he is not in a position even to identify his own measure of rational intelligibility at all. While Barth does not polemically position theology and philosophy in opposition, as Strauss does, Barth’s theologian is just as susceptible to philosophical skepticism as Strauss’s, since she can neither defend the rationality of her own claims nor coherently question the validity of the non-believer’s claims. The theologian cannot establish when and why her own claims make sense over against those of the non-believer. If however, she cannot say when and on what grounds her claims make sense, she cannot reliably assert that any of them is meaningful or intelligible. All remain vulnerable to skeptical challenge and are therefore arbitrarily anchored. Ultimately, philosophical skepticism has the last word in both Strauss and Barth’s thought, and this, I maintain, is a product of their shared formal response to the fact-value paradigm. Unlike their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jewish and Christian predecessors, both thinkers directly challenge the self-evidence of the validity of fact claims. Nonetheless, neither thinker satisfactorily establishes the logical validity of theopolitical claims, and in this way, both perpetuate the underlying arbitrariness of the fact-value paradigm itself. When coupled with their powerful philosophical challenge to facts discourse, Barth and Strauss’s portrait of the crisis afflicting revelatory theology dims any hope of discovering a single standard for the logical validity of all knowledge claims. As the third and final form of the appropriation of the fact-value divide, external critique proves to be the most critical expression of it, the most philosophically reflective response to it, and ultimately, the most dramatic signal of its waning pragmatic value. And it is, finally, their shared skepticism that exposes what I call the “forced option” currently facing Jewish and Christian thinkers: either we accept (with Strauss and Barth) that all knowledge claims are arbitrarily anchored, whether fact or value claims, or we recognize that we cannot identify a stable or fixed condition of the possibility of justifiable knowledge claims and instead engage in an ongoing investigation that seeks changeable conditions of the possibility of knowledge claims in the here and now. It is to this latter possibility that we now turn.

Chapter Five

Beyond the Fact-Value Divide

Thus far, Nature and Norm has told the story of the impact of the factvalue divide upon Jewish and Christian thinkers and has revealed their growing awareness of its challenge to Jewish and Christian thought. We have identified three different ways Jewish and Christian thinkers have responded to the fact-value divide. Option one was for Jewish and Christian thinkers simply to accept the fact-value divide. However, doing so resulted in the eventual loss of meaning of central Jewish and Christian theological claims. This problem led thinkers to adopt a second option, redescribing the fact-value divide by appealing to a sacred “more.” Unfortunately, instead of challenging the logical hegemony of fact claims, these appeals took it for granted, merely supplementing its metaphysical picture by pointing to a non-logical sphere of reality now identified with “religion.” In chapter four, we observed that the same failure to resolve the theopolitical problem appears even in thinkers whose appeal to a “more” led to the third option, a direct and external critique of the fact-value divide. Perpetuating a problem one seeks to address is a consequence of failing to understand the problem itself. This chapter argues that the only way forward is through an immanent critique of the fact-value paradigm grounded in a self-conscious awareness of the vulnerability of one’s thought to the negative consequences of this standard of logical validity. In this chapter I will first examine what I take to be the philosophical demands of the shift away from the logical dominance of the fact-value divide. Second, I will identify characteristics of post-fact-value Jewish and Christian thinking. Third, I will present a case study of two thinkers—Peter Ochs and Nicholas Adams—whose work addresses dramatically different thematic issues but

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nonetheless exemplifies a shared awareness of the need for an immanent critique of the fact-value divide and a logical reorientation of Jewish and Christian thought.

I. The Philosophical Demands of the Theopolitical Problem An admission of the theopolitical problem therefore means that Jewish and Christian thinkers recognize its implicit presence within their own method of thought or what is the vulnerability of their thought to arbitrary anchoring when unaccompanied by a speculative (transcendental) activity of justificatory self-reflection. It is this recognition that distinguishes immanent critique from other responses to the fact-value divide. If most modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers did not recognize the theopolitical problem as a problem of this standard of logical validity, this is largely because appropriating the fact-value divide continued to help them address the problems that gave rise to their thought. Moreover, as I have shown, Jewish and Christian thinkers did tackle with the symptoms of the theopolitical problem when and in proportion to which to these negative effects distracted them the benefits of the fact-value paradigm for their thought systems. Consequently, my identification of this “failure” by Jewish and Christian thinkers in our current time is not meant as criticism. Pragmatically speaking, if Jewish and Christian thought of the past had been truly challenged by the theopolitical problem, Jewish and Christian thinkers would have addressed it, since the problems raised by the fact-value divide threaten the viability of Jewish and Christian thought altogether. When fully recognized, however, awareness of the logical fall-out from the fact-value divide presents thinkers with a forced option either to accept the negative effects of it, that is, the vulnerability to skepticism and accompanying meaningnlessness of key claims, acosmism, practical ineffectiveness, and dogmatism or, by recognizing the problem, engage in an ongoing speculative investigation into the potentially alterable and pluralist criteria of logical validity. This is the situation we face currently. More explicitly, by “immanent critique” I mean a two-stage process of logical self-critical inquiry. Immanent critique begins with a thinker’s awareness of her own tendency to presume the fact-value divide as it manifests itself in the current moment in her tendency to make claims that display unintelligibility, acomism, practical irrelevance, and polemicism. The good

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news is that this recognition issues its own directive for philosophical repair, since to concede that we do not know how theopolitical claims work for us or relate to our being-in-the-world, and to concede a desire to redeem these claims, is tantamount to a willingness to engage in an inquiry about the logical conditions by means of which they can work for us. Thus the second stage of immanent critique is to engage in inquiry about the conditions of the intelligibility of Jewish and Christian theopolitical claims in the here and now. Pragmatically speaking, this new goal is commensurate with the analysis we have developed in the prior chapters, since as noted, modern Western Jewish and Christian thinkers generally appreciated natural science and only criticized it when it threatened the logical validity of Jewish and Christian claims. Consequently, the work of immanent critique should enable Jewish and Christian thinkers to appreciate the fruits of scientific knowledge by showing how to relate Jewish and Christian claims to them as claims about a single shared world, without having to accept the logical privilege of natural scientific knowledge. This is because immanent critique itself issues the philosophical demand to investigate conditions of logical validity and thereby undertakes a philosophical activity of justification that is no longer taken as beholden to the criteria of natural scientific knowledge. By recognizing that the sciences themselves are not equipped to determine general criteria of logical validity, recognition of the theopolitical problem lands Jewish and Christian thinkers in new philosophical territory that presents them with a new philosophical responsibility and authority. The specific parameters of this philosophical responsibility and authority derive from the nature of the theopolitical problem itself, which is the challenge of identifying conditions of the intelligibility of theopolitical claims appropriate to us in the current time. Stated in the language of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical discourse, this means that recognizing the theopolitical problem instigates a transcendental inquiry. However, the features of this transcendental inquiry differ significantly from the tradition of transcendental inquiry launched by Kant, since as discussed in chapter one, Kant’s transcendental investigation took for granted natural science as the paradigm of logical validity, whereas the transcendental investigation called for here is motivated by the crisis generated by that assumption. Moreover, the transcendental turn motivated by the theopolitical problem is predicated upon the contingency of standards of logical validity. Unlike Kant, who sought universal and

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necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, immanent critique as a mode of transcendental inquiry will not establish fixed categories of objective validity. Implicit in the theopolitical problem is the assumption that there is no single standard of logical validity currently available in the wake of the recognition of the wide-reaching negative consequences of the fact-value divide. Consequently, determinations of intelligibility require ongoing investigations into the current conditions within which claims are held. For this reason, the kind of transcendental inquiry hereby required issues only provisional determinations of objective validity on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, the demand for a transcendental inquiry into the provisional conditions of the logical validity of theopolitical claims remains a philosophical demand instigated by the particular philosophical circumstances presented by the fact-value divide and therefore does not constitute a universal philosophical demand or present a universal philosophical solution. But what are the features of this postfact-value transcendental investigation that is thrust upon Jewish and Christian thinkers faced with this current philosophical situation? As noted above, the answer arises out of the particular problem itself, which is our inability to know how Jewish and Christian claims work for us in the here and now. Accordingly, what we need is a transcendental review of how those of us for whom these claims matter can determine their logical relation to other claims we have about the world in the current moment. Immanent critique, we can say, requires a transcendental investigation into how Jewish and Christian claims function at particular times and within particular conditions for those persons who hold them or seek to determine their logical validity. Since immanent critique presupposes a failure of a single and universal standard of logical validity for persons who seek to redeem the intelligibility of their claims, immanent critique presupposes the “who,” “how,” and “when” of Jewish and Christian claims that require rational determination. In the final section of this chapter, I will offer a case study that illustrates the value of this approach as displayed in the work of a Jewish philosopher (Peter Ochs) and a Christian theologian (Nicholas Adams). Before turning to this example, however, we need a clearer picture of what it means to engage in a transcendental analysis of how to live with our claims in world, that is, to determine criteria by which we might evaluate the logical relations between our claims and the world in which we live.

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II. Characteristics of a Post-Fact-Value Jewish and Christian Thinking A. Intelligibility, Justification, and the Who, How, and When of Knowledge An account of how we live with our claims in the world required by the forced option of immanent critique presupposes a plausible, pragmatic account or picture of what it means to say that we live in the world. Surely, any account of how we live requires consideration of the fact that we are natural organisms that live in and interact with an environment. While an environment conditions the operation of an organism, organisms seek their own self-preservation and respond to these conditions. Organisms use their environments to perpetuate themselves and in the process alter their environment and their relationship to it over time. I take this elemental description of the constraints and the freedom of human beings as natural organisms as a plausible starting point for a thick description of the relationship between knowledge claims and how we live which serves as the point of reflective orientation for the kind of investigation we are now authorized to exercise. To flesh out the details of this framework, I will draw from John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Dewey’s Logic offers one of the clearest descriptions of the relation between how we hold our knowledge claims and how we live in our world, and for this reason, it provides Jewish and Christian thinkers with a useful instruction manual for the on-going philosophical work of determining the criteria of the intelligibility of their claims. This invocation of Dewey’s account of the logic of inquiry is not meant as an appeal to a universalizable analysis of logical validity. As I will discuss below, Dewey himself recognized the pragmatic need for a reorientation in contemporary accounts of logic as a direct response to the particular limits of modern, western accounts of logic. Likewise and more importantly for the purposes of this analysis, the recognition of the need for the labor of immanent critique announced here turns to Dewey’s analysis of the communal activity of transcendental self-reflection as one plausible and highly useful account of how the immanent critique now urgently needed by Jewish and Christian thinkers might be described. According to Dewey, human life may be characterized as the life of a natural and social organism that interacts dialectically with its environment.1 1 It is widely noted that Dewey’s account of the interaction between the organism and its environment constitutes a direct response to early modern mechanistic and reductionist accounts of reality as matter. Dewey introduces his interactive account of

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As Dewey explains, “an organism does not live in an environment; it lives by means of an environment.”2 For example, living organisms use energy, and when depleted, they need resources to restore it. Because organisms are not self-sustaining, they must use resources from their environment to preserve themselves. This is why Dewey uses the term “environment” to refer to those features of the world specifically involved in the life-preserving activities of organisms. For Dewey, the preservation of life is contingent upon the stability of the organism-environment relation, but given the complexity of organic systems and of the accompanying environment, imbalances frequently occur and organisms experience a deficit of energy and a need to restore an equilibrium. Moreover, the balance required for the preservation of life presupposes regularity with respect to both an organism’s activities and its environment. On the one hand, integration between an organism and its environment requires stability on the side of the environment, since any change in the latter requires a change in the former. On the other hand, integration presupposes that organisms will develop effective and life-preserving ways of responding to their environment, what Dewey calls adaptive habits.3 Dewey’s analysis of the logic of inquiry—what for us constitutes a pragmatically useful thick description of the elements of a transcendental analysis of the intelligibility of claims for a community in a particular environment in an early essay, “The Reflex Arc Concept of Psychology” Psychological Review 3, no. 4 (1896): 357–370. As Thomas M. Alexander argues, “Dewey’s ‘The Reflex Arc Concept of Psychology’ is . . . truly revolutionary. There Dewey articulates clearly the idea of organism and environment as a field or interwoven process of acting and undergoing, evincing a genuinely ecological understanding of action.” Thomas M. Alexander, “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dewey, ed. Steven Fesmier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 29. 2 John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Redditch: Read Books, 2013), 47. 3 Dewey’s naturalist account of inquiry was deeply influenced by Darwin. One can draw a direct line between Darwin’s influence and Dewey’s notion of “warranted assertability.” As Larry A. Hickman explains, “The work of Charles Darwin exerted a profound influence on Dewey’s thought. . . . Just as Darwin had proved the notion of fixed biological species untenable, Dewey would seek to demonstrate that there are no fixed or certain truths.  .  .  .  [T]his project was based on a candid recognition of the observable fact that living beings must constantly adapt to changing environmental circumstances.  .  .  .  Because inquiry is an organic activity, and because organisms encounter constraints as well as facilities, assertions must continually be tested and new warrants continually be issued.” Larry A. Hickman, Pragmatism as Post-Modernism: Lessons from John Dewey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 207–208.

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time and place—emerges out of this model of the natural integration of organisms with an environment.4 While it may seem odd to speak about “knowledge” and “logic” with respect to biological life, Dewey argues that there is a direct link between the biological principle of organic integration and the search for ways to restore a lost condition of integration. For cultural organisms such as ourselves, environmental constraints become logical constraints and the search for integration is inquiry.5 Given the stakes, it is important to offer a precise account of what is involved in an organism’s attempt to restore conditions of integration. In Dewey’s description, the process includes the following elements. First, an organism experiences an unmet need. Somehow, the organism’s relation with its environment is not working, or we might say, a former habit-condition correlation fails to fulfill an organism’s need. Second, the restoration of balance cannot be obtained by a strict “return” to the earlier environment-habit correlation, since the former conditions failed to produce this balance. Third, a new habit-environment correlation needs to be discovered—that is, an organism needs to adopt a new way of relating to its environment. As Dewey explains, this might involve “search[ing] for [new] material”6 in 4 As is clear from the discussion above, by “transcendental” I refer to philosophical reflection upon justificatory standards. So understood, it makes sense to appreciate Dewey’s Logic as offering a transcendental account, even if, as scholars such as Thomas M. Alexander have pointed out, Dewey rejected Kant’s particular form of transcendental reflection, which sought universal rational categories, in favor of an account of justificatory practices as emerging from environmental interactions. As Alexander explains, for Dewey, “knowing is the outcome of inquiry, and inquiry arises in the context of life activity through the disruption of habit . . . this marks a complete abandonment of the ‘transcendental’ point of view in which reason was the constitutive ground of the possibility of experience.  .  .  .  [As Dewey argued] ‘the antecedents of thought are our universe of life and love; of appreciation and struggles’ (1903, MW: 2:298). . . . Thinking [for Dewey] is limited to its own context. ‘What we have to reckon with is not How can I think überhaupt?, but How shall I think right here and now?’ (10–3, MW 2:300).” Alexander, “Dewey’s Naturalist Metaphysics,” 29. 5 Dewey is not alone in identifying a connection between organic integration, problemsolving, and scientific inquiry. According to Isaac Levi, “Dewey appealed to structural similarities between the behavior of non-human organisms when adjusting to their environments and the deliberate efforts of inquirers engaged in problem-solving. This way of ‘naturalizing’ intentional behaviors continues to find adherents. For example, biologists and economists have often recognized structural affinities between applications of game theoretical structures to the transactions of lower animals with other such animals and their environments.” Isaac Levi, “Dewey’s Logic of Inquiry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, ed. Molly Cochran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 85–86. 6 Dewey, Inquiry, 27.

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the environment that can serve as a resource for a new habit, or generating a new strategy for dealing with the existing environment. Fourth, a new approach to an existing environment is also a change in the environment itself, since an environment is defined as the world implicated in organic use of it. For this reason, a resolution of the problem here presupposes the existing environment within which the organism lives. Biological modifications occur within existing conditions of life and any changes made must therefore comport with these conditions, lest the modification resolve one problem but generate a host of others. Finally, the outcome of the process is a new, functional but inevitably fallible, habit-environment integration that resolves the earlier problem and thereby installs a new state of environmental integration. As such, Dewey’s framework for analyzing the relation between knowledge and how we live has its origins in an account of biological interactions with our environment. However, human beings are cultural and not merely biological organisms, in that human beings are social generators of meaning. Unlike strictly biological organisms, human beings respond to their environment in social groups by deploying intellectual operations which parallel our physical ability to see, hear, move, and so forth, and guide our efforts to integrate ourselves with our environment. However, Dewey emphasizes that our cultural capabilities function on a continuum with our organic ones. If culture inevitably “modifies” our organic actions, it does so only insofar as it is “foreshadowed in [the] behavior of the biological kind, and the latter prepares the way for the former.”7 As an aspect of how people integrate with their environment, cultural activity is, like all organic activity, habit-oriented and purpose driven. But how does culture modify our organic behavior and how does this further define the relationship between knowledge and how we live? In Dewey’s account, “culture” refers in general to intellectual operations and their outcomes enacted by persons in social relations as they live by their environments. But to speak of the outcome of socially exercised intellectual operations is to speak about “meaning,” and so, according to Dewey, “culture” also refers to the “meanings which have developed in the course of living, together with the ways of forming and transmitting culture with all its constituents of tools, arts, institutions, traditions, and customary beliefs.”8 7 Dewey, Inquiry, 75. 8 Ibid., 73.

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Moreover, meaning takes place in and through language. Language, Dewey says, “is the agency by which [cultural] institutions and acquired habits are transmitted, and  .  .  .  it permeates both the forms and the contents of all other cultural activities.”9 However, because Dewey conceives of language broadly enough to include any symbolic bearer of meaning, he identifies all cultural practices as linguistic in the broadest sense, including “rites, ceremonies, monuments and the products of industrial and fine arts. . . .”10 Common to each is its representative capacity, its capacity to transmit the outcomes of intellectual operations or habits of meaning by way of physical marks or “signs.”11 As the agency or bearer of all cultural expressions, language shapes and determines the precise ways in which a particular culture is both continuous with and yet also modifies organic behavior. Consequently, language shapes and conditions the relationship between knowledge and how we live. Language is the agency of culture’s intellectual operations and the transmitter of its intellectual outcomes or knowledge. As we will see, in Dewey’s account, knowledge or “judgments” are socially vetted and environmentally constrained expressions of meaning. Moreover, since in Dewey’s view, “Language is a biological mode of behavior emerging in natural continuity from earlier organic activities,”12 it operates within the same dialectical relationship between organic habits-environment characteristic of any organic behavior. For this reason, meaning or semantic intelligibility is a result of successful and yet always provisional efforts at environmental integration. To say that linguistic meaning is an outcome of processes continuous with the development of organic habits is also to say that meaning is not merely conventional, but rather constrained and tested by its preservational value for social organisms within their changing environments. Meaning is not merely a function of social agreement since, as organic, social agreement itself is always environmentally situated or “grounded.” As Dewey explains, meanings are “established by agreements of different persons in existential activities having reference to existential consequences.”13 Meanings are habits produced by social agreement that are, we might say, “tried and true,” since these linguistic habits have shown themselves to have “functional 9 10 11 12 13

Ibid., 78. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 79-80. Ibid., 81.

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fitness,” that is, existential significance as determined by their utility for particular groups in particular situations. For example, in learning a word like “fire,” a child learns to package a set of very useful inferences. While the sound “fire” may be conventional, the package of inferences is constrained by what fire actually does in the environment. As Dewey says, “A sound or a mark of any physical existence is a part of language only in virtue of its operational force; that is, as it functions as a means of evoking different activities performed by different persons so as to produce consequences that are shared by all the participants in the conjoint undertaking.”14 Because meanings are tested in relation to the existential situations in which they are used, meanings are not arbitrary but are justified in and have intelligibility by means of their existential contribution. Because social life itself is part of an existential situation, presupposing complex lines of relation between environmental conditions and operational responses, meanings are also intelligible only in relation to other meanings. If as Dewey maintains, a “genuine community of language or symbols can be achieved only through efforts that bring about communication of activities under existing conditions,”15 and if this means that meanings trace and are tethered to life-activities, it is inevitable that there is no such thing as an isolated “unit” of meaning, since life-activities are themselves serial processes that transpire in ongoing and ever changing patterns of relations. “Any word or phrase has the meaning which it has only as a member of a constellation of related meanings.”16 As such, meanings sustain their justifiability and intelligibility only in relation to other meanings, and for this reason, sustained communal usage over time within networks of culturally related meanings or “codes” is thus itself an index of semantic intelligibility. To speak of linguistic meanings as justified is to speak of them as a logical phenomenon. Among the chief tasks of Dewey’s Logic is the attempt to identify the connection between meaning, logic, and situational use. Logic, Dewey maintains, “arise[s] [with]in operations of inquiry,”17 which are internal to the cultural generation of meaning. Stated differently, meanings, like natural habits, are outcomes of adaptive processes in pursuit of more integrative ways of being in lived situations. When we appreciate that for Dewey meanings are products of symbolic relations, chief among which are 14 15 16 17

Ibid., 82. Ibid., 50–51. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 4

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words and propositions, it becomes clear that in Dewey’s account, meanings are intellectual outcomes or the constitutive elements of knowledge. If, however, meanings are intellectual products of social inquiry, then social groups will inevitably develop common meanings that remain functional for them in their situation, what Dewey refers to as the collection of “common sense” propositions. More specifically, common sense propositions are claims about practical activities performed in relation to ordinary social situations and which enable social groups to better “use and enjoy” their environment. As Dewey explains, common sense claims are products of common sense inquiries which occur “for the sake of settlement of some issue of use and enjoyment. . . . [T]hey are such as constantly arise in the development of the young as they learn to make their way in the physical and social environments in which the live; they occur and recur in the life-activity of every adult. . . .”18 Akin to a culture’s storehouse of practical wisdom, common sense plays a “regulative and normative”19 role in a given group’s culture, in that propositions may be evaluated according to whether they make “good sense” or represent “good judgment.”20 In this way, common sense claims function as minimal conditions of cultural intelligibility. But though common sense claims represent cultural custom, they are not merely conventional, but rather possess logical validity, or, in Dewey’s language, “warranted assertability.”21 In Dewey’s account, determinations of warranted assertability are achieved by inquiry, which, hearkening back to the model of organic behavior, amounts to practical tests of a proposition’s situational value. Common sense claims too may possess warranted assertability by virtue of their existential or situational value. However, this correlation between logical validity and situational utility entails that what count as common sense claims are always in principle subject to correction. “The settlement of a particular situation by a particular inquiry is no guarantee that that settled conclusion will always remain settled . . . there is no belief so settled as not to be exposed to further inquiry. . . .”22 Below, I will provide details of Dewey’s account of the process of inquiry. Suffice it to say here that the common sense claims arise through 18 Ibid., 102–103. 19 Ibid., 62. 20 Ibid., 103. 21 Ibid., 11. 22 Ibid.

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informal and/or practical everyday modes of inquiry. Since common sense claims arise directly from existential situations of social need, they acquire their status by virtue of what Dewey calls their “qualitative”23 pay-off. The purpose of practical propositions of common sense is to directly facilitate social operations of environmental use and consumption. Consequently, the test of whether or not a given proposition satisfies this purpose is whether or not the proposition identifies qualities and ways of approaching these qualities that help social groups navigate a given situation. For example, taboos against eating certain foods identify certain food qualities as negative thereby directing social behavior. To the extent that such judgments prove adaptive for the communities who act upon them, they become part of the culture’s eating customs and assume prima facie warranted assertability. Stated otherwise, common sense claims are tested by the extent to which they are informally adopted up by the community of language users. Common sense meanings, Dewey says, “hang together not in virtue of their examined relationship to one another, but because they are current in the same set of group habits and expectations.”24 Moreover, once admitted into the pool of common sense claims, these propositional customs frequently sustain long histories of use. This, of course, does not mean that with changes in the integrative conditions of social groups, common sense claims cannot fall into disuse or lose their intelligibility status. To this point Dewey says that, “one has only to note the enormous differences in the contents and methods of common sense in modes of life that are respectively dominantly nomadic, agricultural and industrial”25 in order to see how “much that was once taken without question as a matter of common sense is forgotten or actively condemned.”26 Of course, common sense is not the only kind of knowledge cultures produce. Dewey distinguishes between common sense and science, where the former refers to everyday practical knowledge generated for its utility whereas the latter refers to theoretical knowledge developed as an end in itself. Like Nature and Norm, Dewey’s Logic arises out of the ashes of the modern fact-value divide, or what in Dewey’s terms is the dramatic and damaging schism between theoretical and practical knowledge. As a philosopher, Dewey is not only concerned to identify the logical conditions 23 Ibid., 63. 24 Ibid., 85. 25 Ibid., 108. 26 Ibid.

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of the possibility of common sense, but he is equally concerned to repair what he takes to be the modern tendency to alienate the theoretical sciences from their common sense or practical value.27 As Dewey argues, the central characteristic of “every phase and aspect of modern life: religious, economic, political, legal and even artistic”28 is the “split”29 between science and common sense. Dewey maintains that the alienation of theoretical from practical judgments is not a product of modern science itself. If anything, modern science, unlike its Greek predecessor, deals directly with and is “reanimated by contact and interaction with just the things of ordinary experience.”30 Modern science embraces and directly concerns itself with “the ordinary processes that had long been at home in the arts, weakening and intensifying, combining and separating, dissolving and evaporation, precipitating and infusing, heating and cooling.  .  .  .”31 Neither science nor its experimental methods are the source of the divide between science and common sense.32 Rather, the problem arises because it has taken communities a long time to apprehend the meaning and value of scientific discoveries for those who develop, use, and live with them. For Dewey, apprehending the meaning of a discourse of knowledge for those who use it requires a transcendental logic of socio-environmental integration, which would account for the intelligibility of knowledge claims by relating them to their existential matrix. Therefore, resolving the modern gap between theoretical and practical knowledge requires an account of the “unified logical method”33 implicit in both. For while modern scientific practice is inseparable from the life and work of culture, the science of 27 For a contemporary assessment of Dewey’s contribution to developments in the philosophy of science see Matthew J. Brown, “John Dewey’s Logic of Science,” The Journal of the International Society for the History of the Philosophy of Science 2, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 258–306. 28 Dewey, Inquiry, 79. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 123. 31 Ibid., 74. 32 Not only did Dewey refuse to identify science as the problem facing contemporary philosophy, he recognized it as an invaluable guide to the nature of inquiry. As F. Thomas Burke argues, “Dewey [actually] contends that philosophy must begin with the methods of scientific inquiry.” See F. Thomas Burke, D. Micah Hester, Robert B. Talisse, eds, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Dewey’s Logical Theory: New Studies and Interpretations (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), xii. 33 Dewey, Inquiry, 79.

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logic has been slow to apprehend this. Instead, it has perpetuated a logic that treats mathematical, logical, or scientific axioms as self-evident and available to human beings by means of a “faculty that had the power of direct apprehension of ‘truths’ that were axiomatic in the sense of being self-evident, self-verifying [and/or] the necessary grounds of all  .  .  .  reasoning.”34 Only now, some nearly three centuries after the rise of modern science, do we recognize the time it has taken for philosophy, culture, and science alike to apprehend the role culture has in guiding these developments and determining their value for the life of the communities who use them and the logical implications of this role. To speak of the logical unity of science and common sense is to speak of their existential situatedness. “Discourse that is not controlled by reference to a situation is not discourse, but a meaningless jumble  .  .  .  without its controlling presence, there is no way to determine the relevancy, weight, or coherence of any designated distinction or relation.”35 Both emerge as agents of socio-environmental problem solving. As Dewey explains, “in the first place, science takes its departure of necessity from the qualitative objects, processes, and instruments of the common sense world of use and concrete enjoyments and sufferings.”36 Whether one considers that astronomy developed out of “primitive methods of keeping track of time [required for] . . . agricultural groups with reference to sowing, tilling and repeating . . .”37 or that medicine is a response to “the practical needs . . . [of] healing the sick and dealing with wounds,”38 the relationship between science and communal efforts to contend with the demands of reintegrating with their respective environments is clear and compelling. From here “analytic geometry and calculus became primary modes of conceptual response as quantity, change, and motion were found to be not irrational accidents but the keys with which to solve the mysteries of natural existence.”39 Dewey adds that as “information about things, their properties and behaviours, is amassed .  .  .”40 scientific inquiry into these matters and their relation to one another can develop “independently of any particular immediate 34 Ibid., 23. 35 Ibid., 114. 36 Ibid., 71. 37 Ibid., 72. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 124. 40 Ibid., 71.

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application”41 while retaining an indirect relation to ordinary life-activities. Even so, Dewey insists that, “scientific subject-matter and procedures grow out of the direct problems and methods of common sense.  .  .  .”42 At the heart of the logical unity between common sense and science is therefore the shared “pattern of inquiry” operative in both discourses.

B. Habituation, Disuse, and Rehabituation: The Social Determination of Warranted Assertability In Dewey’s view, therefore, science is first and foremost a problem-solving activity. It solves problems that arise from the existential demands of social integration and the common sense habits that address them, inevitably altering these conditions in the process. The modern failure to appreciate the feedback loop between common sense and science reflects a failure to appreciate the connection between the rational intelligibility of language and our organic and cultural efforts at environmental integration. Dewey advocates a “reform of logic”43 that overcomes the limits of formal Aristotelian logic, which sought to purify logic from “all existential taint [but which] has become so formalistic that it applies only to itself.”44 In response to the failure of science to solve the problems that provoke it, Dewey argues that we must investigate the human, socio-environmental shape of science and develop “a unified logical method . . . [that reflects] the fundamental unity of the structure of inquiry in common sense and science . . . [and appreciate how their difference [concerns] the problems with which they are directly concerned, not . . . their respective logics.”45 Dewey’s account of the logic of organic and cultural problem solving, what he calls the “pattern of inquiry,” offers one plausible and useful description of what I take to be the constitutive elements of an immanent critique of the fact-value paradigm. I have argued that the need for immanent critique emerges from a pragmatic apprehension of the functional failure of key Jewish and Christian claims to display their intelligibility to communities that once regarded these claims as intelligible. Immanent critique is a transcendental investigation into the conditions of the 41 Ibid., 110. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 81. 44 Ibid., 131. 45 Ibid.

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possibility of claims becoming intelligible for these communities. Dewey’s logic of inquiry presents intelligibility as a matter of the functional fitness or warranted assertability of a claim relative to particular environmental and social conditions. His analysis of the elements of inquiry fleshes out the conditions, process, and criteria by means of which claims achieve warranted assertability. Dewey’s account helps identify what a transcendental investigation into the the relationship between the “who,” “how,” and “when” of the intelligibility of knowledge claims can look like. It provides Jewish and Christian thinkers with a useful framework for determining how to generate logically valid claims, how these claims lose logical intelligibility, and how a formerly habituated claim now in disuse might be rehabituated into a community’s pool of intelligible judgments. Inquiry, in Dewey’s view, is activated by a situation that is unsettled with respect to a particular issue of integration, at a particular time and for a particular group of people who experience it. Consequently, while a problematic situation is registered within someone’s mind, her consciousness of a problem is an index of an existential reality, the lack of integration within her environment. As Dewey says, if “we are doubtful, [this is because] the situation is doubtful.”46 And if we are doubtful because a situation is doubtful, the “we” who is doubtful is the particular “we” for whom there is a disturbance in their particular situation, what Dewey calls the “locus of disequilibrium.”47 For this reason, an unsettled situation is an elemental condition for the intelligibility of judgments. Knowledge claims that propose resolutions to situational disturbances possess logical validity by virtue of their pragmatic capacity to resolve a situational disturbance; though as such, their validity extends only to those persons for whom they effect this consequence, at this time or to persons in the past or the future who meet with similar conditions and similar effects. But how do judgments arise? What are the mechanisms and criteria by means of which knowledge claims are vetted? What characteristics do knowledge claims have such that they do resolve problematic situations for particular persons in particular circumstances? How do knowledge claims work for the persons who inquire after them?

46 Ibid., 105–106. 47 Ibid., 170.

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Judgments that earn the attribution of warranted assertability are products of inquiry provoked by an unsettled situation. Like other organisms, the challenge of disequilibrium activates our search for a solution. Unlike other organisms, however, human beings do not search for solutions by instinct alone, but rather we can direct our search by identifying the parameters of a problem (what Dewey calls “observation” of the “facts of the case”) and then proposing lines of investigation (generating hypothetical programs of inquiry that Dewey calls “ideas”) . According to Dewey, an adaptive or effective response to a problem minimally requires an accurate awareness of the context within which the problem emerges. Effective inquiry begins, therefore, with observation, an awareness of “the terms of the problem, because they are conditions that must be reckoned with or taken account of in any relevant solution that is proposed.”48 Equipped with a working account of the context-specific objects and relations within which the problem arises, inquirers are in a position to introduce avenues of investigation by identifying questions which, if examined further, may yield a working solution to the problem at hand and hence a warranted judgment. In Dewey’s language, they propose “ideas” or “hypotheses.” For Dewey, an “idea” is not an item within consciousness, but rather a practical program of action, such as “let us investigate x object or condition and see what we find” or “let us consider focusing more attention on y object to identify its unique function in particular situation z,” or, “what if we perform an experiment wherein a object is put into relation with b object so that we can learn more about both of them.” In each of these instances, we see an inquirer deploying her hypothetical reasoning to direct investigations whose conclusions or findings may contribute new knowledge claims or judgments in light of which a formerly unresolvable problem can now be resolved. Consequently, inquiry requires coordination between observation and ideas. While the potential success of an idea is partly contingent upon an accurate account of the facts at hand, the opposite is the case as well. Knowing which facts should be attended to with respect to resolving the particular problem encountered requires the analytical reflection and predictive imagination of the researchers who develop ideas to guide investigative work. Facts must be operational or, we might say, pragmatically relevant. Determinations of the potential pragmatic relevance of facts are made by 48 Ibid., 173.

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inquirers insofar as they propose ideas about possible lines of investigation. Facts “are selected and described, . . . for a purpose . . . namely statement of the problem involved in such a way that its material both indicates a meaning relevant to resolution of the difficulty and serves to test its worth and validity.”49 Facts therefore have logical potential only insofar as they are operationalized by inquirers who can hypothesize about their potential for resolving existential disturbances. Drawing on Dewey’s account of the elements of inquiry, we can identify four key plausible criteria that judgments of knowledge must meet in order to achieve warranted assertability, or in the language of this analysis, satisfy the transcendental conditions of sustaining meaning for a particular community who holds particular claims in a particular setting and time. If deployed to help guide the work of immanent critique now required of Jewish and Christian thinkers, these criteria can be used to outline minimal considerations for determining the functional fitness of Jewish and Christian claims. 1) A valid knowledge claim must be directly related to an unsettled situation or situation of need. For this reason, Jewish and Christian thinkers should be able to identify what unsettled situation a particular claim addresses. 2) A valid knowledge claim must contribute to resolving the problem addressed as evidenced by the use of the claim. Therefore, Jewish and Christian thinkers should be able offer accounts of how a claim resolves a problematic situation and offer a healthy sample of occasions of the use of the claim in question. 3) A valid knowledge claim must be inferentially related to other already established knowledge claims relevant to the situation in question. As such, Jewish and Christian thinkers need to account for the logical function of a claim, typically by analyzing its inferential role. 4) A valid knowledge claim must relate to existing facts that surround that situation and/or not be entirely incommensurate with other common sense judgments held by the particular community, and not strictly those directly relevant to the situation in question. Stated otherwise, Jewish and Christian thinkers seeking to vet 49 Ibid., 179.

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or test the intelligibility of a particular claim can justifiably cite conflicts between said claim and other common sense judgments held by the community as working evidence to doubt the logical validity of the proposition in review. Reflection upon their claims in light of these minimal conditions of logical intelligibility can help Jewish and Christian thinkers engage in a successful exercise of immanent critique. Beyond this, Jewish and Christian thinkers should also be able to identify the discrete elements of a positively vetted proposition or judgment. A claim with warranted assertability is a proven correlation between an object (“fact” of observation) and an idea. In more formal language, a knowledge claim is an intellectually achieved habit of correlating a fact (a “subject”) with an idea (a “predicate” or particular way of holding or taking that subject), which by virtue of the changed situation it effects, is taken up as a “decisive directive of future activities”50 with reliable existential consequences. Consequently, a knowledge claim has objective validity not by virtue of representing a given object, but by virtue of the practical conjunction between a fact (or “subject”) and an idea (or “predicate”). According to Dewey, it is the role of the copula to represent this conjoining function. The copula is a “name for the complex of operations by means of which a) certain existences [that is, facts] are restrictively selected to delimit a problem and provide evidential testing material, and by which b) certain conceptual meanings, ideas, hypotheses are used as characterizing predicates.”51 In short, a judgment is a pragmatically effective proposition that summarizes the results of inquiry and therefore can be used habitually until circumstances suggest otherwise. The above model offers one viable description of the work of immanent critique, the mandate for which arises from Jewish and Christian thinkers’ urgent need to respond to the theoplitical problem, that is, to determine how specific claims are intelligible for their communities at particular times and in particular situations. At any given time, certain claims will be in use and others in, or approaching, disuse. As well, more often than not, a community’s religious claims will appear somewhere across a broad spectrum of use and disuse since a community’s habitus or way of living presents members with complex networks of overlapping situations and 50 Ibid., 193. 51 Ibid., 210.

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conditions within which one and the same claim can achieve and/or lose functional fitness. Consequently, “doubts” concerning the logical fitness of any given claim need not result in the total dismissal or rejection of a claim. Frequently, as Dewey explains, “one indispensable condition of controlled inquiry is readiness and alertness to submit even the best grounded conclusions of prior inquiry to reexamination with reference to their applicability to new problems.”52 In light of this account of immanent critique, which I have enhanced through a functional invocation of Dewey’s thick description of the logic of inquiry, we can appreciate why immanent critique affords a tenable strategy for resolving the theopolitical problem. Arising as it does from the ashes of the potential dissolution of key Jewish and Christian claims, immanent critique is a transcendental approach to logical validity which does apply to and can be used in the assessment of Jewish and Christian claims in and for the current philosophical situation. As we may recall, this project began with two primary goals: 1) to repair the failure to demonstrate how Jewish and Christian claims could relate to other knowledge claims about the world (what I call the “theopolitical problem”), and 2) to retain Jewish and Christian thinkers’ tendency to valorize the modern scientific focus on inquiry about the world. Immanent critique repairs the apparent divide between theopolitical claims and claims about the world because it itself embodies a community’s commitment to reflecting upon the relation between its theopolitical claims and other claims it makes about the world. It makes this demand because it recognizes no fundamental difference between the logical validity of theopolitical and scientific claims. This logical reorientation in hand, Jewish and Christian thinkers are equipped and authorized to identify the intelligibility conditions of their claims and avoid the multiple threats of meaninglessness, acosmism, utopianism, and dogmatism characteristic of their adherence to the fact-value logic. At this juncture, it is important to address the worry that this appeal to communal practices of meaning is vulnerable to the charge of relativism. This charge is easily dismissed, since my accounts shows that the conditions of the possibility of logical validity that emerge from immanent critique are not exhausted by an individual or community’s subjective determinations of meaning. Communal practices of meaning-generation interact with a 52 Ibid., 224.

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changing world. Without such interaction, there would be no stimulus for the labor of reflection upon a community’s inferential habits; once established, habits of meaning would persist indefinitely and the intelligibility of key claims could never be called into question. The fact that claims can and do get called into question—the fact that there are times when their meaning is not immediately apparent—indicates the contingency of these habits within a changing environment. To speak of the possibility of claims having or not having intelligibility is to recognize that claims can really be justified, even if their status as justified is temporal and therefore provisional only. Conversely, it is the very contingency of claims that requires communities to continually engage in the accompanying (time-specific) activity of justification. This is not to say that all claims must be subject to rational reflection all the time. It is, however, to say that a condition of the possibility of a claim’s intelligibility is that it could be subject to a process of justificatory reflection that would present an account of the current conditions of its intelligibility. The fact that a claim remains in use within a community signals its implicit confidence that it can account for its conditions of use, whereas doubts regarding a claim’s utility signal the need for explicit reflection to illuminate the currently non-evident conditions of its intelligibility. Certainly not all claims can be redeemed in this way. Such claims should and eventually will go out of circulation. Undoubtedly, communities frequently hold on to claims long after they sustain their meaning, but claims with no social utility will eventually perish from lack of use or polemical defeat. Immanent critique not only repairs the fact-value divide by giving rise to a new account of the process of determining logical validity that appreciates the rational contingency of a community’s claims. It also does so in a way that continues to valorize the Enlightenment’s attention to worldly inquiry and knowledge acquisition without demoting the logical status of theopolitical claims. For if processes of justification are predicated upon the contingency of claims, this means that acts of justificatory reflection amount to acts of inquiry into the two-fold objective conditions of claims— “ideas” (the inferential relations between claims) and “facts” (the particular circumstances or environmental conditions in which communities use their claims). In this respect, claims are contingent by virtue of their use in the “world” within which communities operate when by “world” we mean the composite of how local temporal and environmental conditions are taken-up and reflected in changing patterns of semantic practice. Contra

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the unintelligibility, acosmism, utopianism, and polemicism of arbitrarily anchored Jewish and Christian claims, immanent critique thus produces a keen attention to the world as it is lived in and by communities in their linguistic habits.

III. Case Study: Peter Ochs and Nicholas Adams Among the central claims presented in Nature and Norm is that appropriation of the fact-value paradigm generates surprising points of overlap between thinkers whose thematic commitments vary significantly. Thus far, I have demonstrated this correlation in four different case studies comparing the work of a) Rosenzweig and Kant, b) Spinoza and Hobbes, c) Buber and Schmitt, and d) Strauss and Barth. The goal in the current chapter is to present a final case study to demonstrate how a post-fact-value turn towards immanent critique in two thinkers with different thematic commitments produces relief from symptoms associated with arbitrary anchoring. In light of the above account of immanent critique, it is now clear that a post-fact-value Jewish or Christian thinker will acknowledge the threat of arbitrary anchoring and recognize the need to engage in a transcendental analysis of the conditions of the possibility of themselves or their communities making intelligible or logically valid claims. In Dewey’s language, the thinker must understand knowledge as the pragmatic means by which human beings as social organisms develop intellectual habits that enable them to adapt to and therefore live in their changing environment. She must appreciate that logical intelligibility arises from determinations of the “for whom,” “how,” and “when” a judgment is intelligible or achieves warranted assertability. The following case study focuses on Peter Ochs’s contemporary Jewish thought and Nicholas Adams’s Christian theology. Like the case studies above, these two thinkers present different thematic interests. Ochs is a post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher concerned with preserving the Jewish tradition in the wake of this crisis. By contrast, Nicholas Adams is a Christian theologian whose work attends to the impact of German idealism on Christian theology. Despite their differences, however, both Ochs and Adams recognize the need for immanent critique in Jewish and Christian thought, and in both there is clear evidence of relief from the characteristic symptoms of the fact-value logic.

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Peter Ochs While Ochs’s recent work has focused largely on the deployment of scriptural text study as a practical tool for the work of inter-religious conflict resolution,53 the roots of Ochs’s “Scriptural Reasoning” can be found in his work as a Jewish philosopher. It is therefore somewhat ironic that Ochs is not widely recognized as a distinctively Jewish thinker by other contemporary Jewish philosophers. This, I suspect, is a result of the fact that unlike most modern and contemporary Jewish thinkers, Ochs’s work does not construct a conceptual system of Jewish thinking that builds upon foundational assertions. Rather, Ochs documents how Jewish thinkers think by reflecting upon the socio-historical conditions within which a particular Jewish thinker works, identifying the relation between those conditions and the particular hypotheses or judgments that thinker offers, and examining the responses to that thinkers’ work by other members of the Jewish thought community. We see these elements in Ochs’s Renewing the Covenant, a tribute to the work of Eugene Borowitz, in his commentaries on the work of Michael Fishbane, Steven Fraade, and David Weiss Halivni, and in his transcriptions of individual Jewish voices in “Textual Reasoning” sessions. Taken together, Ochs’s writings on contemporary Jewish thought expose his awareness of the need for immanent critique or a transcendental examination of the “who,” “how,” and “when” of Jewish thinking. Like Dewey, Ochs recognizes the connection between scientific inquiry and common sense situational problem solving. Recall that for Dewey, common sense beliefs are beliefs that support a community’s ongoing integration with its environment. Similarly for Ochs, modern Jewish thought is in a state of disequilibrium that threatens its survival. It is arbitrarily anchored and cannot secure meaningful claims for the Jewish communities who need them. As such, contemporary Jewish thought, he explains, must morph into “a search for ways of responding to contemporary religious and communal crises [that also illuminate how] current disciplines of [Jewish] enquiry fail to respond to these crises and [signal] that those disciplines must be repaired so that they will respond.”54

53 Cf. Peter Ochs, Religion without Violence (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2019). 54 Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene, eds., Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 292.

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More specifically, Ochs maintains that contemporary Jewish thought inherits what he calls a “dislocation from the speech community”55 that results from the conceptualism of modern Western philosophy. This project has shown not only that modern Western thinkers take the logical prioritization of natural scientific knowledge to be self-evident, but also that critical reactions to the fact-value divide tend not to challenge this appeal to self-evidence, instead merely installing different (non-naturalist) propositions as their own purportedly self-evident foundations. In Ochs’s account, this reactive chain effect inevitably displays a polemical or “dyadic logic  .  .  .  that generates comparable sets of antagonistic postures regardless of the goal of one’s argument.”56 Consequently, modern philosophy, in Ochs’s account, is characterized by the attempt to ground thought in self-evident propositions which are nonetheless, “dislocated [from] the pragmatic norms through which language discloses its full meaning”57 and remain disassociated from the pragmatic needs of people in their particular socio-historical contexts. Not surprisingly, like Nature and Norm, Ochs bemoans the often tragic irrelevance of Jewish thought systems rooted in appeals to self-evident propositions and recognizes the need for Jewish thinkers to investigate precisely how Jewish thought can become relevant for the communities who need it in the here and now, and for the foreseeable future insofar as current philosophical conditions remain in place. To remain viable, Jewish thought must embark upon the task of repairing its own condition of disequilibrium vis-à-vis the generation of knowledge claims that living Jewish communities deem relevant. Stated otherwise, it exercises immanent critique by applying the practical “rule of common sense”58 that when it comes to the pursuit of knowledge, inquiry must judge claims by the “logical corollary to Jesus’s words, “Ye shall know them by their fruit.”59 For Ochs, the philosophical turn to common sense is the embrace of Charles Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, that to understand the meaning of a concept one must, “consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we 55 Peter Ochs, “Torah, Language and Philosophy,” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 18, no. 3 (January 1985): 115. 56 Peter Ochs, Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2011), 7. 57 Ochs, “ Torah, Language and Philosophy,” 117. 58 Ochs, Another Reformation, 12. 59 Ibid.

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conceive the object of our conception to have.”60 The pragmatic maxim is itself a common sense judgment insofar as it requires thinkers to refer their claims to their realm of action, without which their thought systems will ultimately prove maladaptive and their central claims perish over time. Like Dewey, Ochs sees judgments as practical rules of action, and following Peirce, he distinguishes two ways that these intellectual habits can be indeterminate: generality and vagueness. In an article, “Post-Liberalism as Wisdom: Ochs on Vagueness and Inquiry,” Mark James explains the distinction this way: In terms of the pragmatic maxim, a general sign affords the interpreter an arbitrary freedom to further determine its meaning by making clear that some facts and consequences are irrelevant with respect to action in accordance with its truth. If “man is mortal” is true, then each individual person will die, irrespective of her other characteristics. The truth of this sign leaves its interpreter free to apply the predicate “mortal” to any arbitrary human being. By contrast, a vague sign restricts the interpreter’s freedom because even if it is true, a vague sign does not determine the consequences of its truth sufficiently for action in particular circumstances. “A man whom I could mention is conceited”—without further information, one cannot know which man the speaker has in view, and so one cannot fully adjust one’s actions to the consequences of his being conceited . . . a sign is vague “in so far as it reserves further determination to be made in some other conceivable sign.”61

A general sign fixes its content in advance while leaving indeterminate the particular situations in which that context applies. By contrast, the more vague a judgment is, the more it requires that its user exercise interpretive effort for the judgment to be operational. As such, a vague judgment is simultaneously difficult to doubt and contingent upon its application within particular linguistic occasions and contexts. As well, the more vague a judgment is, the more it exposes the regulative or pragmatic character of judgement determination. Vague judgments like “you will know them by their fruits” are therefore both the 60 Charles Peirce, “How To Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878): 286–302. 61 Mark Randall James, “Post-Liberalism as Wisdom: Ochs on Vagueness and Inquiry,” in Signs of Salvation: A Festschrift for Peter Ochs, ed. Mark Randall James and Randi Rashkover (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, forthcoming).

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most reparatively valuable over time, and the least immediately operational, since they require the highest degree of interpretive determination in order to be relevant or functional, that is, the more vague they are, the higher degree of interpretive determination they require. Consequently, for Ochs as for Peirce, the greater the degree of crisis or situational disequilibrium experienced by a given community, the greater the vagueness of the reparative judgment to which the community must appeal, in this case, the pragmatic maxim. Dewey’s analysis of the pattern of inquiry helps explain this correlation. If the process of inquiry is activated by situational disintegration, higher levels of disintegration will signal more widespread failings of community held judgments and lower levels of disintegration will signal higher degrees of confidence in the functional utility of existing claims. Reparative judgments offered in situations of high disintegration must be vague, since clarity is identical with communal confidence about the norms for applying a judgment. Stated differently, communities experiencing disintegration first consult existing intellectual habits for strategies to repair the current problem. Early efforts at problem-solving might involve simply rearranging existing facts or performing a relatively simple experiment involving existing facts that can open up new facts that effectively navigate the community back to a settled state. The bigger the problem, however, the less these initial exercises of reinterpretation will suffice to resolve the issue, and the more ambitious, open-ended, and imaginative the work of inquiry will need to be. For this reason, the community must rely upon more vague intellectual practices to guide this work. In Ochs’s view, contemporary Jewish thought is in the latter situation. Like Nature and Norm, Ochs maintains that Jewish thought has reached a point of malfunctioning altogether.62 It is no wonder that in Ochs’s view, contemporary Jewish thought must reorient itself vis-à-vis the pragmatic maxim, which, as a vague judgment, can activate an ambitious and generative program of inquiry into the functional fitness of its current claims. Since the pragmatic maxim requires thinkers to determine the practical meaning of a claim relative to particular contexts, it may be understood as 62 In Reasoning after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy, Ochs asserts that, “Judaism can no longer be articulated within the dominant paradigm of Western philosophy, that is, the paradigms that link the works of Descartes, Kant, existentialists, phenomenologists, and more recent Anglo-American analysists” (Steven Kepnes, Peter Ochs, and Robert Gibbs, Reasoning after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy [New York: Routledge, 2018], 1).

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a call to engage in a transcendental reflection upon the “who,” “when,” and “how” of knowledge claims. Consequently, Ochs’s appeal to the pragmatic maxim is tantamount to the exercise of immanent critique. For Ochs, such an appeal reflects a deep recognition of and sense of gratitude for the interpretability of the environment within which Jewish communities live since the environment provides the situational context and the material for the common sense claims by means of which communities preserve themselves. For Jewish communities, this environment is the Jewish life-world or, as Ochs calls it, “the Torah of the people Israel”63 or the sum total of Jewish speech-habits, linguistic contexts, behaviors, and texts. Like Dewey, Ochs maintains that a return to common sense means a return to the everyday meanings used by one’s natural speech community. Jewish philosophers, he says, need to be redirect[ed]  .  .  .  back to the speech communities they left  .  .  .  this means first, recognizing that their philosophical activity is . . . an effort to replace the pragmatic dimension of language they’ve lost . . . [and] this dimension is revealed only in the particular form it takes in a particular speech community . . . for them, the Torah of the people Israel.64

Throughout his career, Ochs has used the term “Textual Reasoning” (TR) to refer to the reorienting of Jewish philosophy to its common sense resources and its on-going reassessment of its judgments in relation to the particular communities who use them. As he explains, “the aboriginal context for Textual Reasoning is pragmatic on two levels. On one level, it is a search for ways of responding to contemporary religious and communal crises. On a second level, it is a claim that current disciplines of enquiry fail to respond to these crises.”65 Elsewhere he states that, “communal speech dislocations are repaired through modifications in the pragmatic dimension of language: adjustments in the community’s rules of behavior.”66 Therefore, for Ochs Textual Reasoning is Jewish philosophy “characterized [as] . . . the progressive definition of Torah as some system of semiotic

63 Ochs, “Torah, Language and Philosophy,” 119. 64 Ibid., 119. 65 Peter Ochs, “Textual Reasoning as a Model for Jewish thought After the Shoah,” in Filosofia e Critica della Filisofia nel Pensiero Ebraico, ed. P. Amodio, G. Giannini, and G. Lissa (Napoli: Giannini Editore, 2004), 235. 66 Ochs, “Torah, Language and Philosophy,” 120.

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norms.”67 In the terms deployed here, Textual Reasoning is one expression of immanent critique as a post-fact-value performance of Jewish thought. We identified above four required features of a transcendental inquiry into the “who,” “how,” and “when” of a community’s knowledge claims: that 1) the inquiry must directly pertain to a specific problem of socio-environmental integration, 2) the knowledge generated by the inquiry should directly address the problem at hand, 3) knowledge claims should be inferentially related to other existing judgments concerning the situation at hand, and 4) knowledge claims should not stand in dramatic tension with or threaten to dramatically undermine other indirectly related common sense claims held by the community. In his essay “Scripture and Text,” Ochs offers a review of the features of Textual Reasoning that satisfies the above four criteria. First and foremost, Textual Reasoning is a communal exercise in pragmatic repair. As Ochs explains, The practice of TR differs . . . from other most recognized ways of conducting Jewish philosophy or Western philosophy. First, its inquiry is communal; the principles and premises of TR inquiry are generated not by individual practices of study, but by practices of a group . . . [As well,] a TR fellowship assumes that its principles of inquiry apply only to the specific project at hand . . . its reparative work is judged by its fruits. Projects of TR inquiry are offered for the sake of contributing to the repair of some identifiable ill.68

Textual Reasoning is thus an activity consciously performed by a particular community (who) trying to contend with a particular problem (how) in a particular time (when) that generates a new functional way of acting. More specifically, Textual Reasoning is a communal practice of inquiry that investigates, tests, experiments with, and generates new judgments from the existing pool of common sense knowledge claims (that is, “Torah”) of the particular Jewish community in question. For Ochs as for Dewey, existing common sense claims consist in networks of intellectual habits or ways of deploying language for the sake of socio-environmental integration. On the one hand, activated by a problem, Textual Reasoning activities signal the practical inadequacy of existing knowledge claims. On 67 Ibid. 68 Peter Ochs, “Scripture and Text,” in The Cambridge History of Modern Jewish Philosophy, ed. Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman, and David Novak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 196.

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the other hand, as a common sense mode of inquiry, Textual Reasoning also presupposes pre-existing knowledge claims both formerly and currently accepted as functionally fit with respect to other situational demands. As the resources the community has to work with, they constitute the starting point for any new investigation. This is what Dewey meant when he spoke of the primacy of observation. Even demands for new knowledge presuppose existing knowledge, and so inquiry inevitably involves some kind of investigation into, experiment upon, or refashioning of an existing knowledge pool. Put differently, inquiry is a corrective process that presupposes an initial pre-understanding, and for this reason, it always has a hermeneutical character. This is why Ochs understands Textual Reasoning as an “interpretive practice that can generate guidelines for reparative work”69 by discovering new intellectual habits relevant to resolving the particular point of situational disequilibrium at hand. In sum, Textual Reasoning is a hermeneutical practice of Torah study that illuminates intellectual habits or judgments that sustain functional fitness for a particular community. Consequently, TR is both hermeneutical and philosophical. TR is hermeneutical in the sense that it always develops new intellectual strategies in relation to the intellectual habits implicit in rabbinic and scriptural texts. TR is philosophical insofar it involves inquiry into the justificatory status of Jewish knowledge claims. In “Scripture and Text,” Ochs describes this as the corrective process of seeking revisable “first principles”: [TR] fellowships generate first principles in two ways: either philosophic inquiry may emerge directly out of formational study, in which case the . . . principles remain embedded in the inquiry and are not necessarily identified, or, reflecting on its formational study, the group may observe certain features of its performance that it would like to isolate and adopt as finite sets of principles to guide a specific project of inquiry . . . [these] principles are context-or project specific. TR neither eschews its capacity to frame a ratio . . . nor presumes that its first principles . . . are self-evident, self-justified, or of universal import. The minimal requirements for such principles are that they emerge out of disciplined readings of rabbinic and scriptural sources that are applicable to the project at hand, and that they are refined as needed in the process of inquiry.70 69 Ochs, “Scripture and Text,” 197. 70 Ibid., 196.

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As a reparative exercise, Textual Reasoning can provide a variety of problem-solving interventions, including: 1) identifying judgments or claims in semantic crisis, 2) identifying the “facts of the case,” the textual or common sense network of claims directly implicated by the claims in question, 3) rehabituating formerly fit claims, 4) determining that certain claims are irredeemable with respect to their functional fitness, or 5) developing new knowledge claims in response to changing communal circumstances (such as instances where a community encounters a new challenge and needs to introduce a new concept into the tradition). Frequently, Ochs uses the rabbinic term derash to convey Textual Reasoning’s hybrid practice of transcendental reflection and text study. In an article “Textual Reasoning as a Model for Jewish Thought after the Shoah,” Ochs offers a thick description of an online Textual Reasoning exchange concerning a communal problem concerning the mechitsa, the physical separation of men and women during prayer services, that exemplifies many of the above modes of intervention. According to Ochs, one of the participants expressed the problem thus: Anyone who lives in the complex web of Jewish life and practice has the right and obligation to voice concern or even outrage over what they deem immoral in the tradition. Moreover, those trained in philosophy have even more of an obligation to argue for or against mechitsa. . . . As a man I can say that the discussion about mechitsa is not a women’s issue—it is an issue about religious community.71

In turn, other participants began to contribute to the conversation, equally motivated by the community problems associated with the practical notion of mechitsa. Several participants introduced rabbinic texts that discuss the mechitsa. As one participant said, “OK, since you asked for it, here is the main Talmudic source for mechitsa, from B. Sukkah 51b–52a. . . .”72 With some textual facts of the case in hand, participants began to experiment with different approaches to these facts in the hopes of addressing problems in the community of those participating in the conversation. For example, one participant discovered an underappreciated connection between the mechitsa and a particular ritual occasion at the Temple, what B. Sukkah 71 Peter Ochs, “Textual Reasoning as a Model,” 6. 72 Ibid., 11.

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51a–51b describes as, “the Joyous Celebration of the Water Libation . . . on the night following the first festival of [Sukkot] they went down to the Women’s Courtyard [Ezrat Nashim] and made a great tikkun.”73 In this instance, the reader’s particular appreciation for the relation between this Temple occasion and the mechitsa generated a new reflective inference, namely that, the discussion in the Sukkah does not, in fact, extend the once-a-year separation of men and women in the Temple to the synagogues.  .  .  .  The textual evidence, rather than warranting the mechitsa, indicates that it was not halakhically grounded, but only a medieval custom [minhag], raised only more recently to a symbol of Orthodox practice.74

With this set of hermeneutical insights, this reader demonstrated what it might mean for a derashic interpretation to both: 1) rehabituate a claim and 2) challenge its current functional fitness. The reader’s focus on the association between the Temple occasion and the mechitsa practice performs a new intellectual habit that lends intelligibility to the concept in question. By the same token, the intelligibility of this rehabituation (its link to the Temple) also calls into question the fitness of the received concept of mechitsa for this particular contemporary community of readers. Each of the various activities performed in the context of TR presupposes what I refer to as immanent critique, the transcendental identification of the “who,” “how,” and “when” of the claims in question. More specifically, each of these activities directly identifies the intellectual habits at stake in the determination of knowledge claims. Consequently, there is a direct parallel between Ochs’s account of derash and Dewey’s analysis of the production of a knowledge claim. Recall that in Dewey’s account, knowledge claims are products of the intellectual connection (represented by the copula) between hypothesis generation (ideas) and observed facts. Problem solving presupposes facts of the case on the one hand and new strategies for seeing a situation and its possibilities on the other hand. For Ochs, derash is the hermeneutical praxis of investigating the conditions of the possibility of a Jewish thought claim in relation to observed facts or “Torah”. Like Dewey’s hypothesis generation, derashic activity is an experimental exercise that investigates possible habits or pragmatic norms for holding judgments. 73 Quoted in ibid., 11. 74 Ibid., 11.

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Derashic hypotheses can take many different forms. Sometimes they involve the rearrangement of pre-existing textual judgments (that is, positing new unprecedented relations between existing judgments). Sometimes they involve an inquiry into the historical-critical or redactive history of a claim that yields new semantic possibilities. Derashic interpretation can even experiment with possible comparisons between presentations of the judgment in question in the Torah and non-Jewish presentations of similar judgments in secular culture or in the discourses of other religious traditions. The goal in each instance is the determination of a new intellectual habit that enables the community to achieve higher levels of environmental adaptability or, simply said, to live and preserve itself in its world. Philosophically speaking, derash in Ochs’s account is simultaneously the activity of transcendental reflection upon the conditions of the possibility of the intelligibility of Jewish thought claims and the activity by means of which new logically intelligible claims are generated. In Dewey’s language, it is a reflection upon the functional fitness of claims or their warranted assertability. This is why Ochs maintains that, all true-or-false claims about a textual canon and its history belong to the sphere of derash, understood as the interpreted meanings of a text as they are clarified by a specific community of inquiry on the occasion of a specific project of inquiry. The clarity and truth of such interpretations are warranted only with respect to this context.75

As discussed earlier, identification of the philosophical status of knowledge claims with context specificity raises relativistic concerns. Nonetheless, like immanent critique, Textual Reasoning’s appreciation for the context-specificity of standards of logical validity actually presupposes and does not deny the reality of philosophical constraints upon the justificatory value of knowledge claims. As Ochs makes clear, “the proviso constitutes the relativity of truth and meaning but not any relativism: the truth and clarity of a context-specific claims signals the space-time reality of a multipart relation that binds this context to this claims.”76 The above portrait of Textual Reasoning does not exhaust Ochs’s contribution to contemporary Jewish thought. Nonetheless, this snapshot illuminates Ochs’s appreciation for the crisis affecting Jewish philosophy 75 Ochs, “Scripture and Text,” 203. 76 Ibid.

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in the wake of the fact-value divide and the need for immanent critique. Moreover, it enables readers to appreciate the extent to which a Jewish application of immanent critique can relieve the negative symptoms associated with adherence to the fact-value logic: the meaninglessness of claims, the inability to link key claims to knowledge about the world (acosmism), the often tragic ineptitude of key ideas to have transformative effects in the world, and the tendency towards dogmatism and/or polemicism. Ochs’s critical common sense contemporary Jewish thinking demonstrates clear relief from these dangerous consequences. As we have seen, chief among the features of Ochs’s common sensism is a recognition for the natural speech community as the context within which knowledge claims have meaning. Moreover, Ochs not only situates Jewish thought in Jewish speech environments, but he recognizes Jewish reflection as an ongoing review of the functional fitness, that is, the situational and worldly relevance, of Jewish knowledge claims. This is because, first and foremost, Textual Reasoning is a response to situational challenges that presuppose pre-existing knowledge claims about the community’s environment and also activate the need for new or altered claims that can adequately address the particular problem at hand. Consequently, the pragmatic knowledge generated by Textual Reasoning cannot remain acosmic, or unrelated to other claims the community makes about the world, since as a method of problem-solving, it requires commensurability between any new judgments issued and the common sense claims the community already successfully uses as it lives in and with its environment. Moreover, Ochs is clear that among the common sense judgments sustained by Jewish communities are those derived from science. This is because for Ochs, “Torah also bears an overall relation to the order of creation . . . there is no need to isolate the subjects of science as less worthy of divine concern than the subjects of rabbinic commentary.”77 To do so, would be to construct arbitrary boundaries around the living Jewish communities, who deploy the theopolitical discourse of Torah in conjunction with the full range of scientific, mathematical, and indeed aesthetic traditions of knowledge that also constitute modes of relation with their environment. For concrete individuals and communities, whose beliefs are habits of action, Torah and science are inevitably conjoined, even if individual thinkers (including ordinary people) posit a separation between these realms. 77 Ochs, “Scripture and Text,” 218.

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Of course, to the extent that contemporary Jewish thought investigates the functional fitness or logical validity of Jewish knowledge in relation to the context-specific demands of the speech community, it functions as a reflexive praxis of common sense critique that discourages dogmatism or polemicism. If, as we have discussed, arbitrarily anchored claims tend to be deployed dogmatically and for polemical purposes, Textual Reasoning recognizes environmental contexts as conditions of the rational justification of judgments. Consequently, it is not surprising that Ochs’s early work in Textual Reasoning paved the way for his later focus on inter-religious relations and global conflict resolution. Central to both endeavors is the ability of religious traditions to appreciate that “all true-or-false claims about a textual canon and its history belong to the sphere of . . . the interpreted meanings of a text as they are clarified by a specific community of inquiry on the occasion of a specific project of inquiry. The clarity and truth of such interpretations are warranted only with respect to this context.”78 Lastly, Ochs’s common sense approach to contemporary Jewish thought has the potential to give new life to emancipatory impulses in Jewish thought that, though clearly at work in thinkers like Buber and Heschel, have nonetheless been severely and tragically curtailed by the inability of these thinkers to demonstrate the meaning and functional fitness of their central claims. At stake is the ability of Jewish thought to provide theopolitical relief to those who suffer at the hand of oppressive regimes and polarizing ideologies, both non-Jewish and Jewish.

Nicholas Adams If Ochs’s philosophy addresses the fate of post-Holocaust Jewish thought, Nicholas Adams’s work focuses on the intersections between Christian theology and nineteenth-century German Idealism to illuminate Christians’ capacity to engage redemptively in the wider world. Yet though their thematic preoccupations differ dramatically, nonetheless both display the features of a post-fact-value approach to Jewish or Christian thought and provide relief from the negative symptoms associated with it. First and foremost, Adams’s work exercises immanent critique by drawing attention to the negative consequences of Christian theology’s partnership with modern Western philosophical accounts of reason 78 Ibid., 203.

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and by calling for a transcendental inquiry into the logical validity of the Christian community’s knowledge claims. In an article entitled, “Saying the Creed Together: Reasoning in the Tradition,” Adams presents his own brief narrative of the oppositional logic of the modern, Western philosophical theory of truth. According to Adams, modern Western philosophy is the historical outcome of two impulses: first, a quest for a universal account of truth able to overcome the polemical differences between religious traditions whose differences erupted in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, and second, the strategy of taking mathematics and geometry as paradigms of a universal rationality, spearheaded by Descartes and verified by the technological improvements made possible by the mathematical natural sciences. As Adams explains, In the period after the Reformation  .  .  .  traditions seemed bound in conflict. . . . Christian philosophers sought a rule for all rules, a master key for all interpretive locks.  .  .  .  Descartes tried to forge something all could use and he chose to write in the language of mathematics  .  .  .  above all geometry. . . . Geometry . . . transformed the face of western Europe . . . as new cities grew up, and as famine and disease become gradually limited through new agricultural technologies and widespread building of sewers, it seems that a kind of force of Reason was driving history.  .  .  .  [For a while] . . . niches were found for tradition; it tended, for the most part to govern parts of life that Reason could not . . . marriage and family life, cuisine and hospitality, ethical and moral life, liturgy and worship. . . . It would take some years for . . . .the traditions which embodied answers to these questions to wither. . . . Yet by the year 2000, tradition seemed in many places to have become synonymous with “heritage” (of interest mostly to tourists). . . .79

Clearly, in Adams’s view, contemporary Christian knowledge claims are in crisis. Adams’s diagnosis of the logical irrelevance of the Christian tradition is tantamount to a call for a transcendental inquiry. This is why Adams insists that his focus is on the logical rather than ontological dimension of Christian thought. Theology, Adams argues, is like any serious body of knowledge. It possesses a pool of concepts and judgments that concern a particular area or subject matter of discourse as well as a set of patterns 79 Nicholas Adams, “Confessing the Faith: Reasoning in Tradition,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Sam Wells (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2004), 210.

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or rules by means of which those same concepts and judgments are held in relation to one another. As such, theology is not simply ontology but also an “enquiry into how [ontological] concepts change  .  .  .  [and] are fashioned . . . [by] their use in . . . different contexts.”80 Theological work involves both a logical review of the intelligibility of concepts by virtue of how they are used by living communities in particular contexts and ontological development of these concepts. For Adams, immanent critique takes the form of a call for Christian theologians to consider that and how, “words have meanings because of the other words to which they are related.”81 Words and judgments acquire meaning or intelligibility by virtue of how the persons who use them, relate them (habitually) to other words and judgments in particular contexts of use. Attending to these relations leads to what Adams calls a “logic of pairs.” For Adams, a pair is not a single thing that has two parts but rather two things whose meaning derives from their mutual relation. A pair is not an aggregate of two independently meaningful things, but, as Adams explains, “a pair is two things, where each is distinct from the other, but each cannot be adequately described independently of its relation to the other.”82 Consequently, and prima facie paradoxically, Adams maintains that a logic of pairs is a form of triadic thinking. Adams concedes that, This sounds absurd, on the face of it. Surely pair-talk is binary! It is in fact triadic. In the case of the married couple, there is the husband, the wife, and their relation in marriage. If one subtracts the third term—their relation—one has two terms and not a pair. In the case of many pairs the third dimension is often a language, or an institution, or a history: the first term is related to the second term by virtue of both being terms in the same context of use.83

In the current historical climate, Adams maintains that it is imperative for Christian theologians to focus on the preeminently philosophical task of investigating the meaning of truth, lest their work in ontological description remain perpetually threatened by the shadow of skepticism. 80 Nicholas Adams, “Hegel (A Short Introduction for Theologians),” in Theology and Philosophy, ed. Oliver Crisp, Gavin D’Costa, Mervyn Davies, Peter Hampson (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 140. 81 Nicholas Adams, Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2013), 62. 82 Adams, Eclipse, 9. 83 Ibid.

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To clearly articulate this philosophical insight, he turns to the work of G. W. F. Hegel. According to Adams, Hegel’s philosophy offers a conceptual language for and defense of triadic thinking with both “reparative” and “generative” effects for Christian theology. By “reparative,” Adams means that it helps Christian theologians articulate the regulative appeal to a logic of pairs in their own work. By “generative,” he means that the triadic logic uncovered in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic clarifies the Trinitarian logic already implicit within the classical creeds that Christian theologians so urgently need in the current crisis. Adams’s Eclipse of Grace provides his most extensive account of the logical value of Hegel’s philosophy for contemporary Christian thought. My intent here is not to provide a review of Adams’s text, but to present a glimpse into Adams’s appreciation of Hegel’s philosophical work as it contributes to his own project of Christian logical reform. According to Adams, the Phenomenology of Spirit is an investigation into the question, “what is truth” that demonstrates the need for a “logic of pairs”84 through a review of modern philosophical proposals. As Adams explains, the Phenomenology documents modern attempts to “answer the question, ‘What is taken to be true in philosophy?’”85 and shows how each of these proposals ultimately fails “from [its] own point of view.”86 The Phenomenology, in other words, performs an immanent critique of modern philosophy, exposing the contingency and relationality of modern philosophical categories, their participation in a web of relations by means of which they are thought and acquire meaning. More specifically, according to Adams, the Phenomenology documents how particular theories of truth fail to present self-evident and uncontestable criteria of truth. Rather, their intelligibility presupposes relations to additional ideas. By making these relations explicit, the Phenomenology produces ever more complex hypotheses about the nature of truth, since each explicitly incorporates the new ideas or concepts presupposed by the prior hypothesis. The results are cumulative, so that over time, simple and unreflective initial hypotheses become increasingly dependent upon subsequent interpretation. Over the course of the Phenomenology, the failure of hypotheses to warrant themselves demonstrates their relationality within a network of interdependent interpretations, governed by a “logic of pairs.” 84 Ibid., 5. 85 Adams, “Hegel: A Short Introduction for Theologians,” 130. 86 Ibid., 131.

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Adams uses the phrase “logic of pairs” to describe the character of truth that emerges through this reflective activity in which false logical oppositions predicated upon the apparent self-evidence of any given hypothesis are overcome and the relations between philosophical concepts or hypotheses, by means of which they acquire their meaning, are exposed. As Adams states, Hegel notices that modern philosophy very often deals with opposites that are separate, which then need to be brought back together again: individual and community, thinking and being, idea and thing, freedom and determinacy, mind and body, science and history, theology and philosophy, reason and revelation, faith and reason, and so on. Hegel generally diagnoses these as false oppositions, and attempts to find an alternative logic in which they are different rather than opposed, in relation rather than separated. That means that the primary task is not to bring two separate things back together, but to refuse their primordial separation.87

Above all, Adams reads the Phenomenology as an immanent critique of modern philosophy’s driving hypotheses about truth: the objectivity of “being,” on the one hand, and the subjectivity of “thinking,” on the other hand. Beginning with the sections in the Phenomenology on “sense-certainty,” “perception,” and “force and the understanding,” Hegel shows that modern philosophical theories of the criteria for what counts as objective truth presuppose a knowing subject or transcendental “I,” which, in turn, presupposes the notion of “Spirit,” the reflective life of the community that reconciles apparently competing proposals of what counts as true in order to preserve its own life as a community. On Adams’s reading, the logic of pairs first emerges in the Phenomenology’s discussion of the reconciling community, in the section, “Conscience: The ‘beautiful soul’, evil and its forgiveness.” Here, Adams maintains, the Phenomenology presents a detailed account of how consciousness of this logic emerges to repair philosophical knowledge by demonstrating the relational interdependence of the philosophical categories thus far posited by consciousness (that is, being, objectivity, subjectivity, thinking, individual, and community). Consequently, the Phenomenology’s illumination of this rule of thinking offers criteria of logical validity that can be applied to many discourses, including and most importantly for his purposes, theology.88 87 Adams, Eclipse, 12. 88 In chapter five, I also argue that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit presents a philosophically rigorous account of the immanent critique of modern western thought

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According to Adams, the Phenomenology is explicitly focused on God. The fact that its analysis of communal self-justificatory reflection leads to “religion” and “absolute knowing” shows that a logic of pairs participates in and presupposes a higher theo-logic. Like Ochs, Adams maintains that the regulative maxim that truth is the interpretation of the intelligibility of concepts held in relations by communities of use has theological and scriptural roots. According to Adams, these roots are themselves Christological and Trinitarian in nature. Nonetheless, Adams’s identification of the logic of pairs with a Christian theo-logic does not compromise the post-fact-value character of this thought, since it reflects his confidence in the adequacy of a contemporary pragmatic review to resolve the crisis confronting Jewish and Christian thought in our time. In discussing Hegel’s last chapter on absolute knowing, Adams states that truth, as the outcome of the triadic relationality of modern philosphical hypotheses to other presuppositions, is therefore, “(a’) dynamic and (b’) a matter of relations,” and this notion has its roots in Christian Trinitarian thinking. As he explains, “the logic of relations is not Hegel’s invention, which he then reads into the prior tradition. It is the tradition’s invention, a tradition of which Hegel is part, and which he reads against certain trends in modern philosophy.”89 In other words, the same triadic thinking which in the Phenomenology repairs the history that parallels philosophical stages in modern Jewish and Christian thought. Like Adams, I interpret the Phenomenology as a negative transcendental deduction of the philosophical activity of communal self-reflection upon the intelligibility of knowledge claims. However, unlike Adams, I argue that the Phenomenology, like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, is directly concerned with the question of how modern philosophy can come to apprehend the logical validity of natural scientific knowledge, and that this process parallels the move to immanent critique in contemporary Jewish and Christian thought attempting to address the fact-value divide. Consequently, Nature and Norm’s endorsement of a pragmatic review of Jewish and Christian knowledge claims is only relevant to this particular sphere of challenges. As I will detail in chapter five, I read the Phenomenology’s discussion of the “reconciliatory” community as the beginning of the end of the Phenomenology’s narrative of how this community has come to philosophically apprehend the logical status of natural science. Accordingly, I understand the subsequent chapters on “religion” and “absolute knowing” as commentaries on the implications of this communal self-reflection. By contrast, Adams sees the justificatory activity of the reconciliatory community as a penultimate expression of the logic of pairs which signals and requires an explicitly theological interpretation that, though awareness of it arises under the particular conditions of the current philosophical climate, successfully remedies not only this particular modern set of issues, but applies equally to any and all expressions of a logic of opposition. 89 Adams, Eclipse, 34.

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of modern philosophy can be generative for Christian theologians because it is a logic implicit in their own theological tradition. In his essay, “Confessing the Faith: Reasoning from the Nicene Creed,” Adams explains how the connection between immanent critique and the Christian theological tradition is implicit in the Nicene Creed since “the creed is a pattern for reasoning theologically [that] sets criteria for . . . describing the one God whom Christians worship”90 and therefore creates the conditions for determining intelligible Christian theological claims. Undoubtedly the Nicene Creed is Christianity’s signature theological statement regarding the relationship between God and Christ. Certainly, Adams concedes, “Christianity’s peculiarity lies in its identification of God’s appearing in Christ.”91 Nonetheless, the Creed is more than this ontological identification since “its strangeness resides in its Trinitarian and prayerful character,”92 by which he means that God’s revelation in Christ is God’s “approach”93 to and communication with us. It is Trinitarian because the identification between God and Christ remains is linked to and expressed in “the actual human lives which bear witness to [it] by living lives of worship.”94 The Creed, Adams concludes, “does not operate . . . by silencing certain types of speech, but because it is Trinitarian, by discouraging certain types of silence, the neat, the closed, the finished.” In encouraging speech but regulating the relations between utterances, the function of the Creed is logical. As a regulative presentation of the logic of the Trinity, the Creed provides concrete criteria for generating intelligible claims about the identification of God and Christ by specifiying their relation to the contexts of use in the life of worshipping communities. The logical appreciation for the Trinitarian character of theological truth secures the on-going generation of meaningful theological discourse rather than the generation of “timeless fact[s] which can be shielded from making any troublesome claims upon the world.”95 In this way, theological claims may avoid the vulnerability to skepticism characteristic of thought systems associated with appropriation of the fact-value divide. 90 Nicholas Adams, “Confessing the Faith: Reasoning in the Tradition,” in Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 228. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Adams, “Confessing the Faith,” 229. 95 Ibid.

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Relief from one of the symptoms of the fact-value divide is, in turn, connected to relief from the others. For example, Adams asserts that a Trinitarian logic guards against the polemicism characteristic of arbitrarily anchored claims. In “Confessing the Faith,” Adams profiles what he takes to be the logical polemicism on display in the infamous Arian controversy. Drawing on the work of Rowan Williams,96 Adams revisits the history of the Council of Nicaea and its treatment of Arius’ position concerning the “relationship of Christ’s divinity to his humanity.”97 Without disregarding the fact that “there are problems with [Arius’s] arguments, .  .  .”98 Adams nonetheless criticizes the Council’s refusal to have offered “patient consideration” of Arius’s positions. Instead, it “misrepresented, oversimplified and distorted [them]. And on the basis of this, . . . (to cut a long and painful story short) pronounced [him] a heretic.”99 Ironically, had the Council adhered to a Trinitarian logic, Adams argues, it would have been able to more fairly represent Arius’s arguments. This is because adherence to the logical rule of the Creed requires communities to develop working hypotheses regarding the relational language and communal life within which theological claims inevitably acquire meaning, and it allows them to appreciate a plurality of such hypotheses, regardless of which hypotheses are ultimately judged to be true. This is why Adams concludes that, “all who recite . . . the Creed as a prayer contribute in a small but significant way to the healing of Nicene wounds and . . . learn the pattern for good conversation.”100 Moreover, as Adams details, the same triadic reflection that adjudicates internal religious conflicts can also repair Christianity’s potentially polemical relations with other religious traditions since Trinitarian thinking presupposes the difference between ontology and logic. Needless to say, interfaith discussions that focus on ontology often leave much to be desired. Either participants arrive at agreements over generic claims that leave more contentious differences unaddressed, or participants present apparently oppositional positions on key issues and reach conversational stalemates. By contrast, the logically informed work of triadic thinking charts a course beyond these two outcomes. In Adams’s language, 96 See Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (Grand Rapids: Wm.B. Eerdmans, 2002). 97 Adams, “Confessing the Faith,” 217. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 219.

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It is the binary shape that provokes conflict. I am right and you are wrong. In a binary shape, it is a problem that what I affirm you deny. . . . In a triadic shape, it is not a problem: it is merely a fact. . . . A binary form assigns a value to a variable. A triadic form describes how, or rather names for whom, a value is assigned to a variable.101

Adams’s application of immanent critique to the playing field of interfaith relations capitalizes on the manner by which a transcendental logic of the “who,” “how,” and “when,” of a community’s determination of the intelligibility of claims has the potential to diffuse polemical tensions associated with a failure to recognize the conditions for the justifiability of knowledge claims. It hinges upon conversations that explain or provide the “deep reasonings”102 of religious communities with respect to particular claims under discussion. Adam concedes that a dialogue of this sort most likely will not yield agreement between different religious communities. Instead, the goal of this kind of dialogue is to foster what Adams calls “long-term disagreements.”103 The longevity of these disagreements is itself testimony to the fruits of the parallel performance of immanent critique, for it helps those outside of one’s tradition to appreciate how claims that are not “axiomatic” for oneself can nonetheless have meaning and be justified for someone else. In the end, such an appreciation permits two different traditions to understand rather than polemically negate each other’s claims. In sum, triadic thinking is, for Adams, the key to repairing the crisis affecting Christian theology in the wake of modernity’s paralyzing logic of opposition. In chapter three, I enlisted Rose’s appeal to Phocion’s women as a model for how Jewish and Christian thinkers can operate in a theopolitically efficacious manner. Rose insisted upon the women’s willingness to take up and situate their claim of suffering in the midst of the common sense traditions of what Rose refers to as the “city” or the polis. The power of their appeal lies in their ability to identify the precise area of deficiency within these common sense traditions relevant to their particular point of disintegration and to recognize that any solution they advance must stand 101 Nicholas Adams, “Long-Term Disagreement: Philosophical Models in Scriptural Reasoning and Receptive Ecumenicism,” Modern Theology 29, no. 4 (October 2013): 165. 102 Nicholas Adams, “Making Deep Reasonings Public,” Modern Theology 22, no. 3 (July 2006): 385. 103 Adams, “Long-Term Disagreement,” 163.

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in a determinate relation to the knowledge claims that function for those who live together within the city limits or socio-political environment. One finds a similar template at work in both Ochs’s account of contemporary Jewish reflection and Adams’s focus on the restoration of Trinitarian logic within Christianity. As described above, Ochs’s Textual Reasoning is a reflective exercise that services the particular problems of the Jewish community and combines idea generation with observation of existing facts. In this way, Textual Reasoning offers community members a set of tools that enable them to both meaningfully articulate points of suffering and investigate potentially rational, because context-specific, solutions. So too Adams’ Trinitarian logic of pairs emerges from reflection on Christian habits of speech that relate claims about God and Christ to the life of the community, making possible a non-utopian generation of new ideas. Despite their differences, each exercises an immanent critique that relieves their thought of the damaging consequences associated with appropriation of the fact-value paradigm.

Chapter Six

Science Apprehending Science

We have come a long way from the start of our analysis. In the preceding chapters I have illuminated the logical impact of the scientific revolution on modern Jewish and Christian thought. More specifically, I have demonstrated the negative effects of the appropriation of the fact-value divide by a swath of modern Jewish and Christian thinkers and have argued that not only does recognition of this influence constitute a key organizing principle for narrating the history of modern Jewish and Christian thought, but that a failure to appreciate this narrative comes at the cost of the ability of religious thinkers to present their theopolitical claims as meaningful in relation to other knowledge claims about the world. As I have maintained throughout, the analysis is not an attempt to discredit science in the name of elevating religious thought. Nature and Norm begins and ends with a pragmatically oriented recognition of the respect for science presupposed by many modern religious thinkers. I have attempted to document both that religious thinkers recognize the value of scientific claims as well as the historically situated process by means of which religious thinkers have come to epistemologically and logically apprehend this relationship. I have shown how religious thought comes to terms with and can fully sustain its appreciation for scientific knowledge without sacrificing the logical validity or justificatory status of its own claims. If, therefore, Nature and Norm demonstrates how modern religious thought arrives at a philosophical apprehension of the relation between religious

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knowledge and scientific knowledge, this apprehension is an outgrowth of an internal process of reflection by which religious thinkers faced the vulnerability of their claims to charges of skepticism. As documented in Nature and Norm, what begins as an appropriation of the fact-value divide develops into an attempt to negotiate the value of religious claims in view of this standard and culminates in a wholesale immanent critique of the dominance of this paradigm over religious thought. Consequently, in Nature and Norm we recognize the slow process whereby Jewish and Christian thinkers realize the inadequacy of the fact-value divide and claim the philosophical authority to identify a different standard of logical validity. As we may recall, Nature and Norm documents this process by exposing four stages in the Jewish and Christian response to the fact-value standard. These are: acceptance of the fact-value divide, redescription or appeal to the “more,” external critique, and immanent critique. This process has resulted in a threefold reflective apprehension of: 1) the function of the fact-value divide as an expression of the early rational self-evidence of scientific knowledge which by virtue of its deleterious effects on religious thought has given way to an immanent critique of it as the governing standard for religious knowledge; 2) a philosophical appreciation of the difference between the discourse of science as a body of knowledge and the philosophical process of determining rational validity; and 3) a philosophical appreciation for the relationship between the logical validity of claims and their pragmatic viability as they are lived by communities. Taken together, this pragmatically driven and historically developed internal process of logical self-reflection has not only yielded an account of how religious claims can sustain logical validity, but an account that makes room for the logical validity of both religious and scientific claims and thereby accommodates the ongoing respect held by religious thinkers for scientific knowledge. In this way, immanent critique enables Jewish and Christian thinkers to sustain an Enlightenment-inspired appreciation for worldly inquiry without succumbing to the damaging consequences of the fact-value logic. In this chapter I want to extend this argument by demonstrating that the process of modern Jewish and Christian logical self-reflection documented here is part of a larger process of modern Western reflection upon the value and logical significance of scientific knowledge itself. Perhaps the most rigorous review of the history of modern European self-reflection upon the fact-value divide is G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel’s account of the European

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journey from “nature” to “Spirit.”1 Like Nature and Norm, the Phenomenology begins with the rational self-evidence of scientific standards taken for granted by modern Western thinkers. Motivated by the problems emerging from this position, the Phenomenology narrates a process of reflection concerning the rational grounds for knowledge claims that culminates in an appreciation of the need for communities to engage in ongoing justificatory activity in history, what Hegel calls “absolute knowledge.” Following in the footsteps of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the Phenomenology tackles the question of the rational grounds of natural scientific knowledge in particular. However, unlike Kant’s Critique, the Phenomenology does not philosophically privilege natural scientific knowledge as the absolute and singular Faktum for its transcendental deduction. Rather, the Phenomenology begins as an account of the logical validity of natural science because it begins with philosophical attitudes popular in Hegel’s own time. As Terry Pinkard remarks, the Phenomenology starts with the “kinds of considerations that the readers of 1807 would have already taken for granted as authoritative for themselves.”2 It so happens, of course, that the kinds of considerations taken for granted by Hegel’s 1807 readers resemble Kant’s own assumptions. In Hegel’s time, this means beginning with early epistemological theories that ground knowledge in a “kind of pre-reflective view of ourselves in the world as one natural entity among others,”3 what amount to “empiricist and post-empiricist conceptions”4 of modern science. However, when appraised for its utility as a viable theory of knowledge, this taken-for-granted standard of logical validity deriving from natural scientific facts fails to account for itself. As Pinkard explains, Hegel’s Phenomenology demonstrates the limits of any appeal to any specific claim or set of claims as a “ground” or justification for other knowledge claims since,

1 Hegel’s interest in the arc between nature and spirit was characteristic of what Terry Pinkard refers to as the “Romantic Turn in Idealism” spearheaded by Schelling who, as Pinkard notes, began, “as Spinozist” and was dedicated to the development of a philosophy of nature. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 129–133. 2 Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22. 3 Ibid., 23. 4 Ibid.

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there are . . . very conflicting claims to knowledge among different types of communities. Some religious types claim to know God with certainty . . . and other more secular types claim to know the individual items of senseexperience with certainty.  .  .  .  The latter may claim to reject the former because they do not fit their canons of ‘scientific procedure’ or the ‘commonly accepted standards’ of rationality. . . . Neither side, so it seems, produces any real argument to convince the other, since both stances amount to simply taking certain standards or certain projects to be self-evident.  .  .  .  Indeed what each side takes as self-certifying is dependent, so it seems, on other assumptions that are certainly not so self-evident.5

The Phenomenology thus demonstrates that facts (including scientific facts) do not provide self-justifying criteria of logical validity, since these criteria presuppose other conditions that are not self-evident. Described by Hegel as a “pathway of . . . despair,”6 the Phenomenology documents the long trail of responses to the initial failure of natural empiricism to ground itself. In the process, the Phenomenology exposes a quest to uncover an unconditioned ground for knowledge that directly parallels the logical phases identified in the preceding chapters. Like Nature and Norm, the Phenomenology is not a tribute to the death of the fact-value divide, but an account of how European thought comes to recognize this divide as a stage in the philosophical apprehension of scientific knowledge and thereby comes to establish standards of logical validity independent of scientific criteria of factual knowledge. In what follows, I will describe the Phenomenology and Nature and Norm as two sides of the same story of how modern Western thought has come to “live with Science and in Science.”7 Before detailing the parallels between Hegel’s negative transcendental deduction of the conditions of the possibility of scientific knowledge and the account of the encounter between Jewish and Christian thought and the fact-value divide presented above, it is worth examining the account of the whole Hegel provides in the Preface. Although, as Hegel cautions, the Preface presupposes the hard labor of rational self-investigation, it nevertheless introduces a valuable blueprint of the philosophical

5 Ibid., 4–5. 6 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 49. 7 Hegel, Phenomenology, 14.

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development of modern European self-reflection that parallels the four stages of modern religious self-reflection documented in Nature and Norm. According to the Preface, the Phenomenology documents how modern European society gains a scientific apprehension of the justificatory grounds of knowledge, what Hegel calls the “Concept” or “Notion.” If, as Robert Pippin argues, Kant had already shown that, “the validity of the categories and the possibility of knowledge itself is everywhere oriented to the requirements of an apperceptive subjectivity and achieves idealistic results, results relativized to such a subject, . . .”8 the “Notion” introduced in the Preface of the Phenomenology represents Hegel’s phenomenologically and historically earned description of this transcendental self. As introduced in the Preface, the Notion is an activity, what Hegel refers to as a “process of life,” constituted by three specific cognitive phases that mirror the phases described in the preceding chapters: 1) The Understanding (which includes both acceptance of the fact-value divide and appeal to a “more” beyond it), 2) External Critique of the Understanding, and 3) Immanent Critique or Absolute Knowing. The Notion culminates in the logical activity of a community of knowers who collectively recognize that determining the rationality of individual judgments requires a process of collective “reconciliation” or “forgiveness” performed by the community as it considers the validity of judgments in light of its here and now.9 As I will discuss below, European consciousness achieves this appreciation for the logical function of the community as rational arbiter of the validity of its individuals’ claims as an outgrowth of its reflection upon religion, since its identification of the community’s logical activity of reconciliation as divine enables it to apprehend the full breadth of its own logical activity or “life” 8 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 33. 9 Appreciation for the role that social practices play in transcendental determination of judgments is the main theme of Molly Farneth’s Hegel’s Social Ethics. There she puts the above point nicely when drawing from Robert Pippin’s work she says, “Pippin argues that with Kant as his starting point, Hegel describes our experience of the world as an ongoing practice of making judgments about the way the world is . . . . Where Hegel extends this claim . . . is in his instance that these judgments must be open to contestation from other self-conscious subjects. Hegel argues that we cannot make normative judgments of the kind that characterize human beings as self-conscious subjects unless other self-conscious subjects are in a position to affirm or contest our judgments. These others not only judge our self-determined judgments: they are also the condition for the possibility of our judgments in the first place.” Molly Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict and Rituals of Reconciliation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 46.

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such that it can take ownership of this logical activity and self-consciously labor to sustain it. In the Preface, Hegel introduces readers to the fruits of consciousness’ awareness of the life of the Notion as applied to the community’s philosophical apprehension of its form of life. The life of the Notion—the activity of transcendental logic—arises out of what Hegel refers to as the “familiar,” beliefs and habits of mind that a community takes for granted and regards as natural. The “familiar” refers to the unexamined character of ordinary cognition. Sometimes Hegel refers to the familiar as “natural consciousness” or “the knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object. . . .”10 Because of its immediacy, Hegel maintains, this mode of holding knowledge is indeterminate. As he states, “quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood.”11 Consciousness attempts to determine the contents of the familiar only when it meets with circumstances that signal a question or problem with this content. In these instances, consciousness seeks to identify and organize its vague impressions and assert what it knows more clearly and explicitly. This is the function of the first stage of conscious cognition, the Understanding. Hegel refers to the Understanding as the “mightiest of powers” since it and only it has the ability to resist the naturalness of immediate knowledge and “analyze” its contents into “fixed and inert determinations.”12 The “Understanding” or the activity of analyzing the contents of the familiar and identifying this content in the form of particular claims is, Hegel says, the negative power of “self ’ or the “pure I” that “detaches” thought from the silent immediacy within which, it is actual  .  .  .  and pries this content away from this organic whole. The understanding of the “pure I” that installs this separation is the “tremendous power of the negative” so far as it destroys the natural actuality of knowledge and “break [s] an idea up into its original elements . . . which do not have the form of the given idea, but . . . constitute the immediate property of the self.13

As will become clearer below, most of the shapes described in the Phenomenology exemplify the work of the Understanding because the Understanding is a non-philosophical attempt to illuminate what it takes 10 Hegel, Phenomenology, 58. 11 Ibid., 18. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.

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to be the self-evident standard of rationality implicit in the body of familiar knowledge. Since consciousness does not achieve absolute apprehension of the reflective activity of communal justification until the end of the process, this means that consciousness’s prior shapes are products of the Understanding’s perpetual production of hypotheses that negate purportedly self-evident standards of rationality implicit in knowledge claims. Consequently, there is a direct correlation between consciousness’s embrace of the fact-value standard of rationality and its labor as the Understanding. This is a central element in the following analysis and requires unpacking. As mentioned earlier, the Phenomenology advances a negative transcendental deduction of what counts as knowledge in the modern Western cultural context. By beginning with the familiar, the Phenomenology signals the proto-pragmatic insight that demands for the justification of knowledge claims arise when formerly unquestioned claims lose meaning for those who hold them. Appreciation for the proto-pragmatic character of Hegel’s account explains why the negative transcendental deduction of the Phenomenology begins with an account of the rationality of the modern European form of life that most resembles the body of knowledge it analyses. For both the Phenomenology and for Nature and Norm, there is an inverse correlation between the familiarity with which a culture holds its knowledge claims and the extent to which it develops theoretical explanations of the rationality of this body knowledge. The more familiar, the more the knowledge claims work and the less the culture will advance accounts of how such claims work. Like Nature and Norm, the Phenomenology begins with the natural scientific worldview common to modern European culture. Consequently, also like Nature and Norm, the Phenomenology’s early applications of the Understanding give rise to the fact-value distinction or the immediate identification of the rational self-evidence of natural science over and against non-natural scientific knowledge. When treated by the Understanding, knowledge taken as familiar is presented as fixed and organized into true and false propositions. Frequently, however, the self that deploys the Understanding to clarify the contents of its knowledge also seeks to determine the logical validity of these potentially true propositions. The same self that pries the knowledge of the familiar out of its actuality in order to satisfy its need to know what knowledge is also seeks to determine why this knowledge is taken as true. The modern European consciousness tracked by the Phenomenology presents a wide variety of accounts of the rational grounds of its knowledge.

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Frequently, it will associate these theories or explanations with “philosophy.” Nonetheless, Hegel insists that these attempts at assigning grounds to a collection of facts offer a weak and unwarranted determination of their validity. “Science, just because it comes on the scene, is itself an appearance: in coming on the scene it is not yet Science in its developed and unfolded truth.”14 In this way, the explanations afforded by the Understanding parallel the attempts of Jewish and Christian thinkers to respond to the fact-value paradigm traced by Nature and Norm. Both trajectories expose the need to respond to the presupposition of the rational self-evidence of scientific claims, but both also generate inadequate explanations that take this rational self-evidence for granted until doing so causes more problems than it solves. In a way that parallels the movement through acceptance, redescription, and external critique of the fact-value divide presented in chapters two through four, the Phenomenology documents developments in the theories generated by the Understanding as consciousness moves through its different shapes. As the Understanding develops, its theoretical explanations of the self-evident grounds of knowledge appear to grow more distant and distinct from the fact-value model, and can often be applied to non-scientific domains of knowledge as well. Nonetheless, it is the central argument of this analysis that what look like philosophically significant departures from the logic of the fact-value divide turn out upon closer examination to be only more sophisticated repetitions of it, since the defining feature of a fact-value account is the arbitrarily anchored character of its purported standard of rationality. Of course, it is reasonable to ask, if as the agent of the Understanding, consciousness performs a superficial activity of asserting what it takes immediately to be the standard of rationality implicit in a body of knowledge, how can this same consciousness correct inadequacies in its own posited announcements? How can consciousness participate in a process by means of which “it may purify itself ”?15 The answer lies in the hybrid character of consciousness. In the Introduction, Hegel explains how, on the one hand, consciousness qua the Understanding posits self-evident standards of rationality and therefore treats these standards as objects outside of itself. On the other hand, this 14 Ibid., 48. 15 Ibid., 49.

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same consciousness recognizes that the object it identifies as the “truth” of cognition or the standard of rationality, is an object that it knows. This awareness positions consciousness to discern whether or not the object it posits as a logical standard adequately conveys what consciousness seeks to express in positing this standard. Consciousness’s awareness of its structural role in the act of positing endows it with a standard by which to measure the accuracy of the objects (or shapes) it posits and it therefore maintains a position from which it can compare these two perspectives. Consequently, consciousness’s hybrid character enables it to posit its way into self-comprehension. The process reaches an end when consciousness posits a shape that dissolves the difference between itself and the logical standards it posits. Eventually, consciousness posits an account of itself as the process of reflective, rational self-determination in which it, as a separate subject, is implicated. At this juncture, consciousness will no longer posit rational standards as the Understanding that takes for granted the externality of the standard of rationality as an object in itself, independent of the object as it is “known by consciousness.” Because the standards of knowledge that emerge are no longer dependent on a posited relation to something outside its own activity, Hegel calls the culmination of consciousness’s journey “Absolute Knowledge.” Nonetheless, throughout the Phenomenology, consciousness fails to associate its ability to measure the adequacy of its object with its own philosophical freedom or power of rational self-determination, but instead presupposes the externality of whatever standard of rationality it posits. As Hegel explains, Demanding and supplying these [superficial] explanations [consciousness as the Understanding] passes readily enough as a concern with what is essential.  .  .  .  [Nonetheless,] when this activity is taken for more than the mere beginnings of cognition, when it is allowed to pass for actual cognition, then it should be reckoned as no more than a device for evading the real issue. . . . For the real issue is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out. . . .16

Hegel’s point is that facile assertions of the logical value of facts fail to satisfy consciousness’s demand to determine the validity of knowledge

16 Ibid., 2–3.

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claims since the theories posited by the Understanding remain arbitrarily anchored. Still, the road from a tacit acceptance of the primacy of natural science to an apprehension of communal acts of justificatory self-determination is not without an intermediary step. In chapter four, I examined the value of the critique of the self-evidence of scientific fact issued in the work of Leo Strauss and Karl Barth. I labeled their critique “external” since while both thinkers challenge the rational self-evidence of natural scientific facts, neither recognizes the arbitrarily anchored character of their own critical position. In the Preface, Hegel describes a parallel moment in consciousness’s development whereby it also issues a critique of prior theories but without interrogating its own critical self-certainty. This moment of critique arises from the Understanding’s character as the “tremendous power of the negative  .  .  .  or the pure I.”17 In the Phenomenology this cognitive phase of critical doubt corresponds to the moment of what Hegel calls “pure insight” or radical skepticism, which gives way to the absolute tyranny of the Enlightenment best exemplified by the reign of terror. While the Phenomenology dedicates significant attention to this third moment of critical cognition, the Preface quickly moves to describe the fourth stage in the development of modern European philosophical development, the move from “Substance” to “Subject,” corresponding to what I have called the shift from external to immanent critique. Hegel marks this as the transition from the analytical death exercised by the pure I of the Understanding to the conceptual life of Spirit, which is “not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it.”18 According to the Preface, the self as critic (or agent of the negative) cannot constitute the final moment in cognition’s attempt to know and justify itself. As Hegel explains, consciousness “looks the negative in the face . . . and tarrying with it”19 identifies its limits. If, as the Preface has signaled, the pure I of critical consciousness skeptically calls into question the validity of all positive finite determinations of the Understanding, it is also the case that this pure I asserts itself as self-evident and therefore requires its own justification. Like Strauss’s philosophical skeptic, in its role as critic the pure I of the Understanding posits itself as the legitimate and self-evident foundation of its critique. Yet 17 Ibid., 19. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

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consciousness, motivated still to determine and justify the contents of its knowledge, “recognizes [this critical activity] as a moment  . . . [and] the pure certainty of self abstracts from itself—not by leaving itself out . . . but by giving up the fixity of its self-positing. . . .”20 In this way, consciousness realizes that critique alone cannot satisfy the demands of consciousness since it does not justify or establish its own worth, but must serve a purpose beyond itself and achieve its worth through something other than itself. As such, external critique by the self morphs into an immanent critique of the self. In this moment, the critical self begins to develop into the reflective or speculative self that exercises an on-going critique of posited standards of rationality for the sake of, and therefore in response to, its community’s own form of life, what Hegel calls its “Spirit.” It is thus the life of the community that, according to Hegel, constitutes the purpose of and constraint upon the exercise of justificatory critique. This moment of critique differs from the superficial process of unreflected doubt or skepticism consciousness has exercised thus far. Throughout the Phenomenology, shapes of consciousness reflect and are driven by the fact-value divide insofar as consciousness merely asserts them without philosophically reflecting upon them. Even consciousness’s cycle of assertion, negation, and reassertion,derives from its insistence upon the self-evidence or “giveness” of the standard it proposes. This, Hegel says in the Preface, is “just the skepticism which only ever sees pure nothingness in its result . . . and cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss.”21 By contrast, The skepticism [of immanent critique] is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness  .  .  .  [and] renders the Spirit for the time competent to examine what truth is. . . . For it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions, . . . with which the consciousness that sets about the examination [of truth] straight away is still filled and hampered, so that it is in fact, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake.22

20 Ibid., 20. 21 Ibid., 51. 22 Ibid., 50.

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In this moment of immanent critique, consciousness recognizes itself in its own activity of “mediation” or rational determination, and it no longer distinguishes between what it knows that it knows (or its knowing “of ” the object) and the standards of rationality or cognition which it posits as “truth.” The self, in Hegel’s language, becomes “Subject,” or the self that engages in an ongoing activity of justifying the knowledge which the community lives with and uses. Ultimately, as Hegel shows, immanent critique is a move into an awareness that the transcendental condition of our knowledge is historically conditioned and communal. The activity of consciousness as Subject is historical insofar as it confronts the rational self-evidence of the Understanding and its facts together with the self-certainty of the self that critiques them and counters this self-certainty with a call for an on-going investigation into logical validity. This activity is communal insofar as the knowledge it investigates and reflects upon is the shared knowledge of those who participate in this particular form of life, or in this case, modern Western intellectual culture. For Hegel, as for Nature and Norm, the move to communal justificatory self-reflection not only constitutes the final moment in the process of the modern Western intellectual pursuit of self-justification, but even more importantly, it constitutes the moment in which consciousness achieves an adequate account of the transcendental conditions for its familiar knowledge in and through self-justificatory communal reflection, which activity also operates as the condition of the possibility of each of the prior cognitive moments. The familiar requires the Understanding, the Understanding presupposes the self-certainty of the pure I, and the pure I achieves value or justification in the communal activity of justificatory reflection. These conditions—which can be summarily identified as the life of the Notion or communal self-reflection—constitute the logical conditions of modern scientific knowledge that the Phenomenology sought from the outset. As Nature and Norm culminates in an awareness of the responsibility and capacity of religious communities to reflect on their knowledge claims and their relation to other elements of Western knowledge including science, so the Phenomenology culminates in an account of the transcendental condition of western scientific knowing and the philosophical responsibility faced by communities to assess the rational workability of these claims for the communities who live with them over time and in changing worldly conditions.

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The goal of the remainder of this chapter is to present a detailed account of the parallel between Hegel’s Phenomenology and Nature and Norm. It will strengthen the argument presented in the prior chapters by illuminating how the logical process at play in the development of modern Western religious thought is part of a larger process whereby modern thinking comes to understand and take responsibility for the knowledge it develops in and through science.23 This analysis in hand, contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers can and ought to feel emboldened to recognize the inextricable connection between communal justificatory self-reflection and the logical value of their religious knowledge claims. Jewish and Christian thinkers ought, in other words, to recognize that they must encourage this kind of communal self-reflection in order to resolve the theopolitical problem, and that indeed, they can perform this kind of logical self-examination insofar as they participate in the philosophical outcomes of reflection upon scientific knowledge. As an investigation into the philosophical significance of natural science, Hegel’s Phenomenology offers its own account of the fact-value divide that directly parallels the account of modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian presented thus far. In particular, the Phenomenology’s shapes display the four stages of logical development described in Nature and Norm. Hegel’s discussion of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness (chapters I–V) together with the first section on “Spirit” (first two sections of chapter VI), parallel the accounts of acceptance and the turn to the “more” discussed in chapters two and three of Nature and Norm. The Phenomenology’s parallel to the stage of external critique, discussed in chapter four, appears in the section entitled “Faith and Pure Insight” and continues into Hegel’s discussion of “The Enlightenment” (chapter IV.B.) Finally, the Phenomenology presents an account of the turn from external to immanent critique that parallels the turn in modern religious 23 It is important to note that while the discussion will inevitably walk through the discrete stages of consciousness’s development as described in Hegel’s text, the analysis offered is not meant as an exhaustive review of the Phenomenology. Scholarship on the Phenomenology is extensive and this review is not meant as a substitute for it, but rather an account of how the stages in consciousness’s development run parallel to those described with respect to Jewish and Christian responses to the fact-value paradigm. For detailed commentary on the Phenomenology see Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology; Richard Winfield, Hegel’s Phenomenology: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures (Plymouth, UK: Rowan and Littlefield, 2013), and Quentin Lauer, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993).

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thought detailed in chapter five, in the section entitled, “Spirit that is certain of itself. Morality” (chapter VI.C.), where consciousness begins to posit hypotheses or pictures of rationality that offer the foundation for the life of the Notion. Consequently, the discussion that follows will be divided into three primary sections: 1) The Fact-Value Model: From Sense-Certainty to Self-Alienated Culture, 2) External Critique: From Pure Insight to the Enlightenment, and 3) Immanent Critique: From the Moral Law to Communal Justification.

I. The Fact-Value Model: From Sense-Certainty to Self-Alienated Culture According to the argument presented above, the conscious or unconscious acceptance of the fact-value divide has resulted in a network of damaging consequences for Jewish and Christian thought, which, for reasons we have explained, are only evident to us at this historical juncture. As discussed in chapters two, three, and four, the influence of the factvalue divide has assumed a number of different forms throughout the course of modern Jewish and Christian thought, each revealing a new stage of reflection upon the relation between religious thought and the fact-value divide. So understood, the reductive embrace of science represents the most uncontested expression of the relation between Jewish and Christian thought and the fact-value divide, whereas the assertion of the “more,” or what I have referred to as redescription of the fact-value divide, constitutes a first-order response to its limits for religious thinkers, even if this response does nothing to alter the logical assumptions at work in the fact-value divide. In the Phenomenology, the two sections on Consciousness and SelfConsciousness (chapters I–V) together with the first two sections of chapter VI parallel my account of reduction (discussed in chapter two) and the turn to the “more” (discussed in chapter three). My discussion of this first stage of the modern European embrace of the fact-value logic consists of three parts corresponding to what I consider the dominant characteristic of that stage’s controlling hypothesis or posited standard of rationality: A) Pre-idealism (chapters I–IV) B) Transcendental Idealism and Scientific Theory (chapter V.A.) C) Transcendental Idealism and Practical Freedom

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1) rationality as individual, practical freedom (chapter V.B./C.) 2) rationality as Spirit: from “custom” to Roman law (chapter VI.A.) 3) rationality and self-alienated culture (chapter VI.B.)

A. Pre-Idealism: Epistemology, Self-Consciousness, and the Fact-Value Value Paradigm Epistemology and the Spatio-Temporal Object The beginning section on “sense-certainty” establishes the central claim of this chapter: that the Phenomenology offers a documentation of the process by which modern European culture has come to apprehend the significance of the “New Science,” and is thus an extended reflection upon the fact-value paradigm of rationality.24 As Terry Pinkard explains, the Phenomenology, begins with those kinds of considerations that the readers of 1807 would have already taken for granted as authoritative for themselves. . . . In Hegel’s time, that would mean beginning with what certain post-Enlightenment theories of knowledge, perception and theory of construction take to be . . . obvious. . . . It is thus quite natural that the Phenomenology of Spirit would begin with an examination of some kind of claim to immediate knowledge that would grow out of a reflection our natural awareness of ourselves and things [or] a prereflective view of ourselves in the world as one natural entity among others.25

The beginning of the Phenomenology describes the first attempts of the modern European consciousness to analyze the grounds of natural scientific knowledge. Sense-certainty is the first of three sections under the rubric of consciousness: Sense-certainty, Perception, and Force and the Understanding. As initial examples of the labor of the Understanding, each seeks to illuminate the self-evident validity of natural scientific knowledge

24 Hegel most likely had Locke’s empiricism in mind in his account of sense-certainty and perception. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History he says that, “Locke does not get beyond the ordinary point of view of consciousness, viz. that objects outside of us are the real and the true.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubener and Co., 1896), 296. 25 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 22–23.

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by providing epistemological explanations of how a subject gains access to objects in space and time posited as external to it. According to sense-certainty, knowledge is rational because it reflects our immediate sensory access to “what is,” or more specifically, to an individual object. On this view, knowledge is identified with the immediate object of sense-perception without any distinction of properties or relations. “The  .  .  .  knowing which  .  .  .  is immediately our object cannot be anything else but . . . a knowledge . . . of what simply is.”26 As indeterminate as this picture seems to be, it nonetheless implies two sides: a knower and a known. The knower senses and indicates her object with a “this,” while the object indicated is regarded as other than the knower and, qua pointed to, is a this, “here and now.” Since the object with which we are in immediate contact is merely sensed and not conceived, it cannot be determined by any universally applicable predicates and as Pinkard explains, “can only be a purely singular object. . . .”27 And since sense-certainty presumes that objects (or facts) alone possess logical validity, it posits that the object “[is] in the form of a simple, immediate being, or [is] the essence, the object,” while the knowing subject “is posited as what is un-essential and mediated . . . the ‘I.’”28 Sense-certainty is an epistemological theory that therefore suggests that we know spatio-temporal objects—the elemental building blocks of natural science—because we have immediate, sense access to them. Proponents of sense-certainty run into problems, however, when their attempts to express this epistemology contradict the epistemological position they seek to defend. As a posture of pre-reflective indexical immediacy, sense-certainty permits identification of its object as nothing more than a “this” “here and now.” The indexical reference to a “this” “here and now,” however, does not adequately express knowledge of a singular object in space and time. Identifying an object as a “this” fails to identify features that distinguish this “this” from that “this.” Ironically, Hegel tells us, the indexical “this” is a universal term since it may be applied to anything and thus by itself cannot distinguish one “this” from another. In conclusion, proponents of sense-certainty, “say the direct opposite of what they mean,” since they tacitly assume distinguishing features along with the “this.” “They mean ‘this bit of paper on which I am writing’ . . . if they wanted to 26 Hegel, Phenomenology, 58. 27 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 24. 28 Hegel, Phenomenology, 59.

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say it [within the framework of sense-certainty], then this is impossible, because the sensuous ‘this’ that is meant cannot be reached by language, which . . . is inherently universal.”29 The inadequacy of sense-certainty as an epistemological account of how people know singular objects in space and time presses European thought forward into modern theories of perception.30 While sense-certainty fails to explain how the Understanding distinguishes one object from another, perception theories maintain that “this” is distinguished from “that” when “this” is a “thing” with its own properties. This red thing can be distinguished from that blue thing because being red is different from being blue. On this view, knowledge of singular objects in time and space presupposes a perceiver’s identification of a relationship between universal properties and the thing to which they belong. Unlike sense-certainty, perception is a “mediated” form of knowledge since it answers the question how is “this” not “that.” Whatever “this” is, it is by virtue of its difference from something else. In perception, then, sense data is perceived as a “universal property” that is mediated by or belongs to a “thing,” which thus conditions that property; the conditioned sense data left over from sense-certainty constitutes the thing’s difference. “The sense-element is still present, but  .  .  .  not as the singular item that is ‘meant’ but as a universal, or as that which will be defined as a property.”31 Therefore, things and properties are reciprocally related: the thing is an object because of its properties, and by the same token, sense data is apprehended when it is perceived as a universal property of a particular thing. Things need properties and properties need things. Unfortunately, the relationship between properties and the things that constitutes the essential character of the object of perception is also the source of its failure as an account of logical validity. In perception, things are individual—“this” and not “that”—by virtue of their properties. Their properties, on the other hand, are universals, and perception cannot explain how universal properties relate to individual objects or even to each other as plural features of a given object. Identification of properties as simple 29 Ibid., 65–66. 30 Kenneth Westphal argues that Hegel’s discussion of perception is a direct response to Hume’s empiricism. See Kenneth R. Westphal, “Hegel and Hume on Perception and Concept Empiricism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 36, no. 1 (January 1998): 99–123. 31 Ibid., 68.

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universals does not go far enough in explaining why and how a given property is “here,” connected to this collection of properties, rather than “there,” connected to that collection of properties. Moreover, Hegel argues that although sense-certainty speaks of a thing as a holder (an “also”) of its properties, it cannot successfully distinguish the thing from its properties since it cannot recognize the thing as having any features of its own. If a thing is nothing beyond its properties and yet properties are not properties unless they belong to a thing, then perception cannot explain itself in a way that makes sense of its own posited position. Before conceding defeat, proponents of perception experiment with a number of other attempts to account for the relation between things and their properties, but each fails for the same basic reason: like sense-certainty, perception assumes that sensuous reality is the given foundation of knowledge. Hegel’s discussion of perception gives way to a new epistemological theory called “force and the Understanding.” The connection between this epistemology and natural science is even clearer since it showcases a number of popular philosophies of science that take for granted the self-evident rationality of natural scientific claims yet incoherently invoke elements of natural scientific theory in their accounts of the grounds of this knowledge. Hegel’s discussion of force and the Understanding begins with perception’s failed effort to negotiate between the thing and its properties. As an outcome of this failure, consciousness recognizes that a thing and its properties are mutually related. But instead of assuming the distinctness of things and their properties and trying to account for their unity, at this stage the Understanding posits their unity as more basic and as unconditionally real, what Hegel calls an “unconditioned universal.” Force is the concept of this underlying unity. Like sense-certainty and perception, force and the Understanding grounds knowledge claims by attempting to show how subjects can gain access to external objects. However, in this section, consciousness comes to identify the real spatio-temporal object not as something we sense or perceive but as something whose intelligibility or inner nature we access only through a representation or a thought. Hegel’s analysis of force and the Understanding begins by showing how the two aspects of the spatio-temporal object (thinghood and properties) operate within the unifying context of a force. As Robert Stern explains, “the concept of force came to dominate eighteenth-century physics through the work of Newton, while playing a dominant role in the thought

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of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant.”32 More specifically, the notion of force is invoked to account for an object as a transitional movement from oneness to diversity. Coming out of perception, consciousness posits that on the one hand there are “independent matters” (properties) and the “thing” counts as nothing more than that within which they subsist. On the other hand, as elements in a unity, these independent matters are sublated and lose their independence from each other. “They are each where the other is; . . . they are absolutely porous, or are sublated.”33 Consequently, the apprehension of force as the unconditioned universal is an apprehension of a thing as a movement that expresses itself through its manifold properties and as the transition from this expression back into the unity of the thing. As Hegel states, “matters posited as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity. But this movement is what is called ‘Force.’”34 At first, Understanding attempts to understand force itself as a distinct thing that has effects upon other things (different types of matter) that appear to be distinct from the force that affects them (as if gravity were a thing distinct from physical bodies that causes them to move). Upon closer examination, however, we see that the matters acted upon by a force are characterized by a receptivity to the action of this force (as for example the mass of an object is its receptivity to gravity). If the nature of that which is acted upon consists in its being acted upon, and if that which acts upon it is “force”, then it makes sense to say that force itself is both that which acts and that which is acted upon—that is, as a single underlying movement that includes both. However, Hegel points out that proponents of this account must maintain that there are actually two forces at work. On the one hand, to speak of a plurality of matters that wait for force to express itself is, it seems, to speak of these matters as “soliciting” force to express itself. On the other hand, a second movement seems to proceed from the original force itself, since without it, the matter that waits would have nothing to solicit. Indeed, its soliciting is itself solicited by the original force. Each force thus need the other to perform its own activity. However, this means that no force or combination of forces can explain the unity of the object without a 32 Robert Stern, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2002), 60. 33 Hegel, Phenomenology, 81. 34 Ibid.

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further account of what grounds the reciprocal relation between forces, which Hegel calls the “thought of Force.” In his words, “Thus the truth of Force remains only the thought of it; the moments of its actuality, their substances and their movement, collapse unresistingly into an undifferentiated unity. . . .”35 The original notion of force is shown to be contingent upon its “inner essence” or non-sensible truth. Consciousness “looks through the mediating play of Forces into the true background of Things,” an outcome inferred from the “play of Forces . . . [as] the developed negative . . .”36 of the apparent difference between the two forces in their interplay. Since this inner being constitutes the stable essence of the perpetual flux of forces, Hegel refers to it as the “law of Force.” What looks like a perpetual flux turns out to be a constant and predictable pattern of interaction or a law. As Richard Winfield explains, “the play of forces has reverted into a single movement, where the transformations of each force are governed by a single process.”37 With the notion of law, consciousness concludes that flux is intelligible in and through laws, which are “the outcome of the flux itself . . . that is posited in the inner world as it is in truth. . . .”38 As Quentin Lauer remarks, with the turn to law, the “scientific understanding is . . . where it wants to be,”39 since here consciousness appeals to the “calm realm of laws”40 as the source of the intelligibility of scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, Hegel shows that identifying ultimate reality with the supersensible realm of laws suffers from two problems. First, law is supposed to be the source of the intelligibility of appearances but appearances change and laws have to catch up to make sense of these changes. But if there is always a remainder of appearance that law has not yet absorbed, then law is not an exhaustive source of intelligibility. Second, in its quest to identify the ground of the rationality of scientific knowledge, the Understanding searches for a single organizing principle for all determinate laws. However, the Understanding fails to discover such a principle since, as Terry Pinkard explains, “if it is general enough to be the law governing the so-called supsersensible forces (and out of which phenomenal laws are to be constructed), then it will have no content. If it is particular enough to 35 Ibid., 86. 36 Ibid., 87. 37 Winfield, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 82, emphasis mine. 38 Hegel, Phenomenology, 90. 39 Lauer, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, 85. 40 Ibid.

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have any content, it will not be general enough to be the ‘law of force.’ . . .”41 Moreover, the metaphysical law is caught in the contradiction between its universal form and the particular content it is supposed to generate. So, it remains unclear how this law functions as a lawful source of necessity for particular laws since it is not in and itself merely an abstraction from them. Perhaps, as was popular at the time, the movement from general law to particular laws might be explained if each law is recognized as an expression of a primary “force” (for example, the law of gravity is grounded or is an expression of the “force” of gravity). Unfortunately, the attempt to posit a “force” for particular laws does not help identify the necessity of their particularity but only tacks on a metaphysical ground. Still by invoking the category of force, the Understanding inadvertently stumbles upon a critique of this constancy itself since the category of force implies transition. The discovery that law is governed by a principle of change gives rise to the idea of an “inverted world” or a new realm of law. The Understanding’s inability to arrive at a clear explanation of law’s determinacy now registers as a full-blown critique of the idea of law. In place of its appeal to stable principles that were thought to govern reality’s flux, consciousness now proposes that reality’s flux determines the law and “through this principle, the first supersensible world, the tranquil kingdom of laws, the immediate copy of the perceived world, is changed into its opposite . . . with this the inner world is completed as appearance.”42 The inverted world cannot, however, be construed as the absolute opposite of the tranquil realm of laws since it is predicated upon a recognition of the instability of the Understanding’s representations of change. As Hegel says, “from the idea, then, of inversion . . . this absolute Notion of the difference must be represented. . . .” Consciousness realizes that it has to “think pure change or think [of] the antithesis within the antithesis itself.”43 For if the world of appearance is a world of difference, it is also the case that difference is not adequately represented by a single concept or law that, as constant and selfsame, contradicts the changing nature of the reality it is supposed to represent. For this reason, a critique of constancy requires a critique of the idea that a representation can be fixed and thereby differentiated from another fixed representation. To represent the changing world of appearance as changing requires a representation that honors 41 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 40. 42 Hegel, Phenomenology, 96. 43 Ibid., 99.

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change, which Hegel identifies as the new dynamic principle of inner difference or infinity. With the idea of infinity, the Understanding arrives at a principle that connects unity with difference and appears to reconcile the Understanding and its representations with the reality of appearances. The Understanding’s concepts and the appearances, for which they purportedly accounted, are now situated within a single infinity or perpetual process of inner differentiation. The Understanding’s discovery of the infinite constitutes a key moment in consciousness’ attempt to illuminate what it still takes to be the self-evident rationality implicit in natural scientific knowledge. Looking back, consciousness now recognizes that its earlier quest to identify the rational grounds of knowledge through epistemological explanations of a knowing subject’s access to spatio-temporal objects that with the turn to the force and the Understanding is associated with as Pinkard puts it, “the conceptual opposition . . . between sensuous entities of the appearing world and the supersensible entities of the world of things in themselves,”44 now culminates in an awareness of the Understanding itself as the movement of infinity. Still, to speak of the Understanding as the conceptual process of positing and op-positing or the movement of infinity is to speak of consciousness as that which posits and op-posites itself. As the movement of the infinite, the Understanding morphs into self-consciousness, or as Hegel says, “consciousness is for its own self, a distinguishing of that which contains no difference, or self-consciousness.  .  .  .  I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so I am directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is not different [from me].”45

Epistemology and Self-Consciousness The turn to self-consciousness in the Phenomenology marks an important move towards European culture’s recognition of the human community living in the world as the agent of reflective rationality. If the central question of the prior section on consciousness is how persons can derive norms of intelligibility from external spatio-temporal objects, the central question of this second section on self-consciousness is how the self can be the source of rational norms? In posing this question, consciousness becomes aware 44 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 43. 45 Ibid., 102.

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of itself as free over and against the world of nature, which, until this point, had been taken for granted as the objective origin for the validity of natural scientific claims. At this juncture, it is important to recognize that the turn to self-consciousness or the “Subject” does not advance consciousness’s account of the rationality of knowledge beyond the fact-value divide. While consciousness here turns its attention to the self as the self-evident source of rationality, it continues to presuppose that rationality is something “given” rather than generated. A complete apprehension of the speculative nature of the determination of rationality requires dissolving not only spatio-temporal objects but also consciousness itself as a given fact independent of the hypotheses or explanations it puts forth. Insofar as consciousness does not find itself implicated in its hypothesis, it fails to provide a non-arbitrarily anchored standard of rational validity and remains indebted to what it takes to be the self-evidence of its account of rationality. This is why Hegel associates the activity of consciousness itself with the faculty of the Understanding even though consciousness no longer posits this faculty as its current shape or going hypothesis. This hypothesis is documented in chapter IV’s discussion of the self and its desire, the master–slave relationship, stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness. The discussion of the turn to the self begins with a picture of the self as an individual who takes her own desires and will as what counts as the ground of rational claims. As an agent of desire, the subject asserts her needs over and against everything else in nature, approaching nature only as the source for the satisfaction of her own desires. However, the self quickly discovers that the attempt to satisfy her desires through nature presupposes her need of nature. Ironically, the self affirms nature rather than nature affirming the self. Is there a way for nature to affirm the self ’s desires as what counts as valid? This is possible only if nature negates itself; but, of course, only persons can will to negate themselves or their own will. Consciousness thus concludes that the self ’s desires can be affirmed if another person negates her own desires and recognizes those of oneself. However, consciousness soon realizes that another self-consciousness will not want to do this because it is concerned with its own life and desires and the two will struggle in a life or death battle. But since each seek not only gratification but recognition by another self, a struggle to the death cannot determine either individual as the principle site of rationality, since in extinguishing another person,

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death also removes the possibility of receiving their recognition. Instead, both parties choose life, even though this inevitably means that the stronger person dominates the weaker. In short, one individual becomes the master and the other becomes the slave. The master–slave relationship constitutes the final move in self-consciousness’s attempt to posit a view of the desiring subject as the singular source of rational normativity over and against nature or the spatio-temporal object. This is because in the course of the master–slave relationship, while the master attempts to regard the slave as a mere object, the slave discovers that she is the determinant of what counts as valid, and not the master. Unlike the master, who needs the slave to produce the objects of his desire, the slave remains devoted to the master as her “essential truth.” For this reason, the slave demonstrates the ability to destabilize her own particular “attachments” in the production of the objects that the master desires, rather than herself. As Hegel explains, “through [her] service [she] rids [herself] of [her] attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.”46 In her service she forms the natural world into an object that reflects someone else’s desires and not her own, even as, ironically she becomes the source of the master’s sense of what counts. Stated otherwise, the slave demonstrates the ability to think about someone else’s desire, and thus begins to adopt a “universal” standpoint. By virtue of her capacity to rise above herself, the slave is no longer a slave, but the “Stoic self ” who finds freedom in her thought of the universal. Still, her thoughtful embrace of the universal is nothing more than the withdrawal from her own subjective desires. Her embrace of the universal is empty because the only normative content she knows is what counts for her as an individual. She understands the concept of a universal norm, but she cannot coherently determine its content because she does not know how to reconcile her own desire with someone else’s but only how to deny her own desires. In the end, the Stoic’s “thought” amounts to a perpetual critique of “contingent, single and separate consciousness[es]. . . .”47 The impossibility of articulating the Stoic universal leads to the posture of skepticism. Like the Stoic, the skeptic’s thought is dependent on what it takes to be the opposite of its thought. The skeptic knows that what counts is the universal. However, the skeptic cannot know how she can 46 Ibid., 117. 47 Ibid., 105.

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access that universal, since the only content she knows is the particular and contingent. As Terry Pinkard explains, the skeptic knows that, [the] impersonal point of view [is true] and [at the same time] this point of view is impossible for him to attain. [Consequently, he] must represent this objective, authoritative point of view to himself as something beyond his capacities, which he only knows well enough to know that he cannot attain it. . . .48

Caught in this crisis, the skeptic becomes the unhappy consciousness, which takes for granted that her ability to recognize the universal norm must come from an outside source. The unhappy consciousness adopts various forms of piety as it seeks ways to connect to a universal posited as outside its contingent existence—an “unchangeable” God that remains “beyond” the reach of consciousness, and which consciousness must yet represent to itself in order to seek it49 (In its attempt to ground itself in a “beyond,” the unhappy consciousness is the most overt form of what I have called the turn to the “more.”) The result is despair, an ineradicable sense of failure as the self constantly measures itself against a universal it can never attain. In the wake of its devotional efforts and yearning for God, consciousness realizes that its devotional practices are exercises in its own work and expressions of its own desires in the world. Thus, “the world of actuality to which desire and work are directed is no longer for this consciousness something intrinsically null, something  .  .  .  to be set aside and consumed, but  .  .  .  also a sanctified world.”50 As such, it sees the objects of its desire in light of the God who made them and is grateful. Yet it knows that the objects of its gratitude do not come from itself, perceiving itself only as guilty. Nonetheless, in this despair, consciousness makes a critical connection between its guilt and its aspiration for the universal and comes to appreciate the latter as the presupposition of the former. As Hegel says, “the feeling of its wretchedness and the poverty of its actions is linked to the consciousness of its unity with the Unchangeable.”51 The negative awareness that consciousness has of itself is, at the same time, a positive awareness of its relation to the universal. In its negativity, consciousness sustains both a subjective awareness of 48 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 71. 49 Hegel, Phenomenology, 129. 50 Ibid., 132–133. 51 Ibid., 135–136.

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contingency and a subjective reflection on the universal insofar as the latter is the condition for the former. While the Stoic self was unable to overcome the divisions between its subjective desire and its reflection on the universal, here by contrast, the self as subjective desire is reconciled with the thought of the universal through the self ’s ability to conceive of a relation between its subjective desires and the universal will (or “Reason”), even if at this stage, this only the purely negative relation of guilt. According to Hegel, the self discovers its own autonomy in its capacity to perform this mediation in its conscious choice to allow a “mediator” to orchestrate this reconciliation. As Terry Pinkard explains, what matters is that “participants in the ‘unhappy consciousness’ implicitly come to the . . . conclusion . . . that it is their decision to elevate themselves to that point of view and that they determine the value that they shall place on the words of the mediator-priest.”52 With this decision, consciousness qua contingent asserts the value of a reconciliation with the universal as its own. By identifying itself as the free source of a universal standard of rationality, self-consciousness morphs into the rational, transcendental “I” that constitutes the free source of the objective validity of knowledge. In short, self-consciousness becomes Reason.

B. Transcendental Idealism and Scientific Theory Again, consciousness’s determination of “Reason,” might appear to overcome a fact-value logic since it marks consciousness’s initial foray into idealism and the transcendental turn. Nonetheless, the transcendental turn posited by the Understanding at this stage still takes for granted the rational self-evidence of the validity of fact-claims without recognizing its own on-going activity of rational, normative justification as documented in Hegel’s discussion of “Observing Reason.” In the opening sections of chapter V, “The Certainty and Truth of Reason,” Hegel documents consciousness’s shape as “Reason” so far as it is aware of its own contribution to the universal. As Hegel states, Up until now it [self-consciousness] has been concerned  .  .  .  to save and maintain itself for itself at the expense of the world. . . . But as Reason . . . it is certain that it is itself reality or that everything actual is none other than

52 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 77.

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itself . . . its thinking is itself directly actuality, and thus its relationship to the latter is that of idealism.53

By saying that “everything actual is none other than itself,” Hegel means that at this stage, consciousness takes the rational self to be the source of the logical validity of knowledge claims. Consciousness hereby recognizes the fully mediated character of rationality. Nonetheless, consciousness’s assertion of the transcendental self remains untested and undetermined. In Hegel’s account, consciousness’s new hypothesis meets its first challenge when it confronts its reliance on the sensuous data with respect to which it perform its own categorical function. On the one hand, the categorical “I” is said to be the unconditioned, while on the other hand, it presupposes the empirical knowledge it purportedly grounds. The “I” needs the Thing just as much or more than the Thing needs the “I.” Indeed, Reason not only needs the Thing but comes to recognize itself only in the Thing, to “possess in thinghood the consciousness only of itself.”54 In the section entitled, “Observing Reason,” Reason begins its quest to affirm itself as the transcendental “I” by illuminating its own contribution to empirical knowledge. According to Hegel, observing Reason determines itself in and through the results and successes of scientific observation in three distinct phases: description, classification, and the determination of natural laws. In the first phase, Reason identifies itself with the act of stringing together a list of discrete properties of an object’s sensuous particularity. However, this activity is not an adequate expression of Reason since, as Quentin Lauer explains, “piling up of sensible characteristics does [not] constitute a knowledge of things”55 and the activity of description does not therefore identify a rational element in scientific knowledge. From here, Reason investigates the work of classification, which seems to identify the difference between “essential” and “inessential” characteristics of particular objects or characteristics that “separate [particular things] from others, and are explicitly for themselves.”56 Finally, classification gives way to Reason’s identification of itself with laws of the natural world since classificatory accounts of the essential characteristics of objects are challenged when changing environments result in changes in these apparently essential 53 Hegel, Phenomenology, 139. 54 Ibid., 145. 55 Lauer, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, 160 56 Hegel, Phenomenology, 149.

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features. In the wake of these events, Reason finds itself searching for an explanation of the correlation between these changes and their particular occasions. Reason finds itself therefore in the development of scientific laws that track these connections and affirms them through processes of experimentation. “In its experiments the instinct of Reason sets out to find what happens in such and such circumstances . . . [and] raise the law into the form of Notion, and to free its moments completely from being tied to a specific being.”57 According to Hegel, however, determination of Reason as law reaches its limit when consciousness discovers organic objects that are more than the sum of the laws that determine how they are affected by their external environment. Organic objects are, “freed from the necessity of Nature . . . and [operate] spontaneously above it,”58 according to the organism’s own “End” or internal purpose. When consciousness discovers the teleological character of lived organisms, this discovery challenges its understanding of itself as observing Reason, since living organisms display a feature that cannot be accounted for through observational science. Instead, Reason discovers that to account for the purposiveness of organisms it must take its own purposive life as a paradigm. Reason quests after an objective example of “life” in which it can affirm itself and finds itself to be its own best candidate for this example. Reason, consciousness discovers, seeks to affirm itself [that is, realize its own concept or what it is] over and against the contingent and indeed lawful aspects of nature. In its quest to affirm itself in objective reality, Reason winds up discovering itself instead in its act of reflection or judgment that “as the category,” it is not affirmed in “being” or in any empirically observable objectivity. As Hegel puts it, “the given object is consequently determined as a negative object; consciousness, however, is determined as ‘self-consciousness’ over against it.”59 Put differently, in this moment, consciousness discovers that Reason affirms itself in the activity of self-reflection and in this act of self-reflection constitutes itself as its own self-determining and self-preserving life. Consciousness’s discovery of Reason’s character as self-determining will be the key to its apprehension of the justificatory activity of a community as a form of life. Arguably, the remainder of the Phenomenology is the process by means of which what is here taken as a hypothesis or 57 Ibid., 153. 58 Ibid., 156. 59 Ibid., 209.

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shape of consciousness becomes less abstract and ultimately grasped by consciousness as the activity of its own self-reflection With this new development, Reason no longer affirms simply itself by conceptualizing observable facts. Rather, since Reason operates teleologically as mental activity, consciousness maintains that thinking—the free activity of generating rational and reflective judgment—can be seen in an individual’s conscious capacity to determine her actions over against their determination by natural forces. As Hegel states, “to begin with, this active Reason is aware of itself merely as an individual and as such must demand and produce its reality in an ‘other.’”60 As Quentin Lauer explains, “mental activity first reveals itself . . . in the practical work of guiding action . . . . But it is individuals who act and so the focus of attention becomes the practical activity of individual self-conscious reason.”61 Individuals are free and can preserve themselves when they are guided by an active reasoning that does not generate fixed and immutable propositions but rather, as a dynamic life, can freely respond to changing social, historical, and natural events. This is why Hegel argues that Reason affirms or objectifies itself in “world-history”62 since human history is the product of consciously determined human practical actions and since it sees this activity as the site of Reason’s affirmation of itself or the source of rationality. Consequently, from this point forward, consciousness is preoccupied with explaining how people act freely in history.

C. Transcendental Idealism and Practical Freedom At this juncture, consciousness embarks upon the immediate determination of a new hypothesis that rationality is transcendental Reason as practical human freedom. In this stage, consciousness’s activity remains governed by the labor of the Understanding (and hence by the fact-value divide) despite the fact that the hypotheses posited assume the form of practical idealism.

Transcendental Reason as the Individual and Her Self-Actualization In the first few stages we see Reason attempt to affirm itself in the practical freedom of the individual insofar as she pursues the following personal 60 Ibid., 211. 61 Lauer, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, 173. 62 Hegel, Phenomenology, 178.

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interests: pleasure, sentimental law, and virtuous ideals (chapter V.B.) These accounts reflect modern European culture’s notion of the individual as one who, “need not accept anything outside of its own resources in order to be able to justify itself.”63 Ultimately, Reason cannot affirm itself in these accounts because as we have learned, transcendental Reason is the mediation between individual and universal will, yet in each of these shapes, the individual is ruled by her own subjective interests and cannot therefore legitimately determine what counts as the universal will. First, Reason attempts to affirm itself in the individual self ’s free activity of pleasure seeking. However, the fulfillment of pleasure requires participation by another person who satisfies the self ’s desires. Pleasure is therefore a relational activity that requires recognition from others, whereby the individual realizes that “as an individual  .  .  .  she is only a moment, or a universal.”64 But this universal remains empty since her individual desires provide no grounds for others to act. In the wake of this challenge, the self identifies itself instead as that which submits to the universal, first by simply identifying her own desires with the universal as the “law of the heart.” However, the individual inevitably encounters pushback from others since her law “contradicts the equally individual laws of their hearts. . . .”65 Finally, aware of the tension between individuals who each advance their own personal “universal,” consciousness reverses course and posits a portrait of a “knight of faith” who refuses to put her own interests first but instead vows to pursue a life of virtue. Unfortunately, the knight of faith’s pursuit of virtue remains a quest for self-affirmation, no less than the pursuit of pleasure or sentiment. With the failure of the knight of faith, consciousness negates the idea of practical reason as the achievement of particular goals and replaces it with an appreciation for the individual who pursues “its [own] self [as] an End”66 and expresses this self in the work it produces. Questions arise, however, because no other individual perceives this work as universal since each recognizes only its own work as an expression of the unconditioned. Consciousness appreciates the contradiction and identifies her pure activity (in abstraction from particular products) as the essence of the work produced. Unfortunately, only the individual can vouch for the fact 63 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 92. 64 Hegel, Phenomenology, 218. 65 Ibid., 227–228. 66 Ibid., 235.

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that her own free activity is expressed in her work, and so this individual effort becomes her primary focus rather than the universal.67 Nonetheless, despite the particularity of her efforts, each individual nevertheless aspires to express herself to others through her work. Indeed, “actualization is . . . a display of what is one’s own in the element of universality whereby it becomes . . . the affair of everyone.”68 Consciousness learns that individual action is not merely private, but rather implicated in a universal “matter in hand,” the product of her work that is itself, a “substance permeated by individuality.”69 The universal presupposes the individual’s activity and the individual’s activity turns out to be the condition of the universal. As Hegel states, “‘the matter at hand’ is therefore the ethical substance and consciousness of it is the ethical consciousness.”70 The acts of each individual make a claim on all, and vise versa. At this juncture, consciousness posits the theory that an individual acts freely in adhering to the universal law generated by her own Reason. As universal, the moral law is a priori, “valid in and for itself,”71 and it applies to everyone at all times. Unfortunately, the moral law lacks content since the determination of content introduces the element of contingency whereas the moral law is supposed to be universal. For example, a law that states “know the truth” is devoid of content, but when “know the truth” means “know this particular truth,” then adherence to it requires knowledge of said “truth,” is therefore conditioned, and is no longer valid in itself. For this reason, consciousness loses sight of the universal because it contains it only “in the form of . . . a willing and knowing by this particular individual” such that the moral law amounts to an abstract “ought to be of an unreal commandment and a knowledge of formal universality.”72 The contradiction facing consciousness is clear: the individual is implicated in the universal and yet the universal cannot derive from the individual alone. If law is universal, it has to be “the will of all”73 or, as Quentin Lauer explains, “ethical consciousness  . . . has superseded itself as a singular . . .”74 67 Ibid., 249. 68 Ibid., 251. 69 Ibid., 252. 70 Ibid., 253. 71 Ibid., 256. 72 Ibid., 260. 73 Ibid. 74 Lauer, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, 201.

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and is now identified as the already “existent law” which individuals do not “believe in” but exist through and which all take to be valid.

Transcendental Reason and Ethical Substance The Phenomenology’s documentation of the Understanding’s labor to produce arbitrarily anchored theories of the self-evident conditions of knowledge continues with consciousness’s account of “the Ethical Order” and “Self-alienated Spirit or Culture” (Chapter VI.A/B.I.a.) Together, these are the final two shapes in which consciousness represents transcendental Reason as affirming itself through practical (ethical) freedom. Undoubtedly, transcendental idealism constitutes a key evolutionary moment in European culture’s effort to come to terms with the rational conditions of scientific knowledge since it illuminates the mediated character of all knowledge, including scientific facts. Nonetheless, transcendental idealism’s account of the mediated character of claims is itself unmediated, since it takes the structures of Reason as given (for instance, Kant’s “fact” of Reason). This is why Hegel argues that if the task of consciousness is to affirm Reason as self-determining, any form of transcendental idealism that takes rationality as a given constitutes an inadequate affirmation of Reason and remains the product of consciousness as the Understanding. This remains the case in the sections that follow, despite consciousness’s increasing appreciation for the social context within which practical reason functions, what Hegel calls “Spirit”. At this stage, consciousness has moved beyond portraits of practical freedom grounded in the individual’s aims or activity and has discovered the individual’s indebtedness to a universal ethical substance (Sittlichkeit), which, taken by all as unconditionally valid, grounds and yet also presupposes the individual’s free action. Hegel calls this ethical substance “Spirit,” the customs and social contexts within which individuals take themselves to function and within which they identify themselves in relation to others who operate in the same context. Spirit is, as Lauer says, “the life of a people regulated by immemorial custom.”75 Hegel exemplifies the early stages of Spirit with reference to ancient Greece, as represented in the modern European imagination. As Pinkard explains, the Phenomenology takes up 75 Ibid., 205.

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[the] Greek alternative, which even if it is could not be achieved in the context of modern life, nonetheless showed what a successful version of the projecting  .  .  .  would look like.  .  .  .  The elegiac nostalgia for Greek life— beautiful, lost and irrecoverable—was a weighty feature of the intellectual atmosphere of Hegel’s time. . . .76

According to Hegel, Greek society understood communal ethical life as governed by two different areas of law: human law that regulates society as a whole in matters of life in the world and divine law that governs persons as members of different families in matters pertaining to death. Both are considered universal and each is implicated in the other. Since divine law regulates the treatment of persons in death (by families), it presupposes the existence of human laws that regulate persons in life. By the same token, human law presupposes the individual family members whose death summons the gods of the netherworld to their side, since the state uses war and death to secure total commitment to the nation over and against any other corporate or familial ties. In this way, “the ethical realm is . . . a tranquil transition of one of its powers into the other.”77 This tranquil whole reaches its limit, however, when cases arise that force actors to violate one of these laws in order to meet their obligation to the other. Antigone is the classic example, since she violates state laws in complying with the divine law to bury her treasonous brother. In this context, the “universal appears as a ‘pathos’”78 because the structure of Sittlichkeit leaves agents without the means to adjudicate between these two commitments. What emerges from this pathos is a loss of confidence in ethical substance, which takes the form of an abstract individual or “unyielding self ”79 in relation to the formal universality”80 of a positive law that has no customary content, but instead governs over the “soulless community which has ceased to be the substance of individuals.”81 No longer able to identify themselves with their role in a particular culture, the individual remains an abstract person under the law (a citizen). Moreover, since her identification with the universal is formal only, her individuality remains unregulated and

76 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 134. 77 Hegel, Phenomenology, 278. 78 Ibid., 287. 79 Ibid., 290. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid.

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the world of legal status devolves into a circus of “unfettered freedom.”82 No person has legitimate legal authority over another, but in the vacuum of a living spirit of ethical substance stands a single individual whose wealth distinguishes him from others and positions him as a ruler who therefore assumes power and governs over others as a “hostile being”83. In the wake of the tension presented by the abstract legal personality of the citizen, consciousness recognizes the individual’s hybrid relationship to her community. On the one hand, she is alienated from it since it recognizes her only as an abstract individual and sustains an arbitrary authority rooted only in the power of the state. On the other hand, the formation of this legal community is a product of her own work in negating social custom. “This world is . . . the work of self-consciousness, but it is also an alien reality already present and given, a reality which has a being of its own and in which it does not recognize itself.”84 Consequently, though alienated from the power of her community, the individual issues value judgments about the wealth and power of the state and in this way, contributes to the development of a culture of one or the other and as Pinkard states, “the Roman form of life thus . . . created the possibility of the modern world.”85 By issuing such judgments, individual persons shape the existing world of money or power into a sphere of cultivated values, and identify with it. Ultimately, however, neither the culture of nobility (state) nor of bourgeiose (wealth) expresses the universal since both are products of these individual, subjective judgments which are Hegel says, “one-sided determination[s].”86 Ultimately, the edifice of culture, apparently generated by these judgments as an expression of the universal or a site of transcendental rationality, falls apart. “What is learnt in this world is that neither the actuality of power and wealth, nor their specific Notions, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or the consciousness of ‘good and bad . . . possess truth. . . .”87 In this situation, ethical judgments become meaningless. Nevertheless, all is not lost, since the cultural self ’s caustic attacks upon the inadequacy of its judgments signals a self-consciousness of itself as the agent of critique. Ethical substance

82 Ibid., 292. 83 Ibid., 293. 84 Ibid., 294. 85 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 150. 86 Ibid., 306. 87 Ibid., 316.

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returns to the “self that knows, not only how to pass judgment  .  .  .  but knows everything to be self-alienated. . . .”88

II. External Critique: Pure Insight and the Enlightenment With the demise of modern culture and ethical substance (Sittlichkeit) as the reigning transcendental contexts within which modern European society understood the rational presuppositions of its knowledge, consciousness arrives at the next major phase of engagement with the fact-value divide, what I call external critique. In chapter four, I discussed the analogous shift to external critique illustrated by Karl Barth and Leo Strauss. Both challenge the self-evident rationality of scientific knowledge claims by issuing an external critique of the fact-value logic without offering an account of the rationality of his own position. This transitional moment in Nature and Norm directly parallels the Phenomenology’s discussion of consciousness’ overcoming of self-alienated culture in the section on Pure Insight and the Enlightenment. The shapes of “Faith and Pure Insight” and “Enlightenment” (chapter VI.B.I.b./B.II.) mark the last times that consciousness deploys the Understanding as the exclusive instrument of its investigation into the rationality of knowledge claims. Beyond this point, the labor of the Understanding will be contextualized and conditioned by an additional exercise of rational reflection, what I identify as an immanent critique of the Understanding as an exhaustive mode of rational determination. As we have noted, the earlier theories of the Understanding locate the rationality of claims in our epistemological access to given objects of the spatio-temporal world, while later, more determinate theories identify Reason itself as the transcendental condition of the objective validity of knowledge claims while continuing to take Reason’s own role as given and to investigate it in terms determined by the Understanding. As we have seen, the givenness of Reason in ethical substance gives way to self-alienated culture, which constitute the final stages in Understanding’s attempt to identify a positive theory of the modern European form of life. In the cultural critic, consciousness recognizes the negative power of the Understanding or pure “I” itself as the condition of all of its prior shapes. Not surprisingly, this same pure “I” will bend back and critique itself in an act of unbridled and 88 Ibid., 320.

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self-destructive freedom. From this point on, any attempt by consciousness to salvage the project of the Understanding and its quest to determine the rationality of scientific knowledge will require a recognition of the Understanding’s own limits and situatedness in the broader context of the “Notion,” the activity of communal justificatory self-reflection. In the section entitled, “Faith and Pure Insight,” Hegel documents the rise of Enlightenment Reason and skepticism as the outcome the self ’s failed attempt to identify itself with the universal in and through culture. In its place, consciousness discovers the pure “I” that judges the two sides of culture (political power and wealth) as expressions of mere subjective inclination. As judge, it “knows  . . . that it is the power over them. . . . [W]hile they are vain things . . . in thus knowing . . . it has immediately risen above [them]. . . . The positive object is merely the pure ‘I’ itself. . . .”89 As a product of the retreat from the culture, the pure “I” negates the content of culture from two vantage points or positions. On the one hand, like the self of culture, the pure “I” seeks to identify with an object. Since, however, it sustains no confidence in existing culture, the pure “I” produces (cultivates) its own object or content from its own stock of internal representations. Here the pure “I” is the self of faith. On the other hand, the pure “I” also reflects the self that, in response to the limits of custom, stands in judgment of culture as its criterion. Here this self plays the role of rational critic, whose “insight” or “pure thought . . . in the light of its negativity . . . eliminates everything objective that supposedly stands over against consciousness. . . .”90 Since both forms are expressions of the pure “I” that, as the power of the negative, establishes itself as the exclusive standard of rationality, each undermines the other, and together they expose the inability of the pure “I” to preserve itself. From the vantage point of Enlightenment Reason, faith’s object is a “predicateless absolute”91 and the source of superstition. Nonetheless, if insight is correct to criticize faith for its failure to conceptualize the absolute, faith rightly observes that Reason sustains an unjustified confidence in its own unbridled skepticism. For the self of Reason is “unrestricted” in its attacks; it insists on conceptualizing all content in its own image, but it fails to conceptualize itself and becomes its own irrational remainder. In the end, it can neither justify nor preserve itself, and the pure “I” emerges as an unstable tension between these two inadequate and 89 Ibid., 321. 90 Ibid., 323. 91 Ibid., 330.

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irreconciliable postures. With this, the Understanding reaches its limit and its entire effort comes to a halt. In this moment, the fate of the pure “I” parallels the fate of Barth’s Nein and Strauss’s skepticism. All three issue critiques of the fact-value divide, or the Understanding’s positive attempts to illuminate the self-evident rationality of knowledge claims, and all three fail to justify their own critique. Consequently, all three thinkers face a forced option either to abandon the quest to illuminate the rationality of knowledge claims altogether or to recognize the limits of the Understanding itself and identify its conditions or justification. As I have shown in chapter four, external critique morphs into immanent critique when the failure of the attempt to identify fixed standards of rationality results in this crisis of intelligibility. By contrast, an awareness of the failure of fixed theories of the grounds of rationality prompts the question of whether there are particular (and yet potentially alterable) standards of rationality for knowledge claims here and now for those who hold them, which amounts to an investigation into the conditions of the possibility of the ongoing determination of rationality altogether. As I argued in chapter five, such a move is motivated by thinkers’ desire to perpetuate the sustainability of their knowledge claims for communal forms of life. At this stage, European consciousness in the Phenomenology demonstrates a similar desire to justify the contents of its form of life.

III. Immanent Critique: From the Moral Law to Communal Justification A. Immanent Critique: From Moral Consciousness to the Reconciliatory Community The move from external critique to immanent critique appears in the section of the Phenomenology that begins with “Spirit that is certain of itself; Morality” and culminates with the infamous chapter on “Absolute Knowing.” As we have seen, the transition emerges when consciousness recognizes the dogmatism of the unrestricted, negative power of the pure “I.” Unwilling to apply its demands for justification to itself, the pure “I” of the Understanding is itself unjustified. In order to preserve itself, it needs to critique itself as the self-certain (given) agent of critique. Transcendental Reason remains unable to affirm itself as a dynamic and self-correcting life

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vis-à-vis the pure “I”’s unrestricted critique of any and all fixed standards of rationality, since it remains arbitrarily anchored. Moreover, it is not free, for without a criterion for the exercise of its own freedom, the Enlightenment self cannot place limitations on its own active skepticism, that is, it cannot distinguish between justified critical judgments concerning fixed standards of rationality and unjustified critical judgments of fixed or posited standards of rationality. Stated otherwise, the Enlightenment self presupposes itself as an authoritative Subject whose purposive life constitutes the criterion against which the Understanding’s critical judgments can be weighed. It cannot presuppose anything other than itself since as the pure “I,” it has already called any other positive ground of rationality into question. Without taking itself as a criterion, the Enlightenment self cannot preserve itself as an instrument of rational determination. The self of the Understanding presupposes the concept of itself as a Subject as the primary condition of the on-going (infinite) activity of its self-justification/self-reflection or immanent critique. The Understanding’s activity of issuing finite judgments of critique presupposes the Subject’s activity of infinite judgment by means of which these finite judgments may be judged, reconsidered, dispensed with, or revised. In chapter five, I illustrated how the parallel move from external critique to immanent critique is a pragmatic one. Either Jewish and Christian thinkers skeptically conclude that they cannot swell the tide of semantic crisis or they acknowledge the problem of intelligibility and see it as tantamount to the question: “what are the conditions under which claims can assume meaning, here and now or for us?” The latter constitutes an immanent critique of the fact-value paradigm that launches an investigation into the conditions of the rationality of particular claims for the community who holds them under the current environmental conditions. In the Phenomenology, we find an analogous shift from the labor of the Understanding to immanent critique or what will be the life of the Notion as the self-reflective activity of rational communal self-justification. However, in the Phenomenology, the account of this move gets broken down into a series of stages that chart the development of communal Subjectivity as the activity of rational self-determination. These stages are documented in the section on “Morality” and culminate in Hegel’s description of the self-reconciliatory praxis of the community as the authoritative judge of what counts as the changing rational standards of its knowledge claims.

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The Phenomenology then documents how communal subjective justificatory praxis constitutes one aspect or cognitive-logical moment of the larger process by which the European form of life preserves itself and how consciousness recognizes itself in this Life, thereby assuming full ownership over the logical functions of this form of life. Hegel tracks these developments in his account of “religion” and in the final chapter on “Absolute Knowing.” Stated simply, religion and absolute knowing are the paths by which European intellectual reflection takes ownership over its own logical functions such that it can “save” itself when it needs to. As we have noted, these developments emerge from consciousness’s awareness of the role of an authoritative Subject whose life provides the criterion for the activity of ongoing (infinite) reflection upon the finite judgments of the Understanding. But what is the criterion that measures and motivates the activity of reflection on the judgments of the Understanding? What is the Subject or “life” that reflection upon the standards of rationality works to preserve? Ultimately, consciousness will discover that it is the form of life of the modern European community with which the Phenomenology begins that constitutes the criterion and set of constraints within which its evaluation of the standards of rationality arises and for which its reflective praxis transpires. Just as modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers come to appreciate their form of life as the criterion or set of constraints within which they issue determinations concerning the rationality of their own knowledge claims, so consciousness will discover that its own form of life constitutes the authoritative criterion of its judgments of rationality. In both cases, “form of life” refers to the community’s body of knowledge and the changing inferential habits within which it holds its knowledge as it changes over time. In the Phenomenology, consciousness does not immediately arrive at an awareness of the community’s form of life as the authoritative subject of its rational self-determination. Instead, its opening hypothesis in this section is an immediate and merely formal notion of the Subject that limits the Understanding with the moral law in the form of “duty.” More specifically, consciousness posits a moral self that “knows duty to be [the] absolute essence,”92 the limit or criterion in relation to which the finite judgments of the Understanding are deemed valid. 92 Ibid., 365.

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Not surprisingly, consciousness soon discovers that it will have to amend this hypothesis since the morality it posits stands in an irreconcilable antinomy in relation to nature. On the one hand, morality presupposes nature to be enacted—both the nature within which it transpires and the sensuous nature of the persons performing it. On the other hand, morality necessarily opposes nature and asserts itself against it. However, if duty cannot be actualized, it cannot constitute the criterion of our rational self-determination. “Morality [turns out] to be imperfect because it is affected by the sense-nature and Nature opposed to it.”93 True or perfect morality is possible only for a perfect being, an ideal that moral consciousness must postulate in order to determine its own duty. However, to think itself in terms of another moral consciousness is to be alienated from itself as the criterion of rational self-determination. In the end, consciousness in its role as the moral self cannot grasp its own concept. Instead, it needs to posit a criterion it “knows”—a concept in which and for which it exists so that it may perform justificatory reflection for the sake of its own life. In the wake of the failure of this hypothesis, consciousness comes to appreciate the imperfect yet knowable reality of the real Subject who affirms and acts on her own convictions, which Hegel calls the Subject as “conscience.” While conscience may at first seem an unlikely candidate for a criterion governing the on-going activity of transcendental justification, Hegel explains that, “conscience [is] the common element of . . . two self-consciousnesses”94 since when one person expresses herself as “I,” she repeats an expression used by others and implicitly seeks their recognition. So recognized by others, the Subject as conscience conceives of itself and its inner voice as the ultimate arbiter of purpose and “knows its inner voice . . . to be a divine [one].” As such, she takes herself to be a participant in a romantic community of other divine voices such that her, “solitary divine worship is at the same time . . . the divine worship of and by a community. . . .”95 Unfortunately, the romantic self who worships only its own inner voice threatens its own actualization by refusing to act in the world. “It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action.”96 Despite this, it “persists,” since in fleeing the world it performs a judgment against 93 94 95 96

Ibid., 381. Ibid., 388. Ibid., 397. Ibid., 400.

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others who do not flee but take for granted other criteria of rationality beyond the convictions of the individual soul herself. Hegel calls this the “beautiful soul,” who, as Pinkard explains, is an “ironist” for whom “Nothing can count . . . unless he lets it count for him.”97 However, the ironist’s rejection of the world turns out to be a mode of relating to the world, since a critic is always parasitic on the object of his critique. Moreover, since the ironist’s act of criticism issues a “silent” judgment against others, his position proves to be hypocritical, since it presupposes the expectations of others about what makes sense. Only in light of these expectations is the ironist’s act understandable as a judgment. The ironist’s intervention presupposes a “‘commonsense’ criterion of intelligence and rationality. . . .”98 The community itself recognizes his hypocrisy. The ironist, they maintain, cannot both declare his position to be an expression of duty and maintain that, “duty is only a matter of [empty] words.”99 In this way, consciousness comes to recognize the ironist’s failure to appreciate his own role in the community and the extent to which his conception of himself is inextricable from the community. Nevertheless, the ironist is correct to denounce the corresponding hypocrisy of the community, whose members take their common sense assumptions as universal law rather than as merely mutually recognized individual convictions. In denouncing hypocrisy as base, vile and so on, it is appealing . . . to its own law, just as the evil consciousness appeals to its own law. . . . [T]he former . . . has, therefore, no superiority over the other law, rather it legitimizes it. And this zeal does the very opposite of what it means to do. . . .100

The criticism of the ironist makes explicit that if there are communally shared common sense standards of what “counts,” these are products of particular convictions subject to processes of community recognition and not fixed or metaphysically grounded. These insights in hand, consciousness takes a significant step towards determining the Subject whose life constitutes the measure and mandate for justificatory reflection. At this juncture, consciousness realizes that the Subject is neither the universal self of the moral law nor the individual moral genius bound only to its own convictions, but rather the reconciliation of these two 97 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 214. 98 Ibid., 216. 99 Hegel, Phenomenology, 400. 100 Ibid., 402.

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sides of the moral subject in an historically situated community of mutually legitimizing particular individuals.101 Here, the worth or value of the Subject derives from the unique nature of the bond sustained by the community. On the one hand, this is a community that sustains agreement with respect to what counts as commonsensical or intelligible. If it did not, individual members would not be able to make judgments without perpetually falling prey to the skeptic’s challenge. On the other hand, this is a community constituted by finite individuals whose lives are situated in the constraints of history and nature. Taken together, the community is the Subject whose identity depends upon its shared beliefs about rational intelligibility as these standards are continually recalibrated in relation to changing times and circumstances. According to Hegel, consciousness arrives at this insight when the two sides of the romantic community recognize themselves in the other. On the one hand, the ironist comes face to face with herself in the moralist member of the community who uses particular and contingent standards to issue a judgment about and to the ironist. In this confrontation, the ironist realizes that it too is an agent who judges and relates to others. On the other hand, the moralist sees herself in the former ironist, who now concedes her participation in the community. This first consciousness [ironist] which turns its back on its actual existence, and makes itself into a superseded particular consciousness, thereby displays itself as in fact a universal  .  .  .  and therein the universal consciousness [moralist] thus recognizes itself. The forgiveness which it [moralist] extends to the other [ironist] is the renunciation of itself.102

In this moment, the moralist appreciates the formality of the processes of mutual universal legitimization and the particularity and contingency of the content of all communal claims to common sense or rational intelligibility. She learns that without the contribution of the individual’s convictions, her own judgments are nothing more than “a mere matter of words. . . . The consciousness that acts [the ironist] declares its specific action to be a duty, and the consciousness that judges it cannot deny this; for duty itself is the 101 As Molly Farneth explains, “In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel shows the connection between communities’ accounts of why the things that they believe and do ought to be believed and done—that is, why they have authority—and the practices through which the members of those communities instantiate norms and adjudicate conflicts over them.” Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics, 10. 102 Ibid., 407.

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form which lacks all content but is capable of any.”103 Together the ironist and the moralist recognize themselves as agents of a “concrete universal” which both constitutes their identity or concept (telos) and requires ongoing determination as the product of processes of communal self-legitimization and mutual acknowledgment. Stated otherwise, the two sides of the romantic self recognize themselves in “Spirit,” that is, in the dynamic life of a particular community as it exists in and is performed by finite individuals. In this shape, consciousness arrives at an awareness of Absolute Spirit, the “reconciling Yea . . . [or] God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge.”104 With this discovery, consciousness achieves a significant insight. Having recognized the need for a Subject whose life constitutes the context and criterion of the labor of the Understanding (that is, immanent critique), and having recognized this as the objective site of a transcendental Reason that affirms itself through perpetual determinations of justification, consciousness now appreciates the life of the historical, reconciliatory community as the determination of that objective site. It has discovered that the Subject is the community that sustains communal standards of intelligibility and tests them in the changing conditions the community encounters. The Subject is the community that preserves its life by reconciling the voices of its individual members in order to determine its own ways of functioning as a community in the world. The word of reconciliation is the objectively existent Spirit, which beholds the pure knowledge of itself qua universal essence, in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself qua absolutely self-contained and exclusive individuality—a reciprocal recognition which is absolute Spirit.105

Ultimately, the Subject is the community that sustains itself through philosophical review of the cognitive habits that hold it together. If, however, the life of the community consists in the maintenance of common beliefs about what “counts,” it is imperative that the community recognize when current standards raise questions and revise these standards as needed for the preservation of the community’s form of life. Indeed, this is the same conclusion reached in chapter five. There as here, the failure of prior attempts to appropriate and contend with the 103 Ibid., 403. 104 Ibid., 409. 105 Ibid., 408.

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fact-value account of the self-evident rationality of knowledge claims results in a challenge to the pursuit of a fixed standard of objective validity altogether. There as here, the fall-out from the failure of the fact-value divide to secure a stable account of the rationality of modern European knowledge leads to the recognition that standards of rationality are mediated by communities that seek to preserve themselves in history. By the end of the Phenomenology’s section on morality, consciousness has discovered that if moral consciousness is that which authorizes the Enlightenment self to exercise its [critical] freedom, it is also the case that moral consciousness is transcended or conditioned by the reconciliatory practices of the community that are themselves beyond good and evil or by means of which the community adopts a posture of evaluating particular standards of normativity. Consequently, the essence of the reconciling community is experienced as “God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge.” In this way, moral consciousness takes on the shape of religion.

B. Religious Representation and Philosophical Authority As discussed in chapter five, immanent critique as it emerges through developments in Jewish and Christian thought amounts to a self-conscious awareness of the need to determine how the claims made by Jewish and Christian thinkers comport with the material and inferential conditions within which we live in the current historical moment. We also discovered that the exercise of immanent critique yields two additional philosophical outcomes. First, as the on-going activity of communal self-justification, the move to immanent critique accounts for and justifies the other pre-philosophical or pre-justificatory modes of rational determination as legitimate attempts to preserve the viability of Jewish and Christian knowledge claims in changing conditions. Second, this awareness gives rise to a newfound philosophical authority and responsibility for contemporary Jewish and Christian thinkers to investigate and illuminate the justificatory status of either status quo knowledge claims that present pragmatic challenges or new knowledge claims or proposals for action.106 106 It is worth noting the similarity between the authority referred to here and the association between judgments and authority described by Robert Brandom. Like Nature and Norm, Brandom’s work associates judgments with the application of communally exercised rules of inferential associations. Brandom’s work explores

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In other words, implicit in the move from external to immanent critique is an awareness of the historical nature of the logical developments that have pragmatically culminated in the move to immanent critique. Immanent critique is itself a commentary upon these developments, and in this way, it presupposes and teaches the historical tale of the logical challenge presented by the scientific revolution and the history of Jewish and Christian attempts to respond to the logical prioritization of scientific fact. It follows that the theopolitical problem is a feature of our current historical climate. We gain this insight because immanent critique arises out of the conditions of a forced option, which signals the inadequacy of pre-philosophical attempts to offer an adequate account of the logical validity of theopolitical claims at the current time. Consequently, immanent critique is not a critique of the relevance or adequacy of prior efforts at logical explanation for their time but a commentary on the adequacy of these explanations for our own. It is my central contention that these central implications of immanent critique are paralleled in the Phenomenology’s section on “Religion.” In this section, Hegel shows that a community’s reconciliatory (justificatory) activity opens up into a knowledge of the “life of the Notion,” which is the panoramic apprehension of the connection between the non-philosophical and philosophical cognitive moments in the modern European form of life as it strives to preserve itself in the face of the rise of scientific knowledge.107 how the application of rules presupposes normative qualities like commitment, accountability, trust and authority. More significantly, however, Brandom argues that concepts are habits of inferential relations and, consequently, count as reasons for those who use them. By extension, people who sustain awareness of when their concepts count as reasons achieve an authority linked to their deployment of said concept. In the language used in Nature and Norm, immanent critique provides an opportunity for a rational authority that is the direct result of the self-consciousness of a community’s ability to provide an account of how its claims work. Thanks to Kant, as Brandom explains, philosophy understands that, “concepts are . . . ‘functions of judgments.’ That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for. . . . At the center of what one is responsible for is having reasons for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against). . . . Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons.” Robert B. Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 9. 107 Tal Lewis makes a similar point with respect to Hegel’s portrait of Christianity when he says that, “Hegel offers a conception of Christianity that he takes to be simultaneously expressive of the genuine content of the tradition and consistent with modern social and intellectual developments.” See Tal Lewis, Religion, Modernity and Politics in Hegel

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Consequently, Hegel’s account of religion sets the stage for the insight that this apprehension of the history of modern European cognitive engagements with the rationality of scientific knowledge sponsors a newfound philosophical authority on the part of the community whose epistemic conditions call for it, which Hegel describes in the Phenomenology’s final chapter, “Absolute Knowing.” In Hegel’s account, religion serves as a vehicle through which a community reflects upon its working account of the rational grounds of its knowledge claims. Philosophy and art provide two other ways of representing the same content. In religion, a community represents what it takes to be the unconditioned ground of its claims in the form of symbols and stories. As Terry Pinkard explains, “whereas philosophy articulates [these] matters in discursive abstract conceptual thought, religion presents [these] matters in representations, in the form of concrete symbols and images. . . .”108 Hegel identifies Christianity in particular as the absolute religion, since it provides a religious representation of consciousness’ shape as the reconciliatory community and it illuminates the unity of the logical stages in the modern European philosophical journey implicit in its corresponding shapes of consciousness. Undoubtedly, this unity of logical stages is already implicit in the consciousness’s shape as the reconciliatory community, since, on the one hand, the Christian community is the result of the quest for its ground and, on the other hand, it is a result that needs no further mediation, since it is itself the activity of self-mediation. This connection becomes explicit in Christianity’s representation of God. As Hegel states, “Spirit as such contains the previously structured shapes in universal determinations. . . . Religion presupposes that these have run their full course and is their simple totality or absolute self.”109 Consequently, as consciousness’s expression of Spirit or the unconditioned on-going activity of communal justificatory reflection, the Christian theological account of the life of divine Logos calls for its own symbolic demythologization. Religious consciousness knows the absolute in the form of a symbolic or representational object, and to that extent as something given. By contrast, an adequate apprehension of the (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13. In other words, for Hegel, Christianity represents a shape of consciousness that reflects the modern European community’s move into speculative reflection. 108 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 223–224. 109 Hegel, Phenomenology, 413.

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life of the Notion does away with all “objective” hypotheses concerning the unconditioned ground of knowledge and replaces them with the ongoing subjective (communal) reflection on the rational intelligibility of claims. As Hegel states, as we now know that Spirit in its own world and Spirit conscious of itself as Spirit, or Spirit in religion, are the same, the perfection of religion consists in the two becoming identical with each other; not only that religion concerns itself with Spirit’s reality but, conversely, that Spirit, as self-conscious Spirit, becomes actual to itself. . . .110

Hegel’s discussion of Christianity as the absolute religion appears in the third and final part of the chapter on “Religion” and is preceded by his discussion of two prior forms of religion: natural religion and religion in the form of art. Hegel considers religious representations as a language that communities use to express what they take as the ultimate standard of rationality governing their form of life rather than being world-views that present claims about the supersensible or sensible world. Each stage of the Phenomenology thus has a corresponding religious representation. Consequently, Hegel’s discussion of natural religion and religion in the form of art provides a meta-account of the philosophical need for Christian theology that runs directly parallel to the developments in the Phenomenology of consciousness. In the first section of chapter VII, Hegel identifies “natural religion” as the religious representation of consciousness’s turn to the spatio-temporal object, or nature as the focus of its first theory of rationality. In natural religion, “God” is accordingly understood as unmediated “being” or Substance and—like its parallel in the section on consciousness—is conditioned by the artistic creativity of those who mediate it. This leads to Hegel’s account the religion of art, which corresponds to consciousness’s turn to transcendental idealism. Here Hegel focuses on Greek religion, which correlates with consciousness’s shape as Sittlichkeit. In Greek religion, the artist is the mouthpiece of the nation’s own spirit. Just as the role of the self develops in and through Roman law and self-alienated culture in the phenomenology of consciousness, so in Greek religion, the artist’s role increases until, like the Enlightenment self, the religious spirit of Greek ethical art implodes into the “negative power” of criticism, exercised by

110 Ibid., 412.

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the “individual self . . . through which and in which the gods, as also their moments . . . vanish.”111 In the wake of the implosion of the religion of art, conditions are ripe in Hegel’s phenomenology of religious representation for the evolution to Absolute Spirit or immanent critique. Like the pure “I” of the Understanding it parallels, religious consciousness faces a forced option: either to self-destruct or to recognize that its own preservation presupposes a criterion that it serves. The self of Greek religion experiences “grief and longing” for the very “God” or “Absolute” in whose name it first developed. In this moment, therefore, Hegel’s phenomenology of religion catches up to his phenomenology of consciousness in the Christian representation of the incarnation. Hegel’s account of the incarnation follows from and presupposes the prior two shapes of religious consciousness. Just as the reconciliatory community constitutes the Subject of the pure “I,” the representation of Jesus Christ constitutes the Subject of the skeptical self of Greek religious art, just as the self of Greek religious art served as the mediator of the Substance of natural religion before it. Therefore, Jesus Christ is that within which each of the prior moments achieve sustainability and that which conceptualizes or apprehends them as what they really are. However, since both elements constitute moments of God himself, Jesus Christ is also the God who preserves or saves himself in and through the unified process of self-justification. “In this religion the divine Being is revealed. Its being revealed obviously consists in this, that what it is, is known . . . the divine nature is the same as the human, and it is this unity that is beheld.”112 As a religious representation that explicitly presupposes the two prior shapes of religious consciousness, the incarnation illuminates how the activity of immanent critique, exposed in the life of the reconciliatory community, lends meaning to the prior two stages of religious phenomenology, which correspond to consciousness’s shape as “Consciousness” and “Reason,” and thereby includes all three moments as constitutive elements of God’s self-preservational activity. As Hegel explains, the incarnation represents “the simplicity of the pure Notion which contains (the earlier forms) as its moments,”113 that is, it constitutes the Notion or rational life within which the two prior moments are sustained in a unified concept and through which they achieve justification and meaning. In this way, the 111 Ibid., 542–543. 112 Ibid., 460. 113 Ibid., 457.

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incarnation offers a religious representation of how Absolute Spirit provides the apprehension of “science in Science,” the modern European apprehension of the philosophical significance of its scientific knowing. What in Nature and Norm is an appreciation for immanent critique as an insight into the entirety of the Jewish and Christian attempt to come to terms with scientific knowledge is, in the Phenomenology, represented by the self-mediating and self-sustaining life of the incarnational God. It is easier to appreciate the extent to which the incarnation represents the unity and narrative totality of all three logical moments (consciousness, self-consciousness, and Spirit) detailed in the Phenomenology by examining Hegel’s analysis of the Trinity. According to Hegel, the incarnation is the “immediate Notion and is not yet developed.”114 As the religious representation of the “Absolute Being” that preserves itself in and through its own life of self-justification, this shape of religious consciousness must develop beyond its representational expression in the individual man Jesus. The self-conscious apprehension of the conceptual unity of Substance and self, or Father and Son, that is, the meaning of this symbolic representation, exceeds the limits of this picture of this singular man and achieves more adequate expression in the representation of the Holy Spirit, which is the apprehension of God in the community of believers. This individual man, then, which absolute Being has revealed itself to be . . . is the immediately present God; consequently, his “being” passes over into “having been”. . . . In the vanishing of the immediate existence known to be absolute Being . . . Spirit remains the immediate Self of actuality, but as the universal self-consciousness of the [religious] community . . . not the individual by himself, but together with the consciousness of the community and what he is for this community, is the complete whole of the individual Spirit.115

In Jesus Christ we find the conceptual unification of divine substance and human self in the self-consciousness of the God who is human. In the Holy Spirit we find the same conceptual unification in the life of the community. In this way, the religious representation of the work of the Holy Spirit extends consciousness’s account of the reconciliatory community and connects it directly to the self-preservational life of Absolute Being. In the 114 Ibid., 461. 115 Ibid., 462.

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representation of the Holy Spirit, consciousness identifies the community with the Absolute Being who preserves itself in and through its life of self-justification. As Terry Pinkard remarks, God in the Christian understanding is the representation of the conceptual idea that spirit knows itself as spirit—namely, that the human community comes to an awareness that it is in working out the internal requirements of its own reason-giving activity that it sets for itself what is to count for it as its absolute principles, and that its internal requirements are those that it itself has developed out of the insufficiencies of its earlier account of what it took to be definitive for itself, and that this activity of self-conscious spirit is divine, what is of absolute and inherent value, what is the “ground” of all belief and action.116

Even so, this theological representation of immanent critique is self-contradictory. As we have seen, the Trinity provides a religious representation through which consciousness appreciates the relation between the justificatory reflection of the reconciliatory community and consciousness’s prior non-philosophical exercises in rational determination. Nonetheless, this same representation fails to adequately capture the community’s autonomous act of self-preservation since it represents the community’s own activity of self-preservation as a saving act of God, and only by extension something the community itself achieves. We may recall that the justificatory praxis exercised by the community saves the community’s form of life by enabling its members to have confidence in the rational validity of their theoretical and practical claims. Consequently, a theological narrative that depicts the community’s self-conscious awareness of the Absolute as the work of an “alien” figure (such as the Holy Spirit) runs directly counter to the shape of consciousness which motivates the religious representation itself. Consequently, “The Notion requires the content to be the Self ’s own act.”117 At this juncture, consciousness recognizes the contradiction implicit in the religious representation and negates this form by demythologizing the representation of the Holy Spirit into the community that is conscious of the self preservational character of its own form of life:

116 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 254. 117 Hegel, Phenomenology, 485, emphasis added.

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the Spirit of the community is thus in its immediate consciousness divided from its religious consciousness.  .  .  .  The content of [religious] picturethinking is Absolute Spirit; and all that now remains to be done is to supersede this mere form, or rather, since this belongs to consciousness as such, its truth must already have yielded itself in the shape of consciousness. . . .118

More importantly, since consciousness now knows that all cognitive shapes achieve significance in and through the Absolute Spirit, that is, the self-preserving community, consciousness comes to sees itself implicated in this community as its own “object” or “hypothesis.” “Self-consciousness has equally superseded this externalization and objectivity . . . and taken it back into itself so that it is in communion with itself . . . this is the movement of consciousness, and in that movement consciousness is the totality of its moments.”119 As the shape of the Absolute Spirit of the community’s self preservational life, consciousness’s object mediates all cognitive moments, including that of consciousness itself. This is why Hegel describes the Absolute Spirit as “the perfection of Spirit into which its individual moments—consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit—return and have returned as into their ground, they together constitute the actuality of the totality of Spirit. . . .”120 Confronted by the self-mediating Absolute Spirit of the community, the quest of consciousness for rational determination is satisfied in and by its object, and the difference between self and community evaporates in what Hegel calls “Absolute Knowing.” The Spirit formerly associated with a religious representation is “freed” from this form and “now has the shape of self-certainty. . . . Spirit, manifesting or appearing in consciousness in this element, or what is the same thing, produced in it by consciousness, is Science.”121 As self-certain, consciousness achieves the shape of “Science” or justified knowledge about how we know what we know and apprehends its prior moments as stages in its coming into awareness of the speculative self-reflection of the community as Absolute Spirit. “This last shape of Spirit—the Spirit which at the same time gives its complete and true content the form of the Self . . . this is absolute knowing; it is Spirit that knows itself in the shape of Spirit or a comprehensive knowing.”122 In Hegel’s language, 118 Ibid., 478–479. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 413. 121 Ibid., 485–486. 122 Ibid.

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consciousness’s recognition of itself in its object or “shape” constitutes the dissolution of the phenomenology of consciousness altogether into the “free actuality” of Absolute Knowing, the modern European self-consciousness of its own self-justificatory life. As Terry Pinkard states, “the attitudes of awe and reverence to the sacred as lying in the inherent value of rational, self-conscious life, so Hegel argues, is the condition of modern, non-alienated  . . . life.”123 At this juncture, consciousness’s scientific apprehension of “science” directly parallels the philosophical insight into the historical specificity of immanent critique discovered by Jewish and Christian thinkers in the preceding analysis. As we have seen, through the religious representation of Christian theology, the European community comes to recognize its present speculative activity as the condition of the possibility of all of its prior cognitive activities as a form of life. From here, consciousness also achieves awareness of its unique historical role as self-consciousness, that is, the community’s philosophical responsibility and authority to preserve the European form of life through justificatory self-reflection by demythologizing religious representation and dissolving the community’s consciousness of separation from its object. In this final stage, consciousness understands the difference between scientific knowledge claims and their philosophical justification. It apprehends that a culture’s need to determine the rationality of claims assumes different cognitive forms depending upon the extent to which claims do or do not function within the current conditions of the community who holds them. It understands the significance of communal justificatory praxis in relation to the full range of its cognitive shapes, which it recognizes as “the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science.”124 As the heir of that history, it realizes that it is both responsible for and has authority over this philosophical labor of justificatory self-reflection.

IV. Conclusion The above comparison between Nature and Norm and the Phenomenology of Spirit exposes how modern Jewish and Christian responses to the factvalue divide run parallel to non-religious cultural and intellectual attempts 123 Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 258. 124 Hegel, Phenomenology, 50.

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to come to terms with the philosophical significance of developments in modern science. Like Nature and Norm, the Phenomenology ends by emboldening the western European intellectual community to exercise its philosophical authority for the sake of sustaining the rationality of its knowledge claims. For in recognizing the need to engage in ongoing immanent critique, the community also recognizes a responsibility and an authority to engage in this labor for the sake of the life of the community in the here and now. Implicit in the task of immanent critique are several implications that bear upon the ongoing work of Jewish and Christian thinkers. a. The theopolitical problem is a characteristic of our current historical climate, arising out of the conditions of a forced option. It thus signals the inadequacy of pre-philosophical attempts to offer an adequate account of the logical validity of theopolitical claims at the current time. b. Consequently, immanent critique is not a critical judgment on the relevance or adequacy of prior efforts at logical explanation for their time but a commentary on the adequacy of these explanations for our own. c. Immanent critique therefore presupposes an apprehension of the historicity of logical assumptions about the validity of knowledge claims held by modern Jewish and Christian thinkers. d. This awareness generates a self-consciousness of our own historical moment and what we need to do in light of it. This particular historical moment calls for Jewish and Christian thinkers to exercise the kind of speculative or philosophical reflection outlined here and endows them with the pragmatic authority to do so. e. Jewish and Christian knowledge claims relate to scientific claims when the latter are no longer taken to be the self-evident standard of rationality but rather, like the former, are understood as knowledge claims whose validity depends on particular forms of life. f. Rational determination of Jewish and Christian claims sustains the Enlightenment’s concern with empirical knowledge about the world, since justifying theopolitical claims depends upon on-going assessments of the worldly conditions within which knowledge claims are held.

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g. Immanent critique includes the entire process by means of which a form of life generates accounts of the rationality of its claims as needed and in different moments of historical challenge. In the current climate, we can no longer afford the luxury of taking for granted the self-evidence of our knowledge claims scientific or otherwise. Knowledge is something we use and for which we are responsible. Like Phocion’s women, it is incumbent upon us as scientists and religious thinkers to exercise our historically mandated philosophical authority to preserve the vitality of the knowledge claims with which we most successfully live in and with our world.

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Index

A

absolute knowing, xxv, 147, 156, 188, 190, 197, 202-203 Adams, Nicholas, xxv, 26, 109, 112, 130, 142-151 logic of pairs, 144-147, 151 long-term disagreements, 150 Agamben, Giorgio, xxi authority, xii, xiv-xv, xvii-xviii, 17, 21, 39, 52-53, 54n97, 64-67, 70, 72-75, 89, 106-107, 111, 153, 185, 193n101, 195, 196n106, 197, 203-205

B

Bacon, Francis, xiv, 30 Novum Organum Scientiarum (New Instrument), Francis Bacon, xiv Barth, Karl, xix, 21-22, 25-26, 61, 78-83, 93-108, 130, 161, 186, 188 critically realistic dialectical theology, 93n57, 95, 100 Epistle to the Romans, The, Karl Barth, 81n4, 93, 94n60 Batnitzky, Leora, ix, 80-81, 82n5, 91-93 beautiful soul, 24, 146, 192 Benjamin, Mara, 8-9, 12n44 Brandom, Robert, xxivn34, 195n106 Boehm, Omri, xviin15, xviii Brody, Samuel, 61n11, 69n40, 73 Buber, Martin, 17, 24, 26, 56, 61, 68-79, 130, 142 I and Thou, 75-76 Prophetic Faith, The, 71

C

Carnap, Rudolph, xviin20 Cassirer, Ernst, 1n1, 18n65, 27-28, 31-32 Philosophy of the Enlightenment, The, 1n1, 18n65, 27-28, 31-32

causality, 18, 35, 37, 45, 75 Christianity, 32, 49-50, 59, 69, 148, 151, 196n107, 197-198 Cohen, Hermann, 88, 95-98, 101-103, 105 coercion xiii, 73-74, 91 community, xii, xxiii-xxv, 8-9, 11-12, 17, 49, 60, 64, 66, 68, 70, 74-75, 92, 107, 114, 118, 120, 124, 126-129, 131-143, 146-147, 150-151, 156-157, 162-163, 173, 179, 184-185, 189-197, 200-204 reconciliatory community, 147n88, 188, 194, 197, 199-201 critique, xii, xxii, xxiii, xxvi, xxvii, 7, 9, 2122, 25-26, 33-34, 55-56, 65-67, 73-74, 78-79, 81-85, 88, 92-95, 99, 106, 108109, 142, 153, 156, 159-163, 165, 172, 175, 185-186, 188-189, 192, 196 external critique, xxii, xxvii, 25-26, 33-34, 55-56, 65-67, 78-79, 82-83, 92-93, 108-109, 153, 156, 159, 162, 164-165, 186, 188-189 immanent critique, xxii-xxv, xxvii-xxviii, 21, 92, 109-113, 123, 126-132, 135-136, 139-142, 144-146, 147n88, 148, 150-151, 153, 156, 161-165, 186, 188-189, 194-196, 199-201, 203-205 consciousness, xxivn34, 10, 87, 98, 124-125, 146, 156-166, 169, 170-183, 185-188, 190-195, 197-203

D

D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 1n1, 2, 18n65 Dewey, John, xxiii, 113-128, 130-131, 133-137, 139-140 common sense, xvii, 119-123, 126-127, 131-133, 135-138, 141-142, 150, 192, 193

Index

dogmatism, xx, xxv, 28, 91, 110, 128, 141142, 188

215

empiricism, xxvi, 88, 155, 166n24, 168n30 Enlightenment, xv, xvii, xx, 2, 7, 25, 28, 33, 42, 59, 86, 129, 153, 161, 165-166, 186-187, 189, 195, 198, 204 radical Enlightenment, xiv, 28, 29nn7-8, 30nn9-15, 32n22, 33, 53, 86 moderate Enlightenment, 28, 33, 53 ethical substance, 182-186

140, 142-144, 146-147, 149, 152-154, 166n24, 168n30, 180, 193, 195-197, 203 historicism, 54, 85 Hobbes, Thomas, 26, 28, 29, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 78, 85, 130 De corpore, Hobbes, 43, 51 law of nature, 47-48 Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, 42n54, 46, 47n68, 47n70 48n76, 49, 50, 51n88, 52nn90-92, 53nn93-96 Hume, David, 18, 32, 50, 158, 168n30 Natural History of Religion, 32, 50

F

I

E

facts, xiii-xvi, xvii-xviii, xxvi, 28, 32, 54n97, 59-60, 62-63, 75, 79, 84n11, 85, 89, 95, 97-103, 108, 125-127, 129, 133-134, 138-139, 151, 154-155, 159-161, 163, 167, 180, 183 fact-value divide, xiii, xv-xviii, xx-xxiii, xxv-xviii, 17-26, 29-34, 41-42, 45, 49 Farneth, Molly, 156n9, 193n101 falsification, 72 Fisch, Menachem, 29 forgiveness, 146, 156, 193 force and the Understanding, 146, 166, 169, 173

G

Geiger, Abraham, 57, 60, 65 Gibbs, Robert, 13-14, 15n61, 134n62 gnosticism, xxi, 61-62, 65-66, 68-70, 72-75 Gogarten, Friedrich, xix, 61, 69

H

Hammerschlag, Sarah, xxin32 Hegel, G. W. F., xviii, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 5n13, 24, 85, 98-100, 103, 144nn80-81, 145-147, 153-164, 166-167, 168n30, 169-180, 181n63, 182-185, 187, 189, 191-193, 196-200, 201n116, 202-203 sense-certainty, 146, 165-169 perception, 3, 57, 146, 166, 168-170 Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel, xviii, xxv, xvi, 24, 145-147, 153-167, 170-171, 172nn42-43, 173, 176-180, 181n64, 182-186, 188-190, 192-193, 195-198, 200, 201n117, 203-204 Herrmann, Wilhelm, 95-97, 99, 102 history, xii, 2, 8-9, 22, 28, 45n62, 54, 56, 60, 63, 66, 71, 81n3, 82n6, 84n11, 89-91, 93, 101, 105-106, 121n27, 136n68,

inquiry, xiii-xiv, xxiii, xxv, 13, 16, 30, 51, 86, 98, 110-115, 118-129, 131-134, 136137, 140, 142-143, 153 Israel, Jonathan, xiv-xv, 27, 29-31, 32n22, 33, 42

J

Jacob, Margaret, 27, 29-31, 33 James, Mark, ix, 133 Judaism, xx, xxin32, 10, 22n70, 41, 54n97, 60n10, 61n11, 69, 73n65, 88, 133, 134n62 justification, xiii, xxiii, 10, 21-22, 42, 65, 73, 79-80, 86, 89, 106, 111, 113, 129, 142, 154, 158, 161, 165, 177, 188, 191, 194, 199, 203

K

Kant, Immanuel, xvi, xviinn14-15, xviiin22, xx-xxi, xxvi, 1-7, 12, 14, 16-19, 22-23, 25-26, 33, 56, 75-76, 81, 96, 100-101, 111, 115, 130, 134, 147n88, 154, 156, 170, 183, 196n106 Critique of Pure Reason, xviin14, xxvi, 2, 3, 18, 147n88, 154 Kavka, Martin, ix, xxin32, 11, 61n11, 76, 136n68 Kierkegaard, Soren, 73 Kingship of God, The, Martin Buber, 71 Krisis theology, 34, 82 

L

Lauer, Quentin, 164n23, 171, 178, 180, 182-183 law, xin1, xxin32, xxii, xxv, xvi, xxvii, 1, 3,-7, 15n61, 17, 18, 25, 30-32, 39, 40, 50, 52-53, 56, 60, 63, 64, 72, 73-75, 77, 80, 81n3, 85, 88-91, 96, 105, 106n103, 165-166, 171-172, 178-179-184, 188, 190, 192, 198

216

Index

Lazier, Benjamin, xix-xx, 55, 61-62, 69, 94 Lewis, Tal, 196n107 liberalism, 81, 88 Locke, John, 25, 28, 33, 54, 85, 166n24 logic, xiii, xx, xxiii, xxv-xxvi, xxviii, 3, 34, 53-54, 67, 73, 98, 101-102, 113-115, 118, 121-124, 128, 130, 132, 141, 143, 145-151, 153, 157, 159, 165, 177, 186 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, John Dewey, 113, 114n2, 118, 120 logical positivism, xxvii logical validity, xv, xxii, xxiv-xxvii, 20-23, 25, 28-29, 42-43, 53-55, 59-60, 62, 75-77, 79, 82-83, 86, 90-91, 93, 95, 101, 106-113, 119, 124, 127-129, 140, 142-143, 146-147, 152-155, 158, 163, 167-168, 178, 196, 204

M

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 85 materialism, xvii, 19n68, 43n56, 45, 49n78, 62, 67, 78-79, 97n73 McCormack, Bruce, 80, 93-96, 99-101 meaninglessness, xx, xxv, 17, 23-24, 60, 91, 128, 141 Mendelssohn, Moses, 19n68, 25 miracles, xv-xvi, 50, 83, 86-87, 89 Moyn, Samuel, 80-81

N

natural right, 47-48, 84n11, 89 natural science, xiii, xvii, 2, 18-19, 21, 27-28, 45, 49, 53-54, 65, 76, 78, 82-90, 96-97, 101, 111, 143, 147n88, 154, 158, 161, 164, 167, 169 nature, xiii, xv-xvi, xx, 1, 12, 14-15, 19-20, 22, 27-38, 40-42, 46-48, 50-51, 53-55, 57-58, 60, 69, 75, 77, 83-84, 86, 88-89, 93, 111, 121, 145, 147, 154, 169, 170, 172, 174-175, 179, 191, 193, 196-199 negation, 15, 93, 162 New Science, 30, 31, 54n97, 62, 65, 166 New Thinking, The, 7-8, 14, 20-21, 88 Newton, Isaac, xiv, 18, 28, 31, 33, 54, 169 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), Isaac Newton, xiv, 31 Newtonian science, 18-19 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 85 Nimmo, Paul, 22n70, 80, 95, 103-105 norm, xiii, xx, 22, 175-176

normativity xvin12, 38, 65, 100-101, 106, 175, 195

O

objective validity, xxvi, 3-4, 14, 19-20, 88, 104, 106, 112, 127, 177, 186, 195 Ochs, Peter, ix, xxv, 11n42, 26, 109, 112, 130-142, 147, 151 vague judgment, 133-134 Otto, Rudolph, 57, 59, 62, 65, 79, 81, 96

P

perception, 3, 57, 146, 166, 168-170 philosophy, xiv-xv, xviii-xx, xxvii, 6n17, 9, 14, 18, 20, 30-32, 35n27, 42-45, 48-49, 51, 55, 60, 69, 78-95, 108, 121n27, 121n32, 122, 132, 134-137, 140, 142-143, 145-148, 154, 159, 196n106, 197 Pinkard, Terry, 154, 156n8, 164n23, 166167, 171-173, 176-177, 181n63, 183, 184n76, 185, 192, 197, 201, 203 Pippin, Robert, xxvin36, 100, 156 polemicism, xxi, 23-24, 66-67, 74-75, 110, 130, 141-142, 149 post-liberalism, 25, 55, 81, 88, 133 pragmatic maxim, 132-135 Proudfoot, Wayne, 58, 60 Putnam, Hilary, xvii-xviii

R

Rashkover, Randi, xxin32, 15n61, 22n70, 61n11, 108n103, 133n61 reason, xvi-xvii, xxvii, 3-6, 17, 25-26, 36-38, 41, 47-48, 52, 53-55, 62, 80, 89, 98, 101, 115n4, 142-143, 146, 177-183, 186-188, 194, 196n106, 199, 201-202 practical reason, 3-5, 19, 47, 76-77, 107, 181, 183 Reis, Timothy, xvii-xviii, 27 representation, xiii, 10, 62, 64, 67-68, 73, 91, 106, 169, 172, 195, 197-203 revelation, 1, 2, 7, 9, 12-14, 16, 25, 27, 40, 59, 78-79, 81-83, 86-92, 96-97, 100-102, 105-107, 146, 148 Rose, Gillian, xi-xii, 73-74, 150 Rosenthal, Michael, xvin12, 39 Rosenzweig, Franz, xix-xxi, 1-3, 6-18, 20-23, 25-26, 56, 69, 73, 88, 91, 130 Star of Redemption, The, 2, 7, 12 Rutherford, Donald, xvin13, 37-38

Index

S

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 21, 25, 57-60, 62, 65, 78-79, 96-97 On Religion: Speeches to the Cultured Despisers, 57, 96n69 Schmitt, Carl, xix, 22, 24, 26, 56, 61-70, 72, 73-79, 83, 91, 106, 130 science, xiv-xv, xviii, xxvi-xxvii, 1-2, 8, 10, 27, 31-32, 43-45, 51, 54, 59, 62, 66, 8386, 95-99, 102, 106, 111, 120-123, 141, 146, 152-155, 159, 163-165 scientific revolution, xiv, xxii, xxv, 2, 28, 55-56, 82, 152, 196 scriptural hermeneutics, 8-9, 12, 29, 53, 105 scriptural reasoning, 131 self-consciousness, xxvi36, 100, 164-166, 173-175, 177, 179, 185, 191, 196, 200, 202-204 self-justification, 163, 189, 195, 199-201 sense-perception, 93, 167 skepticism, xiii, xx-xxi, xxvi, 2-3, 6, 14, 20, 22, 33, 50, 54, 58, 66, 78-79, 82-83, 91-95, 108, 110, 144, 148, 153, 161-162, 174-175, 187-189 speculative, 4, 5, 16, 110, 162, 174, 203-204 speculative reflection, 197n107 speech-thinking, 8, 16, 20 Spinoza, Baruch, xv-xvii, xviiin33, xix-xx, 19, 22, 26, 28-32, 34, 35-42, 54n97, 8384, 88, 90n48, 130 Ethics, xvi, 30-31, 35-36, 37nn34-36, 37nn38-39, 38nn43-44 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theologico-Political Treatise), xv, xvi, 38, 39 Spirit, xix, 29, 43, 64, 68-69, 98, 104, 106, 146, 154, 161-162, 164-166, 183, 185, 188, 194, 197-203 Strauss, Leo, xviii-xix, 22, 26, 78-95, 107108, 130, 161, 186, 188 Natural Right and History, 82n6, 84n11, 88, 89nn39-40, 89n43, 91nn50-51, 93n59 Philosophy and Law, 81n3, 86, 88, 89nn44-45 Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 83, 88, 90n48

T

Taubes, Jacob, xxi Textual Reasoning, 11n42, 131, 135-138, 140-142, 151

217

theological realism, 7, 9-10, 12, 22, 56 theology, xxvi, xix, xxi, 1, 2, 4-5, 10, 12, 14-15, 17, 20, 22, 25, 28, 34, 40-41, 4952, 55, 62, 65, 67-68, 70, 75-76, 78-82, 92-95, 98-102, 106, 108, 130, 142-146, 150, 198, 203 political theology,  25, 56, 61-62, 65-68, 73, 75, 79, 106 theopolitical problem, xxii-xxiv, 27, 79, 91, 109-112, 128, 164, 196, 204 theopolitics, 24, 56, 61, 68-70, 73-75 Tindale, Matthew, 54 Toland, John, 54 Torah, 135-137, 139-141 tragic ineffectiveness, 23, 75 transcendental, xxvi-xxvii, 3, 13-16, 18, 20-22, 65-67, 73, 96-104, 106-107, 110-115, 121, 123-124, 126, 128, 130-131, 135-136, 138-140, 143, 146-147, 150, 154-158, 163, 165, 177178, 180-181, 183, 185-186, 188, 191, 194, 198 transcendental idealism, 165, 177, 180, 183, 198 transcendental reflection, 3, 22, 73, 96, 98, 100, 102, 115, 135, 138, 140 triadic thinking, 144-145, 147, 149-150 Trinity, 148, 200-201

U

Understanding, the, 156-161, 163, 166, 168169, 171-174, 177, 180, 183, 186-190, 194, 199

V

vagueness, 133-134 values, xiii, xvi, xviii, 19, 28, 39, 46, 54n97, 56, 82, 84-86, 88, 95-96, 99, 101, 185 Voltaire, 18n65, 54

W

warranted assertability, 114n3, 119-120, 123-127, 130, 140 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 21, 54n97 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xvii, xviii, xxiiin33, xxiv, 80 Philosophical Investigations, xxiii, xxivn33 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, xvii, xviiin21 Wolff, Christian, 54 Woodard-Lehman, Derek, 80, 95, 107