Habermas, Jurgen - The German Idealism Of The Jewish Philosophers.pdf

(86 KB) Pobierz
LIG1
1
The German Idealism of
the Jewish Philosophers
“The Jew can play a creative role in nothing at all that concerns
German life, neither in what is good nor in what is evil.” This state-
ment by Ernst Jünger has outlived the anti-Semitism of the conser-
vative revolutionaries in whose name it was written more than a
generation ago. I heard the identical assertion just a few years ago in
the philosophy department of one of our great universities. As this
version had it, Jews at best attain stardom of the second rank. At that
time, when I was a student, I did not give it a second thought; I must
have been occupied with reading Husserl, Wittgenstein, Scheler,
and Simmel without realizing the descent of these scholars. However,
the well-known philosophy professor who gainsaid the productivity
of his Jewish colleagues did know of their origins. The stubbornness
of the components of an ideology whose discrepancies could be con-
veyed by any lexicon is remarkable. If it were a matter of dissecting
into pieces a form of the spirit such as that of German philosophy
in the twentieth century, separating it out according to its parts, and
putting it on the scales, then we would find in the domain suppos-
edly reserved for German profundity a preponderance of those the
same prejudice wants to assign to the outer court as merely critical
talents.
It is not my intention here to offer another proof of what has long
since been demonstrated. There is another situation much more in
need of clarification: It remains astonishing how productively central
motifs of the philosophy of German Idealism shaped so essentially
by Protestantism can be developed in terms of the experience of the
Jewish tradition. Because the legacy of the Kabbalah already flowed
38
The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers
into and was absorbed by Idealism, its light seems to refract all the
more richly in the spectrum of a spirit in which something of the
spirit of Jewish mysticism lives on, in however hidden a way.
The abysmal and yet fertile relationship of the Jews with German
philosophy shares in the social fate that once forced open the gates
of the ghettos, for assimilation or reception of the Jews into bour-
geois society became a reality only for the minority of Jewish intel-
lectuals. Despite a century and a half of progressive emancipation,
the broad mass of the Jewish people had not gotten beyond the
formal aspects of equal rights. On the other hand, even the courtly
Jews, like their successors, the Jewish bankers of the state of the
nineteenth century, never became fully acceptable socially. Indeed,
they had not striven so seriously to break down the barriers of their
invisible ghetto; a universal emancipation would have threatened
what privileges they possessed. Assimilation stretched only a thin
protective layer around the permanently foreign body of Jewry. Its
medium was a culture gained academically, its seal a baptism often
socially coerced. If these cultivated Jews would give back to the
culture intellectually as much as they owed to it, their social stand-
ing remained so ambivalent right into the 1920s that Ernst Jünger
could not only deprecate their productivity as the “feuilleton prattle
of civilization” but also put in question the process of assimilation:
“To the same extent that the German will gains in sharpness and
shape, it becomes increasingly impossible for the Jews to entertain
even the slightest delusion that they can be Germans in Germany;
they are faced with their final alternatives, which are, in Germany,
either to be Jewish or not to be.” This was in 1930, when those who
could not adapt to a dubious politics of apartheid were already being
offered the menacing promise that was so gruesomely kept in the
concentration camps.
And so, precisely out of the marginal strata that had been assimi-
lated most successfully, there emerged the spokesmen for a turning
back of the German Jews to the origins of their own tradition. This
movement found its political expression in Zionism and its philo-
sophic expression in the (as it were, anticipated) existentialism of
Martin Buber, who fastened onto the last phase of Jewish mysticism.
The Polish and Ukrainian Hassidism of the eighteenth century had
drawn its ideas from kabbalist writings, but the doctrine had retreated
so far behind the personality of the Hassidic holy men that the tra-
ditionally idealized figure of the learned rabbi was pushed out by that
The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers
39
of the folkish Zaddik, whose existence was the Torah become entirely
and utterly living. In Buber’s zeal against the rationalistically stulti-
fied teaching of the rabbis and his appropriation of the religion of
the people, which was full of mythic legends and mystical faces, a
new pathos of existential philosophizing was enflamed:
With the destruction of the Jewish communal spirit the fruitfulness
of the spiritual conflict became weakened. Spiritual force is mustered
henceforth on behalf of the preservation of the people against
outside influences; the strict enclosure of one’s own realm, to protect
against penetration by alien tendencies; the codification of values in
order to fend off every shift in values; the unmistakable, unreinter-
pretable, hence consistently rational formulation of religion. In place
of the God-filled, demanding, creative element there entered the
ever more rigid, merely preserving, merely continuing, merely defen-
sive element of official Judaism; indeed, it was directed ever more
against the creative element, which seemed to endanger the status quo
of the people by its audacity and freedom; it became its persecutor
and life-enemy.
The Hassidic impulse first found a philosophical language in the
work of Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig, who with Buber translated
the Bible into German, had worked on Hegel’s philosophy of state
as a student of Friedrich Meinecke. In his own great project he
attempted – as the title of the three-volume work, Star of Redemp-
tion , announced from afar – an interpretation of Idealist thought out
of the depths of Jewish mysticism. Not only was he one of the first
to establish links with Kierkegaard; he also took up motifs of the so-
called late Idealism, especially from Schelling’s last philosophy; thus
he divulged the lineage of existentialist philosophy decades before it
was painstakingly rediscovered by the official history of philosophy.
The basic question on which the Idealist self-confidence in the power
of the concept shatters is this: “How can the world be contingent,
although it still has to be thought of as necessary?” Thought labors
in vain on the impenetrable fact that things are so and not otherwise,
that the historical existence of human beings is so profoundly bathed
in enigmatic arbitrariness:
Inasmuch as philosophy . . . denies this opaque presupposition of all
life; that is, inasmuch as it does not let it hold good as something real
but makes it into nothing, it conjures up for itself the illusion of
40
The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers
presuppositionlessness. . . . If philosophy wanted not to stop up its ears
in the face of the cry of anguished humanity, it would have to start
from this: that the nothingness of death is a something; that each new
nothingness of death, as a new newly fruitful something, is not to be
talked or written away. . . . Nothingness is not nothing, it is something.
. . . We do not want a philosophy that deceives us by the all-or-nothing
tone of its dance about the lasting domination of death. We want no
deception.
The deception that has been seen through leads to the insight that
the world, in which there is still laughter and crying, is itself caught
up in becoming – the appearances still seek their essence. In the
visible happening of nature is disclosed the growth of an invisible
realm in which God himself looks forward to his redemption: “God,
in the redemption of the world by human beings and of human
beings in relation to the world, redeems himself.”
Idealism only entered into competition with the theology of cre-
ation; still in bondage to Greek philosophy, it did not look upon the
unreconciled world from the standpoint of possible redemption. Its
logic remained in the grips of the past: “True lastingness is constantly
in the future. Not what always was is lasting; not what gets renewed
at all times, but solely what is to come: the kingdom.” The meaning
of this, of course, is only disclosed to a logic that does not, like that
of Idealism, deny its linguistic body; it has to open itself up to the
underlying logic deposited in the language – a resonance from the
ancient kabbalist idea that language reaches God because it is sent
out from God. Idealism condemned language as the instrument of
knowledge and elevated a divinized art as its substitute. A Jew actu-
ally anticipated Heidegger, the philosophicus teutonicus , in this pecu-
liarly heightened awareness.
Toward the end of World War I, Rosenzweig sent home the
manuscript of Star of Redemption by mail from the field of battle. The
way he conceived of the messianic vocation of Jewish exile
during his time on the Balkan front is documented by a passage
from one of his letters: “Because the Jewish people already stands
beyond the opposition that forms the authentically dynamic power
in the life of the nations, beyond the polarity of particularity and
world history, of home and faith, of earth and heaven, so, too, it does
not know war.”
Another Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen, had on Christmas
Day 1914 testified in the same sense to the students withdrawing
The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers
41
from their studies to the field of battle that the political expression
of the messianic idea is eternal peace: “Since the prophets as inter-
national politicians recognized evil as existing neither exclusively nor
especially in individuals but in the nations instead, so the disappear-
ance of war, eternal peace among the nations, became for them the
symbol of morality on earth.” Cohen, who so idiosyncratically takes
Kant’s idea of eternal peace back into the Old Testament, stands,
however, in a different camp than Buber or Rosenzweig. He repre-
sents the liberal tradition of Jewish intellectuals who were inwardly
connected with the German Enlightenment and supposed that in
their spirit they might be capable of feeling at one with the nation
in general. Immediately after the outbreak of the war, Cohen deliv-
ered before the Kant Society of Berlin a remarkable speech (“On the
Peculiarity of the German Spirit”) in which he exhibited to the im-
perialistic Germany of Wilhelm II and his military forces the origi-
nal testimony of German humanism. Indignantly he dissociated
himself from the “insulting” distinction between the nation of poets
and thinkers and that of fighters and state builders: “Germany is and
remains in continuity with the eighteenth century and its cos-
mopolitan humanity.”
Less cosmopolitan is the tone of his apologia: “in us there strug-
gles the originality of a nation with which no other can compare.”
This kind of loyalty to the state later delivered over those who in
deluded pride called themselves National German Jews to the tragic
irony of an identification with their attackers.
Cohen was the head of the famous Marburg School, in which there
flowed the Jewish erudition of a generation that philosophized in the
spirit of Kant and transformed Kant’s teachings into an epistemology
of natural science. Kant (who, after all, was so amazed at the lin-
guistic power of Moses Mendelssohn that he once stated that “if the
muse of philosophy should choose a language, she would choose this
one”) likewise selected, as a partner in the academic disputation con-
cerning his Habilitationsschrift , a Jew: the onetime physician Marcus
Herz. Just as Lazarus Bendavid had done in Vienna, in Berlin Herz
put his all into propagating Kantian philosophy. The first one to go
beyond promulgation to appropriate the new criticism in a produc-
tive way, and to push it radically beyond its own presuppositions
was the genial Salomon Maimon, who had been inspired in his youth
by Spinoza. Maimon went from being a beggar and vagrant to being
a scholar protected by a patron; Fichte, who was not the least bit

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin