Hey list philosophers (Justin and Jim Frameland?). I need some feedback on any obvious mistakes or misinterpretations---see below. On list or off list is fine. This section covers a lot of territory and makes reference to Spinoza, Jacobi, Kant, Fichte, Cohen, Guttmann in relation to Leo Strauss. It also tries to quickly sketch out 20s German Zionists movements. I am way over my head, so any glaring mistakes need to be corrected by others.
Argument with any of the issues is fine too. I might not be able to defend the positions very well, but I'll probably learn something...
(BTW this illustrates why it is tough to attempt an intellectual bio of evil Leo Strauss)
Thanks,
Chuck Grimes
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With English or Russian Zionists in control of events in Palestine and the WZO, Germany where Zionism had been founded by Herzl was more or less side-stepped for the moment. Additionally, in Weimar, Zionists were a minority within a minority. Jews were approximately 0.9 percent of the population in 1920s and had voted 64% for the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP), 28% for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) and 4% for Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KDP). Most German Jews were businessmen or professionals, then craft and trades, clerks, and students. Very few German Jews were industrial proletariat or rural agricultural workers, and therefore they shared little in common interest by class or politics with the dominant immigrant population in Palestine who were Russian or Polish, proletarian and socialist (Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, chp 3).
Strauss's post-doctoral fellowship in Freiberg ended and Strauss applied for a fellowship to the Akademie fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, the Jewish theological institute directed by Julius Guttmann (1880-1950). This was the same institute that Hermann Cohen had lectured at and contributed to during his retirement. The institute under Guttmann had continued Cohen's spirit in the belief that ``only the philosopher can produce the systematic presentation of Jewish ethics and philosophy of religion which does justice to what was essential in Judaism.'' (Guttmann, TPJ p xi).
What was still on Strauss's mind were the themes in his thesis, the basic oppositions between reason and belief, science and religion, political and religious systems and their respective categorical coverage of truths about the world and human society. It was within this general spirit that Strauss began to write on Zionism for several Jewish publications. Strauss had maintained his contact with Zionist movements by maintaining his membership in the Judischer Wanderbund Blau-Weiss from his gymnasium years.
The Blau-Weiss youth groups were originally the Jewish counterpart to the aryan Wandervogel movements where every Heil was matched with a Shalom. The Blau-Weiss had been given a more political orientation and organization under the leadership of Walter Moses (Zack, 5p). This reorganization took the form of calling for establishing settlements in Palestine under a more authoritarian and hierarchical internal organization. This was resisted by some factions in Blau-Weiss who wanted to follow a more vaguely defined self-realization program in the context of an idyllic and equally ill-defined Jewish communalism. The Blau-Weiss was briefly united with Kartell judischer Verbindungen (KJV) under Moses to sharpen their commitment to Palestinian settlement, but the union would be broken by 1925 when divisions occurred over their relationship to the newly establish Jewish Authority and immigration policy to Palestine under the British Mandate.
So, it was within these interscene controversies over the relationship between political Zionism, cultural Zionism, and traditional Orthodoxy in opposition to assimilation that Strauss tried to take a position in his first essay, titled ``Response to Frankfurt's `Word of Principle''' from 1923. The Frankfurters included Eric Fromm and Leo Lowenthal who were evidently more interested in establishing a socialistic, practical, and political movement, graduating so to speak from a more naive, quasi-religious and poetical strain of Jewish identity. Strauss in what would become something of his own hallmark, came down squarely in between all factions and took on a metaphysical tone:
``The primordial religious demand is not to believe in _dogmas_ but to believe in _being_. We pose the `Gretchen question' and post it not just generally with respect to the first principles but with respect to all of the details of which our prayers speak.'' (Response to Frankfurt's `Word of Principle', 1923, Zank 70p)
The Gretchen question refers to a passage in Goethe's Faust, in the scene in Martha's Garden, when Gretchen asks Faust if he really believes in God. Faust dodges the question and makes vague references to belief in love, in the feeling of wonder and experiences of life (Faust, trans. McIntyre, p128). The reference to a belief in being as opposed to dogma is ambiguous, but more than likely the intent was to remind readers the issue was a belief in the actualized spirit of the Jewish people, its soul or perhaps its Volksgeist rather than a belief in dis-embodied tracts of religious or political doctrines. There is also a reference to Heidegger, but we will take that up shortly.
The theme of a primordial religious demand was taken up again and again through a series of ten essays from The Holy (1923) through Biblical History and Science (1925). These form an extended development of the themes in the thesis on Jacobi. Just as Jacobi had objected to and resisted the over baring domination of reason and its systemization of knowledge in Kant and especially Frichte, so Strauss objected to the domination of Jewish religious thought by highly rationalized cultural and theological theories. Like Jacobi who called for an attention to the necessary position of faith in metaphysics, Strauss made related demands for the primacy of a belief. In a moment of perhaps un-intended self-revelation Strauss wrote:
``It frequently happens in the Zionist youth movement that our young students, writing in one of our journals, immediately apply to our own problems those philosophical, sociological, or historical theories which they have become acquainted with in the universities, somewhat heedless of the possible dubiousness of such applications'' (from The Holy, 1923, Zank, 75p)
Of course Strauss was attempting almost desperately to bring his own philosophical studies into play to understand if Zionism was predominantly a political, cultural or religious movement. In The Holy, Strauss sets up an interesting parallel metaphor between the idea of a student applying a half understood philosophical system to the complexity of the world, and the German Jewish experience under assimilation, which attempted to understand, articulate, and believe in the lost spiritual world of Judaism. The implication was that a theology of assimilation, its dis-embodied rationalism as such was incapable of grasping the religious object of the ancient Jews or understanding their primordial revelation.
The more concrete interlocutors of Strauss's questionings were not the student and youth movement Zionists who he was apparently addressing in these articles, but the neo-Kantian developments of Herman Cohen and Julius Guttmann in their work to establish a modern philosophy of Judaism. Julius Guttmann had originally trained as a philosopher at the University of Breslau and held a privitdozent position there until his appointment as director of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.
Both Cohen and Guttmann had realized that while Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason had foreclosed the rational proof of the existence of God, his system had provided for identification between a belief in God, and the moral order of the human world in the Critique of Practical Reason. The effect of this epistemological shift had closed the door on the rational metaphysical foundations of Christianity since Thomas Aquinas. On the other hand, the shift enabled or empowered, the rational foundation of ethics and its identification with religious and moral belief. It was this shift that attracted both Cohen and Guttmann to a revival of Kant, and made possible in effect a rational or `scientific' philosophy of Judaism. The positive feature of their approach retained both the liberating and liberal thrust of the Enlightenment in its battle against religious orthodoxy, and the quintessential core of Jewish life, that is, its ethical traditions and moral precepts. From this perspective, Kant's moral imperative, to act only as if following a universal principle was fulfilled almost automatically, provided that the acts and judgments were observant and devoted toward the good.
>From Guttmann view, the relationship between God and world and God and
man was quintessentially that of the ethical and personal will.
``This relationship is an ethical-voluntaristic one between two moral personalities, between `I' and `Thou.' As God imposes his will upon that of man, so man becomes aware of the nature of his relationship to God... Communion with God is essentially a communion of moral wills... God's relationship to the world is conceived along the same lines. He is the Lord of the world, he directs it according to his will, and he realizes his purposes within it. His relationship to the world is not grounded in a natural force, but in the unconditioned freedom of his will. This conception empties all the ancient accounts of creation of their mythological content, and permeates them with its own spirit.''(Guttmann, TPJ 6p)
But, from Strauss's point of view, Cohen and Guttmann had lost what Jacobi had exposed in his critique, the loss of the thing in itself (Being, or God). In this context then the loss was the inability to understand or experience the primary source of religious belief as revelation. They had instead fallen prey to precisely Jacobi's charge of Spinozism, the idea that scripture was an historical or naturalized document that could be interpreted just as the phenomenon of nature are interpreted. On the other hand, Strauss agreed with Guttmann that political Zionism had the potential to restore Jews to Judaism, hence his primordial religious demand.
Strauss starts to sharpen his critique of Cohen and Guttman in On the Argument with European Science (1924):
``There is a European endeavor that as such has an immediate relation to the Jewish context, and this endeavor is the entire complex of the modern science of religion. For when Europe criticized itself, that is its Christianity, it eo ipso criticized Judaism. That this critique made an impact on the Jewish context is illustrated historically by the fact that the Jewish tradition, insofar as it was not able to reconstruct itself with regard to this critique, succumbed to Europe's attack. Herein lies the decisive cause of what is known as assimilation...'' (Zank, 108p)