Peter E. Gordon

The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age

Brief survey of Charles Taylors earlier books, followed by an extensive review of Taylors A Secular Age, published 2007 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

CONTINENTAL DIVIDE: ERNST CASSIRER AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER AT DAVOS, 1929—AN ALLEGORY OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

The 1929 ‘Davos encounter’ between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer has long been viewed by intellectual historians as a paradigmatic event not only for its philosophical meaning but also for its apparently cultural-political ramifications. But such interpretations easily lend legitimacy to a broader and recently ascendant intellectual-historical trend that would reduce philosophy to an allegorical expression of ostensibly more ‘real’ or instrumentalist meanings. However, as this essay tries to show, the core of the dispute between Cassirer and Heidegger is irreducibly philosophical: the Davos debate brought into focus the emergent themes of the so-called “Kant-crisis” of the 1920s, and cast new light upon neo-Kantian doctrines as to the status of objectivity and the possibility for intersubjective consensus in both knowledge and ethics. The Davos encounter cannot be retroactively decided on political or cultural grounds, since it concerns just that unresolved tension between transcendentalism and hermeneutics that is itself constitutive of intellectual history as a discipline.

Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy

Introduction: Weimar Thought: Continuity and Crisis 1 Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick Part I: Law, Politics, Society 1 Weimar Sociology 15 David Kettler and Colin Loader 2 Weimar Psychology: Holistic Visions and Trained Intuition 35 Mitchell G. Ash 3 Legal Theory and the Weimar Crisis of Law and Social Change 55 John P. McCormick 4 The Legacy of Max Weber in Weimar Political and Social Theory 73 Dana Villa Part II: Philosophy, Theology, Science 5 Kulturphilosophie in Weimar Modernism 101 John Michael Krois 6 Weimar Philosophy and the Fate of Neo-Kantianism 115 Frederick Beiser 7 Weimar Philosophy and the Crisis of Historical Thinking 133 Charles Bambach 8 Weimar Theology: From Historicism to Crisis 150 Peter E. Gordon 9 Method, Moment, and Crisis in Weimar Science 179 Cathryn Carson Part III: Aesthetics, Literature, Film 10 Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Weimar Criticism 203 Michael Jennings 11 Writers and Politics in the Weimar Republic 220 Karin Gunnemann 12 Aesthetic Fundamentalism in Weimar Poetry: Stefan George and his Circle, 1918-1933 240 Martin A. Ruehl 13 Weimar Film Theory 273 Sabine Hake 14 The Politics of Art and Architecture at the Bauhaus, 1919-1933 291 John V. Maciuika 15 Aby Warburg and the Secularization of the Image 316 Michael P. Steinberg Part IV: Themes of an Epoch 16 Eastern Wisdom in an Era of Western Despair: Orientalism in 1920s Central Europe 341 Susanne Marchand 17 Weimar Femininity: Within and Beyond the Law 361 Tracie Matysik 18 The Weimar Left: Theory and Practice 377 Martin Jay 19 The Aftermath: Reflections on the Culture and Ideology of National Socialism 394 Anson Rabinbach Weimar Thought: A Chronology 407 Contributors 417 Index 423

FORUM: KUHN'S STRUCTURE AT FIFTY INTRODUCTION

Anyone who works at the interstices of intellectual history and philosophy and the history and philosophy of science will be quick to rank Thomas Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions amongst the most influential works of the last half-century. But its influence extends well beyond these disciplines as well. First published in 1962 as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science , over the last fifty years it has enjoyed a rich afterlife, leaving in its wake an immense if contested inventory of ideas whose significance has transcended the well-policed boundaries that often separate the natural sciences from the social sciences and the humanities. Even more surprising for a book of its academic character, it has enjoyed a reception in popular discourse that exceeds its disciplinary bailiwick. Its trademark terms—not only the celebrated ideas of a paradigm and a paradigm shift but also more technical themes such as normal science , incommensurability , and anomaly —have been naturalized into mundane English with a degree of success that puts to shame just about any other work of recent scholarship. Paraphrasing one of its characteristic claims, one may be temped to observe that, since the publication of Kuhns Structure , we all live in a different world.

Must the Sacred be Transcendent

Abstract In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor appeals to the metaphysical–normative distinction between “immanence” and “transcendence” as definitive for post-Axial religion. On Taylors view, therefore, those of us who embrace a fully secular modernity can be described as having abandoned “transcendence” to take up our lives wholly within the confines of the immanent frame, though he grants we may seek alternative satisfactions or “substitutes” for eternity. But the notion that any metaphysical–normative model of sacred experience can serve as an irresistible foundation is open to doubt if one recalls the Heideggerian insight that any metaphysical picture both reveals and conceals aspects of our experience. Taylors own description of sacred and non-sacred experience within the immanent frame seems to rely upon this foundational distinction, without entertaining the possibility that the language itself may very well actually distort what our experience is like. This paper pursues the above objections to Taylors argument, focusing special attention on the assumption that one can judge aesthetic experience (such as listening to a Beethoven string quartet) with the criteria we have inherited from post-Axial religion. The overwhelming authority of the Axial tradition might seem to validate questions such as, “Is there an object?” or “Is the experience purely immanent?” But to such questions we might respond that such language simply has no grip on the phenomena. Any such talk of “substitution” might therefore be understood as an historical remnant in Taylors book of the traditional monotheists critique of idolatry.

Joseph Soloveitchik and Halakhic Man

The modern philosophical critique of revealed religion in general and traditional Judaism in particular has been primarily normative, as opposed to epistemological, in nature. Take Spinoza, for example. While he contrasted theology and philosophy in epistemological terms - inasmuch as theology, in his view, does not possess any truth-value as opposed to philosophy, whose goal is the truth - his primary contrast between the two was normative - inasmuch as he claimed that theology leads only to obedience to God, as opposed to philosophy which gives rise to the love of God. As for the Mosaic Law, for Spinoza it possessed only a purely political significance and lacked any broader moral or spiritual, much less any intellectual value. Kant adopted Spinoza’s critique of Judaism, and in a similar vein argued that “Strictly speaking Judaism is not religion at all” but “only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state.” Of course, for both Spinoza and Kant, denying any value to Jewish law was tantamount to denying any value to Judaism in toto. By contrast, modern Jewish thinkers who sought to find the significance and value of Judaism as residing in something other than the study and observance of the Law could agree with the view of Jewish law taken by Spinoza and Kant, without believing that they had thereby rejected Judaism as a whole.

Baruch Spinoza and the Naturalization of Judaism

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) occupies a somewhat awkward position in the historiography of Jewish philosophy. In the standard story - or at least those versions of it that move beyond the simplistic description of how his philosophy represents a radical and heretical break from what comes before - he is presented either as the culmination of the Jewish medieval rationalist tradition (especially Maimonides and Gersonides) or as the father of modern Jewish thought, and sometimes as both. These are important (but still all too infrequently studied) perspectives for understanding Spinoza’s metaphysical, moral, and political ideas, and not just their antecedents and their legacies, but their substantive content as well. While most scholarly attention has been devoted to the seventeenth-century Cartesian background of Spinoza’s philosophy, his system also needs to be situated (as Harry Wolfson and others have recognized) in a Jewish philosophical context. But is this enough to give him a rightful place in a “Companion” to Jewish philosophy? After all, Thomas Aquinas was strongly influenced by Maimonides, and our understanding of the Summa Theologiae is deepened by a familiarity with the Guide for the Perplexed , but no one of course has ever suggested that St. Thomas is a Jewish philosopher. Does the additional fact that Spinoza, unlike Thomas, is Jewish alone qualify him for membership in the canon of “Jewish philosophers”?

Feminism and Modern Jewish Philosophy

INTRODUCTION: FEMINISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND JEWISH PHILOSOPHY The interactions between feminism and philosophy, and feminism and Judaism, have undergone serious development in recent decades. Starting with the former, many feminists have argued that Western philosophy has systematically excluded women. More specifically, feminists have argued that what Western male philosophers have presented as “essentially human” is in fact rooted in the male experience and does not reflect women’s experiences; that because the (male) ideals of reason were formed completely without female input, the Western philosophical tradition is thus biased; and that many philosophical works, written by men, contain numerous misogynist statements. In a similar vein, feminist theologians have maintained that Western religious traditions have systematically excluded women’s voices; that religious institutions have been predominantly male-oriented and reflect male concerns and priorities; and that many canonical religious texts, written almost exclusively by men, contain misogynist statements. That feminist philosophers and theologians have risen to the challenges raised by an androcentric philosophical and theological canon has been well-documented. Jewish feminists as well, influenced by their feminist peers, have begun to level significant attacks against what they see as a Judaism entrenched in patriarchal institutionalism. This patriarchy is perhaps best expressed by Judith Plaskow in her seminal work Standing Again at Sinai : “Underlying specific halakhot … is an assumption of women’s Otherness far more basic than the laws in which it finds expression …men – and not women with them – define Jewish humanity. Men are the actors in religious and communal life because they are the normative Jews.

Editors' Introduction: Adorno, Music, Modernity

“As a temporal art,” Theodor W. Adorno observed, “music is bound to the fact of succession and is hence as irreversible as time itself. By starting it commits itself to carrying on, to becoming something new, to developing. What we may conceive of as musical transcendence, namely, the fact that at any given moment it has become something and something other than it was, that points beyond itself—all that is no mere metaphysical imperative dictated by some external authority. It lies in the nature of music and will not be denied.”1 Such remarks remind us once again that Adorno was at once a philosopher and a musicologist: among all the members of the Frankfurt School, he possessed not only a sociological and social-theoretical awareness of the dialectical relation between music and society but also an incomparable feel for music’s inner power. Indeed, he thought of philosophy itself in musical terms. Despite his well-known condemnation of commodified music as one facet of the “culture industry,” Adorno’s appeal to music’s “transcendence” betrays an

Überlegungen zu Continental Divide

Ich danke den vier Gelehrten, Hans Joas, Hans-Peter Krüger, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger und Stephan Steiner, für ihre äußerst durchdachten Erwiderungen auf mein Buch Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos.1 Mir war es eine große Ehre, an einem meinem Buch gewidmeten Symposium des Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala teilzunehmen, das im Januar des Jahres 2013 stattfand. Besonderen Dank schulde ich Björn Wittrock, der so großzügig war, die ursprüngliche Einladung zu erweitern und eine Gruppe derart kompetenter Philosophen und Historiker an einem Ort zusammenzubringen. Obwohl nur vier der ursprünglichen Erwiderungen hier veröffentlicht werden, scheint es mit angebracht, mich für die vielen aufschlussreichen Bemerkungen zu bedanken, die mehr als ein Dutzend Teilnehmer in der ursprünglichen Veranstaltung vorgebracht hatten. Die vorliegenden Abhandlungen machen nur einen keinen Teil der im Collegium vorgestellten Kommentare aus. Obwohl ich einige meiner Gedanken bereits dort vorgestellt habe, bin ich doch dankbar für die Gelegenheit, an dieser Stelle einige meiner Antworten näher auszuführen. Vielleicht ist die Bemerkung angebracht, dass seit der Abfassung des Buches mehr als fünf Jahre vergangen sind. Weil ich ein beständig Lernender und von meinem philosophischen Temperament her ein Skeptiker bin, hat der Lauf der Zeit zwangsläufig einige Änderungen meiner Sichtweise zuwege gebracht. Wenn es Hume war, der unser Vertrauen auf das über die Zeit anhaltende Fortbestehen personaler Identität erschüttert hat, so hoffe ich, dass man mir, indem ich mich auf seine Gedanken berufe, dafür vergeben mag, das Verlangen auszudrücken, einigen der unter meinem Namen veröffentlichten Ansichten abzuschwören: