The Existentialist Poetic of Thoreau's Journal

Henry David Thoreau conceived of his writing of nature in his Journal as an experiential form of writing. As he commented in his entry of 2 July 1852, ‘Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but in the fullness of life. To such a one she rushes to make her report.’ The grounding of nature writing within one’s own personal experience is emphasized again by Thoreau on 19 April 1854: ‘I am not interested in mere phenomena, though it were the explosion of a planet, only as it may have lain in the experience of a human being.’ Such sensual experience generates the reader’s sense of the writer’s physical presence, so that we no longer feel imprisoned in our mechanized contemporary environments but instead actively there, out there, with Thoreau. ‘The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.’ (3 February 1852)

Thoreau drew a direct link between the plenitude and degree of illumination of a reader’s or student’s cognition, and that student’s ability to immerse himself in studies which enable him to become charged by sensual experience.

‘It is essential that a man confine himself to pursuits – a scholar, for instance, to studies – which lie next to and conduce to his life, which do not go against the grain, either of his will or his imagination. The scholar finds in his experience some studies to be most fertile and radiant with light, others dry, barren, and dark. If he is wise, he will not persevere in the last, as a plant in a cellar will strive toward the light. He will confine the observations of his mind as closely as possible to the experience or life of his senses. His thought must live with and be inspired with the life of the body. […] Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ (12 March 1853)

Here we find an affinity between the impulses underlying Thoreau’s journalizing and a central aspect of Weimar era German thought to which I have referred often on this blog. For we are reminded here of Jaspers’ early existentialism which, as Chris Thornhill writes in his study Karl Jaspers, sought to ‘deploy Kant as the basis for an existential metaphysic of possible lived unity’. Jaspers’ early existentialism, Thornhill notes elsewhere, sought precisely to overcome Kantian antinomies such as that of reason and experience, by ‘incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life in an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence’. This existentialist project was anticipated by Thoreau’s requirement of the subjectivist researcher, ‘whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science’, that ‘His thought must live with and be inspired with the life of the body’:

‘There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective. The sum of what the writer of whatever class has to report is simply some human experience, whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science. The man of most science is the man most alive, whose life is the greatest event.’ (6 May 1854)  

In his journal entry for 14 July 1852, Thoreau had already related his concern with the ‘most alive’ to the question of a living language. Here he pointed to the emergence of the sort of artificial, manufactured-to-death language which characterizes today’s bureaucratic, public sector discourse and capitalist, private sector discourse alike. ‘A writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words, such words as “humanitary,” which have a paralysis in their tails.’ The deathliness of ‘humanitary’ results from its excess: from its self-aggrandizing add-on, the suffix ‘-itary’. Just as here he notes the excessive moment of particularity in ‘humanitary’, on 30 March 1853 Thoreau went on to comment on how a particularizing, analytic perspective on life diminishes our full experience, or our existential sense of ‘possible lived unity’. His references to ‘view’ and ‘the unbounded universe’ make it clear that he thinks of such full experience in terms of our visionary capacity:

‘Ah, those youthful days! are they never to return? when the walker does not too curiously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, - the phenomena that show themselves in him, - his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird is now become a mote in his eye.’

Crucially, for Thoreau the writing of full experience is genuine poetry, because such a writing conveys the ‘affinity’ or sympathy between the writer and whatever he has experienced – ‘the phenomena that show themselves in him’. In that way it also conveys the sympathy between the particular elements of nature which scientific observation simply separates. ‘What affinity is it brings the goldfinch to the sunflower – both yellow – to pick its seeds? Whatever things I perceive with my entire man, those let me record, and it will be poetry.’ (2 September 1851) Or again, three years later on 24 September 1854: ‘What name of a natural object is most poetic? That which he has given for convenience whose life is most nearly related to it, who has known it longest and best.’ Thoreau’s preoccupation with a unified life’s possibilities of sympathy and relationality, enabled him to describe the action of existential poetic naming which derives from imbibing a natural object’s spirito-existential ‘nutriment’: on 19 September 1854 he had written, ‘I have given myself up to nature; I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me’.  

On 2 January 1859, Thoreau’s exposition of ‘vital and natural’ poetic language brought him to counterpose ‘artificial’, patriarchal, academic regulations of language to the free speech of mothers, brutes and animals:

‘When I hear the hypercritical quarrelling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs, - Mr. Webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to Mr. Kirkham’s rule, - I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.’

Thoreau’s suspicion of academic language use – of ‘literacy’ – rests on his sense that, just as natural life itself symbolizes human experience, so too, conversely, human symbolic expression is grounded in natural phenomena: ‘Talk about learning our letters and being literate! Why, the roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings’ (16 October 1859). It is because their language conveys the sourcing of letters in natural things that ‘We cannot spare the very lively and lifelike descriptions of some of the old naturalists’, as he writes on 17 February 1860 (for example). ‘They sympathize with the creatures which they describe.’ But for Thoreau, importantly, a vital and natural – poetic – language conveys not just nature’s facticity, but its spirit too. On the following day, his journal entry expounded his animist phenomenology and noted the inadequacy of traditional scientific description to that phenomenology:

‘Surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by which it most concerns us. […]

   Science in many departments of natural history does not pretend to go beyond the shell; i.e., it does not get to animated nature at all. A history of animated nature must itself be animated.’

On 15 February, Thoreau wrote of ‘the physical fact which in all language is the symbol of the spiritual’; his sense of natural phenomena as being symbols of natural anima, explains his intention – stated nine years earlier on 9 November 1851 – that lively and lifelike, poetic expression is to convey ‘animated’ phenomena on their own terms, without reducing them to mere brute facticity, as would the ‘common sense’ view of nature. For only such a form of expression can convey the sympathy between the writer’s anima and nature, or the way in which the writer has experienced and imbibed natural anima. ‘My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought.’  

Thoreau opposes vital poetic language and the experience of nature which it conveys, or what he calls ‘the true growth and experience, the living speech’ (16 October 1859), to the paralyzed vitality and ‘dry technical terms’ which he associates with academic science’s specialist accounts of nature:

‘I look over the report of the doings of a scientific association and am surprised that there is so little life to be reported; I am put off with a parcel of dry technical terms. Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular language. I cannot help suspecting that the life of these learned professors has been almost as inhuman and wooden as a rain-gauge or self-registering magnetic machine. They communicate no fact which rises to the temperature of blood-heat. It doesn’t all amount to one rhyme.’ (6 May 1854)

On 5 September 1851 we find Thoreau praising James John Garth Wilkinson’s The Human Body and Its Connection with Man, Illustrated by the Principal Organs for its analogical method. By drawing quotidian physical analogies (such as when he describes the papillary cutis as ‘“an encampment of small conical tents coextensive with the surface of the body”’), Wilkinson, Thoreau feels, finds in popular, nonspecialist language a means of communicating unified, existential reason’s sympathetic experience of the body: this is true cognition or ‘perception of truth’.

‘The faith he puts in old and current expressions as having sprung from an instinct wiser than science, and safely to be trusted if they can be interpreted. The man of science discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit. Wilkinson finds a home for the imagination, and it is no longer outcast and homeless. All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.’

Nine years later, on 13 October 1860, Thoreau’s existentialism leads him to argue that, because of their success in conveying ‘the highest quality of the plant, - its relation to man’, ‘it is commonly the old naturalists who first received American plants that describe them best’. Here Thoreau again advocates (the ‘free and lawless’ writing which can relay) singular, existential cognition over professional scientific knowledge:

‘After all, the truest description, and that by which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires. No scientific description will supply the want of this, though you should count and measure and analyze every atom that seems to compose it.’

Thoreau’s rejection of the language of academic science and advocacy of an existential poetic, relates to his rejection of professional, scholarly literacy in favour of popular, democratic literacy. ‘Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular language.’ On 6 December 1859:

‘Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but the art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind it. This unlettered man’s [Irving’s] speaking and writing is standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American.’

Walden Pond in 1908

We are reminded of the earlier remark that ‘the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection’. It is as if, for Thoreau, an academic aesthetic architecture of ‘grammar and rhetoric’ is to be supplanted by a demotic aesthetic physics of verbal force and compaction. Already on 12 November 1851, he was thinking in terms of ‘interjection’ and discharge: ‘Those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life, - a distinct fruit and kernel itself, springing from terra firma.’ The ‘continent concentrated thoughts’ of which Thoreau wrote on 30 August 1856 recall these well-defined resiliencies. In order to adequately reflect the complexity of nature, Thoreau maintains on 27 October 1858, language really should be compounded – ‘ground together’ – rather like in German:

‘Who will undertake to describe in words the difference in tint between two neighbouring leaves on the same tree? or of two thousand? – for by so many the eye is addressed in a glance, In describing the richly spotted leaves, for instance, how often we find ourselves using ineffectually words which merely indicate faintly our good intentions, giving them in our despair a terminal twist toward our mark, - such as reddish, yellowish, purplish, etc. We cannot make a hue of words, for they are not to be compounded like colours, and hence we are obliged to use such ineffectual expressions as reddish brown, etc. They need to be ground together.’

A principle of compounding or compaction can also be found underlying Thoreau’s broader conception of writing as the creation of ‘a theme’, and subsequent identification of ‘one pertinent and just’ thematic ‘observation’. Thoreau’s idea of writing here would reverse today’s academic writing practice, which typically starts from a pre-set, often predatorily pre-identified theme, before exploitatively selecting the material (and only that material) which will enable one to sustain one’s forced argument. The dominative logic of subsumption, against which Theodor Adorno directed much of his thinking, continues to determine so much of what passes for intellectual life now. A commodity is to be delivered, or you will be made unemployed, your selfhood erased and then accused of mental illness, etc. On 3 February 1859 Thoreau noted:

‘The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself. Most that is first written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone and foundation. It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation.’

In his entry for 13 October 1860, Thoreau suggested that visionary affirmation of natural phenomena, by contrast with professional scientific description of nature, involves an existential, sensually delighting form of language which has its own inevitable momentum: like the interjections and discharges of which he writes elsewhere, these ‘unconsidered’ or ‘unconscious’ statements – acts of definition – are not impeded by the sort of career-sustaining guards and scruples which complicate academic language.

‘[…] unconsidered expressions of our delight which any natural object draws from us are something complete and final in themselves, since all nature is to be regarded as it concerns man; and who knows how near to absolute truth such unconscious affirmations may come? Which are the truest, the sublime conceptions of Hebrew poets and seers, or the guarded statements of modern geologists, which we must modify or unlearn so fast?’

On 1 April 1860, Thoreau’s understanding of how the action of inevitably releasing verbal statements of visionary definition accords with a principle of natural law – a ‘sympathy with the universal mind’ – is so transcendentally shocking as to negate for him the import of communication itself.

‘The fruit a thinker bears is sentences, - statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, - not forethought, - so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind, which thought while we were asleep. There is such a necessity to make a definite statement that our minds at length do it without our consciousness, just as we carry our food to our mouths. This occurred to me last night, but I was so surprised by the fact which I have just endeavoured to report that I have entirely forgotten what the particular observation was.’

(All Thoreau quotations here are taken from: Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861, ed. by Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2009))          

Conditioned

‘Whoever has lived through these times and paid attention feels in the inmost way that an hour of reckoning has now come for the German spirit. In sleepless nights of listening and waiting one senses, very close by, the hot breath of this spirit. Now that false dreams of power have been dreamed out, now that need and suffering have burst the hard shells that threatened to suffocate it, this spirit, with a monstrous display of power, struggles toward its realization. […] Nearly all of the innumerable movements that now tremble throughout Germany and shake it to its foundations testify, despite their apparently contradictory directions, to the desire and nature of this spirit. Youth groups that carry forward generalized human ideals or the ideas of the Germanic fraternities; communards whose values are linked to the communism of primitive Christianity; associations of the like-minded that have as their goal a renewal from within; interfaith religious groups; democratic-pacifist unions; and several efforts at popular education: all these seek the same thing, to emerge from abstract ideas anchored in the ego and arrive at concrete communal forms.’

                                     -Siegfried Kracauer, ‘German Spirit and German Reality’ (1922)

Kracauer’s insightful definition of the stirring of collective, existential spirit-life during the early years of the Weimar Republic, is quoted by Michael Jennings in the course of his essay on Walter Benjamin for the 2012 collection edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and Rudy Koshar, The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law. This summary of the early existentialist Zeitgeist, as involving a struggling forth of Geist out of the conceptualizing ‘ego’ and into ‘concrete communal forms’, can be read as a programme statement of The Weimar Moment itself. In his ‘Introduction’ to the volume, Koshar stresses its ambition to attend to the theological dimension of the intellectual life of the Weimar era:

‘Although scholars such as Mark Lilla have celebrated liberalism’s separation of the political and theological spheres, the cumulative effect of these essays is to show that even in its most secular and “humanist” variations, the debate for or against liberalism constantly allowed “theological” themes and gestures entry.’

On this blog [here] I have referred to Chris Thornhill’s emphasis on the way in which Jaspers’ early existentialism evolved out of his critical reaction to neo-Kantianism, in particular the variety propounded by Heinrich Rickert. The Weimar Moment shows what Jennings calls the ‘the religious revival that swept Germany in the early 1920s’, to be instinct with the emergence of meta-Kantian – for instance existentialist – thinking at this time. In his contribution, John P. McCormick notes how Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss also were both ‘deeply affected by the early-20th-century crisis of neo-Kantian thought in Germany’. In statements that bring to mind the debilitating crisis of contemporary academic rationality too, McCormick writes:

‘This crisis is perhaps best characterized as a widespread perception that Enlightenment rationality could not ground itself: that the most sophisticated system of reason required either a leap of faith to get itself off the ground or some external motivation outside the system itself.’ 

In the early 1920s Benjamin as well was becoming aware of the limitations of Kantian rationality, as Jennings stresses when he discusses Benjamin’s positive reception of Erich Unger, whose Politik und Metaphysik of 1921 Benjamin classed as the ‘most significant writing on politics of our time’. (Interestingly, Unger’s title foreshadows the sub-title of Thornhill’s 2002 book Karl Jaspers). As Jennings underlines, ‘each man’ – Unger and Benjamin – believed that philosophical thought ‘must move beyond a Kantian model that for them was based upon an inadequate understanding of human experience and knowledge’. Quoting Unger’s book, Jennings continues by noting that Politics and Metaphysics ‘thus conceives politics as an activity whose primary goal is the provision of an arena for psychophysical experience that may “correspond to a disclosure of divine reality”’. 

‘As Margarete Kohlenbach has put it, Benjamin and Unger shared the conviction that “philosophical thought is to seek to identify the conditions in which man could objectively experience, and thus know, that which in modern religiosity is at best believed, or somehow sensed, to be true.”’      

Rodrigo Chacón, in his contribution to The Weimar Moment titled ‘Hannah Arendt in Weimar: Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament?’, notes the shift in Arendt’s terminology in the course of her life, so that later ‘she would attempt to provide existential concepts for the religious notions that she had used in her dissertation’. For example, ‘human “createdness” would become human “conditionedness” (Bedingtheit)’. Yet Chacón thus suggests that Arendt’s existentialism was inseparable from the initial accent on religious experience in her thinking. In the 1920s, he writes, Arendt was ‘deeply marked by the attempts of Heidegger and [Rudolf] Bultmann to provide a philosophical account of certain Christian possibilities of existence’. Opposing Arendt’s later emphasis on existential Bedingtheit to Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantian ‘hyper-normativism’, Chacón points to the way in which Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s attention to existential experience of the spiritual quality of our life – of Christian possibilities – modulated in Arendt’s mature thought into her existentialist attention to ‘existential sources in Christian religious experience’:

‘Like Bultmann, Barth and others, Arendt was not a moral – let alone a “normative” – thinker, […] because (human) morality – especially in the form of an ethics of the “pure will” – is essentially a rebellion against what conditions us or what is given to us. Thus [for example], again like Bultmann, Arendt problematized a fundamental ethical and religious precept – neighbourly love – from the standpoint of a more authentic understanding of its existential sources in Christian religious experience.’

The essay from Samuel Moyn and Azzan Yadin-Israel, ‘The Creaturely Limits of Knowledge: Martin Heidegger’s Theological Critique of Immanuel Kant’, focusses on Heidegger’s 1928 work Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Here again Bedingtheit and an awareness of human limitations seems to offer the key. Moyn and Yadin-Israel argue that ‘unlike Kant’s, Heidegger’s philosophical argument is intended to win assent for an anthropology of human abasement, neediness, and dependence’. It is in temporality, Moyn and Yadin-Israel assert, that Heidegger finds ‘the damning proof of man’s dependence and indigence – an insuperable limit to his autonomy and perfectibility’. Or alternatively they maintain that, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger transfers autonomy to time. They cite the following extract, commenting that it ‘touches on precisely those capacities that for Kant mark the human subject as a citizen of the noumenal world but transposes them so that they are now attributes of time: self-activation, independence of experience, and a kind of autonomy’.

(Marketa Luskacova)

‘Time is only pure intuition to the extent that it prepares the look of succession from out of itself. […] This pure intuition activates itself with the intuited which was formed in it, i.e., which was formed without the aid of experience. According to its essence, time is pure affection of itself. [….] As pure self-affection, time […] forms the essence of something like self-activating.’        

Indeed for Heidegger, as Moyn and Yadin-Israel continue, ‘Time must be self-affecting for human being to remain consigned to a state of receptivity’, of dependence and finitude. This reference to receptivity leads into Moyn and Yadin-Israel’s discussion of Heidegger’s ideas of attunement, summoning and service. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics : ‘In order to allow the being to be what and as it is, however, the existing being [Dasein] must already have projected that it is a being on the strength of what has been encountered. Existence means dependency upon the being’. As Moyn and Yadin-Israel put it, ‘Knowledge, Heidegger concludes, lies not in the individual’s ability to gain mastery over nature but in an ability to properly orient oneself toward receiving the revelation of the world.’ As Chacón notes too, for Heidegger ‘revelation was to be understood in terms of Dasein’s openness for meaning or sense (Sinnoffenheit)’. Moyn and Yadin-Israel see Heidegger’s location ‘squarely in the aftermath of Barth’s insistence that man’s indigent need for external revelation be recovered as the lost core of Christianity (with Heidegger obviously displacing the source of this necessary revelation)’, as determining his emphasis on ‘Readiness to be summoned to receive the external gift of revelation, presented as an offering and made available through the agency of the “wholly other”’. The Weimar Moment repeatedly returns to the link made by Weimar dialectical theology between conditionedness and revelation. Chacón quotes from Bultmann’s ‘The Eschatology of the Gospel of John’ of 1928: ‘To know him [sic; God] is to see him as really made manifest, and that means to recognize him as Creator, to submit one’s self to be determined by him.’ Ulrich Rosenhagen, in his article treating the Weimar era Jewish-Protestant encounter, summarizes Friedrich Gogarten’s Die religiöse Entscheidung (1921; The Religious Decision) as both an attempt ‘to define a new language of God and revelation beyond history’, and a rejection of religion qua ‘an arrogant human enterprise to overcome the absolute contradiction between creator and creature’.   

McCormick’s account of Schmitt’s and Strauss’ response to the crisis of neo-Kantianism is suggestive in relation to contemporary intellectual crises such as postmodern, nihilist relativism and the conversion of mass socialist politics (in the UK) into the debt-building profligacy of consumerist New Labour. But perhaps the progressivism of Blair’s ‘Things can only get better’ is morphing now into a wary stoicism, of ‘Things had better stay the same’. Recent academic phenomena such as the online journal Thinking Verse or Simon Jarvis’ ultra-formalist epic poem Night Office – which holds to an abababcc  rhyme scheme throughout all its 218 pages – can be read as rebellions against today’s version of the modern rejection of limits, or as restatements of the Weimar era theorists’ insistence on the need to evolve conceptions of conditioning form:  

‘Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that Enlightenment rationality was unravelling into a way of thinking that violently rejected “form” of any kind, fixated myopically on human capabilities rather than natural limits, and lacked any conception of the structural constraints that condition the possibility of philosophy, morality, and politics. Consequently, for both authors, Enlightenment reason obfuscates “genuine” expressions of rationality and obscures the necessity of political order as such.’    

McCormick analyzes Strauss’ schema of varying atheisms, in order to underline his conception of  the religious ‘fear that is necessary for stable human interactions’ (McCormick’s words) and founds political order:

‘Strauss observed that traditional atheisms associated with Epicureanism and Averoism [sic] were fundamentally soft; they rejected the harsh rigours of religious observance and diminished the necessity of fear of the divine. On the contrary, Strauss suggests that modern atheism, as expressed by a Hobbes or a Heidegger, confronts and embraces the harshness of human existence, accentuates the necessarily and fundamentally fearful state within which human beings exist, and accentuates the inescapable fact that human beings are in need, as such, of dominion, of being ruled.’

Whether manifesting now as submission to the principle of capital accumulation à la Weber, or else to an infantilizing consumer culture à la  the Wyndham Lewis of The Art of Being Ruled (1926), such religious awe remains the human norm. Surely religious fear and the need to submit underpinned what Kracauer called the imperialistic-militaristic ‘false dreams of power’ which afflicted Germany in the years preceding the First World War. When we need to be ruled we too in turn begin to dream those dreams; but arguably in ‘German Spirit and German Reality’, Kracauer, with his association of the growing thinking of existential spirit-life with its own ‘monstrous display of power’, begins to suggest a new form of power and an alternative way of being ruled. For what was the 1920s push towards the emergence of existential spirit-life but a more progressive manifestation of ‘The Hunger for Wholeness’ which Peter Gay, in his Weimar Culture, saw to characterize the Weimar era ‘fear of modernity’?

‘Not all who, in the twenties, hungered for connection and unity were victims of regression; a few, outnumbered and not destined to succeed, sought to satisfy their needs not through escape from but mastery of the world, not through denunciation but employment of the machine, not through irrationalism but reason, not through nihilism but construction – and this quite literally, for this modern and democratic philosophy was formulated in their writings and carried out in their buildings by architects.’

Jaspers is positioned on the same axis of civility as Gay's mentor, Ernst Cassirer. Jaspers’ early existentialism was not anti-Kantian, but meta-Kantian. If it sought to supersede Kantian formalism, it remained structured by the antinomies (such as reason/experience) which it sought to overcome by, in Thornhill’s words [here], ‘incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life in an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence’. To submit to (the project of) such an encompassing account, or to seek to absorb oneself within psycho-physical wholeness, was the early existentialist variant of the more populist 1920s trend defined by Kracauer: ‘to emerge from abstract ideas anchored in the ego and arrive at concrete communal forms’. But of course the existentialists, like the new urban constructors, were either ‘outnumbered’ or (in Heidegger's case) seduced by Nazism: Germany drifted on into submission to authoritarian leadership, and remained fatally trapped within the old forms of power.          

Habermas on Cassirer in the 1920s (2)

In Habermas’ presentation in ‘The Liberating Power of Symbols’, the conflict in the 1920s between Cassirer and Heidegger is related to the former’s concern with a humanist, normative (Kantian) constitutionalism. This concern of Cassirer’s is reflected in his upholding of (German-)Jewish ‘ethical ideals’ and civility, in the face of the emergence of fascist political myth.

Fundamental to Habermas’ account of Cassirer is his emphasis on Cassirer’s understanding that it is (in Habermas’ words) ‘the dynamic of symbolization which drives the process of civilization forward’. ‘In the symbolic constitution of human existence and in the symbolic mediation of our life activity the path towards a humane conduct of life is already anticipated.’ This stress on Cassirer’s insights into the entwinement of symbolization and civilization or humanization, underwrites Habermas’ presentation of the Cassirer-Heidegger opposition as an opposition between German-Jewish civility and Heidegger’s (mythic) thinking of (mythically) autonomized, fated praxis – ‘between the decent, cultured spirit of a cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatal rhetoric set on throwing man back onto the “hardness of his fate”’. This proto-Nazi hardness refers to a praxis without fundamental or transcendental norms, such as the norms which, in Cassirer’s thinking, derived from the (post-)Kantian transcendental analysis of language; Habermas suggests that it was Cassirer’s unwillingness to run with and generalize Humboldt’s revolutionary use of Kant’s notion of the transcendental, or ‘transform the heuristic priority which the transcendental analysis of language and of the linguistically constituted lifeworld does in fact enjoy in his researches into a systematic priority’ of his theory of symbolization, which lay behind the limitation of the 1929 Davos disputation to a superficially culturo-philosophical rather than fully philosophical-political debate.

‘The question of the evaluation of symbolic forms remained open, and the normative foundations remained entirely unclear. This may be the systematic reason why the controversy in Davos did not touch on the real crux of the dispute. The conflict between Cassirer and Heidegger, which extended into the political domain, was not played out. The opposition between the decent, cultured spirit of a cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatal rhetoric set on throwing man back onto the “hardness of his fate”, was reflected only in a contrast of gestures and mentalities.’

A foregrounding of the transcendental conception of language derived from Humboldt’s innovations, or of the linguistic ‘normative foundations’ of (the construction of) symbolic forms would, Habermas suggests, have enabled Cassirer to develop the civilizing impetus or content within his theory of symbolization; ‘the emancipatory power of symbolic shaping’.

‘With this step Cassirer could have overcome his epistemologically constricted vision, and resolved the conflict between the perspectivism of equiprimordial worlds [symbols acting as concepts], on the one hand, and the emancipatory power of symbolic shaping [symbols acting as images], on the other, which dogs his philosophy of symbolic forms.’

Habermas observes that Heidegger himself, by the stage of Davos, had not yet achieved a non-nominalist pragmatics of language in his own thinking: ‘it is worth noting that Cassirer, on the basis of his reception of Humboldt, had already long since achieved the turn towards a pragmatics of language which still lay in the future for Heidegger’. Yet ironically, it was Heidegger at Davos who pointed to Cassirer’s lack of an emphasis on the transcendental aspect or normative foundations of his philosophy of symbolic forms – precisely the emphasis which could have stood up to Heidegger’s praxis without norms. For Heidegger a ‘terminus a quo’ – what Habermas calls the ‘fundamental dimension’ – remains unprobed by Cassirer:

‘One could say that for Cassirer the terminus ad quem is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness. For Cassirer the terminus a quo is utterly problematical […] Cassirer’s point is to emphasize the various forms of the shaping in order, with a view to these shapings, subsequently to point out a certain dimension of the shaping powers themselves.’

As Habermas underlines later in The Liberating Power of Symbols, it would be left to Apel subsequently to turn a transcendental view of language against Heidegger’s upholding of autonomized linguistic praxis: Apel insists, Habermas saw, on ‘a transcendental-hermeneutic conception of language, which was directed against the autonomization of the world-disclosing function of language in Heidegger’s history of Being’. For Apel, as Habermas reiterates, ‘Innerworldly “praxis” is only “mediated” by the disclosing “poiesis” of linguistic world-constitution.’ 

Yet as Habermas also shows, it is Cassirer’s political pronouncements of the 1920s which evince the normative aspect of his philosophy, and illustrate his repeated appeal to ‘Kant’s theory of law’. ‘When Cassirer took a stand on matters of public concern he made no attempt to conceal his fundamental normative convictions.’ Habermas quotes from Cassirer’s 1928 Constitution Day speech, to demonstrate how it (as Habermas puts it) ‘sketched with bold strokes the origins of human rights and democracy in the tradition of rational law’: ‘the idea of a republican constitution is in no sense a stranger, let alone an alien intruder, in the overall context of the history of German thought and culture’. Instead, Cassirer maintained, Weimar republicanism ‘grew out of this very ground, and was nourished by its most authentic forces, the forces of Idealist philosophy’.

Jankel Adler. 'Woman with Hat'. 1940

Habermas observes how Cassirer’s support of the normative political process of Weimar constitutionalism was followed by an analysis of the collapse of this constitutionalism, which occurred along with the fatal threat to ‘normatively significant cultural processes’ (Habermas’ words) such as civilizing symbolization. In one of his last essays, the 1944 ‘Judaism and the Modern Political Myths’, Cassirer upheld German-Jewish humanist, normative ‘ethical ideals’ against the bad foundationalism represented by what Habermas calls the ‘fake primordiality of political myths’.

‘We [modern Jews] had to represent all those ethical ideals that had been brought into being by Judaism and found their way into general human culture, into the life of all civilized nations. […] If Judaism has contributed to breaking the power of the modern political myths, it has done its duty, having once more fulfilled its historical and religious mission.’    

Cassirer saw how Nazi political myth enlisted the support of technological products of the scientific enlightenment, perceiving the political practice of the Nazis to be – as Habermas writes – ‘an ominous fusion of myth and technology: fascist mobilization succeeds by employing modern techniques of mass communication in the service of the revival of mythical forms of thought’. Moreover, Cassirer, as Habermas interestingly suggests, could therefore argue for the value of the monotheistic myth of Judaism precisely because Judaism historically fed into a humanizing (German-Jewish) religious enlightenment, rather than into a dehumanizing scientific enlightenment:

‘It is worth noting that Cassirer trusts religious far more than scientific enlightenment as a counter-force to the violence of political myths – he relies on the confinement of myth within its own proper sphere, which was long ago achieved by monotheism.’    

Habermas on Cassirer in the 1920s

I want to underline three particular aspects of Ernst Cassirer’s intellectual life in the 1920s which Habermas draws attention to in the opening lecture in his The Liberating Power of Symbols, in order to reiterate Habermas’ emphasis on the importance of Cassirer’s work of the 1920s – an emphasis which, I feel, remains somewhat understated in the lecture ‘The Liberating Power of Symbols’ itself. These three aspects are: (i) his involvement with the Warburg Library circle, (ii) his novel reception of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language and, (iii) Cassirer’s relation to Heidegger alongside his concern with a humanist, Kantian constitutionalism.

Whilst stressing the independence of Cassirer’s philosophical development, Habermas nonetheless observes how ‘the interest which [Aby] Warburg and Cassirer shared in the symbolic medium of the human mind’s forms of expression was the basis of their intellectual affinity’. Habermas notes that, in 1921, Cassirer was ‘one of the first’ to give a lecture at the Warburg Library based at the University of Hamburg. Habermas then adds that the following description (by T. von Stockhausen) of the present layout of the Warburg Library, ‘which, since 1958, has been housed in Woburn Square in London in an arrangement modelled on the Hamburg original, reads as though inspired by Cassirer’s philosophy of the development of symbolic forms’:

‘The library was to lead from the visual image, as the first stage in man’s awareness, to language and hence to religion, science and philosophy, all of them products of man’s search for orientation, which influence his patterns of behaviour and his actions, the subject matter of history.’ 

As Habermas writes, the library’s very design thus reflects the way in which, for Cassirer, ‘The world of symbolic forms extends from pictorial representation, via verbal expression, to forms of orienting knowledge, which in turn pave the way for practice’. We can see that a progress through the Warburg Library, Image-Word-Orientation-Action, also follows (broadly) the subtitles of the three successive volumes of Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms – Language, then Mythical Thought, then The Phenomenology of Knowledge. A representative report on the recent threat to the Warburg Library emanating from the new management culture of the University of London can be read here. 

Yet Warburg’s thinking influenced Cassirer’s theory of the process of symbolization in the first place, as Habermas shows when he points to Warburg’s concern with what Habermas calls the ‘force of artistic creation, purged of its demons’ – a concern described in E. H. Gombrich’s intellectual biography of Warburg: ‘More than ever therefore, the Renaissance appears in the Mnemosyne as a precious moment of precarious religious equilibrium in which the sources of heathen passions were tapped but still under control.’ Warburg’s atlas project, Habermas notes, was to be introduced with the following emphasis of Warburg's on the emergence of culture out of a work of distantiation: ‘The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.’ As Habermas sees, Warburg’s insights are reflected in Cassirer’s ideas that (as Habermas puts it) ‘the fact that sensory contact with the world is reworked into something meaningful through the use of symbols is the defining feature of human existence’, and that ‘the objectifying force of symbolic mediation breaks the animal immediacy of a nature which impacts on the organism from within and without’. Habermas quotes this account of the process of symbolization in Cassirer’s Geist und Leben :

‘Language and art, myth and theoretical knowledge all contribute to […] this process of mental distanciation: they are the major stages on the path which leads from the space of what can be grasped and effected, in which the animal lives and within which it remains confined, to the space of sensory experience and thought, to the horizon of mind.’  

Of course Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms also emerged out of what Habermas calls his ‘innovative reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language’ – a reception recorded in the 1920s in Cassirer’s 1923 essay ‘The Kantian Element in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language’. Before considering Humboldt’s rôle in Cassirer’s thought, however, it is helpful to understand how his contact with the Warburg Library circle influenced his theorization of the symbolic function of expression. As Habermas notes, the most obvious result of the stimulus which Cassirer received in the 1920s, ‘if not from Warburg himself, then from the scholarly discussions of religion in the circle gathered around him in his library’, can be found in Cassirer’s ‘important reflections on mythical images and linguistic symbols’. Cassirer’s 1925 treatise on ‘Language and Myth’, which – as Habermas observes – appeared in the series of studies published by the Warburg Library, drew on Hermann Usener's classic (1896) work on the formation of religious concepts, Götternamen.

Bifurcation of the fetishizing gaze.
Ilse Bing. 'Self-Portrait in Mirrors'. 1931

Cassirer’s idea that, as Habermas writes, ‘Symbolic form is […] originally generated by a stylizing force, which condenses the dramatic impact of experiences’, made use of Usener’s theory of ‘momentary gods’ to (as Habermas puts it) ‘account for symbolic condensation as a response to the exciting ambivalence of meaning-laden experiences’. It is as if the symbolic transformation of sense experience into meaning is triggered by the very focussing intensity of the nature-traumatized human. ‘Such compressed, highly significant experiences, which are the focus of an isolating attention, can congeal into a mythical image, can be semanticized and thereby spellbound, given fixity by a divine name which makes it possible to recall and control them.’ Habermas quotes Cassirer: ‘only when this splitting off succeeds, when intuition is compressed into a single point and apparently reduced to it, does a mythical or linguistic structure result, only then can the word or the momentary god emerge’.   

Again, in Language and Myth, Cassirer maintains that language and myth are ‘two diverse shoots from the same parent stem, the same impulse of symbolic formulation’, in that language and myth apparently emerge simultaneously from ‘the same basic act of mental processing, of the concentration and intensification of simple sensory intuition’. In a way which perhaps is comparable with Gillian Rose’s underlining (in The Melancholy Science) of the importance for Adorno’s thinking of a Marxist-modernist aesthetic of brüchigkeit or brittleness, Habermas stresses Cassirer’s concomitant emphasis on ‘the broken character of our symbolic relation to the world, a relation which is mediated by words and tools’, and on ‘the indirectness of a self-relation which forces human beings to make a detour via symbolically generated objectifications in order to return to themselves’. For Cassirer, Habermas writes, acts of symbolization are distinguished by the fact that they ‘break open environments shaped by the peculiarities of a particular species’; they do this by ‘transforming fluctuating sense impressions into semantic meanings and fixing them in such a way that the human mind can reproduce the impressions in memory and preserve them’.

Rose cited Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ on how the essay ‘thinks in breaks (in Brüchen) because reality is brittle (brüchig [split, class-divided, antagonistic]) and finds its unity through the breaks, not by smoothing them over’. It can be argued therefore, that in a sense for Adorno as for Cassirer, unified (symbolic, essayistic) expression is consequent upon experiential brokenness. Yet Cassirer’s basic notion of symbolization, as Habermas notes, also posits a symbolic function of conceptualization distinct from that of expression : this separate function of conceptualization too would have to be factored into any convincing comparison of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms with Adorno’s aesthetics of the riven essay form. Habermas outlines the distinction between expression and conceptualization so as to emphasize how Cassirer’s insights drawn from his involvement with the Warburg Library circle’s study of religion, in fact simply supplemented the thinking that he had launched in his earlier reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language:

‘Expression transforms forceful sense impressions into meaningful elements, individual mythical images, which are able to stabilize affective responses; concepts articulate a view of the world as a whole. In his analysis of the expressive function, which is unmistakeably [sic] inspired by myth, Cassirer was stimulated by the discussions in Warburg’s circle. But, as regards the linguistic function of world-disclosure, Cassirer had already learned much from Humboldt prior to his arrival in Hamburg. The insights drawn from the study of religion helped to deepen a conception which ultimately derived from Cassirer’s genuine insights in the domain of the philosophy of language.’    

Habermas writes that Cassirer’s ‘original achievement’, his ‘semiotic transformation of Kantian transcendental philosophy’, rested on his being ‘the first to perceive the paradigmatic significance of Humboldt’s philosophy of language’. Cassirer ‘thus prepared the way for my generation, the post-war generation, to take up the “linguitic [sic] turn” in analytical philosophy and integrate it with the native tradition of hermeneutic philosophy’ (Habermas’ speech on Apel, reprinted later in The Liberating Power of Symbols, indeed lists Humboldt among the ‘marginal figures in the philosophy of language’ recovered within Apel’s early work). We can begin to understand the rôle played by Humboldt within Cassirer’s thinking of the symbolic function of conceptualization – his thinking of the way in which symbols, when acting as concepts rather than as mythical images, ‘articulate a view of the world as a whole’ – if we refer to Habermas’ account of Cassirer’s understanding of the symbolizing process as ‘an interplay of contrary tendencies’. ‘The world of symbolic meanings arises on the one hand from the production of a plenitude of meaningful images, and on the other from the logical disclosure of categorially articulated domains of experience.’ Cassirer, we can see from Habermas’ explanation, took from Humboldt’s thinking the principle of linguistic world-disclosure, against traditional nomination theory of language, but he continued to stress the Kantian aspect of this innovative principle of Humboldt’s:

‘He [Cassirer] retains an epistemological standpoint in the sense that he interprets linguistic world-disclosure on the model of the transcendental constitution of objects of possible experience. He assimilates Humboldt’s linguistic articulation of the world to Kant’s constitution of a domain of objects of possible experience. He reduces both to the common denominator of the categorial articulation of a symbolically generated world.’

Habermas stresses how, by relying on ‘the common denominator of the categorial articulation of a symbolically generated world’, Cassirer’s reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language in fact ‘underestimated the scope of these innovations’, or the scope of Humboldt’s own semiotic transformation of Kantian transcendental philosophy. For Cassirer reduced Humboldt’s thought here to a Kantian theory of objectification, as he sustained his own cherished theory of linguistic conceptualization and then made symbols of his conceptual objects:

‘Relying on an analogy with categorial synthesis, which first endows the manifold of sense impressions with the unity of the objective experience of things, he also understands the function of linguistic form in terms of “objectification”. In so doing, he exploits the ambivalence of the expression “objectification”; for we also use this term to describe the process of externalization which characterizes the sensuous, symbolic embodiment of an intellectual content: “What Kant describes as the activity of judgement is only made possible in the concrete life of the mind by the mediating intervention of language, as Humboldt makes clear. Objectification in thought must pass via objectification in the sounds of language.” This interpretation is the direct descendant of the theory of concepts which Cassirer had already developed by 1910.’

Yet crucially, as Habermas also underlines, Cassirer did see that Humboldt’s use of Kant in fact in a way took him beyond Kantian epistemology. Humboldt, Habermas summarizes, ‘takes from Kant the notion of the transcendental production of a categorially structured world of objects of possible experience, in order to explain the meaning-conferring function of language’. In this way Humboldt ‘describes the productivity of language as a world-projecting spontaneity’. In Geist und Leben, Cassirer conveys this idea of what Habermas calls language’s ‘conceptual articulation of a world of possible states of affairs’: ‘Languages are […] not in fact means of representing a truth which is already known, but rather means of discovering what was previously unknown.’ Habermas underscores the revolutionary implications of Humboldt’s positing of language’s projective capacity and meaning-conferring function in this way:

‘The spontaneous process of world constitution is thus transferred from the transcendental subject to a natural language employed by empirical subjects; the constitution of a domain of objects is similarly transformed into the grammatical pre-structuring of a linguistically articulated world. […] Whatever the members of a linguistic community may encounter in the world is accessible only via the linguistic forms of a possible shared understanding concerning such experiences.’ 

For Cassirer, Habermas writes, this meant that ‘Symbolic form overcomes the opposition of subject and object’. For by ‘transforming the world-constituting activity of the knowing subject into the world-disclosing function of the trans-subjective form of language’, Humboldt’s use of Kant’s notion of the transcendental exploded ‘the architectonic of the philosophy of consciousness as a whole’. Habermas quotes from Geist und Leben: ‘Thus the basic opposition which dominates the entire systematics of Kant’s thought seems inadequate […] when it comes to defining the specificity of the domain of language as a product of the mind.’

To be continued.   

The Research of Hope

William Kluback’s ‘Karl Jaspers and Schmuel Hugo Bergman: Believing Philosophers’ appeared in the collection edited by Richard Wisser and Leonard H. Ehrlich, Karl Jaspers: Philosopher among Philosophers. Kluback opens with a scene which movingly evokes the attempt to perpetuate Weimar era German-Jewish thought after the Holocaust, in the form of a philosophical conversation between Israel and postwar Germany: a meeting on a street in Jerusalem in April 1949 between Jaspers and Bergman (the subject of my previous post on this blog), who had been the first Rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. ‘In 1948,’ Kluback notes, ‘Jaspers had published a book on philosophical faith, Der philosophische Glaube. Bergman had reviewed the book in the newspaper Haaretz a day or two before and now the friends spoke about it.’ Jaspers’ book, writes Kluback, made ‘a deep impression’ on Bergman. ‘The book rightly shocked him. He was stunned by its description of the spiritual situation of the time and by the helplessness of the philosophy that was offered to a tortured mankind.’ For Bergman, Kluback continues, ‘The shattering nature of the problem’ exposed by Jaspers’ book ‘lies in the silence of transcendence’: that is, in contemporary nihilism. Kluback – from the vantage-point of an adherent of religious tradition – points to a post-Kantian ‘anarchy of autonomous, sophistic subjectivity, of inescapable relativism, and of an incurable hedonism’. Weimar thought itself, viewed from Kluback's position, was already coloured by nihilism: ‘Bergman was right when he saw the shattering consequences of nihilism in the decades before 1948 and those which were yet to come.’

Kluback understands nihilism in terms of social coercion, or the way in which a power-hungry rationalism can turn itself into political dogmatism. As ‘philosophers in the age of despotism’, Bergman and Jaspers, Kluback maintains, ‘worried about the efficacy of philosophy […] only because at times some of their colleagues turned to political insanity while others fought and died in physical and spiritual exiles’. For Kluback, ‘The philosopher knew that in the tempests of politics nihilism was the ever present threat to spiritual and physical survival’, because ‘When Bergman spoke of the shattering effect of Jaspers’s book, he recognized the power of nihilism, the profanation of the sacred and the blatant and uncontrolled will to power’. Kluback could be talking about the will-sapping, depressing corruptions which characterize the marketized state bureaucracies of the UK today, such as the higher education system; actually here he is referring to the threat to the creation of the new state of Israel.

‘Hugo Bergman described his reaction to this discussion of nihilism as shattering, threatening the birth of a state in a hostile world where the depths of the oppositon [sic] had hardly been measured. The future demands an unflinching courage, a masterful self-confidence and an incontrovertible hope in man’s reasonableness.’ 

Nihilism hits at the root of the philosopher’s decisive participation in state-building, Kluback emphasizes, because ‘The problem of values was not merely academic; it became the essential quality for the society, the expression of the state’. The emergent state demands an education – a transmitted and interpreted intellectual culture, a community of debate – which is not eroded by nihilism.

‘The Arab question had become acute for the independent Jewish state. There were the historical values, the constitution, the rule of law and the security of the state; all these issues had to be addressed. These were debated and needed consensus and solution. The philosophers had a role to play.’

Kluback’s suggestion, therefore, is that nihilism threatened Jaspers’ philosophical work towards the refoundation and rehumanization of Germany, just as it threatened Bergman’s work as a public intellectual in the new Israel. We can note too that the anti-nihilist ‘historical values’ shared by all three thinkers to which Kluback refers in this connection – Jaspers, Bergman and Buber – were precisely the philosophical values which came to fruition in 1920s Germany:

‘The philosopher [in Israel] accepted the role of educator. Jaspers knew this well. He had been an educator in a Germany destroyed by Nazism. He spoke to the people of the true German spirit. His voice was heard. He had to lay the foundations of a Germany that would seek to lessen the effect of twelve years of totalitarianism. Bergman and Buber had similar tasks in an emerging state. Jaspers would continue his work from Basle, Bergman and Buber from a divided Jerusalem.’

          

It is clear that the post-postmodern supermarket that is the contemporary university is unable to offer such an anti-nihilist education. The blogosphere is awash with disaffected academics (or post-academics) complaining of their alienation from a higher education system lacking in values – for instance an English lecturer in the UK notes today’s inane cacophony of academic discourse, whilst an American Max Scheler scholar comments on the recent interviewing of only one philosopher, himself, for a post in philosophy (the other candidates included an historian and someone from an English department). Both examples point to the fact that the university itself now is programmed by a relativistic nihilism – by the educators’ own inability to hold to any value, effectively, other than their own self-assertive need to hustle, and make some noise. The academic system fosters quasi-celebrities, strange spectral celebrities whose elite peer group glamour is accrued through the canny autopoietic administration of existing knowledges, rather than the creation of new knowledges; it is as if short-term subcultural infamy is to be attained through the collective self-distancing from truth, rather than long-term public fame - the fame of a Kierkegaard, say - achieved following the individualistic creation of new truths. The Scheler scholar, in his blog post [here], concludes that the genuine philosopher can only respond by returning to the work of searching for truth: ‘we can resist the postmodernist on the grounds that not all texts inspire in the same way; philosophical texts are those that inspire the search for truth [his italics]’. Jaspers’ definition of nihilism in his The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, quoted here by Kluback, had indeed focussed exactly on the absence of truth and loss of faith:

 

‘“While demonology and deification of man,” he said, “offer a substitute for faith, open unbelief is known as nihilism. The nihilist ventures to appear without disguise. For him all contents of faith are untenable, he has unmasked all interpretations of the world and of being as delusions: for him everything is conditional and relative; there is no fundament, no absolute, no being as such. Everything is questionable. Nothing is true, everything is permissible.”’

It is in contrast to such a nihilist that Bergman and Jaspers, Kluback maintains, are ‘believing philosophers’.

‘When other men compromise and conform to the needs of the time the philosopher remains embedded in his belief in freedom, in human dignity and the communicating community. These beliefs the philosopher shares with all reasonable beings. In them he sees a hint of the Idea of mankind. The philosopher sees danger in nihilism; it becomes his single antagonist.’

Bergman argued, Kluback writes, that ‘if we are to prevent the danger of nihilism “we must turn to God:” this is the powerful task which Jaspers gives to philosophy’. ‘“What he would like,” Bergman remarked, “is the renewal of philosophical belief that is hidden in the religious, the transformation of religion into philosophy. This certainly will not be the way of mankind, although it may be the way of a minority.”’ Kluback signals that (Jaspers’ and) Bergman’s concept of philosophical faith, and their practice as believing philosophers, may be regarded as being elitist (or at least as being avant-gardist); he observes of Bergman that ‘He knew that a turning toward God was not the answer for mankind, but he also knew that the philosopher had to be a believer; on his faith others depended’. Yet Jaspers’ conception of faith, like Bergman’s concept of revelation, is – Kluback stresses – not exclusive. The believer, Jaspers wrote, must be able to ‘acknowledge the faith that is alien to him as a possible truth emerging from a different source, even if he is unable to understand it’. Bergman, Kluback writes, ‘found in revelation a universality which was at the foundation of his idea of The Believing Community’. Kluback suggests how Bergman's position on the hinge of two faiths, liberal-rational philosophical faith and potentially dogmatic-exclusive religious faith, was determined by his own inspiring conception of a decisively directing, socially unifying revelation:

‘He moved easily between philosophical and religious faith. In fact, it would be difficult to distinguish one from the other in his life and thought. This is comprehensible because he believed that a revelation was given to the people and it concerned their earthly destiny, their service to mankind and their vision of a future that spoke of justice, compassion and love. In a letter to his life-long friend Robert Weltsch, the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau (11/2/71), Bergman spoke of his conviction “that only a new moral direction would make it possible to find a solution for all difficulties, however utopian this may be”.’

Kluback also quotes from an important 1945 letter to the philosopher Jacob Fleischmann in which Bergman clarified his idea of the non-dogmatic path of faith – the shared ‘new moral direction’ – which springs from revelation.

‘“I do not believe in an absolute religion. All religious art [sic, pres. ‘religions’], in my view, are methods to a goal, ways. The dogmatic divisions are artistic superstructures which religions have built over or under their dwelling (Bau). In my eyes they are not important. […] Every people, and their epochs have their paths to God. But God is one, and if we feel a nearness to the Jewish tradition, it is because this pedagogy, and not the dogmatic, is close to our heart. I don’t believe in the absolute truth of either Judaism or Christianity. I believe in a particular mission of the Jewish people which has shown itself in such a fruitful way in our time. Thus it is for me tasteless and laughable when Zionists draw from a religious-historical reality simply political consequences.”’

Like Jaspers, Bergman in this letter is suspicious of objective religious forms on account of their potential dogmatism. Again like Jaspers, Bergman would supplant such absolute religion with a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence; a path to God. Because of his personal closeness to Jewish tradition, Bergman (unlike Jaspers) identifies the path to God with his contemporary ‘particular mission of the Jewish people’. Thus for Bergman the non-dogmatic hermeneutic of transcendence itself has assumed the dimensions of a ‘religious-historical reality’: for him here the struggle towards transcendence takes place within contemporary Jewish history, just as for Jaspers, we could add, it first took place within the religious-historical reality of Weimar era Germany. Both religious-historical realities are built out of, and hence consist of, philosophical faith.

Noting that ‘What we find revealed in Jaspers is the capacity of philosophy to describe the nature of faith, a clarification of the modes of faith’, Kluback underlines the fact that Jaspers’ decisive hermeneutic of transcendence remains a Kierkegaardian, negative one. ‘Faith becomes for Jaspers certainty “coupled with distance.” […] Faith defies description; it belongs to experience. Man never escapes the reality of non-belief, of inner doubt and despair.’ Because, as Kluback writes, ‘Faith is not a given to be held in perpetuity undiminished’, ‘Bergman and Jaspers knew that faith was a struggle; it was a gift’. Thus just as the mission towards God is faith, in the sense that it consists of it, faith itself is, consists of, the struggle – the (transcendentally) decided, decisive risk. Kluback quotes from Jaspers’ final book, Philosophical Faith and Revelation : ‘“There is hope without deception”, he said, “only when we do not hold it to be a certainty, not even a probability, but dare to live by it because such a life can be worthy of us and founded in transcendence.”’

Kluback stresses that a philosophical life is ‘formed through commitment’; ‘The philosopher shows the way of faith; he must decide to travel it.’ His very commitment to the path also suggests, as Kluback intimates with an additional quotation from Philosophical Faith and Revelation, that philosophical faith can become a collective, rather than an exclusive or elitist, project: ‘all our actions are based on what we expect of men – and that means of ourselves. Whoever despairs of man despairs of himself. Contempt of man is self-contempt.’ Kluback reinforces this point: ‘Faith is the foundation of man’s actions, of his world view, of his concept of the future.’ Faith thus emerges as the quality which relates people to each other, as well as to the distinct (yet interrelated) phases of human experience – past, present and future. Once more, the point is that each ‘religious-historical reality’ quite literally consists of philosophical faith.

I have tried to suggest in this post that Kluback shows Weimar era Germany and the new postwar Israel alike to be exemplary religious-historical realities instancing how, as he put it, ‘The problem of values was not merely academic; it became the essential quality for the society, the expression of the state.’ The intuition that in these two historical and intellectual moments the projection of philosophical faith became a social – even a state – project, could perhaps become more sustainable through a consideration of the concern within Weimar thought with natural law; particularly if we understand the tradition of natural law thinking as an articulation of what Kluback calls ‘a sacred covenant of belief between the philosopher, the past, the present and the future’. Kluback’s opposition to the lineage of post-Kantian reason – ‘The [French] Revolution declared the end of the sacred tradition that declared that God is truth’ – brings him to quote from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. ‘Each construct of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society […] connecting the visible and invisible world according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and moral natures’. Whereas now amidst our nihilism, Kluback comments, ‘We have discovered what it means to deify man, to identify history with natural law’, Jaspers and Bergman ‘knew that faith alone held together the sacred covenant that tied the generations to each other’.     

 

(The phrase 'the research of hope' is borrowed from Robert Hullot-Kentor's essay 'Critique of the Organic: Kierkegaard and the Construction of the Aesthetic' (reprinted in his Things beyond Resemblance))