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))

Bergman on Dialogical Philosophy

Shmuel Hugo Bergman’s little-known but intensely readable primer, Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber, presents a series of lectures given by Bergman in 1962. In his ‘Preface’, translator Arnold Gerstein – aptly, I sense – describes Bergman’s original language as ‘a semiformal but elegant conversational Hebrew that is compelling to students and philosophers alike’. The intimacy of Bergman’s lecturing style thus mirrors that of his subject: the dialogue. Nathan Rotenstreich, in his ‘Foreword’, maintains that the term ‘dialogical philosophy’ is ‘undoubtedly taken from Martin Buber’; both Rotenstreich and Gerstein, however, note that for Bergman it is Kierkegaard who emerges as ‘the central link in the history of the philosophy of the dialogue’ (in Gerstein’s words).

Later sections of Bergman’s study address other thinkers of central importance to Weimar era philosophy: Eugen Rosenstock, Franz Rosenzweig. Yet the first and by far the longest part of the book focusses on Kierkegaard’s thought. In some introductory statements prefacing this part, Bergman suggests the affinity of dialogical thinking to existentialist thinking: ‘What distinguishes any genuine dialogue is the fact that the participants are individuals, each bearing their own specific and generic traits. They are not abstractions but men of flesh and blood.’ On the following page Bergman adds a caveat: ‘The philosophy of dialogue which we will discuss in these lectures is not the same as “existentialism,” since not every existential philosophy stresses the dialogical factor; however, the two schools are identical with respect to the position of the individual within the philosophical system.’ As Bergman puts it later, ‘With this stress on the importance of the individual self, the single man in all his existential individuality, Kierkegaard lays the foundation for what has subsequently been called dialogical philosophy.’ But, as Rotenstreich rightly observes, Bergman’s treatment of dialogical philosophers’ relationship to existentialism is ultimately of lesser importance than the emphasis his book places on ‘the centrality of man’s individuality and the relationships and encounters between individuals and with God’. Bergman notes, for instance, that Kierkegaard’s dislike for German Romanticism’s ‘tempestuousness and exaggerated subjectivism that isolated man’, meant that he ‘strenuously sought the way to religion through the use of subjective irony’.

Crucially, in connection with Weimar political philosophy’s decisionism, Bergman shows how Kierkegaard’s thinking of the decision forms an aspect of his thinking of man’s emergent relationship with God, repeatedly referring to ‘the autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’. Because, as Bergman writes, for Kierkegaard ‘Real action is in the internal decision of man’, therefore for him ‘Man’s relation to God is not direct or objective; it is an inner relation, a relation of risk’. For Kierkegaard, as Bergman notes, within the moral and religious dimension of life ‘direct communication is impossible’. ‘In order to see God, one must break the direct-passive relationship. Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act, and he confronts the reality of God.’ 

Bergman emphasizes that the I-Thou relation, the relationship of man to man, is the concern of post-Kierkegaardian dialogical philosophy:

‘Actually, in spite of the tremendous importance of dialogue for Kierkegaard, the major dialogue for him is between man and God. The dialogue between man and man has no function in religious life because religious man leads a solitary life and cannot disclose to others the task that is imposed on him.’

Bergman’s attention to the importance of religious ‘silence’ or ‘speechlessness’ reappears within the context of his discussion of the modality of ‘non-Socratic learning’ within which, for Kierkegaard (as Bergman puts it), ‘a genuine mutual relationship between God and man is created’: learning as divine revelation.

‘The relationship between man and man is invariably Socratic – that is, it will always be such that one man, when he teaches another, even when he teaches him about revelation and faith, can only be an agent or a midwife. He cannot take the place of direct revelation, which comes through God as teacher.’

Commenting on Kierkegaard’s Repetition, Bergman stresses how ‘the essence of revelation’ involves a recreation of man by God, and that ‘God alone can recreate man’. ‘The learner is given something that was not within him and for which he was unprepared, and so the moment in which he receives the doctrine or revelation is of crucial importance.’ It is here that Bergman evokes the sort of divine revocation of speechlessness ‘which is expressed among Jews in the prayer: “Oh Lord, open thou my lips and my mouth may declare thy praise”’. We remember how Bergman wrote of how in relation to God, man’s ‘inner nature […] bursts forth in an independent act’: ‘Man enters this personal dialogue with God only through God’s action.’ It is as if the spiritual release afforded by the human decision is matched by – though it does not have the power to solicit – a divine revocation of our silence.

For instance when it juxtaposes Ferdinand Ebner’s view that (in Bergman’s words) ‘Man’s spirit is in its essence a receiving spirit dwelling in a relationship to a giving spirit’, with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s argument that (as Bergman puts it) ‘logos finds its way to our physical life and awakens it to the life of the spirit’, Bergman’s book foregrounds the position that ‘language is the revelation of God to man’. Noting that ‘this viewpoint predominates in the thought of Rosenstock, a friend of Rosenzweig’, Bergman explores the philosophy of language presented by Rosenstock in his Angewandte Seelenkunde [Applied Psychology], a text published in 1924 (but largely written some years before).

Bergman focusses on the concept of ‘true speech’ – revelational speech – which Rosenstock developed as a result of his view that, as Bergman phrases it, ‘The word, “logos,” is a revelation of divine presence’:

‘In speech [for Rosenstock] there are two levels, reflecting the distinction between true and ordinary speech. The two levels are the compulsion (or necessity) of speaking, and the ability to speak. True speech is not voluntary or arbitrary; it is not a matter of will but a necessity whose force causes speech to spring forth. True speech springs forth almost against the will of man, and thus all true speech is revelation.’

With this idea that ‘The word is given to man or forces itself upon him’, Bergman clearly echoes his earlier commentary on Kierkegaard – where he wrote of how ‘Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act’. It is as if Bergman’s exegesis of the philosophers’ views of the experience of revelation has become as compulsive and involuntary as the experience itself. Yet though for Rosenstock ‘true speech’ entails that (as Bergman puts it) ‘the speaker is entirely subject to his own speech’, this does not mean that for Bergman such involuntary revelational speech divorces the speaking/spoken subject from his own existential individuality. The example of revelational speech which Bergman provides – the Jewish hermeneutic practice of ‘the law of intra-linear parallelisms in the Book of Psalms’ – is itself, Bergman observes, ‘grounded in distress and necessity’.

‘In prayer Israel encircles the prayer leader, who passes in front of the Ark, while others release him by repeating the prayer which he has recited with such total self-absorption and compulsion that he does not hear it. The congregation repeats his prayer, paralleling it by half-lines in such a way that he can and must hear what he has prayed, and in this way they free him from his distress. This is true speech.’  

At the end of his book Bergman returns to this logic of call and response – of sacred language or prayer and hermeneutics – which characterizes revelational speech, noting how Buber (in his ‘The History of the Dialogical Principle’) situated the event of call and response at the core of his thinking influenced by Hasidism:

‘[…] the question of the possibility and reality of a dialogical relationship between man and God, thus of a free partnership of man in a conversation between heaven and earth whose speech in address and answer is the happening itself, the happening from above and the happening from below, had already accosted me in my youth. In particular since the Hasidic tradition has grown for me into the supporting ground of my own thinking, hence since about 1905, that had become an innermost question for me.’

The de-individualizing tendency within the dialogical philosophy of language treated by Bergman emerges clearly however, when he discusses Rosenstock’s idea of ‘liturgical grammar’. Bergman glosses Rosenstock’s notion of calling as recreation: ‘Rosenstock says that liturgical grammar would change Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” to read, “God, you have called me, therefore I am.”’ Bergman underlines how ‘The calling comes first and establishes the “I.”’ He also stresses the scriptural precedence for the idea that ‘only from the “Thou” can the “I” be created’. ‘The classic example is I Samuel, 3:5, where young Samuel turns to Eli and says: “Here am I for thou called me.”’ Within Bergman’s study of dialogical philosophy therefore, there seems to be a tension between his emphasis on the involuntary (and even de-individualizing) aspect of religious experience, and his emphasis on the contrasting ‘autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’ – on an individual’s decisive, committed, risk-taking experience. This tension seems to me to be resolved, though, by Bergman’s ongoing attention to the concept of redemption as recreation: that is, to a redemption of man by God which precisely enables man’s exercise of personal agency.

Bergman’s reading of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption suggests that ‘the redemption of the world must be perceived as a vital process, as the animation of the world’. This sort of redemption is evoked again within Bergman’s account of Buber’s notion of the state of ‘realization’, which Bergman describes as ‘the perception of reality in its immediacy, when one leaps into it, as it were, and identifies with it’. Towards the end of his book, Bergman relays the illustration of realization offered by Buber in one essay in his 1913 Daniel, Dialogues on Realization – a precursor of Buber’s I and Thou of 1923:

‘Buber illustrates this with the example of a Swiss pine […]. If […] I open myself to the tree with all my energy directed toward it, if I assimilate it, as it were, commit myself to it, then I am transformed and I become the tree itself. […] I experience a particular tree. I identify myself with it, without surrendering my unique position. I succeed, in other words, in conjoining the two, myself and the tree. I have access thereby to the mystery of reality. […] Entering the mystery of reality is […] a higher state of activity which I initiate and through which I open myself and transform my energy into a magical strength that fascinates and gratifies, while quieting the chaos around me. […] This is the great miracle of realization which this essay attempts to describe. Something of the philosophy of the dialogue emerges here, because the true dialogue also has the same openness and commitment along with the self-preservation of the person speaking.’