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.   

Either/Or (Part I)

Here are some of my reading notes on the first part of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

‘that eternity which lies not outside time but in the midst of it’ [51. Compare, regarding actualizing the eternal in the temporal (Bergman), the reference on 37 to ‘an idea that joined the finite and the infinite’. Cf. also 54, for instance the remark that ‘Only where the idea is brought to rest and transparency in a definite form can there be any question of a classic work’ (compare 103: ‘the stillness of the moment’). These references to rest and stillness are themselves worth comparing with Kierkegaard’s (hereafter SK’s) notion of ‘suspension’: ‘The art of recollecting and forgetting will also prevent a person from foundering in any particular relationship in life – and assures him complete suspension.’ (295) This effect of an ‘artistically [vs. ethically] achieved identity’ of forgetting and recollecting seems to me to correspond to the Buddhist meditative condition of detachment or acceptance; for me mindfulness can be what SK, on the same page, calls ‘the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world’. Suspension - also because it is an aesthetic position - is of course a relativistic state: one ‘does not hoist full sail for any decision’ (293).] 

‘When was it that the hetairias became common in Greece except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration? And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was? Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed […]’ [141. These statements, like the similar ones in Irony, seem to evoke the conditions of Weimar era Germany – as well as the conditions of our time.]

‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.’ [149. Cf. the ‘subjectivity reflected in itself’ on 143, and the quotation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right regarding ‘the right of subjective freedom’ on 626 n. 13.]

 

‘since we […] acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality […]’ [151. Cf. the advocacy of concise communication – ‘simple statements’, ‘time-and-talk-saving pithy aphorisms’, ‘economizing’ – on 465. Cf. too the recommended ‘venture in fragmentary endeavour’ in line with ‘the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers’, and a vocation of obscurity, on 152 (& 137).]    

[quotation above from 151 regarding ‘fragmentary prodigality’ continues with:] ‘what is the producing individual’s enjoyment is the receiving individual’s also, not the laborious and careful accomplishment or the tedious interpretation of this accomplishment but the production and the pleasure of the glinting transiency, which for the producer holds much more than the consummated accomplishment, since it is a glimpse of the idea and holds a bonus for the recipient, since its fulguration [Fulguration] stimulates his own productivity […]’ [152. 629 n. 36 glosses ‘Fulguration’ as a loan word in Danish, meaning ‘a sudden flashing (for example, the flashing of molten gold or silver)’. Compare, therefore, 129: ‘Then in the most distant heavens, far off on the horizon, one sees a flash; it speeds away swiftly along the earth, is gone in an instant. […] it seems as if the darkness itself has lost its composure and is starting to move. […] There is an anxiety in that flash; it is as if in that deep darkness it were born in anxiety – just so is Don Giovanni’s life. There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy. […] Don Giovanni’s life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life.’ In this relation, compare too SK’s constellation of aesthetic-intellectual love, risk and a Nietzsche-like terror of natural contingency (contingent even in its ‘infinite coherence’). ‘With what kind of love do we embrace nature? Is there not a secretive anxiety and horror in it, because its beautiful harmony works its way out of lawlessness and wild confusion, its security out of perfidy? But precisely this anxiety captivates the most. So also with love, if it is to be interesting. Behind it ought to brood the deep, anxious night from which springs the flower of love. Thus the nymphaea alba [white water lily] rests with its calyx on the surface of the water, while thought is anxious about plunging down into the deep darkness where it has its root.’ (424; cf. 294) On 102 Don Giovanni is posited as ‘absolutely musical’ because, unreflective and nonverbal, he ‘does not have that kind of [intellectual] continuance at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music’.]

‘love is always present tense’ [226]

‘the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries.’ [285. Cf. Hegel’s infinite absolute negativity adopted in Irony, and Hegel’s definition of negativity as ‘the turning point of the movement of the Notion […] the innermost source of all activity’ quoted in 641 n. 3. Cf. with this principle of motion the ‘movement of thought […] in the service of reflection’ discussed on 188, where, for the will (mediation, and the ethical) to begin, or to free itself from serving reflection, it ‘must be altogether impartial, must begin in the power of its own willing; only then can there be any question of a beginning’. The logic of this replacement of the principle of (aesthetic-)intellectual motion by the free exercise of the will (the decision, ethics), seems to me to be analogous to the meditative logic wherein mindfulness emerges from (within, ‘in the power of’) the body’s own wisdom: the breath. Cf. also, however, SK’s opposition of spirit-motion to the perpetual motion imposed by the capitalist work ethic. He writes of the ‘businesslike zeal with which they work at the office’ on 289: ‘There is an indefatigable activity that shuts a person out of the world of spirit and places him in a class with the animals, which instinctively must always be in motion.’ (Cf. SK on ‘busy bustlers’ on 25, and critiquing working for a living on 31).]    

‘There is so much talk about man’s being a social animal, but basically he is a beast of prey, something that can be ascertained not only by looking at his teeth. Therefore, all this chatter about sociality and community is partly inherited hypocrisy and partly studied perfidy.’ [288. Cf. the quotation from Aristotle’s Politics in 642-43 n.12: ‘man is by nature a political [social] animal. […] the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts’. Cf. 22, and also Hobbes?]

‘Every erotic relationship must always be lived through in such a way that it is easy for one to produce an image that conveys all the beauty of it.’ [390. Cf. 418: ‘For love, everything is a symbol […]’; ‘Erotic love is much too substantial to be satisfied with chatter, the erotic situations much too significant to be filled with chatter. They are silent, still, definitely outlined, and yet eloquent, like the music of Memnon’s statue. Eros gesticulates, does not speak; or if he does, it is an enigmatic intimation, symbolic music.’]     

‘To have an understanding of the moment is not such an easy matter, and the one who misunderstands it is doomed to boredom for life. The moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences I do not understand.’ [433. Cf. the seducer’s statements with the references to the moment on 90 and (as 658 n. 209 points out) The Concept of Anxiety, 82-91.]

As in my previous post on The Concept of Irony, the page numbering here refers to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings. 

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.’