Selections from:
Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (2008)
The story goes back to 1975. By that time my philosophical interests had considerably broadened, but prior to that year they still did not include religion or Judaism. But 1975 was
the year that the older of my two sons announced that he wanted to have a bar mitzvah! Although I had never belonged to a “minyan” (a Jewish congregation), during the period that I was active in opposing the Vietnam War, I had once given an Erev Shabbat talk (a Friday evening talk) at the Harvard Hillel Foundation about that war and my reasons for opposing it, and I had a very powerful and favorable impression of the rabbi who invited me to give
it, and who participated in the discussion that followed. Rabbi Ben- Zion Gold was not only the director of the Harvard Hillel Foundation in those years, but was also the founder and spiritual adviser of one of the congregations that met for worship on the Jewish Sabbath. My memory is that there were three Hillel congregations in all, at that time (today there are more): an Orthodox congregation, a Reform congregation, and the one that Rabbi Gold had
founded some decades previously, which called itself then and continues to call itself today simply “Worship and Study” (it uses the prayer book of the Conservative movement).
So when I had to find a place for my son to have his bar mitzvah, I found it natural to go and talk to Rabbi Gold about the possibility of Samuel having the ceremony in the
Worship and Study congregation. We agreed that my wife and I would come to services with Samuel for a year, and that he would study with a Jewish student (a philosophy major whom I knew, as it happened) to prepare for the ceremony. Long before the year was over, the Jewish service and Jewish prayers had become an essential part of our lives, and Rabbi Gold continues to be our teacher and friend to this day. That an adult Jew starts attending services when one of his children has a bar- or bat mitzvah is not at all unusual. But I am also a philosopher. What did I— what could I— make philosophically of the religious activities that I had undertaken to be a part of?
“Davening” versus Transcendental Meditation
Forgive a brief digression. Another part of the story is this: in those days many people were singing the praises of twenty minutes of something called Transcendental Meditation
per day. Although I am sure that many of those people do find it very beneficial, something in me rebelled (perhaps unreasonably). I thought: well, in twenty minutes I can daven (say the traditional Jewish prayers). Why do I need to try something that comes from another religion?
So I started to daven every morning (or afternoon, if I didn’t find time in the morning), as I still do. I appreciate that what “davening” does to or in one’s soul must be very different from what Transcendental Meditation does; be that as it may, I found it to be a transformative activity, and it quickly became an indispensable part of the “religious activities” that I just referred to.
The Tension between Philosophy and Religion in my Life
But to return to the question, what did I make philosophically of the religious activities that I had undertaken to be a part of? The question has no final answer, because it is one I am still struggling with, and will very likely struggle with as long as I am alive. But the following words, which appear on page 1 of my Renewing Philosophy, represent one moment in that struggle:
As a practicing Jew, I am someone for whom the religious dimension of life has become increasingly important, although it is not a dimension that I know how to philosophize about except by indirection, and the study of science has loomed large in my life. In fact, when I first began to teach philosophy, back in the early 1950s, I thought of myself as a philosopher of science and a mathematical logician (although I included philosophy of language and philosophy of mind in my generous interpretation of the phrase “philosophy of science”). Those who know my writings from that period may wonder how I reconciled my religious streak, which existed to some extent even back then, and my general scientific materialist worldview at that time. The answer is that I didn’t reconcile them. I was a thoroughgoing atheist, and I was a believer. I simply kept these two parts of myself separate.
Although by the time I wrote Renewing Philosophy my “scientific materialism” had been replaced by a more humanistic philosophical outlook (in that book, my heroes were Wittgenstein and Dewey), in Renewing Philosophy I did not attempt to deal directly with the question of how, as a philosopher, I was to make sense of the religious side of my life. If I “philosophized by indirection” about that question in that book, it was via the two chapters on Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Religious Belief,” in which I sympathetically expounded Wittgenstein’s view of religious language. As I explained, there is a difficult question that
an interpreter of those lectures has to address: If Wittgenstein is not saying one of the standard things about religious language [and I had already argued he wasn’t doing that]—for example, that it expresses false pre- scientific theories, or that it is non- cognitive, or that it is emotive, or that it is incommensurable [with ordinary descriptive language]—then what is he saying, and how is it possible for him to avoid all of these standard alternatives? Still more important, how does he think we, including those of us who are not religious (and I don’t think Wittgenstein himself ever succeeded in recovering the Christian faith in which he was raised, although it was always a possibility for him that he might), are to think about religious language? What sort of a model is Wittgenstein offering us for reflection on what is always a very important, very difficult, and sometimes very divisive part of human life?
According to the interpretation I went on to offer, Wittgenstein did not, in the end, offer a single “model.” Rather he tried to get his students to see how, for homo religiosus, the meaning of his or her words is not exhausted by criteria in a public language, but is deeply interwoven
with the sort of person the particular religious individual has chosen to be and with pictures that are the foundation of that individual’s life. Wittgenstein wrote that “I am not a religious man: but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.” For Wittgenstein, the problem was to combat simplistic ideas of what is to be religious, both on the part of antireligious people and on the part of religious people, and (I believe) to get us to see the spiritual value that he thought was common to all religions. But he did not face my problem, which was to reflect on a religious commitment that I had made. Renewing Philosophy continued to defer addressing it. I had come to accept that I could have two different “parts of myself,” a religious part and a purely philosophical part, but I had not truly
reconciled them. Some may feel I still haven’t reconciled them— in a conversation I recently had with an old friend, I described my current religious standpoint as “somewhere between John Dewey in A Common Faith and Martin Buber.” I am still a religious person, and I am still a naturalistic philosopher... A naturalistic philosopher, but not a reductionist. Physics indeed describes the properties of matter in motion, but reductive naturalists forget that the world has many levels of form, including the level of morally significant human action, and the idea that all of these can be reduced to the level of physics I believe to be a fantasy. And, like the classic pragmatists, I do not see reality as morally indifferent: reality, as Dewey saw,
makes demands on us. Values may be created by human beings and human cultures, but I see them as made in response to demands that we do not create. It is reality that determines whether our responses are adequate or inadequate. Similarly, my friend Gordon Kaufman may be right in saying that “the available God” is a human construct, but I am sure he would agree that we construct our images of God in response to demands that we do not create, and that it is not up to us whether our responses are adequate or inadequate.
Teaching Jewish Philosophy
What did help me to reconcile these sides of myself, although not in any way I anticipated, and probably not in a way that is “right” for most others, was my decision in 1997 to offer a course in Jewish philosophy. That course included the three Jewish philosophers (or 3¼, if we count Wittgenstein as ¼!) with which this book deals. While they certainly have disagreements, what I found they had in common was related to what I had seen in Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Religious Belief”: namely, the idea that for a religious person theorizing about God is, as it were, beside the point. Buber expresses this profoundly (though certainly not simply!) when he writes (I and Thou, p. 159):
Man receives, and what he receives is not a “content” but a presence, a presence as strength. This presence and this strength include three elements that are not separate but may
nevertheless be contemplated as three. First, the whole abundance of actual reciprocity, of being admitted, of being associated while one is altogether unable to indicate what that is like with which one is associated, nor does association make life any easier for us— it makes life heavier, but heavy with meaning. And this is second: the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. The question about the meaning of life has vanished. But if it were still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your senses. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interpreted by us— for that we lack the ability— only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of “another life” but that of this life, not of a “beyond” but of this our world, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this world. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends with us.
The guarantee does not wish to remain shut up within me, it wants to be born into the world by me. But even as the meaning itself cannot be transferred or expressed as a universally valid and generally acceptable piece of knowledge, putting it to the proof in action cannot be handed on as a valid ought; it is not prescribed, not inscribed on a tablet that could be put up over everybody’s head. The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and the uniqueness of his life.
I repeat: our “three Jewish philosophers” certainly do not agree completely, nor can any of them be summarized in a few words. This introduction is simply a way of indicating
how one person who is religious but averse to “ontotheology” has found them helpful. But I believe that all of us who feel attached to religion (and, perhaps, to the Jewish tradition in particular), but are unwilling to see that attachment as requiring us to turn our backs on modernity can find spiritual inspiration in the different ways in which these three writers, who were simultaneously exemplary human beings and exemplary thinkers, resolved
the conflicts that go with our predicament. (pp. 1-8)
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I already mentioned that for Wittgenstein religion, at its best, was not a theory. He was aware, of course, that religion often includes belief in miracles, or in an afterlife, or both. But even these beliefs, he argued, were not like scientific beliefs; for Wittgenstein “words only have meaning in the stream of life,” and the role that such beliefs play in the life of the believer is wholly different from the role that empirical beliefs play. The idea that religion can either
be criticized or defended by appeals to scientific fact seemed to him a mistake. And I am sure that Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, would have regarded the idea of “proving” the truth of the Jewish or the Christian or the Muslim religion by “historical evidence” as a profound confusion of realms, a confusion of the inner transformation in one’s life that he saw as the true function of religion, with the goals and activities of scientific explanation and prediction. And I believe one finds a very similar attitude expressed when Rosenzweig discusses revelation. For example, in his great open letter to Martin Buber titled “The Builders,” Rosenzweig attributes to Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), the great founder of neo- orthodoxy in Germany, the claim that the giving of the Torah at Sinai is a historical fact.
Rosenzweig’s response is interesting. He does not deny that traditional Jews believed in this “fact,” but he questions whether traditional Jews were concerned with the epistemological
question “why believe in Judaism,” and whether they had just one reason for their way of life:
But for those living without questions,” he writes, for keeping the Law was only one among others, and probably not the most cogent. No doubt the Torah, both written and oral, was given Moses on Sinai, but was it not created before the creation of the world? [Rosenzweig here and in the rest of
this passage is referring to stories contained in the Talmud and midrash]. Written against a background of shining fire in letters of somber flame? And was not the world created for its
sake? And did Adam’s son Seth not found the first house of study for the teaching of the Torah? And did not the patriarchs keep the Law for half a millennium before Sinai? . . . The “only” of orthodoxy should no more frighten us away from the Law than the “only” of liberalism . . . Judaism includes these “onlies,” but not in the sense of “onlies.”
The problem of the Law cannot be dispatched by merely affirming or denying the pseudo- historical theory of its origin or the pseudojuristic theory of its power to obligate, theories which Hirsch’s orthodoxy made the foundation of a rigid and narrow structure, unbeautiful despite its magnificence. Similarly as with
[Jewish] teaching, which cannot be dispatched by affirming or denying the pseudo- logical theory of the unity of God, or the pseudo- ethical theory of the love of one’s neighbor, with which Geiger’s liberalism painted the façade of the new business or apartment house of emancipated Jewry. These are pseudohistorical, pseudo- juristic, pseudo- logical, pseudo- ethical motives: for a miracle does not constitute history, a people is not a juridical fact, martyrdom is not an arithmetical problem, and love is not social. We can reach both the teachings and the Law only by realizing that we are still on the very first lap of the way, and by taking every step upon it ourselves. (pp. 13-15)
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[I]n a conversation I recently had with an old friend, I described my current religious
standpoint as “somewhere between John Dewey in A Common Faith and Martin Buber.”
Let me now explain what I meant by that. In A Common Faith, Dewey recognizes that our religious experiences and the conduct that they inspire often have great value. That they can also have negative aspects is something he is well aware of, from, for example, his
struggle with the tortured feelings of guilt that he suffered in his youth (and that his biographers ascribe to the extreme version of Calvinism to which his mother subscribed),
and from his disappointment at the fact that in his lifetime organized religions so often sided with the powers that be at times of social protest. Indeed, organized religion is not something Dewey ever came to favor. But in his short book, Dewey views God as a human projection
that embodies our highest ideals. By this, I understand Dewey to be saying that the kind
of reality God has is the reality of an ideal. Some people, we know, feel that this kind of reality is merely subjective. But Dewey did not believe that ideas and values are “subjective” in the sense of being outside the spheres of rational argument and objective validity. Our values and ideals are indeed subjective in the sense of being the values of subjects, of human individuals and communities. But which values and ideals enable us to grow and flourish is not a mere matter of “subjective opinion”; it is something one can be right or wrong about. Perhaps some will also say that even if ideals and values can be objectively right, in Dewey’s pragmatist sense,
in which objective rightness is reappraisable and revisable, still the reality of an ideal is something pale, something “intellectual.” But it takes only a moment’s thought to realize that that is not the case, at least not with a living ideal. Think how often such ideals as equality and justice have called forth deeds of great courage and dedication. If these ideals had not at times been overwhelmingly “real” to some individuals, notwithstanding the circumstance
that they are woefully far from being realized, this would be a far more intolerable world than it is.
Like Dewey, I do not believe in an afterlife, or in God as a supernatural helper who intervenes in the course of history or in the course of our lives to rescue us from disasters. I don’t believe in “miracles” in that sense. But spirituality— in my case, that means praying, meditating,
putting myself in touch with the ideals, rituals, ancient texts, that the Jewish people have passed down for more than two millennia, and undergoing the experiences that go with all of these— is miraculous and natural at the same time, just as the contact with another in what Buber calls the “ I- You” relation is miraculous and natural, and the contact with natural beauty or with art can be miraculous and natural. But God is not an ideal of the same kind as Equality or Justice. The traditional believer— and this is something I share with the traditional believer, even if I don’t share his or her belief in an afterlife, or in the supernatural— visualizes God as a supremely wise, kind, just person. Although many intellectuals are afraid of this sort of “anthropomorphism” because they are afraid (as Maimonides was already afraid) that it will be taken literally, I feel that it need not be “taken literally,” but is still far more valuable than any metaphysical concept of an impersonal God, let alone a God who is “totally other.” Thus I understand, in my own way to be sure, what Buber is talking about
when he speaks of an “ I- You” relation to God. (And, if I am wrong about the “nature” of God, that is, in the end, not so important if Buber is right, for thinking about “the
nature of God” is third- person thinking, and that is just what Buber wants us to give up.) (pp. 100-102)
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For Rosenzweig... all theologies that make God in any way a human construct are “atheistic theologies.” (I must admit that in Rosenzweig’s eyes I would have counted as an “atheist theologian.”) (p. 103)
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Martin Buber... tells us not to theorize about God in the third person, but to address God. I feel a deep sympathy with this aspect of Buber’s thought. (p. 104)
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For my “3¼“ Jewish philosophers, philosophy was indeed a way of life— but only when it
leaves the page and becomes “experiential.” And that is what they wanted it to do. (p. 108)