Transfinite Life

Bruce Rosenstock

Description

Oskar Goldberg was an important and controversial figure in Weimar Germany. He challenged the rising racial conception of the state and claimed that the Jewish people were on a metaphysical mission to defeat race-based statism. He attracted the attention of his contemporaries—Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Thomas Mann, and Carl Schmitt, among others—with the argument that ancient Israel's sacrificial rituals held the key to overcoming the tyranny of technology in the modern world. Bruce Rosenstock offers a sympathetic but critical philosophical portrait of Goldberg and puts him into conversation with Jewish and political figures that circulated in his cultural environment. Rosenstock reveals Goldberg as a deeply imaginative and broad-minded thinker who drew on biology, mathematics, Kabbalah, and his interests in ghost photography to account for the origin of the earth. Caricatured as a Jewish proto-fascist in his day, Goldberg's views of the tyranny of technology, biopolitics, and the "new vitalism" remain relevant to this day.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Hans Driesch and the Revival of Naturphilosophie
2. Georg Cantor and the Mathematics of God
3. Goldberg's Ontology and Unger's Politics and Metaphysics
4. The Reality of the Hebrews and YHWH's Battle for the Earth
5. Gershom Scholem, Oskar Goldberg, and the Meaning of Jewish History
Conclusion: Ghosts and the Vitalist Imagination
Appendix I: Thomas Mann's Critique of The Reality of the Hebrews
Appendix II: Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte and Oskar Goldberg's Kabbalah Interpretation
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophie de la religion
• Jewish Studies
• Political
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of religion
• Politics

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253030160
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

TRANSFINITE LIFE
NEW JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND THOUGHT
Zachary J. Braiterman
TRANSFINITE LIFE
Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination
Bruce Rosenstock
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Bruce Rosenstock
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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ISBN 978-0-253-02970-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03016-0 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
For Harriet
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Hans Driesch and the Revival of Naturphilosophie
2 Georg Cantor and the Mathematics of God
3 Goldberg s Ontology and Unger s Politics and Metaphysics
4 The Reality of the Hebrews and YHWH s Battle for the Earth
5 Gershom Scholem, Oskar Goldberg, and the Meaning of Jewish History
Conclusion: Ghosts and the Vitalist Imagination
Appendix I: Thomas Mann s Critique of The Reality of the Hebrews
Appendix II: Franz Joseph Molitor s Philosophie der Geschichte and Oskar Goldberg s Kabbalah Interpretation
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
M Y FIRST DEBT of thanks goes to Professor Manfred Voigts. Not only has his work on Oskar Goldberg, including his scholarly editions of Goldberg s books, essays, and related materials, been an indispensable resource without which this volume would hardly have been possible, but Professor Voigts has also been a generous interlocutor throughout the past several years. He has never stinted in his encouragement of my project, and he has shared valuable insights with me. There is barely a page that in some way does not reflect his influence.
I want to thank the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach for making available to me the Oskar Goldberg Nachlass. The generosity and patience of the librarians in the Manuscript Reading Room help to make this incredible archive one of the world s premier research institutions.
Above all, I want to thank my wife, Harriet Murav. She has accompanied the writing of this book with far more than patience. She has shared every stage of its development and has helped me rethink and reframe my work in important ways. Her yearlong stint at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2012-2013 made it possible for me to spend a very refreshing spring sabbatical semester working in Green Library on the history of German vitalism. I dedicate this book to her.
Note on the Cover Art
The cover s painting by Sigmar Polke, Untitled (2003), is based on an advertisement for an exhibition of Phantasmagoria held at London s Lyceum Theater in the early 1800s, staged by the German inventor Paul de Philipsthal. The advertisement illustrated the effect known as the Red Woman of Berlin.
List of Abbreviations
Goldberg- Aufs tze
Oskar Goldberg, Zahlengeb ude, Ontologie, Maimonides, und Aufs tze 1933 bis 1947 (Berlin: K nigshausen Neumann, 2013).
Oskar Goldberg
Manfred Voigts, Oskar Goldberg, der mythische Experimentalwissenschaftler: Ein verdr ngtes Kaptiel j discher Geschichte (Berlin: Agora, 1992).
Phil .
Franz Josef Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte, oder ber die Tradition , part 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Hermannschen Buchhandlung, 1827); part 1, 2nd ed. (M nster: Teissing sche Buchhandlung, 1857); part 2 (M nster: Theissing sche Buchhandlung, 1834); part 3 (M nster: Theissing sche Buchhandlung, 1839); part 4, vol. 1 (M nster: Theissing sche Buchhandlung, 1853).
Reality of the Hebrews
Oskar Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebr er , Wissenschaftliche Neuausgabe, ed. Manfred Voigts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005).
Theory of Reality
Hans Driesch, Wirklichkeitslehre: Ein metaphysischer Versuch (Leipzig: Emmanuel Reinike, 2nd ed. 1922; 1st ed. 1917).
Introduction
T HE T ALK OF the Town section in the New Yorker of July 17, 1943, included a piece titled Ghost Photographer about a certain Dr. Oskar Goldberg. He s a German scientist of undoubted repute, the writer explains. Two years ago, when he arrived in this country as an migr , he was sponsored by Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and other Germans of equal standing. Four months earlier (March 7, 1943), Goldberg had published on the first page of the New York Spiritualist Leader , a widely distributed newspaper at that time, a request for information about ghost and poltergeist sightings in the New York area. 1 This request, with his contact information included, had the heading, Haunted Houses: Wanted for Tests. It was this advertisement that had caught the attention of the New Yorker writer. When he was interviewed, Goldberg explained that he was planning to undertake a scientific expedition to assemble photographic evidence of ghosts. It s his notion that a picture of a ghost could be obtained with a camera using film sensitive to ultra-violet and infra-red rays, the writer notes. Goldberg said that he had learned how to actually see ghosts with the naked eye during his training under a yogi in India. In addition to his quest for scientific proof of ghosts and of life after death, Goldberg explained what his deeper motive was: The only reason for psychic research is to release earthbound ghosts, all of whom are unhappy. In Rules for Research in Hauntings, a piece Goldberg published in the New York Spiritualist Leader later that same summer, we learn that the reporting of spontaneous apparitions is a religious duty and that anyone who conceals hauntings is acting unethically by preventing research in proofs of immortality. 2 The fact that a German scientist of undoubted repute was hunting for ghosts in New York in the middle of the Second World War could not help but arouse the interest of the New Yorker writer. Here was a round, bald, kindly-looking man of fifty-seven harmlessly and somewhat comically trying to find proof of life after death and, moreover, trying to redeem the unhappy dead.
Oskar Goldberg (1885-1952), as the New Yorker article attests, was never shy of publicity. In Weimar Berlin, Goldberg achieved a reputation among many young Jewish intellectuals as a brilliant Kabbalist with supernormal abilities to penetrate the secrets of the Hebrew Bible. Among those who were particularly drawn to Goldberg s ideas were the philosopher Erich Unger (1887-1950), a fellow student one year behind Goldberg at the Friedrich-Gymnasium; the legal and economic historian Adolf Caspary (1898-1953); and the artist, poet, and later photojournalist Simon Guttmann (1891-1990). 3 Outside of his circle of devoted followers, Goldberg s ideas received a wide and generally positive reception. Two noted historians of religion of the Weimar period, Robert Eisler and Franz Dornseiff, acknowledged the importance of Goldberg s first publication on the numerical structure of the Pentateuch, although they disputed his claim that it was beyond the power of human intelligence to fabricate. 4 Thomas Mann relied on Goldberg s 1925 magnum opus, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebr er ( The Reality of the Hebrews ), for his Joseph novels. In her autobiographical memoir, Margarete Susman, one of the most notable Jewish thinkers of the Weimar period, ranked Goldberg s book alongside Heidegger s Sein und Zeit ( Being and Time ) as the two great metaphysical expositions of the world and human existence published in the German language in the interwar period. 5
Alluding to the ancient historian Josephus s description of the three sects of the Jewish world of his day (Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes), the modern Jewish historian Gershom Scholem identified three Jewish sects in Weimar Germany: the one associated with art historian Aby Warburg s research library in Hamburg, the group of political philosophers and social scientists at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, and the circle around Oskar Goldberg in Berlin. 6 Scholem, despite being a severe critic of Goldberg, thus testified to the historical significance of Goldberg s appeal for a certain group of young German Jews in Weimar. What drew this group to Goldberg was a profound desire to reconnect to what Goldberg called Urjudaism, a form of militant communal existence that flourished when, according to the account in the book of Exodus, the people as a whole seemed to be gathered within the protective presence of their God, with the ark of the covenant in their midst and a column of fire leading them forward toward the promised land. This yearning for some restoration of a communal intensity of Jewish life took many forms at the time, including, of course, Zionism in all of its varieties. Goldberg s ideas offered a number of young Jews a path to a vitality of experience that, unlike Zionism, seemed unsullied by the pragmatic exigencies of world politics. 7 After the bloodletting of the First World War there arose among many young people, not just Jews, a thoroughgoing repudiation of anything less than a revolutionary, world-transformative form of politics. In 1921, Erich Unger, deeply influenced by Goldberg s ideas, published a book titled Politik und Metaphysik ( Politics and Metaphysics ) that argued for the possibility of a politics based on a people s latent biophysical power through which it might tap into transcendental sources of energy. Walter Benjamin was so taken with this book that in a letter to Gershom Scholem he c