Heidegger and Kabbalah

Elliot R. Wolfson

Description

While many scholars have noted Martin Heidegger's indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, as well as his affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, Elliot R. Wolfson expands connections between Heidegger's thought and kabbalistic material. By arguing that the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger, Wolfson presents an alternative way of understanding the history of Western philosophy. Wolfson's comparison between Heidegger and kabbalah sheds light on key concepts such as hermeneutics, temporality, language, and being and nothingness, while yielding surprising reflections on their common philosophical ground. Given Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language, these innovative readings are all the more remarkable for their juxtaposition of incongruent fields of discourse. Wolfson's entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions.

Introduction: Belonging Together of the Foreign

1. Hermeneutic Circularity: Tradition as Genuine Repetition of Futural Past

2. Inceptual Thinking and Nonsystematic Atonality

3. Heidegger's Seyn/Nichts and Kabbalistic Ein Sof

4. imum, Lichtung, and Bestowing Refusal

5. Autogenesis, Nihilating Leap, and Otherness of the Not-Other

6. Temporalizing and Granting Timespace

7. Disclosive Language: Poiēsis and Apophatic Occlusion of Occlusion

8. Ethnolinguistic Enrootedness and Invocation of Historical Destiny

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• mysticism
• Individual Philosophers
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Friedrich Schelling
• German idealism
• Philosophy of religion
• Immanuel Kant
• Delaruelle
• Böhme
• Schelling
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Emmanuel Kant
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Martin Heidegger

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253042583
• Langue: English

Extrait

Heidegger and Kabbalah
NEW JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND THOUGHT
Zachary J. Braiterman
HEIDEGGER
AND KABBALAH
Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poi sis
Elliot R. Wolfson
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Elliot R. Wolfson
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 paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wolfson, Elliot R., author.
Title: Heidegger and Kabbalah : hidden gnosis and the path of poiesis / Elliot R. Wolfson.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2019. | Series: New Jewish philosophy and thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019013600 (print) | ISBN 9780253042569 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253042576 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. | Cabala.
Classification: LCC B3279.H49 W6275 2019 (print) | LCC B3279.H49 (ebook)| DDC 193--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013600
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980138
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
TO THE MEMORY OF
David G. Leahy
philosophical dreamer par excellence
L Univers est une pens e opaque et solitaire qui a d j bondi dans les yeux clos de l homme comme l espace d un r ve sans r ve.
Fran ois Laruelle
If the bleak days scare away all shining radiance, and if all breadth shrivels into the paltriness of narrow conventionality, then the heart must remain the source of what is light and spacious. And the most solitary heart makes the broadest leap into the middle of beyng, if on all sides the semblance of nonbeings stops its noise.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER , PONDERINGS V
To those who are superficial and in a hurry, no less than to those who are deliberate and reflective, it must look as though there were no mystery anywhere.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER , A DIALOGUE ON LANGUAGE
Contents
Introduction: Belonging Together of the Foreign

1. Hermeneutic Circularity: Tradition as Genuine Repetition of Futural Past

2. Inceptual Thinking and Nonsystematic Atonality

3. Heidegger s Seyn/Nichts and Kabbalistic Ein Sof

4. im um, Lichtung, and Bestowing Refusal

5. Autogenesis, Nihilating Leap, and Otherness of the Not-Other

6. Temporalizing and Granting Time-Space

7. Disclosive Language: Poi sis and Apophatic Occlusion of Occlusion

8. Ethnolinguistic Enrootedness and Invocation of Historical Destiny

Bibliography

Index
Heidegger and Kabbalah
Introduction
Belonging Together of the Foreign
The un-rest of questioning is not empty uncertainty; instead, it is the opening-up and guarding of that rest which, as the gathering together into what is most question-worthy (the event), awaits the simple intimacy of the call and endures the extreme wrath of the abandonment by being.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)
To flee into the identical is not dangerous.
To venture into discordance in order to say the Same is the danger.
Heidegger, Letter on Humanism
Martin Heidegger is incontestably considered by intellectual foe and friend alike as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and perhaps one of the greatest thinkers of all time, and this in spite of the controversy surrounding his allegiance to National Socialism and despite, even more damaging, his inability to acknowledge his mistakes publicly and to show remorse or compassion for the victims of the extermination camps. 1 I have explored the topic of Heidegger s flirtation with the right-wing politics of Nazism in a separate monograph. 2 I will not repeat my arguments here, but what is crucial to note is that regardless of how one decides on the relationship between the political and the philosophical, the gift of Heideggerian thought has been enormous, and so, too, the debt of those seized by the reverberations-at times haunting-of his voice, and this includes the impressive aggregate of Jewish students who flocked to the feet of the master or the philosopher-king, as he was known. And so it is with my own philosophical reflections on Jewish mysticism. For several decades, I have availed myself of certain themes in Heidegger s uvre to elucidate the phenomenological aspects of kabbalistic esotericism and hermeneutics. In this book, I will expand my earlier insights and think more deeply about the juxtaposition of Heidegger and kabbalah. 3
Heidegger and Judaism: Review of Previous Scholarship
To contextualize my approach, it would be beneficial to mention some previous analyses that impinge upon this subject. In her provocative study, La Dette impens e: Heidegger et l h ritage h bra que , 4 Marl ne Zarader explored the manner in which the Hebraic heritage influenced Heidegger s thought, principally in his appropriation of biblical faith through the medium of Christianity, which, together with Greek thought, comprise the foundations of occidental culture. The very experience of being and language that Heidegger sought to retrieve from the pre-Socratic thinkers as an alternative to what was forgotten in the history of Western metaphysics can be traced to what has been more overtly expressed- in letters black on white -in Jewish sources. 5 And yet, as Zarader also contends, following Ric ur, Heidegger occludes the Hebraic component of his thought to the point of leaving something like a blank space in his text. 6 Zarader thus concludes that Heidegger both restored to Western thought the determinations central to the Hebraic universe and effaced it from thought and, more broadly, from the West itself. 7 Zarader s own effort was to fill the blank space by making explicit the Hebraic dimension of Christianity that was obfuscated or perhaps consciously repressed by Heidegger with his alternate narrative of a Heilsgeschichte that revolves linguistically and historically about the poles of ancient Greece and modern Germany. 8 Just as Heidegger spoke of the oblivion of being ( Seinsvergessenheit ) as the obliviousness to the difference between being and beings, 9 so Zarader identifies Judaism as what is left unthought at the heart of his thinking. In line with Heidegger s hermeneutic, the more pronounced the concealment, the more profound the disclosure, the more resonant the silence, the more poignant the bearing witness. Particularly relevant to this study is the author s comparison of Heidegger s conception of nothingness and the domain of being s withdrawal to kabbalistic speculation on im um , the contraction of infinity to create the vacuum within the plenum, the space wherein, paradoxically, what is ostensibly other than that which has no other can come to be. 10
When asked in an interview with Dominique Janicaud to respond to Zarader s thesis, Derrida concurred but argued even more forcefully that it was an act of violence on Heidegger s part to disregard Jewish thought so thoroughly and deliberately, a display of disdain that can be explained only as part of an ideological-political agenda, 11 a position that curiously accords with Buber s critique of Heidegger s misrepresentation of the mission of the prophets of ancient Israel, or more expansively the Judeo-Christian tradition, which he contrasts with the prophetic essence of the poet as typified by H lderlin. 12 Others, such as Fran ois V zin, have drawn an explicit connection between Heidegger s systematic, and apparently conscious, inattentiveness to Jewish philosophers and his apathy toward the millions of Jews brutally and senselessly murdered. 13 It is interesting that, in a similar vein, reading against Heidegger s own explicit assertions, Jean-Luc Nancy surmised that his signature idea of Ereignis may have nothing to do with a destinality engaged solely by the Greeks but everything to do with a different history, one that includes Roman, Judeo-Christian, and modern events in a sense that Heidegger was perhaps never truly capable of apprehending. 14 My own inquiry will lend support to Nancy s conjecture, albeit as it relates more specifically to the affinities between the Heideggerian event of beyng and the kabbalistic emanation of the infinite, a comparison that brings to light the metaontological critique of the ontotheology typically associated with the Jewish esoteric teaching. The validity of juxtaposing Heidegger s Seinsdenken and the kabbalistic contemplation of infinity will be strengthened by attending to several other topics worthy of comparative analysis, to wit, the hermeneutical nature of the human experience of history and the contours of tradition, the conception of authentic time as a linear circle that instantiates the replication of difference, the simultaneous disclosure and concealment of the mystery, and the intricate triangulation of language, peoplehood, and land.
Another work that should be mentioned is Johanna Junk s Metapher und Sprachmagie, Heidegger und die Kabbala: Eine philosophische Untersuchung . Even though this book is marred by the fact that the author does not seem to possess the philological skills requisite to read kabbalistic material in its primary languages, and thus her analyses are based on the evaluations culled from other scholars, Junk s study yields some important insights and interpretive strategies that substantively enrich the discussion and illumine the fundamental question of the compatibility of Heidegger s path and the esoteric tradition of the ka