The Philosopher as Witness

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Description

Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003), one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, called on the world at large not only to bear witness to the Holocaust as an unprecedented assault on Judaism and on humanity, but also to recognize that the question of what it means to philosophize—indeed, what it means to be human—must be raised anew in its wake. The Philosopher as Witness begins with two recent essays written by Fackenheim himself and includes responses to the questions that Fackenheim posed to philosophy, Judaism, and humanity after the Holocaust. The contributors to this book dare to extend that questioning through a critical examination of Fackenheim's own thought and through an exploration of some of the ramifications of his work for fields of study and realms of religious life that transcend his own.

Preface

Part 1. Reflections

1. In Memory of Leo Baeck and Other Jewish Thinkers in “Dark Times”: Once More, “After Auschwitz, Jerusalem”
Emil Fackenheim

2. Hegel and “The Jewish Problem”
Emil Fackenheim

Part 2. Critique

3. Hegel’s Ghost: “Witness” and “Testimony” in the Post-Holocaust Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim
Susan E. Shapiro

4. Fackenheim on Passover after the Holocaust
Warren Zev Harvey

5. Of Systems and the Systematic Labor of Thought: Fackenheim as Philosopher of His Time
Benjamin Pollock

6. Fackenheim and Levinas: Living and Thinking after Auschwitz
Michael L. Morgan

7. The Holocaust and the Foundations of Future Philosophy: Fackenheim and Strauss
Sol Goldberg

8. Fackenheim and Strauss
Catherine H. Zuckert

Part 3. Response

9. Emil Fackenheim: Theodicy, and the Tikkun of Protest
David R. Blumenthal

10. The Holocaust Is a Christian Issue: Christology Revisited
Richard A. Cohen

11. The Holocaust—Tragedy for the Jewish People, Credibility Crisis for Christendom
Franklin H. Littell

12. Man or Muselmann?: Fackenheim’s Elaboration on Levi’s Question
David Patterson

13. Emil Fackenheim, Irving Howe, and the Fate of Secular Jewishness
Edward Alexander

14. She’erith Hapleitah: Reflections of a Historian
Zeev Mankowitz

15. Willful Murder in the Lublin District of Poland
David Silberklang

16. Metahistory, Redemption, and the Shofar of Emil Fackenheim
Gershon Greenberg

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• History of religions
• Judaism
• Philosophy of religion
• The Holocaust

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791478295
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

The Philosopher as Witness

SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Thought Richard A. Cohen, editor

The Philosopher as Witness Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust

Edited by

M L. M ICHAEL ORGAN and B ENJAMIN P OLLOCK

S TATE U NIVERSITYOF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Cover image: Allison J. Pollock

“In Memor y of Leo Baeck and Other Jewish Thinkers in ‘Dark Times’: Once More, ‘After Auschwitz, Jerusalem’ ” and “Hegel and ‘The Jewish Problem,’ ” © 2008 by Emil Fackenheim. All rights reser ved. For information, please contact: Georges Borchardt, Inc., 137 East 57th Street, New York, NY, 10022.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2008 State University of New York

All rights reser ved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other wise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu

Production by Eileen Meehan Marketing by Fran Keneston

Librar y of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The philosopher as witness : Fackenheim and responses to the Holocaust /  edited by Michael L. Morgan, Benjamin Pollock.  p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporar y Jewish thought 408)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-7914-7455-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)  1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Influence. 2. Holocaust (Jewish theology) 3. Philosophy, Jewish. 4. Fackenheim, Emil L. I. Morgan, Michael L., 1944– II. Pollock, Benjamin, 1971–

D804.3.P523 2008 940.53'18—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2007035784

Preface

Contents

PART 1. REFLECTIONS

 1. In Memory of Leo Baeck and Other Jewish Thinkers  in “Dark Times”: Once More, “After Auschwitz, Jerusalem” Emil L. Fackenheim

 2. Hegel and “The Jewish Problem” Emil L. Fackenheim

PART 2. CRITIQUE

 3. Hegel’s Ghost: “Witness” and “Testimony” in the  Post-Holocaust Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim Susan E. Shapiro

 4. Fackenheim on Passover after the Holocaust Warren Zev Harvey

 5. Of Systems and the Systematic Labor of Thought:  Fackenheim as Philosopher of His Time  Benjamin Pollock

 6. Fackenheim and Levinas: Living and Thinking  after Auschwitz Michael L. Morgan

 7. The Holocaust and the Foundations of Future Philosophy:  Fackenheim and Strauss Solomon Goldberg

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 8. Fackenheim and Strauss Catherine H. Zuckert

Contents

PART 3. RESPONSE

 9. Emil Fackenheim: Theodicy, and theTikkun of Protest David R. Blumenthal

10. The Holocaust Is a Christian Issue: Christology Revisited Richard A. Cohen 11. The Holocaust—Tragedy for the Jewish People, Credibility  Crisis for Christendom Franklin H. Littell 12. Man orMuselmann?: Fackenheim’s Elaboration on  Levi’s Question David Patterson

13. Emil Fackenheim, Irving Howe, and the Fate of  Secular Jewishness Edward Alexander

14.She’erith Hapleitah: Reflections of a Historian Zeev Mankowitz

15. Willful Murder in the Lublin District of Poland David Silberklang

16. Metahistory, Redemption, and the Shofar of  Emil Fackenheim Gershon Greenberg

List of Contributors

Index

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147

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Preface

Emil L. Fackenheim died at age eighty-seven in Jerusalem early Friday morn- ing, September 19, 2003. His intellectual career, if we date its origin to his entrance into the Hochschule in Berlin in 1935, spanned sixty-eight years. People think of him as a Jewish theologian and philosopher and, especially, as one of the few Jewish theologians who was preoccupied with the Holocaust as a—in fact,the—momentous event for contemporary Jewish life and for Juda- ism today. As we look back over his career, it is probably not inaccurate to take the Holocaust to be its core and to take his post-Holocaust writings as his most important contribution and legacy. In a sense, all of his work, from his deep exploration of faith and reason in Kant and German philosophy and his probing examination of the religious dimension of Hegel’s thought to the attempt to articulate foundations for future Jewish thought, was a personal and philosophical response to Auschwitz and its unspeakable horrors. Fackenheim was born in Halle, Germany, in June 1916. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother a lover of German literature and philosophy. Fackenheim went to the local gymnasium, where he developed an affection for classics. But when he graduated, in 1934, the spectre of Nazism cast its shadow over his life, his decisions, and his future. Sensing the urgent need for Jewish leadership and Jewish renewal, Fackenheim entered the liberal seminary in Berlin, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, to prepare for the rabbinate. A year later, in 1936, he began to study philosophy at Halle simultaneously with his rabbinic program, but both efforts were cut short in 1939 with Kristallnacht, his own incarceration in Sachsenhausen, and subsequent flight—first to England and Scotland and finally to Canada and Toronto, Ontario. Entering the doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Toronto, Fackenheim received his degree in 1945, served a congregation in Hamilton, Ontario, and then, in 1948, returned to begin a teaching career at the University of Toronto, where he remained until his retirement in the early 1980s. He and his family then made aliyah to Jerusalem. Fackenheim was one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century; he was also preeminent among that small group of Jewish

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theologians and philosophers that engaged the Holocaust as the primary event in contemporary Jewish experience. Some see in his career a dramatic shift, occurring around the time of the Six Day War in 1967, from general religious and philosophical reflection concerning faith and reason, revelation, and philosophy to a particular appreciation of the momentous character of Auschwitz and the Nazi death camps for modern philosophy, Jewish belief and Jewish life, Western culture, Christianity, and much else. From one vantage point, then, Fackenheim’s career seems to have turned from the universality of philosophical inquiry to the particularity of the impact of a single histori- cal event on subsequent Jewish life and, indeed, subsequent life and thought. But this is to fail to realize how deeply Fackenheim’s earliest intellectual and existential decisions were steeped in the urgency of living as a Jew in Nazi Germany and in a sense of imperative about his life choices. One can easily see every move in his intellectual career, from his choice of rabbinic studies to his turn to philosophy, his commitment to medieval philosophy to his interest in the conflict of faith and reason, and his immersion in German Idealism to his turn to self-exposure to Auschwitz, as both philosophical and Jewishly involved, inextricably. The chapters in this collection, many of which originated from a confer- ence held in Fackenheim’s honor in 2001 on the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday, take on a new character against the background of his death two years thereafter. At the same time that they testify to the various dimensions of Fackenheim’s work and its implications for life and thought today, they also represent now a kind of memorial to him, to his life and his thought. The title of the collection is intended to register a sense of urgency and perplex- ity about the conjunction of scholarly objectivity and historical engagement, between detachment and involvement. This collection is not calledFackenheim as Witness butThe Philosopher as Witness. Philosophy, one might think, is a universal mode of inquiry, impartial in its methods, completely general in its subject matter, and utterly detached from the particularities of life and his- torical events. A witness is one who testifies, one who has experienced some particular event and who is called upon, whose responsibility it is, to express that experience, to recall and in a sense to confirm that event, to prevent its evaporation, its dissipation. Hence, the pairing of the two, of philosophy and witness, may strike some as anomalous. One is objective and detached, critical and probing; the other is subjective and involved, expressive and elucidating. One seeks universality, some might argue, while the other is intrinsically particular. Moreover, in this case, the object of philosophizing and the object of witnessing are at least in part the same—Auschwitz, Nazi atrocities, horror, evil. What would philosophizing about Auschwitz be without some witnessing, and what would witnessing about it be without some philosophizing? Here, in a dramatic, influential way, Fackenheim’s thought is most powerful. It is both deep and powerful philosophizing and at the same time inescapable and undeniable witnessing, and it speaks to the necessity to bring the two together,

Preface

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to bring together philosophy and scholarship with Auschwitz, to enable us in the future to live, to struggle to understand, to endure, and to respond. In a sense, however, witnessing has been present in the Western philo- sophical tradition from its ancient beginnings. In some cases that witnessing involves appreciating the deficiencies of everyday experience and testifying to the existence and significance of what transcends it—from Plato’s Forms to Plotinus’s One. In other cases that witnessing begins and to a degree stays with an allegiance to the concrete world, our sensory experience of it, and our conduct in it. Fackenheim is heir both to German Idealism and to the existential reactions to it. His thinking has always taken seriously the way philosophy testifies to truths that lie within and beyond the world, in order to come to grips with our experience, our understanding, and our lives in the world. But Fackenheim’s special contribution to the philosophical duty to witness concerns the intensity and seriousness of his witness to the events of Auschwitz and the radical evil manifest in Nazism. Philosophy has never had to testify to such an evil, nor has it ever developed the resources to do so. Exposing itself to Auschwitz, philosophy must be transformed, as must be Judaism, Christianity, and much else. With this special task of witnessing, moreover, Fackenheim gives a new twist to the conception of the Jewish people as a witness to the nations and a witness for God. As a witness to the horrors and epoch-making evil of the death camps, the Jewish philosopher bears a new message to the non-Jewish world, about responsibility and suffering and the future, and in so doing, as a Jew, the Jewish philosopher witnesses for God when God, in a sense, does not witness for himself. But the task of witnessing is itself conflicted and perhaps in the case of Auschwitz even paradoxical. Fackenheim regularly turns to the writings of Primo Levi and principally to Levi’s portrait of theMuselmann. Here we have the ultimate product of the Nazi death factories, a victim who is living but not living, dying and living at once, a new mode of existence, chilling and incomprehensible. In his late volume of essays,The Drowned and the Saved, Levi puzzles about the task of remembering and witnessing the events at Auschwitz. He classifies himself, together with all survivors who lived to testify, as members of a privileged group, those he calls “the saved,” who managed to survive through luck or guile or some special opportunity. “The drowned,” on the other hand, are the real and genuine product of the camps, and they did not survive. Their memories and their testimony do not exist; they cannot. Hence, witnessing the horrors is both necessary and impossible, and this paradox is something that Fackenheim recalls as well, a lesson he affirms again and again to us as we seek not to witness but to remember, which also is a duty both necessary and in some ways impossible. This book begins with two pieces that Fackenheim prepared specially for the conference. One deals with the Judaism he left behind in Germany and the way in which that Judaism and its representatives sought to cope with