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Dr. Yoram Hazony "Sir Isaiah Berlin'

Thursday, 15 December, 2016 - 1:28 pm

I am very grateful to Rabbi and Rebetzin Brackman for all the work that has made it possible for me to be here. It is humbling to come here to oxford and stand in a place where Isaiah Berlin once stood and be tasked with sharing my own thought about Isaiah Berlin and his legacy and adopting it to us, which is our goal this evening to think about the place of the Jew in contemporary philosophy and theology.

Let me begin this challenge by saying that if our question and the subject is the place of the Jew in contemporary philosophy and theology, then there is no better place to began than here at Oxford with Isaiah Berlin. In many ways we can think of his career that began in Oxford in the 1930s and didn’t end until the 1990s, a span of 60 years, a career in which when he first entered there was almost no question whether there should be Jews as Jews contributing to philosophy and theology here in the heart of western Christian civilization. By the time he had concluded a transformation had been worked such that today it’s not an exaggeration to say that such is the openness to hearing what Jews have to say within academia that both of the major camps of philosophy in the western tradition today, the materialists and the Christians, are eager, excited and enthusiastic to hear what the Jews have to say, so a few words about that mysterious transition over those 60 years.

To think about Isaiah Berlin I think we should also name another Jew who was at Oxford for many of those years, AJ Ayer, Prof. Berlin’s almost life long friend and rival. In a certain sense we can say these two Jews are almost the two bookends that describes the ups and downs of philosophy and the place of Jews in it during the 20th century. Prof Ayer was the most famous ‘bad boy’ of the tradition that became known as logical positivism. He was in many ways the ultimate product of the tradition of what we call the enlightenment. By the time we reach Prof. Ayer’s famous language, truth and logic we reach a point in which the greatest, most powerfully articulated fruits of western philosophy at least in the English speaking world were being articulated in the service of a view which we can say had reduced truth, the longing, search and desire for truth, to the methods of the physical sciences on the one hand and mathematics on the other hand, as Prof. Ayer was famous for saying anything that is not verifiable is nonsense. In so saying he lead two generation of the greatest minds in the west to something that would be fair to call it total contempt for things that were not the product of physical science or things that imitate them and mathematics.

Isaiah Berlin is almost universally regarded as a leading, or thee leading, liberal thinker of the 20th century and the instinctive association that I think most of his admirers would have is to associate him with this tradition of enlightenment and western liberalism and yet it’s fascinating when one begins to dig into Isaiah Berlin’s works to see the way in which this extraordinary subtle and gifted man devoted such a great proportion of his output not to the elaboration of the enlightenment and the tradition that gave birth to Freddie Ayer but to pay close, painstaking attention to the tradition of its detractors, what he in a phrase Prof. Berlin made famous called the counter enlightenment. The counter enlightenment, according to Prof Berlin, are thinkers such as Vico, Haman, Herder, Yakobi, even Demester, and Berlin brought his extremely formidable, philosophical and historical acumen to bringing these thinkers to life. Why? What’s the interest in these thinkers? I can only speculate but I will speculate. First of all, Isaiah Berlin, as we have mentioned, is a Jew. Jews have a tradition of being contrarian. This is an old tradition. Abraham, you’d recall, becomes famous for being willing to challenge G-d. G-d said that the world is just one way, but Abraham had something to say about it, he believes the world would be just a different way, so he tells G-d so.

Now its interesting that it recent years I’ve come to know rather well a number of Christians philosophers and one of my dear friends, the Catholic philosopher, one of the great minds of our generation, Eleanor Stump came to one of my conferences in Jerusalem and she stood behind the podium in front of an audience consisting of almost entirely of Jews and she told us that Abraham in challenging G-d had sinned, the sin of pride. I had to admit that I never thought of it, though its plausible and makes sense, and the reason I never thought of it is because I had grown up as a Jew and one thing that unites all Jews, as far as I know, regardless of background and movement, is they’re proud of Abraham for telling G-d what He is supposed to thin about justice. We call that Chutzpah.

There is something deep about the restless Jewish need and mission to puncture the accepted idols of the generation and I believe some of that is what we see in Professor Berlin. He is famous for having once said when visiting a Shinto shrine, that he can worship any G-d but the Christian G-d. Now, this is a lifelong student and professor and don at Oxford and his salary is paid by the established English tradition and yet he is able to worship any G-d but that one, the one that pays him a salary and I think this is a worthy lesson. So Jews are contrarians and Prof. Berlin was also bit of a contrarian, more than a bit, and we can honour and respect that.

These thinkers of the counter enlightenment we are talking about, it’s not just any kind of opposition. What’s the counter enlightenment? The counter enlightenment, all these thinkers ranging from – you can give them all sorts of labels, as they’re quite different people,  some of them are reactionary, some of them are conservatives, some of them are socialist, some of them are romantics, and some are all of them, but what they all are, are people when they beheld the enlightenment vision which consisted of the unshakable belief that there is one truth, there is one truth in politics, there is one truth in ethics, metaphysics, and that truth is accessible to a rational mind, and there’s also only one such thing as reason, there are no variations in reason, reason is but one thing and if you are that one thing, that rational being, as they sometimes said, then you can simply know the answers to all the questions and those answers are always universal and eternal answers, they go on forever they speak to absolutely everyone, and if you do not accept those answers that is because you are living in darkness. Now, all of these counter enlightenment figures that Prof. Berlin brought into the eye of the enlightenment discourse - everyone of course knew of these figures before and that they had existed, but there had never been someone like Isaiah Berlin to stood before the enlightenment community and said that you know your history is missing many of the most important aspects of it. He had never said that he was not sympathetic to the enlightenment but he did present them in book after book and essay after essay with a critique so devastating and presented so sympathetically, though at the end he was always careful to make sure everyone understood how the excess of this tradition led to fascism, and yet at the same time we all know how a professor who wants to disagree with one who is studying, how they can present their views how they are slanted and stilted, especially when dealing with conservatives and reactionaries but not so Prof. Berlin, who presented these thinkers with a passion and a sympathy because of the fact that he believed that the things these people were saying were true. What were they saying? They were saying this universal reason that is the same everywhere that can’t be argued about eliminates everything that is particular about the human being, it eliminates each of our histories and languages, it eliminates the nations in which we live, in order to try and reach the truth, each one according to its own direction, each one according to the local brilliance and insight of a particular people or language or community. All those things become eliminated; they became worthless, as Freddie Ayer said they become nonsense. Everything that is particular, historical, poetic and impassioned, everything that is related to what is termed as the mere contingency of human experience, all of that becomes worthless and nonsense. And these thinkers said hold on; those things that you’ve described as nonsense are reality. They not just trivial, emotional, sentimental subjectivity, they are reality in which human beings live and if you eliminate all of that then the human beings who are subjected to this universal, eternal rational system, they cease to become human beings, they’re drained of whatever it was that made them unique, that gave them some special connection to reality and, some special connection to G-d. You rob them of all of that and you force them into a cookie cutter mold, where anything that made them G-d’s image disappears and they simply become mathematical ciphers; that was the challenge of the counter enlightenment.

It’s interesting that this challenge is in the writing of Prof. Berlin is presented out of the mouths of Germans and Frenchman, and British and Irishman. And yet, if we as Jews, listen to their critique of the enlightenment, surely we can’t miss the Jewish aspect of what it is being said for after all what was the enlightenment objection to Judaism. If we take a Decarte or Spinoza, Leibnitz or Kant, what was their objection to Judaism? What was it such a terrible thing and abused and discredited in the enlightenment university in the eighteen hundreds? Well it was just these things, the Jess stand for history, Jews think they can learn theology fro history, Lessing says, I can\t get over this ditch, I cant get to learn about he eternal reality and the Divine through the corrupt instrument of historical writing which is contingent and flawed and misleading. Kant and Spinoza dismissed and had nothing but contempt for historic writings. Its precisely the contingent they derided, the particular they contested, they called the material. The Jews of mired in the contingent of the material; they can’t rise to the heights of the universal philosophy. 

These are all well known things and they don’t appear in Prof Berlin’s writings. You don’t need to know a great deal to know these things. Someone with an ear inclined to look for it can hear in Prof Berlin’s introduction, his sympathy, his extraordinary warm embrace of these very difficult thinkers who are rebels against the very enlightenment heritage in which in his day was unchallengeable to be thee heritage of the west and the only thing that was worthy in the west and he looks at these thinkers, I believe, from the perspective of the Jew – Herder said explicitly about the Jew – and was even a Zionist and said that Jews were only regain what they have to say upon their returning to their land. Some were indeed terrible anti-Semites, but in Berlin treatment of them we hear the response of a Jew who looks at the criticism of the enlightenment against Judaism and he says implicitly, delicately to his enlightenment hosts and friends, I’m not going to go in the direction Freddie Ayer went, who for all his brilliance became a slave to this enlightenment machine, I myself see the good in it but I withhold my unequivocal support because a Jew can’t really find his place in this machine. Judaism cannot really find his place in this machine. The extent that the enlightenment becomes accepted at face value, Judaism becomes, as Ayer says, nonsense. And that’s the heritage that we as thinking people have inherited from the enlightenment and that is the heritage of our universities. The dominant of the culture was once a Christian culture and after it ceased to be a Christian culture it became an enlightenment culture and the shift from Christian to enlightenment is a complicated one but there is much more that these two enemies have in common that usually meets the eye and their criticism of the particular of the historical and the Old Testament Biblical and the Jew, of anything that is not universal and eternal, is the same criticism and the Jew who resists it must resist in its Christian forma and its enlightenment form.

In 1962, Prof. Berlin wrote an essay The purpose of philosophy, I think in response to his colleague at Oxford Prof. Ayer, although it doesn’t say so. In it he says that with some contrariness that philosophy is everything other than which is mastered by the physical sciences. In so doing it is everything that Ayer calls nonsense. What is philosophy? The ways in which the permanent or the semi permanent categories in terms in which experiences conceived and classified. Then he starts to talk about the different forms and the models and perspectives to things we have in the world. He brings examples, what is philosophy, whether man is made to fulfill a purpose by G-d or nature and if so what is that purpose, whether men are free to choose between alternatives or the contrary we are controlled by the rigorous laws of nature that governs inanimate nature. Whether ethical and aesthetic truths are universally objective or subjective, whether men are just bundles of flesh and blood and bone and nerves and tissue or early habitations of mortal souls, whether u=human history had a discernable pattern or was a repetitive causal sequence of unintelligible accidents. Then notice the following sentence that I have not seen in any philosophy textbook by anyone in the 20th century. He says these ancient questions tormented the ancestors, referring to the enlightenment philosophers, as they had their ancestors in Greece and Rome and Palestine.

Now what is Palestine doing in that sentence? We were just talking about ancestors of philosophy so we understand Greece and Rome but Palestine! Was there a Palestinian philosophy we were not aware of? Prof. Berlin is talking about the Jews. He believes that the Jews had something to say about philosophy. Now you can’t find this in history text boos. They begin with pre-Socratic and go straight onto Berlin and there’s no stops for ancient Israel and yet here it is it says Palestine. IN Princeton, they give you the 30 authors in philosophy to pass your exam – you find any reference to the Talmud. The way philosophy is taught today is the same way it was taught a hundred years ago in Europe, as if the Jews had nothing to do with it.

What is Jewish philosophy today in the universities?  They are for the study of Philo, who of course became a philosopher, we are told, thanks to the influence of Plato, or for the study of Saadia Gaon, who we are told became a philosopher thanks to the Islamic philosophers, or for the study of Hermann Cohen, who became a philosopher thanks to the influence of Kant. What is philosophy about Jewish philosophy is that it is anything but Jewish. It is well meaning, brilliant Jews speaking a language that is not a Jewish language and trying to interpret things that come from Judaism in a language that is not their own. But surely you can all understand that if the university had not been constructed first as a Christian institution and then as enlightenment, post Christian, institution but had rather been constructed by Jews, we would not study history that way. We might think of it this way that there was a Jewish philosophy and what we find in the Bible. At least from what Prof. calls philosophy, the Bible fits very well. Today, people find all sorts of good reasons not to include Bible but if we take this essay, the Bible is philosophy and so might be the Talmud or at least parts of the Talmud. So if the Jewish would have constructed the story it would begin with Moses in Deuteronomy standing as the Jews are about the land of Israel and he tells them that why are we studying Torah and observing the laws? For it is Your wisdom and Your understanding in the eyes of the peoples who hear all these laws and they will say only a wise and understanding is this great people. That is Moses doesn’t think that the Bible is darkness, only for the Jews, he thinks it is enlightenment, the Jewish have something to say to the nations, not because He says it’s wisdom, as those people didn’t believe in the Jewish G-d, they will come from the outside and they’ll be able to see that this is wisdom and understanding. That, Isaiah Berlin would say is philosophy, that’s the Jewish philosophy.

Or maybe a little bit later, Isaiah says, all the nations will stream towards it and many peoples will come, lets go up to the mountain of the lord, the house of Jacob and He will teach us of His ways and we’ll go according to His customs, for from Zion will come forth instructure. The authors of the Jewish scripture believed that they were speaking and saying something for the world. They believed they had something to share with others. If we as Jews had constructed the story then the story would begin with these texts hundreds of years before and we may even ask if there was a influence, we don’t know. We would pay heed to theoaphress an Cleo.. when they say that Aristotle met Jews and he thought they could represent a nation of philosopher. We would rethink our story and what humanity is looking for.

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