© 2009 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

© 2009 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

PUTNAM ON METAPHYSICS, RELIGION, AND ETHICS: CRITICAL NOTICE OF JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AS A GUIDE TO LIFE: ROSENZWEIG, BUBER, LEVINAS, WITTGENSTEIN

phil_337

425..434

MARK ZELCER

For what can be more characteristic of a Jewish thinker than to use the Jewish experience as a conduit to universality?—Rebecca Goldstein1

I. INTRODUCTION In 1991, perhaps somewhat prophetically, before Hilary Putnam published anything about Jewish topics, Kenneth Seeskin recommended looking to Putnam’s writing for insight into how Jews (yes, qua Jews) practice Jewish philosophy.2 Putnam tells us though that up until the past few years he saw nothing particularly Jewish about his philosophy and it is only recently that he has started to see the philosophical side of his life in relation to the Jewish side (4);3 but he does not see himself as a “Jewish philosopher”. In his most recent book, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (henceforth JPGL), Putnam now claims to join his philosophical side with his life as a practicing Jew.4 Ostensibly the book is a brief discussion of a theme addressed by three modern Jewish philosophers: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. What follows is an 1

2 3

4

Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity (New York: Schocken Books, 2006) 178. Kenneth Seeskin, “Jewish Philosophy in the 1980’s,” Modern Judaism 11 (1991): 168. References in the text are all to Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington, IN, Indiana UP, 2008) [henceforth JPGL]. Note also that the first chapter on Rosenzweig is essentially the same as his “Introduction” to Rosenzweig’s Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A view of World, Man, and God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999). The chapter on Levinas is essentially the same as the entry on “Levinas and Judaism” in the Cambridge Companion to Levinas (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002). Putnam repeatedly characterizes himself as a practicing Jew. See his introduction to JPGL, “Thoughts Addressed to an Analytical Thomist” The Monist 80:4 (1997a): 487, and “God and the Philosophers” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXI (1997b): 175.

425

MARK ZELCER

explication of that theme woven together with other aspects of Putnam’s thinking, specifically his ethics. We also pick up some questions that Putnam leaves outstanding and ultimately elaborate on what he must mean in taking Jewish philosophy as a guide to life. II. WITTGENSTEIN Putnam understands the three Jewish philosophers he discusses as having one view in common with Wittgenstein’s5 philosophy of religion (6). Though Wittgenstein’s ideas on the philosophy of religion are known to us only via a few second-handnotes of lectures and conversations6 they have had a disproportionate influence on the philosophy of religion,7 and Putnam is arguably the most prominent thinker to explore them.8 To understand Wittgenstein’s approach consider first a rather traditional philosophical stance toward religious discourse that goes something like the following: Religious statements often appear to take stands on historical or ontological matters. We would ordinarily suppose that a historical or ontological fact-of-thematter under dispute is true if and only if it corresponds to the way things are, and false otherwise. If one were nonetheless to believe the false or dubious statements, she does so non-rationally or irrationally; perhaps she believes on faith. There is considerable reason to believe that many ethical, historical, and ontological claims made by religions are false and can be easily shown to be highly implausible (consider, say, that the Bible endorses genocide as sometimes justified, claims that those on the ark with Noah were the only living creatures at one time or that the 5

6

7

8

Putnam treats Wittgenstein as “1/4” of a Jewish philosopher, mostly because Wittgenstein never wrote about Judaism philosophically and was only partially Jewish by descent. We have fewer than 30 printed pages of notes that have been collected as “Remarks on Frazers’ Golden Bough” (Reprinted in Michael Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion [New York: Blackwell, 2008]) and “Lectures on Religious Belief ” (in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett [Berkeley, CA: U of California P] 53–72). Wittgenstein’s impact on the philosophy of religion was initially discussed in terms of what was labeled “Wittgensteinian Fideism.” More recently it can be seen in discussions in introductory and advanced works in the philosophy of religion. See, for example, Richard Messer’s Does God’s Existence Need Proof? (New York: Oxford UP, 1993); Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger’s Reason and Religious belief: An introduction to the philosophy of religion (New York: Oxford, 2003); and Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert L. Arrington and Mark Addis (New York: Routledge, 2001). Some of these works deal with the Lectures and Conversations, while others explore the concept of religious discourse as a type of Wittgenstinian language game. Norman Malcolm’s Wittgenstein: A religious Point of View? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993) is a general discussion of Wittgenstein’s view of religion. See his Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), ch. 7 and (2008) ch 1.

426