ABSTRACT: The
essay begins with a retelling of the well-known
Bible story of Ishmael and Isaac in order to provide
a biblical context, or subtext, as the case may
be, for the title of Jaspers' book, Der philosophische
Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, and the
basic question he raises, namely, "can the
two faiths (viz.,
philosophy and theology) meet?" The essay concludes,
with Jaspers, that constructive dialogue unlikely
if not impossible because theological discourse in
the monotheistic traditions of the Middle East is
controlled by the genetic fallacy and the persistent
confusion of truths based on alleged facts
and values for
which axiological arguments should be made but usually
are not because of the fear of relativizing
truth-claims. The essay concludes by suggesting that
a move towards toleration through the acknowledgement
of value-pluralism is the only way philosophy and
theology can engage in constructive dialogue.
The first so-called historical
event in the Bible, we are told, is the "call
of Abraham" and God's promise to bring
out of him "a great nation."(1)
The problem with God's promise to Abraham, of course,
is
that he has no children, his wife, Sarah, is barren,
and they are both old (perhaps in their late 70s
or early 80s according to the Genesis chronology)
when he first becomes aware of his extraordinary
destiny through the bizarre series of theophanies
that occur between his call and the binding of Isaac.(2)
Abraham suffers considerable
depression following his conversation with the
Lord God,(3)
believing, or wanting to believe, in the promise
but wondering how it can
ever be
fulfilled.(4) Sarah also suffers depression from
Abraham's depression, no doubt, since she has to
deal with
his frequent
complaint that "one of his slaves" may inherit
his estate owing to the childless condition for
which she is responsible (Genesis 15:3)(5). It
also seems that Sarah initially thought her husband
delusional and "laughed" at the idea of having
a child in extreme old age. Whatever the case,
she certainly must have greatly felt pains of
inadequacy at not having been able to produce any
heirs for
her husband.(6) Accordingly,
and strictly by rational calculation, Sarah provides
Abraham with her young
Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, to see whether his
depression, and perhaps her own, might be alleviated
through the production of a son.(7)
And as in the more recent celebrated cases of Strom
Thurmond
and Saul Bellow, Abraham becomes a father, not
only by the much younger Hagar, but also with Sarah
who, thirteen years after the birth of Ishmael,
conceives and gives birth to Isaac when both are
in their 90s.(8)
For the purposes of this essay,
let the offspring of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac,
respectively, be called the "child of reason" and
the "child of faith."(9) Ishmael is the product
of Sarah's rational calculation — or, one might
say, "the cunning of reason," whereas the birth
of Isaac is entirely the result of faith and the "will
to believe" when Sarah, "with the help of the Lord" and
against all reasonable odds, becomes fertile in
her 90s and successfully delivers a male child.(10)
Accordingly, my comments will
fall under two heads: First, I place Jaspers'
Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der
Offenbarung (1962)(11)
into historical perspective in order to deal with
the basic question he raises in the final
section of this work, namely, "Can the two faiths
meet?" that is, are what Jaspers calls "philosophical
faith" and "religious faith" commensurable or incommensurable?
Second, I discuss the genetic fallacy and its prominence
in the theological discourse of the Western theistic
traditions in order to argue that the problem of
faith and reason cannot be surmounted when the
Middle Eastern monotheistic traditions (Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam) are dogmatically held
and rigidly observed.
Jaspers, of course, holds a
similar view but argues that Anfechtung,(12)
mutually shared by philosophical and religious
believers,
somehow provides the means of transcending differences.
I argue that the genetic fallacy, when unacknowledged
by those adhering to the authority of supernatural
revelation, makes dialogue between the believer
and the unbeliever a virtual impossibility. On
the other hand, when believers come to recognize
the difference between "facts" and "values" and
the validity of the "is/ought" distinction, as
in David Hume, then dialogue is possible. I further
suggest that the fact-value distinction should
not be viewed as a dichotomy, but as a
necessary
distinction for pragmatic discourse and
dialogue, as Hilary Putnam and others have argued.(13)
Apart
from intellectual, that is, "secular," conversion
regarding the difference between facts and values,
it strikes me that the sort of constructive dialogue
and intercultural communication Jaspers' envisions
between what he calls "philosophical faith" and "religious
faith" is highly problematical if not completely
impossible.(14)
Philosophical Faith and Revelation
Since it has been nearly fifty
years since the initial publication of PGO,
it is well to recall the philosophical and theological
context
within which this book initially appeared. The mid-twentieth
century was the heyday of logical positivism, analytic
philosophy, and the philosophy of language — movements
with little regard and even contempt for matters religious,
as evidenced by the famous utterance of Anthony Flew,
"There is no philosophy East of the Suez worthy of
consideration." On the theological side, there were
the influential
movements known as Neo-Reformation, Neo-Orthodox and
Neo-Thomistic theology and philosophy — all of
which were attempting in various ways to salvage traditional
religious faith from the onslaughts of positivism,
modernism, liberalism and relativism.(15)
Existential phenomenology and hermeneutics might be
said to have
occupied the
middle ground between these dogmatic polarities through
the deployment of various bracketing procedures designed
to suspend the alleged subject-object and fact-value
dichotomies in order to disclose what was held to be
the more originary ground for a holistic understanding
of the meaning of religious experience.
Jaspers was such a mediating
thinker, and his most sustained theological and hermeneutical
conversation during the 1950s was with Rudolf Bultmann
concerning Die Frage der
Entmythologisierung (1954)(16) — a
conversation that ended in silence, not unlike the
earlier famous debate between Karl Barth and Emil
Brunner regarding Natur und Gnade (1934).(17)
In motive, Jaspers' critique of Bultmann was similar
to Hegel's
critique of Schleiermacher, namely, to rescue the
truth-claims of Christianity from being reduced to
subjectivism. But curiously Jaspers' position with
respect to Bultmann has more kinship with Schleiermacher
than with Hegel given his endorsement of what one
might call a quasi-romantic "remythologization" of
the cipher language of revelation in order to recover
or at least appreciate the truth of religious claims.
Indeed, the ambiguity of Jaspers' position consists,
on the one hand, of a relentless attack on the truth
claims of dogmatic theology (whether Catholic or
Protestant) and, on the other, advancing the vague
and indeterminate "language of ciphers" as
the only possible solution to the problem of interpretation.
In any case, Jaspers' non-negotiable position with
respect to the project of Entmythologiserung is
very largely the reason why Bultmann abandons the
conversation
as being hopeless.(18)
Somewhat shaken by this exchange, perhaps, Jaspers
continued to refine his position
regarding the "truth" of ciphers in the
1960s, especially in PGO and his final work, Chiffren
der Transzendenz.(19)
While some theologians, including
Fritz Buri and Harold Oliver, defended Jaspers in
terms of a "theology of Existenz" and "thinking
faith," Jaspers' position remains unclear as
regards the nature of truth and truth-claims.(20)
Thus the question remains as to whether this ambiguity,
which runs throughout Jaspers' philosophy, might
be clarified by way of his later comments on religion.
Is it possible to determine in a systematic way the "truth" of
ciphers — especially ciphers of ultimate Transcendence?
Christopher Thornhill, for example, has recently
identified a "shift" (or Umwendung,
a term used by Jaspers himself in PGO)(21) in the
social and
political writings of Jaspers — a shift that
consists of a movement away from what he identifies
as a metaphysical reading of Kant regarding the nature
of the self in the early Jaspers, to a non- or at
least "less" metaphysical reading of Kant
in his later work. Thus we might ask whether it is
profitable to take Thornhill's route, which entails
a systematic contrast between the early and the late
Jaspers, especially on matters of epistemology in
his philosophy of religion, in order to clarify his
position with respect to the nature of truth?(22)
As Thornhill notes, the early
Jaspers, like Heidegger, was vigorously opposed to
Neo-Kantianism, especially Neo-Kantian "legal" definitions
of the self.(23) Instead he opted for what might
be termed a more mystical understanding of the self
as mögliche
Existenz but tempers this position in his later
social and political writings. This modification
is far
less clear, I would argue, in Jaspers' philosophy
of religion where making such a move would entail
the abandonment of metaphysics altogether. In other
words, Jaspers may have moved to a "less metaphysical" reading
of Kant in his philosophical anthropology and in
his social and political philosophy, but he retains
a numinous reading of the ciphers of Transcendence
throughout his work. Moreover, his instance on the "encompassing
ground" within which ciphers arise and are read
remains the source and in some sense the answer to
Anfechtung regarding the ultimate truth
of Transcendence in the later writings.(24) Thus
it may be that Jaspers'
metaphysical reserve, so to speak, in matters
religious and spiritual provides an important clue
as to why
Jaspers did not, as Thornhill queries, develop his
social and political philosophy and his philosophy
of communication with greater precision and rigor
so as to be in tune with the discourse of his contemporaries.(25)
This
ambiguity and a less than complete "turn-about" or Umwendung in
Jaspers' development has recently been noted in
the European
discussion of the social and political philosophy
of Jaspers, Arendt, and "the question of German
guilt." For example, Andrew Schapp argues that
Jaspers' dedication to mögliche Existenz,
or what Charles Taylor has more recently dubbed the "ethics
of authenticity," is precisely what accounts
for his rejection of Arendt's separation of the public
and the private — the implication being that
Jaspers, as a German Christian, could not ultimately
separate these spheres for cultural,
political, and religious reasons.(26)
Hannah Arendt, as an expatriate German Jew and émigré to
the United States, and perhaps also owing to the
influence of
Heidegger, found it necessary to make a radical distinction
between the public and the private in order to achieve
some kind of closure on the catastrophic events of
WWII. But Jaspers, according to Schaap, muddles the
issues of "restorative reconciliation" (modeled
on the Christian dialectic of "guilt and forgiveness")
and the legal issues of "responsibility and
reparation." This, he suggests, is one of the
reasons Die Schuldfrage (1946) was ultimately
unsatisfactory to many German nationals and surviving
Jews as an
adequate answer to the question of German culpability:
The danger of Jaspers' concept of
purification and of the restorative conception of reconciliation
is this: rather than leading citizens to enter into an
open-ended political dialogue through which shared meanings
may be created, the politics of authenticity instead threatens
to reify identities based on guilt or innocence and hence
encourage a retreat into the self rather than political
engagement with others. The particularism which guilt introduces
to the public sphere is, at best, likely to lead to a form
of inverted chauvinism such as philo-semitism rather than
the creation of shared meanings among diverse equals.(27)
Schaap's analysis, of course,
is highly nuanced by the peculiarities of the contemporary
discussion; and one must remember that Jaspers
wrote Die Schuldfrage in the mid-1940s
and
PGO in
the early-1960s. These were extremely precarious
decades, and Jaspers'
mature writings during this period were a courageous
response to the political and cultural uncertainties
of the time, especially as they bore upon the indeterminate
future of the nascent Bundesrepublik. One notes
this urgency in Jaspers' oeuvre beginning in 1958
with the publication of Die Atombombe und die
Zunkunft des Menschen: Politisches Bewusstsein
unserer Zeit in 1958 — which, by 1962,
the Berlin Wall and the official commencement of
the Cold War, was
in its fifth edition.(28)
The atom bomb book was followed immediately by
an important monograph
on Freiheit und Wiedervereinigung (1960)
or Freedom and Reunification, and was also included Hoffnung
und Sorge: Schriften zur deutschen Politik (1965)
and followed by another important book, viz., Wohin
treibt die Bundesrepublik? Tatsachen-Gefahren-
Chancen (1966).
In sum, practically all of Jaspers' writings during
the final decade of his life were political — the
possible exception being the posthumous appearance
of Chiffren der Transzendenz (1970), even
though this monograph can also be read politically
as
the further elaboration and
clarification of his section on ciphers in PGO.(29)
The Genetic Fallacy and the Abrahamic Traditions
The problems of truth and truth-claims
remains unresolved in Jaspers' philosophy of religion
because of the need to address more adequately
than he does the difference between truth-claims
and value-claims. In order to do so, one must come
to terms with the genetic fallacy in the religions
of revelation. For example, in an essay written
just prior to PFR entitled "The Non-Christian Religions."(30)
Jaspers speculates as to how one might overcome
the "dualism
of moral enmity" as an inherent feature of the
Christian consciousness. This dualism arises, according
to Jaspers, by way of "monopolistic claims" of
Christianity, on the one hand, and "loving affection
for whatever bears human features," on the other.
These "monopolistic claims," whether Catholic or
Protestant, are based on cognitive assertions regarding
the authority of revelation, whether the exclusive
authority instantiated in "One Holy [Roman] Catholic
and Apostolic Church" and its magisterium, or Protestant
adherence to sola scriptura and the authority of
the Bible. Thus the "loving affection" of the Deuteronomic
injunction "to love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your
neighbor as yourself," as found in the Sermon
on the Mount and the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth,
is understood, according to Jaspers, as a warrant
for "saving all God's children" through missionary
activity based upon the alleged truth of supersession and doing whatever is necessary to establish the
universal hegemony of Christianity.
Jaspers rightly argues that
such dualistic notions are incompatible with what
he calls the "idea of truth" and the
obvious need to develop a more critical understanding
of truth and truth claims, especially within the
realm of religion, if we are also to hold to the
values of communication and tolerance in the modern
world. As Jaspers puts it:
It is now possible for us to see that
a fundamental difference of the utmost importance lies
in the idea of truth itself. Truth either is universally
valid and identical for everyone — this is the type of
scientific truth, which is always relative, however, true
only for certain objects and under certain conditions,
established by and related to certain methods, or it is
an absolute truth, by which the believer lives and realizes
himself, but at the price that its statements, as rationally
communicable tenets of faith, are not universally valid
for all men. Absolute truth is historic because we
as possible Existenzen are historic. The manifestation of these historicities
in recorded statements and other externals is infinitely
fulfilled only for the man who lives in them, because here
eternity comes to be present, uniquely and irreplaceably
present, in time. For one who merely understands, the manifestation
remains a mere possibility and thus historically relative. If we are not clear in our minds about this distinction
in the idea of truth, we shall plunge either into empty
bottomless abstractions or into monopolistic fanaticism.
(31)
The notion that only existential
truth is absolute whereas scientific truths are
merely relative is troubling, as is his either/or
formulation of the alternatives of "empty, bottomless
abstractions" and "monopolistic fanaticism." In
the former instance, Jaspers' conception of scientific "universally
valid" truth seems to be conditioned by indeterminacy
with respect to the objects and conditions of scientific
observation (a notion probably influenced by Heisenberg's "uncertainty
principle"); whereas absolute truths, he says,
are the truths of possible Existenz, that is, the
truths by which one lives and dies as the investments
of faith, belief, and commitment. For the non-believer,
according to Jaspers, such truths are relative,
that is, the products of historicity determined
by the specific cultural and personal circumstances
of each individual. And while he intimates, in
the latter instance, that existential truth claims
are really claims regarding value, the fundamental
question for Jaspers, as for Hegel, is whether "historical" truths
contain any real or ultimate validity.(32) Because
this question remains central but unanswered for
Jaspers, his philosophy remains ambiguous, especially
in his philosophy of religion. For to be concerned
with the question of historical truth beyond the
truth of personal historicity reveals the conditioning
background of teleology and eschatology and not
merely in terms of the "eschatological" or "authentic
existence," as in Bultmann, but in terms of the
larger historical truth-claims made by Jews, Christians,
and Muslims regarding the nature of reality in
its totality. Such claims, however modified or
qualified, are the product of faith or belief (Glaube)
in the special truths of historical revelation.
Jaspers clearly recognizes this as the great divide
between the Eastern (that is, Far Eastern) and
the Western (or Middle Eastern) religions, namely,
traditions self-defined by the sacralization of
nature (and the god entheos), in the former
case, versus traditions self-defined by the sacralization
of time (the god who "acts"), in the latter case.
While this dichotomy between the oriental and occidental
traditions presents an enticing opportunity for
dialogue and communication, such dialogues remain
inconclusive apart from clarification and agreement
regarding the differences between the truth of
facts and the truth of values. It is precisely
here, within the philosophy of history and intercultural
philosophy, where the genetic fallacy comes into
play as perhaps the critical factor in the contemporary
inter-religious and inter-cultural discussion.
One can argue, as Jaspers sometimes
seems to do (although this is not always clear),
that what separates the "two faiths" (religious
and philosophical) more than anything else is the
failure of orthodox monotheists to recognize the
genetic fallacy as the critical reckoning point
of conflict. Not only is the genetic fallacy a
nodal point of intra-historical conflict for believing
Jews, Christians and Muslims, but also for secularists
who do not believe but who otherwise identify with
the truth of the Abrahamic traditions for cultural
and political reasons.
The principal manifestation
of the genetic fallacy is supercessionism(33)
in its various forms, and it is a difficulty that
begins
with the exile of Ishmael, the "child of reason" in
the service of faith. The genetic fallacy, in brief,
consists in confusing the order of logic and the
order of time, the logical order having to do with
questions of truth (facts) and the temporal order
having to do with matters of value (preferences).
The two most common forms of the genetic fallacy
are the ad hominem arguments that hold
something to be true or false because of the individual
who
is the source of the argument, and ab auctoritate arguments
hold something to be true or false because of the
authority from which the argument springs,
for example, the Torah, the Bible or the Qur'an.
As Kelly Ross puts it: "While both ad
hominem and ab
auctoritate arguments can provide very good
reasons to believe or not to believe something,
they are not logical reasons as to why something
is true."(34) In other words, truth-claims
require rational justification and scientific proof
independently
of their origin. Value assertions and/or claims,
on the other hand, do not require proof independent
of origin, but clearly invite axiological demonstration
that what is asserted or claimed with respect to
a specific value is superior to an alternative
value precisely because it is "more encompassing," to
use the phrase of Jaspers.
It may be the case that Jaspers
fails to discuss the genetic fallacy because of
his difficulties with Neo-Kantianism and the manner
in which the fact-value distinction evolves in
analytic philosophy; and he does not, to my knowledge,
discuss axiology at length anywhere in his works.
Needless to say, a sustained discourse on values
tends to be avoided amongst religionists since
values discourse implies a certain relativism with
respect to truth claims. Hence a reduction of religious
truth-claims to claims regarding conflicting but
negotiable values continues to meet major resistance,
as the contemporary geopolitical and geo-religious
situations bear witness in highly dramatic ways.(35)
Such a reduction necessarily requires the abandonment
of the foundationalism upon which the various forms
of fundamentalism and totalitarianism, whether
religious or secular, utterly depend in advancing
their truth-claims. Jaspers was not unfamiliar
with the dangers of totalitarianism, but for him
totalitarianism meant Fascism and Stalinism,(36)
that is, totalitarianism in party-dominated national
states. Jaspers obviously could not anticipate
the new rather more amorphous but perhaps even
more malignant totalism that would emerge in post-colonial
Islamism, even though his critique of the institutional
forms of Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism
and its exclusivism (i.e., nulla salus
extra ecclesiam est) suggests this possibility
with regard to the collectivist mentality of theocracies.
Indeed,
when Jaspers refers to Judaism and Christianity,
he usually does so by referring to them as the "biblical
religions," that is, the religions for which
the Bible is a sacred and foundational text;(37)
and Islam may properly be included since it was
Mohammad
himself who coined the phrase, "people of
the Book," when speaking of relations between
Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and also convinced,
as it were, of the truth of genetic propositions.
At the end of PFR Jaspers proposes
a solution to the problem of the "two faiths" by
way of what has more recently been termed the ethics
of recognition. Through dialogue and communication,
according to Jaspers, the "two sides," that
is, those adhering to philosophical faith, on the
one hand, and religious faith, on the other, can
come to recognize the legitimacy of the other's
position:
Originally different ways of life,
and of the faith that goes with them, are indeed mutually
exclusive: they cannot be realized in the same human being.
But they do not exclude each other if they meet in different
human beings. Each Existenz is historic; each can be earnest
about loving the other; each can know that between him
and the other runs an encompassing bond.(38)
With this assertion, Jaspers
counters an earlier reference to Schopenhauer who
proclaimed: "No one who is religious comes to philosophy,
for he does not need it. No one who truly philosophizes
is religious; he walks without leading strings,
dangerously, but in freedom."(39) Against Schopenhauer,
Jaspers believed that the gulf between philosophical
and religious faith could be overcome by Anfechtung
combined with a critical rationality capable of
recognizing the "limits" of reason in order to,
as in Kant, "make room for faith." But religious
faith, as defined by the Biblical traditions, has
no limits. It has to do with the "unseen," as Saint
Paul famously observed, and what is beyond any
kind of rational verifiability. As such, religious
faith derives primarily from emotional and not
rational sources, and for the individual completely
in its grasp "faith can move mountains."(40)
Notes
(1)
Most scholars view the first eleven chapters of
Genesis as "proto-historical" or "mythical" accounts
of primeval origins. See Gerhard von Rad, Das
erste Buch Moses (Göttingen, 1956), and in
English translation by John Marks, Genesis (Westminster,
1961). I should say that biblical theologians of
the 1950s and 1960s
typically made this mythical/proto-historical distinction,
whereas today's scholars are quick to point out
that there is no empirical, that is, no archeological,
confirmation of any of the patriarchal history
prior to the Babylonian captivity, including the
existence of Solomon's Temple. Because the Abrahamic
covenant, venerated as a foundational and authoritative
text by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, is
littered with fantastical claims, one can easily
be led to the conclusion that the monotheistic
religions of the Middle East have far more to do
with the irrational than the rational, and that
Tertullian's alleged saying, viz., credo
quia absurdum,
is painfully true. text»
(2) The principal
variant on the "binding of Isaac" in Islam, of
course, is the claim that Ishmael, the first born,
and not Isaac, was the object of sacrifice on Mount
Moriah (Qur'an, Sura 37:99–109). This is a hotly
debated item amongst fundamentalist Jews, Christians,
and Muslims today — not with respect to the problem
of faith and reason but rather the authority of
succession and dispensation. text»
(3) Following
Wellhausen and the documentary hypothesis, von
Rad identifies
Genesis 15 as the 'E' or Elohistic source, the
god being addressed as Adoni Elohim. text»
(4) This
promise includes control of a geographic space
stretching from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates — the
so-called "greater Israel (Eretz
Yisrael)" (Genesis 15:17–21). text»
(5) His seed
had fallen on "barren ground," as the saying goes
in the ancient world. text»
(6) Sarah
is skeptical as contrast to Khadija, Mohammad's
first wife, patroness and convert who, in her 40s
and perhaps 50s, produces several children of which
only one, Fatima, survives, and no sons. To be "barren" in
the ancient world was the worst thing that could
happen to an otherwise happily married woman — especially
a woman of position, for to be without offspring
meant that one would be alone and without familial
support in one's old age. This also seems to be
the motive for Lot's daughters in their decision
to sleep with their father in order to produce
sons, viz., the Moabites and the Ammonites
(Genesis 19:30–38). text»
(7) Daughters
didn't count in the world of rigid patriarchy;
a tradition that persists in much of the world
even today. Here we also see that the notion of "surrogate" pregnancy
is very old indeed; in this case, Hagar giving
legitimate birth to Ishmael ("God heard") "on the
knees of her mistress (Sarah)." Conservative or
fundamentalist readings of Ishmael's birth refer
to him as the child of the "flesh" whereas Isaac
is the child of "faith" — the "flesh" being equated
with rational calculation and eros, and "faith" with
the promise. Saint Paul also identifies
the early followers of Jesus with Sarah and who, "like
Isaac, are the heirs of God's promise" and "no
slave woman's son" for "the slave woman's son was
born according to nature and the free woman's son
according to the promise" (Galatians 4:21–31).
This is a rather amazing passage since it is a
quite remarkable pre-Islamic condemnation of Islam. text»
(8) According
to the text, Ishmael, at age13, and Abraham, at
age 99, are
circumcised to "Seal the Covenant," and Isaac,
born shortly thereafter, is circumcised on the
eighth day, according to a much later prescribed
ritual code (Genesis 21:1–2). This action marks
the definitive
and utterly unique transformation of circumcision
as a puberty ritual in the ancient world to an
infancy ritual — something that clearly marks the
story of Abraham as a post-exilic text for, as
Gerhard von Rad points out in his commentary, none
of the Eastern Semites (including the Babylonians)
practiced circumcision at all (p. 196). Thus the "call
of Abraham," in its entirety and given its doctrinal
importance, is a particularly lively mixture of
'J,' 'E,'
and especially 'P' — the priestly account serving
as the principal redactor of previous accounts
in giving specific doctrinal attention to post-exilic
ritual codes as well as to various etiological
questions, viz., why "such and such" is
the case and not otherwise, in its interpretation
of these
events. text»
(9) By this
characterization I make no reference to the intellectual
capacities
of Ishmael and Isaac (although the text implies
that Ishmael, and later Esau, being "wild
and unruly," are intellectually inferior to
their brothers Isaac and Jacob). I refer only to
the means by which Abraham obtains sons, namely,
Sarah's rational calculation and intervention in
the case of Ishmael, and the ultimate subordination
of her skepticism to God's injunction at Mamre
(Genesis 18:9–15) upon the successful conception
of Isaac. text»
(10) It
is thematic throughout Biblical literature that
conceptions of "male" offspring
take place "with the help of the Lord" (the
preeminent example being the conception of the
Blessed Virgin Mary), the implication being that "female" offspring
are in some sense autochthonic, that is, the product
of natural (female) and not supernatural (male)
power. This miraculous confirmation of belief is
what leads Kierkegaard, in his famous analysis
of the binding of Isaac in Fear and Trembling,
to dub Abraham as the "knight of faith" vis-à-vis Socrates
who is the "knight of reason" grounded
in the "universal," that is, in reason
and logic. Thus "Abraham believed and it was
reckoned to him as righteousness," as Saint
Paul and the tradition asserts (especially Luther) — a
notion affirmed again and again in the Bible and
the Qur'an, the message being do not trust
reason and philosophy but rather, as stated in
Proverbs
3:5, "Trust in the Lord with all thy heart
and lean not unto thine own understanding" or,
as in Islam, "total submission to Allah." text»
(11) Unfortunately
both Der
philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (1962,
1963) and its English translation, Philosophical
Faith and Revelation (1968) are out of print
and only available in a few scattered used editions.
Hereafter
the German edition will be abbreviated as PGO,
and the English edition as PFR. text»
(12) E.
B. Ashton translates
Anfechtung as "self-doubt" – which
is a mild version of the kind of existential and
ontological anguish Jaspers intends to convey by
this term – an anguish perhaps limited to
northern Europeans pondering the "absolute
paradox" as defined by Luther and Kierkegaard. text»
(13) See
Hilary Putnam, The
Collapse of the Fact – Value Dichotomy and
other Essays (Harvard, 2002). text»
(14) Jaspers
also answers in the negative, but qualifiedly,
as we will see,
since Anfechtung affords the potential
for dialogue. I will argue, however and following
William James,
that religious faith is compelled far more by the "will
to believe" than by rational discourse and
the "will to communicate." And the will
to believe receives its energies primarily from
the non-rational and not the rational aspect of
consciousness, that is, from what Ricoeur calls
the "involuntary" or the emotional complex
of the unconscious. Belief may have rational implications
regarding phronesis, as in Aristotle, utility,
as in Mill, or the practical, as in Kant;
but these are hypothetical and not categorical
conclusions
and require an axiology in order to attain the
status of truth claims. Value theory or axiology
typically raises questions of "the good" (in
absolute axiological theory, as in J. N. Findlay's
work, where what is good has ontological status)
or of just "good" (in relativistic axiological
theory, as in Martha Nussbaum, where "good" has
no independent status apart from the valuer) with
respect to moral goodness, social goodness, and
aesthetic goodness — categories that obviously
converge very dramatically in the philosophy of
religion but receive inadequate attention, as Findlay
frequently pointed out. text»
(15) What
Jaspers would have to say today regarding the various
media luminaries
representative of resurgent Neo-Evangelical Fundamentalism
or fundamentalism generally in what he calls "the
biblical traditions" is anyone's guess. But
it is safe to surmise that Jaspers probably would
be appalled by the degeneration of the so-called "Occidental" religious
consciousness and perhaps surprised by the prominent
role religion continues to play in international
politics. text»
(16) Translated
into English as Christianity and Myth in
1958. text»
(17) The
Barth-Brunner debate, as you may recall, also had
to do with faith and
reason, or more precisely, with natural and revealed
theology. After making his case for natural theology,
Brunner is chided and dismissed by Barth as a naïve
subjectivist excessively infected with Kierkegaardianism.
To use the categories of William James, Barth accused
Brunner of being "tender" rather than "tough" minded.
It might be argued in his diatribe with Bultmann
that it is Jaspers who is "tender minded" in
contrast to a rather more "tough minded" Bultmann,
neither of whom, of course, compare with the toughness
of Karl Barth. It may also be recalled that in
the heyday of the debates between logical positivists
and religious philosophers and theologians, Barth
always enjoyed a higher measure of esteem from
analytical philosophers than Tillich and Jaspers,
both of whom, together with Gabriel Marcel, were
regarded as being excessively "literary" and "romantic" in
their approach to philosophy and theology. In other
words, one might not believe that what Barth was
asserting was true, but at least one knew "what" he
was asserting. text»
(18) Bultmann
insisted (with some troublesome exceptions, the
major one being
the historicity of the resurrection.) that the "demythologization" project
was the only way late-modern interpreters of sacred
texts could existentially appropriate anything
meaningful from sacred texts, since their ontological
and scientific claims were completely archaic.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pannenberg
also challenged the project of demythologizing
from
what might be viewed as being more Hegelian and
certainly Gadamerian reasons, whereas the early
Ricoeur attempted to mediate, it seems to me, between
Jaspers, Bultmann, and Schleiermacher by way of
the development of what he called a "restorative
hermeneutic of sympathetic reenactment." text»
(19) The
results were mixed as contrast, for example, to
Tillich's doctrine
of symbols and the tremendous response his position
enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s and even today,
especially in America. text»
(20) Von
der Wahrheit, Jaspers'
major work after Philosophie (3 vols.),
remained unfinished. My own book on Jaspers, viz., Transcendence
and Hermeneutics (Nijhoff, 1979) was a similar
defense, in many ways. text»
(21) See PGO,
pp. 131ff; PFR,
pp. 76ff. A philosophical colleague, Lydia Voronina,
now working for the State Department, recently
reminded me that "legal definitions of the
self" worked very well in bringing down the
former USSR. text»
(22) Here
I refer to Christopher Thornhill's insightful paper, "Humanism
and Wars: Karl Jaspers Between Politics, Culture
and
Law," presented at KJSNA, at the Annual Meeting
of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern
Division, Washington DC, December 30, 2003. See
also Thornhill's fine analysis of Jaspers in Karl
Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London
and New York: Routledge, 2002) where he argues
that Jaspers
transforms Kant's "transcendental theory of
the unconditioned into a transcendent theory of
the unconditioned" (pp. 46ff). I think that
Thornhill is correct, in other words, rather than
understanding the unconditioned epistemologically
strictly in terms of the "limits" of
reason, Jaspers ontologizes the unconditioned (das
Unbedingte) as the Transcendent and something
that discloses its being "in a fragmentary
but unambiguous way," to use the language
of Tillich, in the language of ciphers and symbols.
When combined
with the Encompassing (das Umgreifende),
as Jaspers does in PFR, understood as
being the source of
Anfechtung, we can see the full scope
of his metaphysical, as distinct from a strictly
epistemological, reading
of Kant and Grenzsituationen. text»
(24) These essays were based upon his summer-semester
lectures in Basel, shortly before he died in 1969, where Jaspers expands
on the section in PFR which ends precisely on the relation between Wahrheit und das
Umgreifende in terms of Anfechtung — the latter category
being very culture-specific and inadequately translated as "self-doubt." See
PGO, pp. 532ff. text»
(25) Indeed, it may be the case
that the fuzziness in Jaspers social and political
writings, namely, a failure to take "the
next step," as Thornhill argues, is due precisely to an un reconciled
position in philosophy and religion and whether "the two faiths
can meet." This ambiguity may also be a primary reason why Jaspers
is left out of the social and political discussion
during the 1970s and 1980s, a debate inspired and
controlled in large measure by Neo-Marxism
and Neo-Kantianism in its analytic mode. Conversely,
this ambiguity may be one of the reasons for an
apparent Jaspers renaissance in the
contemporary situation because of an increasing
dissatisfaction with the discourse on "agency" and "procedure," with
Dworkin, Rawls, and Habermas, and increasing attention
to the necessity of developing new models on the "ethics of recognition" in
intercultural philosophy — to which Jaspers' philosophy of communication
lends itself, as Ram Mall and others have noted. text»
(26) In spite of his antagonism
to Christianity, Jaspers, like Kierkegaard, remains
a Christian since he, like his Jewish
and Christian contemporaries, Tillich, Buber, Herberg,
Maritain, Niebuhr,
etc., thinks of reality as a Judeo-Christian phenomenon with
Jerusalem and Athens as its defining cultural poles.
And even though Jaspers gives
far more attention to Eastern traditions than the
other existentialist philosopher-theologians of
the period, Benares, Beijing and Mecca never
fit into a larger equation. The same can be said
of Charles Taylor whose "ethics
of authenticity" derives its identity through the secularized "sources
of the self" in the Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment and who
does, of course, include Benares and other foci
of multi-cultural identity in order to be politically
correct. text»
(27) See Andrew Schaap, "Subjective
Guilt and Civic Responsibility: Jaspers, Arendt and the German Problem," 50th
Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association-UK, April,
2000. Jaspers, it will be recalled, frequently endorsed Plato's concept
of
philosophizing as "the philosophical analogue of redemption," that
is, of "purification." text»
(28) This was the focus of KJSNA at the APA meeting
in Washington DC (2003), at which Thornhill and others addressed Jaspers'
The Future of Mankind. text»
(29) Philosophical Faith
and Revelation was
published in English translation by E. B. Ashton,
as Vol. 17 in the prestigious
Harper/Collins "Religious Perspectives" series edited by Ruth
Nanda Anshen. It is interesting to note that Ms.
Anshen was a perennialist and that Jaspers' comments
on perennialism are far from complimentary.
It may also be important to note that Philosophical Faith and Revelation,
in its first German edition (1962), was preceded
by an essay entitled "Der philosophische
Glaube angesichts der christlichen Offenbarung" published
in a Festschrift for Heinrich Barth in 1958. Heinrich
(and not Karl) Barth is the only theologian quoted
favorably in the book length manuscript
bearing nearly the same title. I say "nearly" the same title
because while the Christian understanding of revelation
is still central to the book, the modifier "christlichen" is
dropped with the adverb angesichts now suggesting
a vis-à-vis stance regarding
the fundamental incompatibility of "philosophical
faith" and revelation generally. In any case, this
is the way I read the modification. As
an aside it is also worth noting that PGO appeared in
print just prior to Pope John XXIII's convocation
of the Second Vatican Council in October of 1962
and the deliberations of Catholic philosophers
and theologians during the Second Vatican Council,
which ended in 1965, play no part whatever in Jaspers'
analysis of the Roman Catholic Church in this work.
It may be fair to surmise, however,
that what Jaspers says on Katholizität had an influence
on at least some of more liberal theologians and
prelates who played significant roles in the Council
in order to bring about a measure of aggiornamento. text»
(30) This essay is included in
the collection, Philosophy
and the World, E. B. Aston ed. (Gateway Editions, Regnery,
1963), but unfortunately contains no critical notes
or even source citations. text»
(32) See especially The Origin
and Goal of History (1948) where this
is a major theme. In it Jaspers asserts: "…history
remains the great question. It is the question
which remains unresolved and can never be resolved by thought alone
but only by reality; viz.,
the question whether the movement of history is
a mere interlude between non-historical conditions, or whether history
is the breakthrough into
the depths. If it is the latter, then history in
its entirety will lead, even in the guise of boundless disaster and
the accompaniment of danger
and ever-renewed failure, to Being become manifest
through man and to man himself, through an upward sweep whose limits
we cannot foresee,
laying hold of potentialities of which we can have
no foreknowledge." text»
(33) Supercessionism has
diverse manifestations and is not limited to religion as such. The most
powerful contemporary example is the attempt of
the Bush administration
to spread democracy
on the notion that it is the most righteous form
of government — a
different kind of missionary activity than previously
witnessed, but missionary activity all the same
in a partially secularized form. See
Frank Fukuyama, The End of History, and Fukuyama,
of course, one of the original signatories to PNAC
and on the editorial staff of The Weekly
Standard. Another signatory is Charles Krauthammer
who, in a recent C-SPAN address, made the case
for "Democratic
Realism" as
distinct from "Isolationism, Internationalism, and Democratic Globalism" — distinct
in the sense that Democratic Realism "selectively implants democratic
values organically in places like Iraq through
territorial conquest." He
failed to mention that "organic" normally means "intrinsic," that
is indigenous or native to the soil upon and within
which something grows. A more conventional and/or
traditional form of supersessionism
might be viewed as underlying the controversy surrounding
Mel Gibson's enormously successful "The
Passion of Christ." text»
(34) Ross continues: "There
is a difference between a reason why something
is believed (ratio
credentis,
explanation) and a reason why something is true (ratio
veritatis, justification).
Ideally the latter would be used for the former,
but we do often have reasons, even good reasons,
for believing things even if we do not know
the reasons why they are true. But if reasons for
belief are used as though they are reasons for
truth, this has been recognized for most
of the history of logic as an informal genetic
fallacy, in which the origin or the cause of a
proposition is taken to have some bearing on
its truth when it does not." It is informal because such
arguments do not otherwise violate the rules of
logic. See http://www.friesian.com/genetic.htm#text-1. text»
(35) Two of the more prominent cases of this resistance
are the opposition to gay and lesbian marriages, in the United States,
and the insistence, of Shi'tes that Shar'iah and Islam be officially
recognized in the proposed Iraqi constitution. text»
(36) Nor could Jaspers speak
out of a situation reflecting "religious pluralism" since,
following WWII, the Jews had been eliminated from the public life of
Germany and the Muslims were not, as yet, a factor.
They become a factor in the 1970s as Gastarbeiter during
the "German
economic miracle." text»
(37) As in the case of Hegel, Islam occupies a very
minor and even non-existent position in Jaspers'
consideration of "the
revealed religions." Were he alive today, Jaspers would probably
be more circumspect with this reference since the
designation "biblical
religions" is no longer used in scholarly circles, or used only
with major qualifications. During the 1950s and
1960s, when Jaspers was producing his major writings
on monotheism, it was commonplace for Western
scholars to speak of the Judeo-Christian tradition
as though it were some kind of seamless reality,
even though there were numerous institutional,
denominational and ethnic differences within these
religions. Today, when Americans and Europeans
make references to the Judeo-Christian
tradition, these voices usually come from politicians
and/or from the religious right. In the former
case, pandering politicians make what
they believe to be a necessary appeal to both Christian
and Jewish voters; but in the latter case, that
is, the Christian case, the hyphenation
represents and/or conceals temporal supercessionism in which Christianity is thought to be the fulfillment
of the older dispensation with the
New Testament the definitive completion of the
Old Testament. This is hazardous ground, for if
one adds Islam to the genetic equation, the
Qur'an becomes the definitive completion, and the
devotees are left to determine whether the earliest
or the latest revelation is definitive.
If one asserts, as do religious Zionists, that
the earliest revelation is foundational and therefore
definitive, then Jesus and Mohammad are
viewed as impostors. If one holds, with Christian
fundamentalists, that Jesus is the fulfillment
of the promise to Abraham, then Mohammad is
the impostor. If one holds, with Muslim fundamentalists,
that both Moses and Jesus have prophetic authority
but that Mohammad is the final prophet,
it is still necessary to establish the ethnic succession
and this is accomplished by way of Abraham's first
born, Ishmael, the exiled child
of reason. In short, Islam can have it both ways
through an adroit utilization of the genetic fallacy
whereby both the values of the "earliest" and
the "latest" revelations are used to confirm absolute temporal
truth-claims. text»
(40) And "skyscrapers," we
might add, since the Jihadists who pirated the
airliners on the fateful morning
of 9-11 and flew them into the New York Trade Towers
were resolute "men
of faith" — absolutely convinced that their actions were
pleasing to the Almighty. So also Mr. Bush who,
like Elijah and with the comeuppance of "shock and awe," demonstrated
even greater power against the "prophets
of Baal." text»
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