Justifying Normativity in Modern Jewish Thought

• In Event: Modern Jewish Thought/Philosophy and the Politics of Religious Studies

Abstract

Contemporary conversations in religious studies suggest that when scholars in religious studies use normative language of any sort, that they engage in an activity that is too close to confessional theology and is therefore unscholarly. This threatens to make many subfields in religious studies seem obsolete or unscholarly, including the subfield of Jewish philosophy and thought, a field whose scholars are largely housed in departments of religious studies.

But on what grounds can one argue that any subfield in religious studies must necessarily be non-normative, and can only be historical, or a field of discourse analysis? As a field in the humanities, religious studies should attend to the full array of human behaviors, and this includes attending to human beings in their normativity.

However, a more interesting question than that of whether Jewish thought can be normative is that of whether any normative stance is legitimate. In my remarks, I argue that normative accounts of Judaism, if they are to be persuasive, must be grounded in human facts, and not in an uncritical theology. Franz Rosenzweig’s death-analysis is one such move, but Jewish thought gets more mileage out of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Often interpreted (wrongly) as a thinker of encounter, Levinas is a thinker who grounds normativity—and even the right to posit transcendence—in the fact of language-use. The argument of the 1951 essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” rests on its brief treatment of language, as do the arguments of the magna opera TOTALITY AND INFINITY (1961) and OTHERWISE THAN BEING (1974). However, even though Levinas gets to God-talk out of his analysis of humans as language-users, he rightly rejects theology as unnecessarily overdetermining God’s being and action. This means that theology must fundamentally be a discourse of imagination, of the “as if” (a phrase that Levinas uses regularly in his writings, particularly in the 1969 Talmudic reading “Judaism and Revolution”). Halakhic positivism is thereby forbidden, law becomes a revisable instrument that fulfills Jews’ desire to flourish, and modern Jewish thought becomes excitingly legible again as a tradition of arguments about flourishing-making acts and beliefs.

author

• Martin Kavka, Florida State University