Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 06:03:05 -0500
Subject: [HAB:] GERMAN IDEALISM & THE JEW [3]: denouement


Mack, Michael.
German idealism and the Jew: the inner anti-semitism of philosophy and 
German Jewish responses.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

I finally finished my quick first reading of this book.  As a whole it 
proves to be a disappointment.  At best it is a compendium of interesting 
data subject to expansion and conceptual evaluation, but as a coherent 
presentation, the book is a failure.  It is important to examine how a 
specialized work of this sort can get away with this.  If it were written 
for a general audience, presumably a fuller background exposition would be 
needed.  Some background is assumed, or so it seems, and so the author can 
supply a certain amount of detail for the ideas he wants to 
examine.  However, the gross generalizations, connections between thinkers, 
and systematic analysis of ideas do not hold up.  The poverty of philosophy 
in understanding history is complemented by the poverty of history of ideas 
in examination of systems of concepts.

I read the remaining chapters of Rosenzweig, Freud, Benjamin, and the 
conclusion, which treats two other figures, Elias Cannetti and someone 
named Steiner.

There are two fundamental problems in this book, to begin with.  The first 
is an assumption of commonality among various German thinkers and a lack of 
systematic examination of their ideas.  Wagner for example may be an 
idealist in a generic sense but I see no evidence he represents a 
systematic development of the philosophical tradition known as German 
idealism.  Idealism is used in a generic sense which may be appropriate for 
certain purposes but hardly covers in an adequate fashion a specific 
philosophical tradition.  I will say more about this when we come to Freud.

The second problem lies in the generalizations about the German-Jewish 
thinkers adduced in the book.  Mack's characterization of both the Germans 
and German Jews is based on a single theme treated antithetically.  But 
this hardly unifies either group or systematically compares one to the 
other.  Secondly, Mack does not face the banality and/or obscurantism of 
many of the German-Jewish thinkers or analyze the basis of the distinctions 
among them.

The problem with the latter group is the extent to which their philosophies 
(not just their sensibilities or outsider status) are based upon some 
re-metaphorized philosophical conception of Judaism to counter other 
philosophies or ideologies.  A Benjamin, Freud, or Marx succeed to the 
extent to which they are universal thinkers, however their perspectives may 
have social roots in the marginalized experience of an outsider ethnic 
group.  However, attempts to construct a Jewish countermythology to fight a 
prevailing mythology regress to unacceptable banality the more they depend 
on a specifically Jewish mythology and metaphysics.  I find nothing 
remotely interesting about Rosenzweig, just as I have never been interested 
in Buber or Fackenheim or any others who attempt to construct a 
specifically Jewish philosophy.  Such attempts are retrogressive in the 
modern world.  They drag us back inside the world of ideology, reversing 
the decisive break Marx made with the Young Hegelians in the mid-1840s for 
their inability to think beyond the insides of ideology.  I have the same 
problem here as I have with liberation theology of all ilks: as metaphor or 
poetry it may have some value, but as philosophy or a belief system it is 
all bullshit.  Mythmaking, even the making of a countermyth, is a 
dangerously inadequate basis for understanding the modern world, and 
parochial, arbitrary and obscurantist in its application to the 
understanding of material circumstances.  I would also include Michael 
Lerner's upper middle class liberal pabulum known as the "politics of 
meaning" in this category of ideological masturbation.

Before I rise again to generalizations, I want to summarize the remaining 
chapters.  Again my caveat: I did not take very good notes.

Rosenzweig has an argument against Kantian autonomy: it abandons any 
meaningful relationship to the external world, and it is impossible to will 
in general.  R also used the Kantian argument against Islam and accused 
Kant of being Islamic (heteronymous).  R claims that epistemology usurps 
infinity (the unknown).  The gap between immanence and transcendence is 
eliminated.

The next chapter is on Rosenzweig vs. Hegel and the politics of 
blood.  There is more on the interesting interaction of pseudotheology and 
pseudoscience  (128).  R argues that the superhuman Aryan body is 
essentially superphysical, i.e. not material at all but ideal.  There is 
also a counterargument to something Hegel says about the metaphysics of 
eating.  Schelling is not condemned as a reactionary but praised for 
asserting that the Jews are "chosen" because of their nonparticipation in 
the violent struggle between states.  R is also a disturbingly 
"blood-and-soil" thinker.  For him Jews are united by a blood brotherhood, 
and blood is outside of history.

It is difficult to read this stuff without gagging.  This drivel is hardly 
materialist.  As a mythical conception it may have some interesting 
moments, not to mention nauseating ones, but it is mythmaking nonetheless, 
at its very worst.

Freud's outlook should not be defined by his antireligious book THE FUTURE 
OF AN ILLUSION, according to Mack.  Freud is very much a Jewish 
thinker.  He sees anti-Semitism as an inner psychical reality dominating 
outer reality.  Judaism engaged in conscious remembrance of past 
trauma.  There is some stuff on the castration complex and Weininger's and 
Jung's denial of sexuality.  Perhaps the most interesting topic in this 
chapter is Freud's repeated references to Kant's categorical imperative as 
essentially a form of taboo, a self-authorizing dogma equivalent to the 
superego (143-149).  There is also an interesting discussion of MOSES AND 
MONOTHEISM.  But the most important ideas I think are the Kantian 
categorical imperative and the denial of reality or neurotic amnesia.  I'll 
get back to Freud's approach to philosophy later.

Walter Benjamin links the evolution to Christianity to Kant and the 
metamorphosis of Christianity into capitalism, with a concomitant abstract 
devaluation of the empirical world.  There is also something about baroque 
allegory.

Finally, there is a concluding chapter, in which Mack introduces Cannetti 
and Steiner.  Mack is writing this book out of a post-Holocaust 
perspective, and there me conclusions that can be drawn for 
postmodernism.  Very disappointing.  The overall theme, I gather, is the 
Jewish response to the idealist repression of materiality.

While granting that this generic theme may be an important one, it is not 
adequate for organizing one's whole thinking about this range of 
thinkers.  There are multiple reasons for this.  Beyond what I've said 
before, I'll try to briefly explain the most important.

The theme of "materiality", while an important one, should not obscure the 
fact that many of these thinkers who try to reinsert materiality to counter 
its denial or devaluation, are hardly materialist thinkers, but mythical 
thinkers.  They may recognize an ideological opponent they can smoke out, 
but their own mythical constructs are grossly inadequate, even though they 
may serve as countermyths to contrary dubious ideological constructs.  The 
problem here is in relying on Jewish countermyths to Christian, volkish, 
and statist myths.  While the motives for doing so may be appealing, they 
work better in the genre of satire than they do in philosophy per se.

The generic concept of idealism as a form of repression/denial may well be 
important, but it isolates one theme or one mechanism, and while imposing 
one aspect of systematicity organized around this single theme, bypasses 
the systematicity of the actual philosophical systems under 
discussion.  And this is what a psychoanalytical approach also fails to 
address.

Which brings me back to Freud as an example of explaining this problem.  In 
focusing on symptomology, Freud overlooks systematicity.  Freud bypasses 
ideology critique as traditionally conceived, which focuses on the systemic 
structure of concepts under criticism.  But in supervening this level of 
analysis by seeking out psychological motives, the psychoanalyst 
effectively conjures the structure of the concepts themselves out of 
existence.  When it comes to symptomatology, Nietzsche was far superior to 
Freud, because Nietzsche understood and analyzed the systemic structure of 
ideas as well as the psycho/ideological mechanisms responsible for 
them.  In any case, philosophical systems are explicit conceptual 
structures, which, whatever motivates them, are, as systems and as products 
growing out of intellectual traditions and problems, constrained to develop 
into coherent logical configurations.  Hence, while the categorical 
imperative (or idealism in general) may partake of the motivation of taboo, 
denial, amnesia, or repression, as a concept it can not be made any sense 
of in such terms.  Adorno explains Kant in a way Freud cannot.

Herein lies the essential limitation of a book conceived along these lines.


___________________

"People who believe absurdities commit atrocities."--Voltaire



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