Note on philosophy and Jewish thought in German, French, Italian, and American English: Some distinctions

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Some observations on philosophy in German, French, Italian, and American English, including consequences for Jewish philosophy:

Some of the best philosophical writing is dense yet very clear. I would further divide clarity into typical English and French variants: the English, like Russell, are pedestrian, the French, like Sartre or Badiou, or Descartes, who theorized this style, are lucid, lucidity being clarity in concepts that are illuminating. This clarity means they are not hard to understand in the sense of puzzles not easily resolved, but only in the sense of requiring time and patience.

Both forms of clarity honor the classics with theirs. Aristotle is a classical writer I find very clear. If anything, he could be faulted for the mania of defining everything. Taxonomy is not scientific in a modern science, however satisfying it may be to pedants and those who would style themselves like Sartre's ridiculous Autodidacte who reads every book in the provincial library from A to Z. Aristotle's use of concepts seems clear in a way that for example Hegel is not; with Hegel the only dictionary that will much help you is one not of German but of Hegel's German.

There are philosophers who find it difficult to write clearly, as if their ideas are pariahs in the world of their prose and its syntax; Kant, Husserl are examples; it seems to be a real problem with philosophy in German. I think that related to this is the feature of German sociology and social philosophy that seems to inhabit a soul to which its language is external, an idea that constitutes part of the German ideology (before the Third Reich) and finds it opposite in that of France. In both traditions, the German and the French, philosophy must be illuminating of some unforseen insights, but for the Germans this requires obscurity and for the French, a clarity that seeks to be almost absolute.

This exteriority to language also characterizes the dominant sensibility of Jewish German-language thought. Consequently, French radicals tend all to believe in an idea of science, while in Germany, thanks to the huge influence of romanticism, both left and right tend not to, something that can be seen philosophically in both the Frankfurt School and Heidegger. At the extreme, this leads to fascination with the esoteric, whose opposite in this respect is not the classicist's normality but the idea of an avant-garde.

I suppose that in Italy, as Roberto Esposito suggests, the place of the desirable otherness here is held by resistances to centralizing hegemony based partly in persistent regionalism. This means it is easier for both the Germans and Italians to be against the state; in France there is a tendency for state, society, and language to faire qu'un, to appear as a single thing, because in France almost alone absolutism is revolutionary.

And Jewish philosophy: Although it inherited the prewar German and not the postwar French traditions, recognizably Jewish philosophy in America is almost always religious. The importance in American society from the beginning of publicly maintained private identities that are religiously based may help to condemn religious Jewish philosophy to the merely edifying character of the kind of optimistic writing associated with not philosophers in contact with the methods and topics of science but rabbis exclusively concerned with the happiness and justice of ethics, and content to appeal in their writing to intuition alone, in line with the general norm of liberal Jewish thought today, particularly in Reform Judaism, of appealing to the individual's good sense and and feeling and insight, an appeal that might be summed up by saying, "The True is the Nice (We just love how it makes us feel)." It is no wonder not only more scientific or mathematical (in method, aiming to be exact in use of concepts and rigorous in development of logically consequential entailments) forms of philosophical thought do not usually figure (directly) in this, and that contemporary French thought is largely absent as an influence, contributing to the lack of sophistication in the intellectual life of Reform, and all American, Judaism, which particularly eschews philosophy, and the French approach to it which often makes tacit appeal to a larger idea of science or something quite akin to it.

The merely scientific philosophy,, on the other hand, engaged in by American Jewish analytical philosophers is rarely distinguishable from that of their gentile colleagues. The American tradition in philosophy is basically the English one, with the difference that our republicanism has facilitated pragmatism, the one school of philosophical thought that is distinctively American in its origins and for the most part. A notable exception to the rule stated here is the late Stanley Cavell. His ethics of acknowledgement, based on readings of Emerson and Thoreau as well as Wittgenstein and Austin, does, I think, have a recognizably Jewish character and in a way that might interest those who find Martin Buber's antinomian philosophy of the radicalism of personal encounters to be hopelessly naive and wrong in ways amply revealed by subsequent linguistics and philosophy of language from Austin to Benveniste.