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

Some observations (that are only seemingly fanciful) on philosophy in German, French, Italian, and American English, including consequences for Jewish philosophy:

Philosophy in the ‘Continental’ (European) tradition is the lingua franca of the art world, of the academic humanities and qualitative social science in the United States, and of the intellectual world on the European continent.  This has been true in America for the last 50 years.  It is thus a puzzle why most self-recognizing ‘Jewish’ thought, especially when religious, has ignored it.  

I have discussed this elsewhere in several pieces on this site, including more particularly with regard to problems in Judaism.  Here, I want to note what seem to me some of the interesting differences between the traditions in these languages.        

What is most distinctive to ‘Continental’ philosophical thought is a critical attitude towards modernity.  This has developed with some interesting national variants. 

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, while the French, like Sartre and Badiou, or Descartes, who theorized this style, are lucid, lucidity being a 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.

French thought is syntactic, while English thought is denotational.  English has far more vocabulary than any other language, and meaning tends to be given as much as anything in use of the right word or concept, and in sentences that can be very short, containing only a single thought, a declaration.  The French language is full of conjunctions used to link single statements through subordination or coordination into syntactically complex ones, so that some sentences are like syllogisms.  Thus, French is a language of thought in the sense that involves inferences and logic, while English is a language of names and declarations.  Subtle shadings of inferential meaning give French grammar some of the features of a logic: parce que is both like and unlike vu que, but both indicate that if this is the case, that is the case also.  The unique English and American proclivity for liberalism in politics must have something to do with this, for we intuitively understand that whatever you think is just your opinion, and while the more rational Europeans and particularly the French may care about whether it is true or not, we consider that less important, being arbitrary.  Moreover, truth for us is a matter of correspondence of name and thing, or statement and situation, whereas for the French it is a matter of correctness of inference; thus, the common French expression for being in the right on some matter is avoir raison, to ‘have reason’.          

Both forms of clarity, the English and the French, honor the classics with theirs. Aristotle is a classical writer whose published lectures, which is what we have, manage to seem mostly very clear. He seems to have had almost a mania for 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 ‘Self-taught Man’, 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 and even more Husserl are examples; this seems to be a real problem with philosophy in German.  Doubtless matters are complicated by the fact that so many German words are combinations of simpler ones. 
There also is a feature of German sociology and social philosophy that it seems to fit a soul to whom 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 unforeseen insights, but for the Germans this has allowed an obscurity, belabored as in Husserl or poetically confused as in some of Adorno and Horkheimer, while for the French, it seems to involve a clarity that seeks to be almost absolute. 

Interestingly, some German language Jewish religious ‘philosophers’ like Leo Baeck write in a style similar to theirs in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Supposedly a realization of a dialectical logic in its complexity, with the kind of rhetorical use of syntax perhaps best mastered among Marxists in the 1967 French classic by Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, which became a manifesto for many of the student radicals of the May 1968 uprising, one suspects that the writers were so poetically inspired that they don’t mind risking confusion, and so being only suggestive of possibilities, and not decisively demonstrating any claim.    

This exteriority to language also characterizes the dominant sensibility of Jewish German-language thought. Consequently, while 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.  This romanticism would of course prove horribly reactionary, and along with the persistence in a society that was a latecomer to modern industrial society and the nation-state, not so much of medieval culture, as sometimes can be seen in Italy, as its social relationships of feudal dependency.  The infamous German authoritarian personality is due partly to that.  Sociology also developed strongly in Germany in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in a way that supposed that the society could be studied from the outside because some people, particularly the Jews, were essentially outside it, something that is not very possible in France or French thought.  An interesting document of this is John Murray Cuddihy’s The Ordeal of Civility, an argument for the almost pure exteriority of Jews in the modern Western world that is mostly indebted to German sociology, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and a reading of French sociology from the standpoint of both.  At the extreme, the romanticism of German thought leads to fascination with the esoteric, whose opposite in this respect is perhaps not the classicist’s normality but the idea of an avant-garde.

French thought tends towards the avant-garde or ‘revolutionary’ and achieves this through a conceptual and scientific rigor.  Since Descartes, the French founding figure of modern philosophical thought, it has prized and insisted on ‘clear and distinct ideas’.  A situation is understood when it is clearly conceptualized in precise theoretical terms. In place of romanticism, there is libertinism, subversion, surrealism, and a public, not private, radicalism.  Erotic transgressions fascinate the French mind, always interested in discoveries, and willing to be scandalized by things the Protestant English and Americans will not hear of.  And instead of the figure of the pariah in German Jewish experience and thought, there is that of transgression, a positive value, if not unproblematic.  The outside of social normality is projected onto the future, not a protectable part of the present.  The French tend to believe in their society and its state, with ‘pagan’ symbols wielded in purely secular ways (revered intellectuals, living and dead, are, by pure rhetorical convention, referred to as ‘gods’ or ‘immortals’), and social propriety is identified with an enforceable proper use of the language.  Unlike in liberal England and America, the revolution in France was not against the absolutist central state so much as it was a republican and popular realization of it.  Thus we want, much more than they do, internal spaces separated and protected from the state.  (This remains the most important difference between the French and continental European political traditions on the one hand and the English and American ones on the other.)  It follows from these things that a Jewish philosophy in France will be a candidate for advancement in a thinking that is itself quite French, not a private Angst bearing on particular persons and communities.  The Jewish philosopher in France does not want to write a philosophy that is truly Jewish so much as one that is (perhaps ‘Jewishly’, which then will have to be defined) true.  Maybe its Jewishness will help make it more true, and relevantly true to contemporary French and world society, but this generality of truth is its aim.  French philosophers know that philosophy is universal in the scope and address of its claims.  There could be a philosophy that seems particular to seacoast vacationers in summertime, and it might be conditioned by some of their characteristic experiences, but its truth would not be so particular.  Since French society officially recognizes no minority status as having public meaning, a Jewish thought can only succeed as a French one, with its ‘Jewish’ character being that of an adjective and not a proper name of something belonging to certain persons or communities.  That this can only sound horrible to so many American Jews proves that they do not understand it.  In fact, it exists, and is very important, if more so to intellectuals than the members of a neighborhood shul, but then the former are part of the French state and nation, while the latter belong to something generally respected but strictly speaking neither included nor excluded, a status they share with every other religion or private association, like a local bar or sports club.  The positive takeaway from this for partisans of their particular viewpoint in philosophy is that their philosophy may well acquire the general applicability that will make it seem much more powerful as a work of thought, having the status less of a local myth that seems true for us because it suits us and so we like it, and more of a general truth that we may be particularly drawn to but that is appealing because it is true, since truths are general and not particular.  That 2+2=4 is a fact that would still be true in Sparta even if only the Athenians knew this and the Spartans did not.        

Italy has a legacy as the West’s most political national society, even if this is less true than it was in the decades after the last war, when the anti-fascist legacy helped sustain the West’s most ‘normal’ Communist Party.  In Italy, as Roberto Esposito suggests in his useful book on Italian philosophy, the place of a desirable otherness is held by resistances to centralizing hegemony based partly in persistent regionalism. This means it is easier for Italians to be against the state. In Germany modernity was questioned but the state could not easily be, while in France there is a tendency for state, society, and language to faire qu’un, to appear as a single thing, because in France absolutism can be revolutionary.  (Marxism and the Soviet Revolution were in this sense continuations of the French.).  Italian thought, which has become so vitally important in the last generation, is able to resist the hegemony of the central state and its modernity by situating itself implicitly in regional difference as a shared idea, and a temporal discordance that is sustained through traces of a still resonant past, including that of republican Rome, the still resonant medieval period that lies at the origin of Italian cultural modernity, and Christianity as a set of intellectual and artistic traditions and not just the popular faith, no less than the Renaissance that was as much a continuation as a departure.  As philosophy since the world wars has been greatly marked by a critique of modernity, and in Italy after the war also by left and liberal anti-fascism, Italian philosophy has lately joined that of France in its centrality to ‘Continental’ European thought, particularly among those with leftist sympathies.  Stylistically as well as thematically, Italian philosophy shares much with that of France, and tends to be poetic as well as tightly reasoned. 

And what about 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 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. 

Generally, it is hard to escape the impression that Jewish thought in America generally tends to be distinctively quite American.  This should not surprise us, given that the Jews who came to America mostly were eager to join the normal bourgeoisie while retaining merely local and familial differences, and as the society was so constructed to welcome recognizable religious and ethnic differences that did not seem so different as all that, they succeeded.  The ethical, political, and aesthetic resonances of American Jewish thought are consequently much weaker than they were in Europe; paradoxically, the often forgotten other tradition in modern philosophical thought has been a far more apt medium for articulating any of the concerns recognizably particular to Jewish traditions, but now with little urgency or even unnoticed.  For, unlike France, where it holds a central place in the educational system that itself is far more important in the society, America does not have a philosophical culture.  The decisive question may only be whether or not we should care. 

If we spoke the educated world’s lingua franca, some of what we speak of and do would seem a lot more relevant.  Otherwise, we have practices of worship sustained by institutions that are conservatories in the sense that some academies of classical music are.  In this way, a past is preserved, and its language along with it, though little used outside liturgical ceremonies, but it is preserved without any marked relation to vital issues in contemporary thought bearing upon any of our social problems or a possible future.  One day in seven, we can leave behind our present business for an edifying concert in a museum of antiquities.  It is only too bad the those who make the future do so by reworking the past, not just replaying it.