Davidson's Response to Fishbane

Ethics between Cognition and VolitionAuthor(s): Arnold I. DavidsonSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 93, No. 4 (October 2013), pp. 452-460Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/671119 .Accessed: 24/03/2015 13:42

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Ethics between Cognition and Volition*

Arnold I. Davidson / University of Chicago andUniversita` CaFoscari Venezia

Michael Fishbanes Ethics and Sacred Attunement embodies all of thevirtues of the classic genre of the essay. Building on his Sacred Attunement,but standing fully on its own, this essay succeeds in combining extraordi-nary scholarship with profound philosophical insight. Ethics and SacredAttunement calls for a reading in at least three separate, but contiguousand interrelated dimensions: 1 the general relationship between theologyand ethics; 2 the specifically Jewish tradition of relating theology and eth-ics; and 3 the nature and foundations of ethics as such. Despite its brevity,the richness and subtlety of Ethics and Sacred Attunement can hardly beexhausted in the space of this response. I have chosen to focus on a limited,and I believe essential, set of issues in the hope of raising further ques-tions, questions implicit in this text that have to be confronted by all theolo-gians and philosophers who are gripped by these problems.Central to Ethics and Sacred Attunement is the idea that patterns and

their meanings are neither self-evident nor imposed, but are the productof human interpretation 422 and, therefore, that we take hermeneuticresponsibility for our relations with things and persons, an idea that, as Fish-baneputsit, isafundamentalpreconditionforethics423.Our fundamentalorientation in the world is as hermeneutic beings who bear inalienableresponsibility for our assessments and explanations 422. As ethical mo-ments break forth explicitly, we must consciously assess a particular personin a particular situation here and now, and any such assessment requiresa hermeneutic moment that Fishbane calls a reflective pause, a space for re-flection and deliberation: Ethical attunement requires a series of pausesamid the entwined loops of intersubjectivity, each one effecting deliberateactsofcoregulationbetweentheselves43132. As our hermeneutic aware-

* All references within the text are to Michael Fishbanes Ethics and Sacred Attunement,in this issue. All translations from French and Italian are my own.

2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0022-4189/2013/9304-0004$10.00

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ness and attention increases, so does our sense of responsibility, a respon-sibility that has no limit fixed in advance. This interactive spiral betweenattention and responsibility grounds an attitude and practice of unendingresponsiveness.Lack of deliberative, of reflexive and focused interpretation, assessment

and evaluation in a world shared with others is the hermeneutic commence-ment of evil. In a brilliant paragraph toward the end of his essay, Fishbanewrites:

Breaches of this entwined attunement, disregulations and interpersonal infringe-ments of every sort, mark the insidious path of evil in its various degrees and forms.For evil occurs along a hermeneutic spectrum. It may begin somewhat innocuously,with a forgetting or obscuring of ones primary hermeneutic responsibilityper-haps through the inurement of habit or self-centeredness. One expression of this isindifference. Such an attitude may lead to disregardperhaps for similar reasons.The result is a more deliberate turning away from the other person. All such mo-ments may result in interpersonal or social disease and may corrode into malignacts of disruption or deliberate destruction. Each act along this spectrum thus ef-fects a different reading of worldly cohabitation, a different effacement of thehuman presence that has solicitedme andmy being. Thus, ethics may be thought ofas involving attunements of intentional coregulation, for the sake of transformingthe world into communities of value through reflective acts of intersubjective in-terpretation 42333.The most powerful confirmation of this philosophical insight can be

found in Primo Levis discussion of the outermost edge of this hermeneuticspectrum of evil, in the chapter of I sommersi e i salvati titled Comunicare.Dismantling the frivolous and irritating, but very fashionable, idea thatwe are all condemned to incommunicability, that we aremonads, incapableof reciprocal messages, or capable only of mutilated messages, false in de-parture and misunderstood at arrival, Levi perspicuously attributes thislamentation to mental laziness, and he challenges this laziness with thefollowing claim: Except in cases of pathological incapacity, one can andone should communicate: it is a useful and easy way to contribute to othersand to ones own peace, because silence, the absence of signals, is in its turna signal, but ambiguous, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. Todeny that one can communicate is false: one always can. To refuse to com-municate is a fault.1

Commenting on the range of various forms of absent communication,and arriving at that devastating, radical incommunicability encountered inthe concentration camps, that collision against a total linguistic barrier,Levi observes, with his characteristic anthropological sobriety, that the useof speech to communicate thought, this necessary and sufficient mecha-nism in order for a human being to be a human being, had fallen into dis-

1 Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati Torino: Einaudi, 1986, 6869.

Ethics between Cognition and Volition

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use.2 After describing in terrifying detail this genuine absence of commu-nication, Levi recalls that in the Lager of Mauthausen, even more multi-lingual than Auschwitz, the rubber whip was called der Dolmetscher, the in-terpreter: that which made itself understood by everyone.3 Levi draws hisdiscussion to a close with the following apparently descriptive observation,a description whose ethical force is undeniable: Not everyone suffered inequal measure frommissing or meager communication. Not to suffer fromit, to accept the eclipse of speech, was a fatal symptom: it signaled the ap-proach of definitive indifference.4

The interpretive indifference noted by Fishbane, the eclipse of commu-nication signaled by Levi, each mark out a form of evil that can only becountered by that attention and vigilance that are inherently ethical.5 If thenotion of communication in Levi directly invokes a social dimension, Fish-bane makes clear, using the full resources of the Jewish tradition, that hisidea of interpretation inevitably implies a social ethic. Both Fishbanes in-terpretation and Levis communication are in effect forms of dialogue. As PierreHadot has argued, dialogue was the fundamental form of ancient philosoph-ical discourse, a mode of discourse that aims to form rather than to in-form.6 The dialectic of the dialogue requires, at eachmoment the explicitagreement of the interlocutor, an accord or attunement that demands apath traveled together, so that the dialectical effort is in fact an ascent incommon toward the truth and toward the Good.7 As Hadot emphasizes,Only he who is capable of a true encounter with others is capable of anauthentic encounter with himself and the reverse is equally true. The dia-logue is truly a dialogue only in the presence to others and to oneself.8 Oras Hadot memorably puts it in our book of conversations, in Antiquity,philosophy is therefore essentially dialogue, a living relation between per-sons rather than an abstract relation to ideas.9 I am reminded here of thephilosophically astute use of the Hassidic tradition by Gilles Bernheim, theformer chief rabbi of France. Speaking of the significance of dialogue, hewrites, The words of the Hassidic masters . . . seem to banish all abstractobjectivity, all supposedly indifferent neutrality toward people. All thatcounts is he or she to whom the words are addressed. The truth is thatwhich reaches each one in the appropriate way. The address to the other

2 Ibid., 68, 70.3 Ibid., 71.4 Ibid., 79.5 I have discussed further aspects of Levis own ethics of communication in Gli esercizi

spirituali di Primo Levi, in La vacanza morale del fascismo: Intorno a Primo Levi, ed. Arnold I.Davidson Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2009, 519.

6 Pierre Hadot, La philosophie comme manie`re de vivre: Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I.Davidson Paris: Albin Michel, 2001, 97, and see also Exercices spirituels et philosophie antiqueParis: Albin Michel, 2002, 3847.

7 Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 4547.8 Ibid., 44.9 Hadot, La philosophie comme manie`re de vivre, 97.

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governs and models the aim. It is advisable to say that which concerns theother, what he can understand, what can be useful to him, and not only todispense some indivisible truth.10 I readMichael Fishbanes social ethics ofhermeneutic responsibility as a call to dialogue, not in the trivial sense thatone usually employs this term, but in Hadots sense of dialogue as spiri-tual exercise, a combat, friendly, but real in which each participant wres-tles with the other and struggles with himself, submitting himself to the re-quirements of the Logos and turning himself toward the Good.11 Thistransformative work of dialogue is an overcoming of evil. As Hadot says, inancient philosophical thought this exercise was often conceived of as anitinerary of the spirit toward the divine.12

* * *I would like to move now to discuss a major series of questions, one that

lies, so to speak, in the space between Fishbane and Levi. In contrast toFishbane, Levis ethics of communication has no theological foundation,and Levi puts forward his conception as rationally defensible without anyneed for such a foundation. The most unambiguously foundational theo-logical moment of Fishbanes ethics is to be found in his articulation of thenotion of Torah Kelulah, which marks off the transcendental world of Di-vine effectivity for our consciousness 42324. The most recurrent charac-terization of the Torah Kelulah in Fishbanes account is as an immeasurablevastness that gathers our sense of the infinite surge of things 423. Healso emphasizes its silence, unsayability, ineffability, which only speaks in-sofar as we strive to hear its address, or attempt to give voice to its inscrutableinscription upon the tablets of existence 424. This basic ontological truthof an ineffable, immeasurable vastness gives rise to our task, our duty, of find-ing hermeneutic measures, measures that give sense to the immeasurableexpressions of the Torah Kelulah 424. Fishbane compellingly weaves to-gether the various dimensions of this hermeneutical ethics founded on theTorah Kelulah: Alert to the omnipresent Torah Kelulah and its many chal-lenges, they teachers within the tradition$ mediate its potential through her-meneutic devices that inject the received forms of culture with new possibil-ity. . . . At every point, the TorahKelulah was parsed anew, and its immeasurableeffects adjusted to the old inheritance through hermeneutic revisions ofevery sort. . . . The Torah Kelulah of God thus holds immeasurable potentialfor human life. How one evaluates these possibilities, and articulates mea-sures for beneficent living, is the ongoing moral challenge 424.There is no doubt that the notion of the Torah Kelulah gives metaphysical

and theological depth to our experience of cosmic vastness. And it is ex-actly at this juncture that the question arises as to the relation between aphenomenology of ethics, indeed of the social ethics of hermeneutic re-

10 Gilles Bernheim, Quarante meditations juives Paris: Stock, 2011, 14.11 Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 45, 47.12 Ibid., 47.


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sponsibility described by Fishbane, and the need for a theological founda-tion such as that of the Torah Kelulah. Are we not able to bring into focusand preserve the phenomenon of cosmic vastness or infinities from a thor-oughly phenomenological point of view, without grounding it theologically?Is the experience so acutely enunciated by FishbaneSomething whelmsme and I parse it; something has exigency, even as I exegete it. I somehowtake its measure and interact with it 431not phenomenologically self-sufficient? Does the being with of the ethics of attunement, which issues fromthe need for interpretation and evaluation, hermeneutic and ethical mea-sure, require an independent theological or metaphysical justification? AsFishbane emphasizes, For we are creatures that continuously shape the sur-rounding vastness into cultural forms and formulations, through our evalua-tions of its nature and being 422. And isnt that description enough? Thecentrality of these questions is internal to Fishbanes account itself. The fi-nal section of his essay, his phenomenology of the ethics of attunement,beings with a consideration of the ways in which we are overwhelmed by aswirlofelements,animmeasurableswirlthatisthepurephenomenologicalequivalent of the all-enfolding Divine effectivity, an immeasurable Vastness,Source of all measures named Torah Kelulah 430, 423. Fishbanes refinedphenomenological sensibility in this last section is not framed in theologi-cal terms. He writes: That primal swirl is the most fundamental ground ofconsciousness, from which and through which we see and hear andmake alldecisions. Ever requiring new acts of interpretation, that swirl is the arche-typical site of an ontological ethics 430. On my reading, this descriptionis the precise phenomenological correlative of an earlier theological descrip-tion: Thus, the Name Shall Be which marks the divine Tetragram$ gathersour sense of the infinite surge of things, this being the experiential groundof all human measures 423. Thus Fishbanes own account pushes us toask: Is the Torah Kelulah an optional foundational discourse that arises, as itwere, after the fact of our primary existential experience? Or is some such dis-course necessary to preserve and give force to this experience? I am remindedhere of Hadots argument that spiritual exercises can be practiced indepen-dently of the discourses that justify them or recommend them, that theseexercises have a value in itself, independently of theories.13 Hadots con-clusion thus gives rise to the corresponding question I want to raise with res-pect to this aspect of Fishbanes account. Hadots decisive claim is as follows:One can in effect justify the same spiritual exercise with extremely differentphilosophical discourses, which are only awkward attempts, that come afterthe event, to describe and justify inner experiences whose existential den-sity in the end escapes every effort of theorization and systematization.14

13 Hadot, La philosophie comme manie`re de vivre, 252.14 Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 331.


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* * *Now that I have moved into the domain of phenomenology and theol-

ogy, I want to conclude by taking up a final issue of fundamental philo-sophical significance, a series of questions that revolve around Fishbanesother central concept, that of humility. The notion of humility plays asessential a role in Fishbanes ethics as that of responsibility. Indeed, hu-mility is the basis for that moral awareness expressed in his hermeneutic ofresponsibility. At the beginning of his essay, speaking of two fundamentaldispositions, Fishbane writes: The more primary disposition of humility isa response to the vastness itself, and issues in tremors of awe; its secondaryconsequence, moral awareness, is an awakening to the realization that ourworld of meanings is constructed through ongoing evaluations and inter-pretations. Thus, if the attitude of humility is an attunement to our fun-damental finitude, the sense of moral awareness relates to our primary re-sponsibility for all our judgments and determinations 422. From thisdescription, dense but direct, I believe that we can extract two distinctivephenomenologies of humility. I will label them the humility of limitationand the humility of awe. The humility expressed in the realization of oneslimitations is precisely a response to the vastness itself 422. In a herme-neutic context, this encounter with cosmic vastness and the constant needto shape the surrounding vastness into cultural forms and formulations,through our evaluation of its nature and being, leads to an acute awarenessof our limitationsboth the limitations in all of our hermeneutic gestures,which are never definitive or finished, as well as the limitations manifest inthe need for a social hermeneutics, a co-regulation with others that mustserve a shared world 422, 432. This humility of limitation, to use Fish-banes incisive words, ramifies into responsibility for personal judgmentsand ethical attunement toward all creatures 42425. However, this rec-ognition of our limitations, as expressed in humility, confronted by vastness,does not need to issue in tremors of awe. The experience of awe gives riseto another phenomenology of humility, one that is distinctively theological.The most phenomenologically precise definition of awe that I have discov-ered is given by the French Robertrespect mixed with fear respect mele decrainteand it is evident that the primary object of awe is God. Presencebefore God makes me aware of my finitude in the face of the Infinity oftranscendence, and this awareness takes me beyond that of my hermeneuticand social limitations. I am humbled and submitted, in an experience morepassive than active, to that Being who provokes and inspires respect and fear.This phenomenology of humility appears explicitly in Fishbanes accountwhen he discusses the hermeneutic mode of Sod, where one is inducted intothe transcendental mysteries themselves 429. As he puts it, The herme-neutic mode of Sodmay thus cultivate a most awesome humility and reveren-tial attunement to the All-Immeasurable of Gods Shall Be 429. This hu-


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mility, intimately linked to awe and reverence, is part of a specific phenome-nological structure, one that is explicitly theological.In order to draw out further the philosophical importance of this multi-

form problem of humility, and confining myself to the resources of theJewish tradition, I want briefly to consider Joseph Soloveitchiks classic es-say, Majesty and Humility.15 After describing what we can think of as thephenomenological core of that irreconcilable and interminable dialec-tic that characterizes our being, Soloveitchik turns to the dialectical moral-ity expressed in the two moralities of a morality of majesty and a morality ofhumility. The morality of majesty, that of cosmic man, aims at sovereigntyand victory, and underlying this ethic of victory is the mystical doctrinethat creation is incomplete. God purposefully left one aspect of creation un-finished in order to involve man in a creative gesture and to give him the op-portunity to become co-creator and king. . . . Under victory we understand,not only the subjection of nature to the needs of man, but also the estab-lishment of a true and just society, and an equitable economic order.16

This creative gesture is consonant with a hermeneutic of responsibility thatemphasizes the fundamentally constructive nature of thought and judg-ment 429.Soloveitchik then turns to the ethic of retreat or withdrawal, which he

roots in the Lurianic doctrine of tzimtzum, the self-contraction or withdrawalof God to make room for a finite world. However, for Soloveitchik the doc-trine of tzimtzum is not just a Kabbalistic mystery, but has foundationalmoral consequences: If God withdrew, and creation is a result of his with-drawal, then, guided by the principle of imitatio Dei, we are called upon todo the same. Jewish ethics, then, requires man, in certain situations, to with-draw.17 As Soloveitchik proceeds, this ethic of retreat and withdrawal be-comes an ethic of self-defeat : Self-defeat is demanded in those areas inwhich man is most interested . . . God tells man to withdraw from whateverman desires the most.18 This ethic of self-defeat, in Soloveitchiks account,then takes a particularly significant form, with its own specific phenome-nological texture that will take me back to the issue of the phenomenologyof humility. Soloveitchik writes: What does man cherish more than intel-lect, around which his sense of dignity is centered? Precisely because of thesupremacy of the intellect in human life, the Torah requires, at times, thesuspension of the authority logos. Man defeats himself by accepting normsthat the intellect cannot assimilate into its normative system. The Judaic

15 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Majesty and Humility, Tradition 17, no. 2 1978: 2537. Thebest overall introduction to Soloveitchiks thought is Reuven Ziegler, Majesty and Humility:The Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik Jerusalem: Urim, 2012. Zeigler discusses all ofSoloveitchiks major works, both Hebrew and English.

16 Soloveitchik, Majesty and Humility, 34.17 Ibid., 3536.18 Ibid., 36.


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concept of represents human surrender and human defeat. Man, anintellectual being, ignores the logos and burdens himself with laws whoserational motif he cannot grasp. He withdraws from the rationalistic posi-tion.19 The acceptance of hukim, as commanded by God, requires a suspen-sion of judgment and evaluation: it is the self-defeat of reason and the sub-mission of the will to God. According to Soloveitchik, a hok can be defined asan absolute norm and an ultimate command, demanding total submissionwithout reservations . . . it demands the surrender of ones mind and thesuspension of ones thinking. It is a total commitment precisely because itrequires an abdication of ones reason.20

As we can see here, to complete the phenomenological structure of thehumility of awe, we must take account of the phenomenon of submissionand explicitly attend to the phenomenology of volition. The experience rep-resented by a hok takes shape in that form of humility, which, in experiencingawe in the presence of God, demands absolute submission to His will. If aweis respect mixed with fear, we can say that while fear provokes psychologicalsubmission, respect occasions ethical submission. Of course, in the phenom-enology of religious submission these two dimensions combine to form anorganic whole: the result is humility as a theological phenomenon. We be-come aware not only of our specific cognitive limitations but of the limita-tions of the intellect as such, and this is brought about through the experi-ence of volitional submission in which our cognitive aspirations are totallysurrendered to the will of God. We are volitionally and cognitively humbledby Gods commands.I am now in a position to formulate my question: Is there an equivalent to

this phenomenology of hukim in Fishbanes ethics of sacred attunement?In an elegant and remarkable phrase, Fishbane characterizes us as cogniz-ing modalities of the Torah Kelulah 424. And, no doubt, the hermeneuticactivities of interpretation and assessment are primarily cognitive activities.On the other hand, it is evident that attunement is a volitional phenome-non, but it does not imply complete surrender, total submission: indeed, itrequires, coresponsiveness, coresponsibility, coregulation 432. So whatthen is our volitional orientation toward the Torah Kelulah? More generally,what is the relation between cognition and volition with respect to the foun-dations of ethics? Or to raise the question in another way, Is our experienceof the humility of limitation or of the humility of awe the basis of our moralawareness? These questions strike me as crucial to understanding the phe-nomenology of command, which will then allow us to discern more clearly

19 Ibid., 37.20 Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Abraham R. Besdin, Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish

Thought, vol. 1 Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1979, 100, 102. For other discussions of Soloveitchik onhukim, see Avishei C. David, Darosh Darash Yosef: Discourses of Rav Yosef Dov Halevi Soloveitchik onthe Weekly Parashah Jerusalem: Urim, 2011, 24348, 33956.


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the strong theological moments, or absence thereof, in our ethical conscious-ness. Such issues concerning the place of the humility of submission in ourmoral life can be condensed in the contrasting provocative avowals of JosephSoloveitchik and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and so I shall end this essay with theirwords:

Soloveitchik: Eleven years ago my wife lay on her deathbed and I watched her dying,day by day, hour by hour; medically, I could do very little for her, all I could do was topray. However, I could not pray in the hospital; somehow I could not find God in thewhitewashed, long corridors among the interns and the nurses. However, the need forprayer was great; I could not live without gratifying this need. Themoment I returnedhome I would rush to my room, fall on my knees and pray fervently.21

Wittgenstein: I cannot kneel to pray, because its as though my knees were stiff. I amafraid of dissolution my own dissolution should I become soft.22

21 Soloveitchik, Majesty and Humility, 33.22 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, rev. ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 63e.


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Davidson's Response to Fishbane

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Transcript of Davidson's Response to Fishbane