The Eclipse of Humanity: Heschel’s Critique of Heidegger 3110441888, 9783110441888

Table of contents :
Overview
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Are Philosophy and Religion Possible after Auschwitz and Hiroshima?
2. Amidst the Traditions
3. First Phenomenology – in the Cobbler’s Workshop
4. Dasein and Adam
5. The Eclipse of Humanity
6. Heschel and the Postmodernists: (Are the Demonic and Death Real?)
Bibliography
Index of Names
Subject Index

Citation preview

Lawrence Perlman The Eclipse of Humanity

Studia Judaica

Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums Begründet von Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Herausgegeben von Günter Stemberger, Charlotte Fonrobert und Alexander Samely

Band 91

Lawrence Perlman

The Eclipse of Humanity Heschel’s Critique of Heidegger

ISBN 978-3-11-044188-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-043544-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043418-7 ISSN 0585-5306 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printing on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

In Memory of my Father Philip Perlman In Honor of my Mother Lynn Perlman In Memory of my In-Laws Myer and Bess Pollock

Acknowledgments There are several people who deserve thanks for their support. My youngest daughter Hannah Perlman, a second-year law student who took time from her very busy schedule, was the first person to read the entire manuscript and made many grammatical and syntactical corrections. She was my first audience and helped me judge the cogency of the arguments. Professor Emeritus Michael Ermarth of Dartmouth College read part of the manuscript and graciously welcomed me to his home to discuss the issues. Paolo Gamberini, S.J., S.T.D., engaged in a dialogue with me in relation to some of the overarching philosophical methods and concerns of Heschel. My friend and colleague Rabbi Elliot Gertel read the entire manuscript and made many observations and suggestions. His attention to detail made the manuscript better in every way. Joyce Rappaport undertook the final editing and preparation of the manuscript for publication. Sophie Wagenhofer and everyone involved at De Gruyter have my gratitude. Most importantly I am grateful to my wife Barbara who has supported me in every way imaginable over the course of the four years it took to complete this book.

Overview Acknowledgments Introduction

VII

1



Are Philosophy and Religion Possible after Auschwitz and Hiroshima? 9



Amidst the Traditions



First Phenomenology – in the Cobbler’s Workshop



Dasein and Adam



The Eclipse of Humanity



Heschel and the Postmodernists: (Are the Demonic and Death Real?) 144

Bibliography Index of Names Subject Index

193 199 201

32 70

98 119

Introduction This work serves two purposes. In plain terms, this work is an analysis of Who Is Man? by Abraham Heschel. From a more complicated perspective it is an analysis of postmodernism as it bears upon certain philosophical and theological positions that are important in the discussion of religion, Judaism, and historical events. To accomplish this straightforward and more complex goal, many complicated issues need to be brought to bear on this slim volume to make it understandable in the context in which Who Is Man? was delivered. It has long been assumed that Heschel ignored the issue of the Holocaust, that he wrote poetry without attempting philosophical and theological argumentation, and that in doing so, he steered clear of serious philosophical ideas.¹ Unfortunately, these assumptions have been perpetrated as much by those who claim to understand him, as by those who dismiss him as a philosophical lightweight. In addition many postmodern attempts at understanding religion have adopted a privileged position of neutrality, claiming to surpass the understanding of those who study religion from inside any particular religion. The case of Heidegger and Heschel and their juxtaposition is seminal on this front. This work disputes these assumptions and claims. To accomplish these goals it unearths the crisis of philosophy surrounding Heschel from the late 1920s until the appearance of Who Is Man? in the 1960s. It identifies an axis around which most of Who Is Man? revolves—the thought of Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust. The centrality of Heidegger’s and Heschel’s different phenomenological outlooks, as they are applied to Dasein and Adam respectively, is emphasized. Lastly, it illustrates how profound Heschel’s critique of Heidegger and postmodernism is by extending Heschel’s ideas in contrast to several important postmodern followers of Heidegger. So while the analysis provided is really about the slim little volume Who Is Man?, it is about so much more. It must come to terms with the intersection of Heideggerian deconstruction and the Holocaust, the history of being from Par Aside from my own work I am aware of only one other attempt that systematically argues the philosophical non-poetic significance of Heschel’s thought. Paolo Gamberini’s Pathos e Logos in Abraham J. Heschel (Rome: Citta Nuovo, ) bases his analysis on the ancient meaning of legein, i. e., to collect, as indicating that Heschel is collecting in a logos, philosophical insights which are independent of poetry and surpass the relevance of poetry. See p. . While I do not agree fully with all the elements of his analysis, Gamberini importantly and cleary understands the relationship between the phenomenological and the ontological in Heschel’s thought and the divide between those interpreters who do and those who do not.

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Introduction

menides to Heidegger, and the image of man in that intellectual history and in the course of human events. Seemingly thrown together for a lecture series with some passages from his previous writings, Who Is Man? is a carefully conceived understanding of Heidegger’s thought, the Holocaust, and the history of philosophy. The difficulty in understanding Heschel’s critique of these issues is not in finding them in Who Is Man?. They are there openly and clearly, even if they have been neglected. The difficulty is in showing the significance of this profound critique of postmodernism because Heschel’s midrashic method does not specify how these ideas are interwoven and tied together. What begins as a simple exercise is much more than meets the eye. The seminal argument made here is that all of the previous readings of Heschel are uninformed, beside the point, and philosophically naïve. According to the analysis undertaken here, Who Is Man? illustrates that the seminal point in Heschel’s thought is its critique of postmodernism. The popularity of Heschel’s writings has clearly presented a double-edged sword. Measured in terms of dissemination, Heschel’s works are unprecedented—their accessibility for a Jewish author of the modern era is unsurpassed. Measured in terms of the discussion of ideas embedded in Heschel’s thought, we have hardly advanced beyond a cult of personality. Again, this is sadly due as much to his adherents and to his detractors. In the constellation of these considerations—the question of being, Martin Heidegger, the Holocaust, and the image of man—Who Is Man? stands as the single-most important Jewish work to bridge the enlightenment and the appearance of postmodern thought. I believe it to be the single-most important Jewish book since the appearance of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Given the intersection of its ideas and the upheaval of history, I believe Who is Man? to be even more significant. The method employed here will be the same as was used in my first study on Heschel and revelation.² It is an analysis of ideas and not an inquiry into the historical record per se. It is an inquiry concerning the meaning of ideas in the historical context in which they were delivered. While I assume that the historical record in each of their cases has not been exhausted, I do think that we have enough information to proceed in each of their instances to apply an understanding of their ontological positions to their history and to their understanding of history. Most significantly in this vein it is paramount to understand what Heidegger means by “epochality” and what Heschel means by “eclipse of human-

 Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation (Atlanta: Scholars Press, ).

Introduction

3

ity” for, 1), they are essential understandings of the historical moment in which each thinker finds himself, and 2), they are related directly to their respective ontological and phenomenological outlooks. Moreover, Heschel and Heidegger share an event that looms large in the background of each of their thinking. And as they engage or disengage from the Holocaust, they reveal concepts and analyses of man, history, and the future significance of their thought. Many of the works that delve into Heidegger’s Nazism are quoted herein and I will not replay their arguments except to note what others have said in relation to the two points I regard as essential—Heidegger’s and Heschel’s understanding of history and its relation to phenomenology/ontology. Consequently I will take it as a given that Heidegger was a Nazi, first by association and then by his own definition, and that he may have ceased being the former but never ceased being the latter, as his own words and actions in the historical record indicate. This means that philosophical silence in the face of evil or the repudiation of ideas deemed detrimental to human beings and civil society are essential to the philosophical record. While this may trouble historians, I hasten to point them in the direction of Plato’s Apology—an important staple in the philosophical record. In that dialogue, Plato relates and analyzes Socrates’ philosophical role and its positive and negative effects in society before his death. Consequently I understand “apology” in the ancient philosophical sense, meaning “the defense of a cause.” And, within that tradition I regard silence in the face of evil, or the non-accountability of one’s role in that, as deeply detrimental to philosophical ideas and human beings. Philosophy must precede history when it comes to questions of meaning. As such and as it relates to Heidegger and Heschel, this study is necessarily an ontological examination of their positions, as each refers to his own positions in this manner. Heidegger calls his position “fundamental ontology” in methodological terms and “pre-ontological” when applied to Dasein’s being.³ Heschel, in referring to moments of insight says they are acts “of raising from the depths of the mind an ontological presupposition which makes that response intellectually understandable.”⁴ To ignore the seminal ontological bias in each of their philosophies is to ignore what is central and informs every aspect of Heidegger’s and Heschel’s thinking. And to ignore how it informs the meaning of the Holocaust and their  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, ), see pp.  – .  Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), p.  and throughout Chapter .

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understanding of it, the most significant event in their generation, is both philosophically and historically unsupportable. It follows then that questions about being, ontology, Dasein, and Adam cannot be understood without this basis. It is important to proceed in this manner if we hope to come to an understanding of their thought so that we do not read into their writings ideas, positions, and nuances that they do not intend or support. When comparing what Heidegger and Heschel mean on this ontological level it is essential to keep in mind that the comparisons and contrasts that follow are not polemical but ontological, ensuing from their primary commitments as they claim them to exist. Ontology as an aspect of philosophy inquires into such questions as, What is fundamental to thought? What is the nature or reality of the categories of being? So, for example, in relation to Heschel it will be very important to ascertain what kind of being he is extending to ontological presuppositions. If he is employing metaphors as a poet might, then his words might be nothing more than inspiring suggestions, flights of fancy, or attempts to move us, with or without understanding. If this is not the case, and if Heschel eschews metaphors and does not see poetry as an adequate expression of ontology, then he must be taken in phenomenological seriousness as putting forth a philosophical idea vis-à-vis reality, and that reality, to be understood, requires a certain mode of inquiry. This example will be elemental in illustrating an important dividing line in how Heschel has been interpreted in the last fifty or so years. Is he a poetic theologian employing rhetoric to urge us to be and think like him? Or, is he a philosophical theologian who conveys ideas that open up insights about questions of belief? Some may want to say he is both. But they must make the internal case, opened up by analysis, showing that metaphors and ideas in Heschel’s thought can co-exist. I will come to a different conclusion through such an analysis. The same questions vis-à-vis poetry and ontology apply to Heidegger and, as we shall see, Heidegger argues that there is an ontological relationship between phenomenology and poetry. Moreover, if, as I will demonstrate, Heidegger’s and Heschel’s ontological commitments begin with opposing phenomenological assumptions and categories, then Heidegger and Heschel will remain at odds in relation to other serious issues—most specifically for our purposes here, the very nature of Dasein and Adam. This ontological requirement cannot be overstated in terms of this study, as it is my purpose to single-mindedly analyze what Heschel means when he refers to man in ontological terms and when he compares his own thinking on this subject to Heidegger’s. Through this sort of analysis, I believe a neglected and seminal chapter in the history of philosophy and the study of religion can come into plain view. Moreover, a prescription for further religious thinking must come to terms with these conclusions.

Introduction

5

If these goals are to be accomplished, they must be carried out in a certain order. The chapters herein reflect that concern. First, the interrogatory nature of both Heschel’s and Heidegger’s philosophical enterprises must be explained. For Heschel, the question, Who is man?, has both a non-historical and an historical impetus. These must be clarified to help locate the phenomenological bases of his thought and how they apply to Heidegger. The question—Who is man?—indicates a break with the philosophical and religious traditions for Heschel, because of the eclipse of humanity that exists within the Holocaust and is tied to Heidegger’s use of being and Dasein. The second chapter establishes the philosophical, theological, and historical context in which the main thrust of Heschel’s question is asked. In addition, it contains an in-depth examination of the biblical verses Heschel uses and most importantly, the manner in which they function as proof texts. Are they indicative of ideas or are they poetry and metaphor? This analysis illustrates how Heschel uses biblical texts not as rhetorical devices, but as phenomenological indications of meaning vis-à-vis the question—Who is man?. Moreover, it shows how, within the phenomenological outlook he uses, the meanings that Heschel is dealing with are ontological and not poetic. On this accumulated foundation, the third chapter can then directly and thoroughly examine the full phenomenological interests of Heschel and Heidegger. It compares and contrasts Heidegger’s use of terms and ideas such as thrownness, transcendence, and submission with Heschel’s understanding of how they apply to the category of being and how they rise to the level of ontological conceptions. Once the phenomenological footing of Heidegger and Heschel’s understanding is laid bare, the fourth chapter analyzes the centrality of Dasein and Adam, their meaning, the tension in which they exist, and the manner in which they do or do not yield a recognizable concept of self. Heidegger’s use of “Das Man” and Heschel’s use of pathos collide, illustrating the opposition of Heidegger’s neutrality and Heschel’s involvement with a meaning beyond being that can never be neutral. The fifth chapter answers the basic question—what is an eclipse of humanity? and applies it to Heschel’s critique of Heidegger. Having shown how Heschel and Heidegger use phenomenology to different ends while they both critique metaphysics and humanism, we can bring into sharp relief how Heschel criticizes Heidegger for his eclipse of humanity. At the confluence of the eclipse and phenomenological assertiveness lies Heidegger’s interpretation of being, epochality, and his own remarks about the Holocaust that have flowed from his previous positions. This must be done to illustrate how Heschel, consistently but unsystematically, lays Heidegger’s ontology bare.

6

Introduction

The final chapter, based on the idea demonstrated until that point, that the deconstruction of being by Heidegger leads to an irreparable deconstruction of humanity—investigates some leading thinkers who have recognized this facet of Heidegger’s thought and have attempted to deconstruct Heidegger to save him from himself. It also investigates some leading Jewish thinkers who, in adopting certain postmodern positions, have been critical of Heschel. To accomplish this goal, many of the conclusions reached in the previous chapters are brought to bear vis-à-vis these thinkers and in relation to their treatment of the Holocaust in postmodern terms. The use of thrownness, comportment, poetry, and humanity, to name but a few motifs, appears, as various thinkers make use of them in their treatment of the Holocaust, death and evil. The subheading of the chapter—placed in brackets —indicates a phenomenological epoché, and accomplishes two goals. It sets the limits for an analysis of the intuitional basis upon which these thinkers deal with death and evil and how they relate these notions to the Holocaust. And secondly, it demonstrates how Heschel’s thinking found in his critique of Heidegger’s and the Holocaust’s eclipse of humanity, bears directly on any postmodern attempt to confront or circumvent the Holocaust. Heschel’s own thoughts concerning postmodernism, when juxtaposed against those thinkers in Chapter Six, indicate a serious and thoughtful rejection of postmodernism as Heschel conceived it in 1965. Since that time, postmodernism has come to mean different things to many people. Still, when Heschel’s thoughts about Heidegger are carefully elaborated, the passage of time sharpens his critique of postmodernism and does not weaken it. In a phenomenological vein and generally speaking, I will let the texts of Who Is Man? speak for themselves so as to open up their depth, indicate their meaning, and make them more accessible. I hope to accomplish this without further harming their theological import, as they have been neglected, misunderstood, and put into categories that they decry. The issue of interpretation here is not focused on a logical necessity that is woven between the texts, but rather on a contextual one, which illuminates the depth of the texts when previously ignored or misunderstood associations are brought to light. A few final words about Heidegger are in order. There are many schools of thought vying for an accurate interpretation of the entire corpus of his published and unpublished work. Sheehan has identified four distinct approaches.⁵ And while I agree, for the most part, with Sheehan’s distinctions and have strong feelings about their strengths and weaknesses, the issue here is not first and fore-

 Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review  () pp.  – , specifically pp.  – .

Introduction

7

most which one is the correct one. The issue here is how does Heschel read Heidegger. Then and only then will we be in a position to evaluate the effect of his reading, which must be directed at the corpus of Heidegger’s work that Heschel critiqued. Then and only then will we be able to understand the extent to which Heschel’s thought counters Heidegger’s positions and whether it is ultimately detrimental to Heidegger’s formulations about Dasein and being. I am aware that the conclusions I draw about Heidegger’s thinking in Heschel’s terms are negative. First, they reflect an accurate analysis of Heschel’s thought, which is a significant chapter in the history of ideas. Second, there is still more material in Heidegger’s archives, which has not yet been made public. The recent publication of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte, ⁶ The Black Books, are a prime example of the situation in which we find ourselves. Antisemitic remarks found in them are unmistakable,⁷ but the issue remains just how the philosophical language used in his works accounts for his silence in the face of atrocity and brutality. Heidegger’s antisemitism is no longer the issue. My own feeling is that any further remarks will not exonerate Heidegger’s accountability nor loosen the attachment between his own phenomenology and his understanding of the Holocaust or, for my major purpose here, lessen Heschel’s critique. We must come to terms with remarks that have been published and place them into an ontological context. So when Heidegger says in a lecture in 1949, Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.⁸

this must be tied to his overall phenomenological enterprise and must stand as an accurate representation of his thinking in its context and in the light of Heschel’s critique—as an eclipse of humanity. Any attempt otherwise would be mis-

 Überlegungen II / VI (Schwarze Hefte  / ) [Reflections II / VI (Black Notebooks  / )] by Martin Heidegger, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann), Überlegungen VII / XI (Schwarze Hefte /) [Reflections VII / XI (Black Notebooks /)], by Martin Heidegger, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann), Überlegungen XII / XV (Schwarze Hefte  / ) [Reflections XII / XV (Black Notebooks  / )], by Martin Heidegger, ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann).  See the reviews by Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” Jewish Review of Books, Summer , and Peter E. Gordon, “Heidegger in Black,” New York Review of Books, Vol. , No.  (October , ).  See Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. J. Margolis and T. Rockmore, trans. P. Burrell and G. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), p. , n.  and Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” New York Review of Books, Vol. , No.  (June , ), pp.  – .

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leading and erroneous. Just exactly how Heidegger makes this analysis and analogy and how Heschel responds to it is at the core of this work. Lastly, I am well aware of the difficulties in translating Dasein and its shades of meaning. Notwithstanding Sheehan’s admonishment to the contrary,⁹ I have left Dasein untranslated in much of the work because Heschel has. Wherever I thought a translation helped rather than hindered, I have rendered it.

 Ibid., p. .

1 Are Philosophy and Religion Possible after Auschwitz and Hiroshima? In 1963, Abraham Heschel delivered the Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures at Stanford University. Two years later, Who Is Man?, an expanded version of these ideas, was published. He called it a prolegomena to a more comprehensive study,¹ which might refer to either past thoughts or to a newer work, which never saw the light of day.² Clearly the topic as a topic, the problem of man as indicated in the preface of the book, while having been touched upon casually in the past,³ is new to Heschel’s bibliography. Unlike virtually every other work of Heschel’s, Who Is Man? is abstruse, seemingly devoid of Jewish references and focused in a way unlike his other books. Praised upon its reception, the book quickly fell into obscurity.⁴ In the philosophical corpus of Heschel’s writing, Who Is Man? reflects a deep crisis and break with past religious thought leading up to and following in the wake of the Second World War. Who Is Man? is nothing less than a critique of the entire philosophical tradition—a calling of it into account in a world that has suffered the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In Heschel’s own words, Philosophy cannot be the same after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Certain assumptions about humanity have proved to be specious, have been smashed. What has long been regarded as commonplace has proved to be utopianism.

 Abraham J. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), p. vii.  Who Is Man?, p. vii. It is worth quoting the passage because it contains an ambiguity that is significant. Is Heschel speaking about his past work or a work that has yet to appear? “Many important aspects of the problem of man have not been discussed in this volume, while others have been dealt with too briefly. But the volume will serve as a prolegomena to a more comprehensive study in which I have been engaged for some time.” I think he refers both to the past and the future, as there are elements of passages taken from previous works, and yet there are ideas and interlocutors that have never been discussed in any earlier work.  The article published in The Concept of Man, ed. S. Radhakrishnan and P. T. Raju (London: Allen and Unwin, ), pp.  – , is a general introduction to a Jewish view of man. Other short articles in this book include the concept of man in Greek, Chinese, Indian, Christian, Islamic, and Marxist thought. Heschel’s essay is written from the perspective of Jewish thought such as the Bible, Rabbinics, mysticism, and medievalism. The entire phenomenological structure of being, world, transcendence, and man is absent from this article, as is the discussion of the Holocaust in relation to these phenomenological topics.  Reviews of the book from The Journal of Religion, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times speak of it in the most glowing terms. Edward Kaplan’s two-volume biography on Heschel, Abraham Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ) and Abraham Heschel: Spiritual Radical (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ) devote less than two pages to the book.

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1 Are Philosophy and Religion Possible after Auschwitz and Hiroshima?

Philosophy, to be relevant, must offer us a wisdom to live by—relevant not only in the isolation of our study rooms but also in moments of facing staggering cruelty and the threat of disaster. The question of man must be pondered not only in the halls of learning but also in the presence of inmates of concentration camps, and in the sight of the mushroom of a nuclear explosion.⁵

In addition to the Holocaust and the splitting of the atom, resulting in atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Who Is Man? Heschel considers human history and religious thought to have experienced a third major upheaval in the twentieth century. In Heschel’s opinion, the advent of the thought of Martin Heidegger as centered in his question of being and being-inthe-world—Dasein—precipitated a significant turn and a reworking of religious ideas in the middle of the century. The first five chapters of the book seemingly follow no order or predefined analysis. Yet, it is in the sixth and last chapter of the book, when Heschel is constructing his own position, that Heidegger is referenced twice by name. It is done once in relation to being and once in relation to man, when Heschel cites a quotation from the end of Division One of Being and Time and the completion of the “Existential Analytic.” Here, the full force of Who Is Man? comes into focus: As sheer being man dissolves into anonymity. But man is not only being, he is also living, and if he were simply to “surrender to being,” as Heidegger calls upon us to do, he would abdicate his power to decide and reduce his living to being.⁶

and, Heidegger’s rhetorical question, “Has the Dasein, as such, ever freely decided and will it ever be able to decide as to whether to come into existence or not?” has been answered long ago; “It is against your will that you are born, it is against your will that you live, and it is against your will that you are bound to give account…⁷

Together, these forces of world history swirling around Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Heidegger’s question of being have produced what Heschel calls “an eclipse of humanity.” Alluding to the Holocaust, Heschel says,

 Who Is Man?, pp.  – .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., p. . The proof text cited by Heschel, the well-known passage from Pirke Avot, Chapter , a saying of Rabbi Elazar ben Ha-Kapparis, is significant in relation to the context of the book, as are other proof texts. These will be discussed in the next chapter.

1 Are Philosophy and Religion Possible after Auschwitz and Hiroshima?

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Today it is the humanity of man that is no longer self-evident, and the issue we face is: How can a human being achieve certainty of his humanity… Moral annihilation leads to physical extermination. If man is contemptible, why be upset about the extinction of the human species? The eclipse of humanity, the inability to sense our spiritual relevance, to sense our being involved in the moral task is itself a dreadful punishment.⁸

This passage, even if left without explication, clearly points to the “extermination” of innocent Jews and others who were deemed contemptible and sub-human by the Third Reich, and brings into bold relief the sense of humanity that has become uncertain—what Heschel sees as a major effect of Heidegger’s thought. In the conflagration of the Second World War brought on by the Third Reich, more than 70 million perished. Approximately six million Jews were murdered for being nothing more than—Jewish. During this period and in the aftermath of the war, religious texts were shorn of any of their traditional intentional transcendent meaning by different philosophical as well as religious schools of thought. The secrets of nature were unlocked and harnessed into two bombs, which, as did the Holocaust, destroyed human life on a level previously incomprehensible. In this vortex, Heschel forged his ideas about man. Who Is Man? is a religious and philosophical treatise that outlines the advent of the eclipse of humanity, its philosophical elements and, most importantly, Heschel’s ideas that counter such an eclipse—most significantly in opposition to the phenomenology and thought of Martin Heidegger. A kind of irony exists when Heschel and Heidegger are considered together. Heidegger was at one time elevated by the National Socialists and Heschel at one time barely escaped the destruction of the Nazis. Yet, there is more than historical irony in the juxtaposition of Heidegger’s and Heschel’s thoughts and lives. Heidegger’s prewar stance, once revealed in conversation with Karl Lowith, was that Heidegger agreed “without reservation that his partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy.”⁹ Heidegger, an important Nazi figure in prewar Germany and in postmodern philosophy, neither explained this remark, nor overcame his silence on the issue of the horror of the Holocaust.¹⁰

 Who Is Man? , pp.  and .  Karl Lowith, “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome,” The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, ), p. .  There have been attempts to examine and explain this silence. Berel Lang’s Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), examines the issue of Heidegger’s silence from the point of view of the “Jewish Question.” While this book makes meaningful contributions to the issue, it cannot connect Heidegger’s moral and philosophical lapse from within his analytic as the “Jewish Question” has no standing therein. John D. Caputo’s Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) takes a different tack. It accepts the

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Heschel, unlike many of his family members, managed to escape the conflagration of Europe, fleeing to London a mere six weeks before the German invasion of Poland.¹¹ Throughout his life, Heschel the philosopher and theologian never wavered in his efforts to raise the specter of social justice for each and every individual regardless of background, creed, race, and religion. Throughout his life, Heschel referred to himself in the words of the Book of Zechariah (1:1–3) ―“I am a brand plucked from the fire…”¹² Heschel, a victim of the Holocaust, and Heidegger, a participant in Nazi Germany—each towering in their respective fields—collide in the pages of Who Is Man? Martin Heidegger stands as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Abraham Heschel was the preeminent voice of Jewish theology following the Holocaust and until our own time. Martin Heidegger’s thought spans from the inception of thinking in ancient Greece, culminating in his description of the problem of being. Abraham Heschel’s theology and philosophical formulations reach equally as far back as Heidegger’s into the ancient world, with the added significance of carrying the entire weight of Jewish tradition. It is in this personal, philosophical, and theological crucible that Heschel attempts to understand an unprecedented decline in humanity—an eclipse of human being. Through his concept of the ineffable, Heschel calls into question Heidegger’s formulation of the question of being and claims Heidegger is involved, as the Greeks were, in an “ontocentric predicament,”¹³ as I shall demonstrate in the second chapter of this work. It is beyond ironic that these two thinkers could have such different attachments to the Holocaust and be personally imprinted by it in their respective ways. The depth of the events surrounding the Holocaust presented an immense challenge to Heschel’s religious view of man. Unbound by previously accepted biblical and civilized constraints, a turn in human history of unforeseen effects moral and philosophical lapse and re-mythologizes Heidegger, with the help of ideas from Derrida and Levinas for example, to deconstruct Heidegger and re-construct a new non-mimetic myth. Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), takes a third position. These and other positions will be taken up in the final chapter as they shed light on the significance of Heschel’s critique that extends well beyond the scope of Who Is Man?.  Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness, p. .  This comment was delivered in Heschel’s inaugural lecture as the Harry Emerson Fosdick Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary and published in No Religion Is an Island (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, ), p. . See the bottom note there.  Who Is Man?, pp.  – .

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had taken place. In a speech recalling Zechariah, delivered in front of his audience at Union Theological Seminary upon his appointment as Visiting Professor, Heschel completes the thought in a most illuminating manner. I am a brand plucked from the fire of an altar of Satan on which millions of lives were exterminated to evil’s greater glory, and on which so much else was consumed: the divine image of so many human beings, many people’s faith in the God of justice and compassion, and much of the secret and power of attachment to the Bible bred and cherished in the hearts of men for nearly two thousand years.¹⁴

In the darkness that followed this rage, religious thinkers and philosophers have attempted to reformulate their ideas and beliefs. Clearly, Heschel’s legacy is a fulfillment of that kind of engagement. Notwithstanding a few isolated characterizations that have been debunked,¹⁵ Martin Heidegger’s thought remained unaltered in the light of these events. In addition, many significant deconstructionists who have followed Heidegger have also left an imprint on the confrontation between Jewish thought and postmodernism, and on what Heschel has called an eclipse of humanity. It has long been assumed that Martin Heidegger, Nazi Germany’s most significant philosopher, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, Judaism’s most prolific and significant thinker in the wake of the mass destruction of the twentieth century, had little bearing on each other’s ideas. Furthermore, it is also assumed that Heschel had nothing much to say about the Holocaust. Heschel’s biographer Edward Kaplan mentions in passing, without conceiving the significance that Heidegger appears once in the text of Who Is Man? ¹⁶ In a biographical work that is replete with meaningful information about the course of events in Heschel’s life, there is unfortunately a definite lack of philosophical analysis—an absence that regrettably mischaracterizes Heschel’s entire thought and its phenomenological context. Moreover, it completely misses the import of

 No Religion Is an Island, p. .  The most important of these efforts have been made by Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrrel, Dominic Di Bernardi, and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allen Blunden (London: Fontana Press, ), Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, ), Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), and Rudolph Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Rudiger Safranski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).  Edward Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, p. .

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Who Is Man? as Kaplan’s remarks concerning the preface of the book indicate.¹⁷ This lack of analysis is compounded by Kaplan’s claims that Heschel doesn’t name his interlocutors.¹⁸ This absence of conceptual analysis flies in the face of important Heschelian ideas. And, while this absence of named interlocutors is sometimes true of Heschel’s main works such as Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, and Man’s Quest for God, it is for the most part incorrect concerning Who Is Man?. Heschel begins with and names Parmenides, Plato, Augustine, Freud, Sartre, and Camus, and culminates with Heidegger to point out but a few of the more than two dozen interlocutors named and argued with in the book.¹⁹ More importantly, we are told by Kaplan that Who Is Man? is nothing new. According to Kaplan, “Heschel distilled the arguments of Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, and The Prophets into six chapters” of Who Is Man?.²⁰ Kaplan implies that Who Is Man? is similar in substance and tone to the essay “The Concept of Man in Jewish Thought,” which had appeared five years earlier. Even a quick perusal and comparison of the texts indicates how vastly different they are. The earlier essay abounds in biblical, rabbinic, and Hasidic quotes with scant reference to the philosophical tradition. Plato,²¹ Aquinas,²² Pythagoras,²³ Maimonides,²⁴ and Kant²⁵

 It is clear to me that Kaplan has misread the Preface, thereby misreading the entire book. Heschel says, “Many important aspects of the problem of man have not been discussed in this volume, while others have been dealt with too briefly. But the volume will serve as a prolegomena to a more comprehensive study in which I have been engaged for some time.” Heschel is ambiguous here. He is both qualifying the appearance of this text, and its relation to others he has written, but solely in the eyes of those who might criticize it for not speaking about some aspects of the problem of man, or speaking of them too briefly. He is clearly telling the reader not to look only to the past in expecting answers to these questions, but to wait for a further study to appear. I think Kaplan arrives at the conclusion that there is a “distillation” of arguments from Man Is Not Alone, God in Search of Man, and The Prophets by misreading a footnote at the beginning of the essay, “The Concept of Man in Jewish Thought,” which Heschel wrote for an anthology of different philosophical and religious ideas of man, The Concept of Man, ed. P. T Raju and S. Radhakrishnan. There, the title of the chapter is noted at the end with a star that directs the reader’s attention to the following note at the bottom of the page, “In this chapter the author has incorporated material from his three books, Man Is not Alone, Man’s Quest for God, and God in Search of Man.” Clearly the note is interjected by the editors as is evident from the third-person language and the fact that Heschel used numbers to indicate his own footnotes in the body of the text. Kaplan, without analysis, carries this over to Who Is Man?.  Who Is Man? p. .  Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, p. .  Ibid.  “The Concept of Man …,” p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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are each mentioned once in the earlier work. There is no mention of the modern philosophical tradition and of the urgency to confront it that is thoroughly infused in Who Is Man?. Moreover, Kaplan suggests that we merely review the argument by reading the chapter heads and subheads in the table of contents of Who Is Man? to gain an understanding of its message.²⁶ On the contrary, Who Is Man? is the philosophical cornerstone of Heschel’s theology. It is his central work that underlies all of his theological assertions. An investigation of its philosophical background and sensitivity is an essential ingredient that allows for a more profound reading of Heschel and the formulation of his ideas. The critique of Heidegger, forming the backbone of Who Is Man?, is not apparent in the chapter headings nor can any amount of reconstructing them bring Heschel’s significant critique of Heidegger to light. It is therefore imperative that Who Is Man? be established in the Jewish and philosophical traditions in which it clearly situates itself, so that its depth and convictions are illuminated. It is imperative to shed light on two of the most significant thinkers in their respective traditions. The establishment of Heschel’s concern for this analysis will be undertaken in Chapter 2 of this work, as I consider the audience to whom the book is addressed. This imprecision by Kaplan leads to more profound confusion when we are told Heschel “began constructing his alternative system to existentialism in Chapter 3 [of Who Is Man?] and just a bit further down the page we are told that “Heschel thus laid the foundations for an alternative model to existentialism with his elevation of Descartes’s rationalist dictum: I am commanded therefore—I am.”²⁷ Again, against the background of Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, an accurate portrait of his philosophical concerns can emerge. The issue that Kaplan confuses is Heschel’s critique of Heidegger’s “Existential Analytic,” which is buried deeply in Who Is Man?, and Heschel’s critique of Camus and Sartre, which lies prominently on the surface in Who Is Man? Without proper treatment, this double-edged sword is entirely overlooked by Kaplan.²⁸ Again, a cursory reading of the texts without naïve or preformulated concepts speaks for itself. In Who Is Man?, Heschel claims, “the acceptance of our existential debt is the prerequisite of sanity”²⁹ and “the security of existence lies in the exaltation of existence”³⁰—

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid pp.  – .  Kaplan approvingly cites a review of Who Is Man? by Booklist, which states that Heschel’s view “is strictly antithetical to existentialism” (Spiritual Radical, p. ).  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., p. .

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hardly refutations of existential thinking or extrapolations of Cartesian thinking. This aspect of Heschel’s critique of Heidegger’s “Existential Analytic” will be dealt with in Chapters 3 and 4 of this work. In addition, it is clear from a cursory reading of A Passion for Truth, which appeared eight years after Who Is Man?, that there is a definite existential stream in Heschel’s thought, which he locates in an affinity with Kierkegaard. When, long ago, I began to read the works of Kierkegaard, the father of modern existentialism, I was surprised to find that many of his thoughts were familiar to me. I realized that a number of his perspectives and basic concerns had reached me from the Kotzker…The similarity of their concerns is all the more striking because of their profound heterogeneity.³¹

I hope to detail this in a third book on Heschel but mention it here because it is important to recognize the non-rhetorical, philosophical argumentation of Who Is Man? that has eluded Heschel’s most thorough biographer. Unfortunately Kaplan is not alone in his imprecision and lack of understanding when it comes to Heschel’s philosophical commitments. Other contemporary interpreters have adopted positions explaining Heschel that incorporate ideas that Heschel firmly argues against. Ironically, leading with their own agendas, they are forced to come to the conclusion that they know better than Heschel exactly what he means. If they did it by way of sustained analysis of the philosophical commitments that Heschel employs that would be one thing, but they don’t. They do little more than incorporate unchecked assumptions into their attempted explanations, which when unpacked are difficult to categorize as explanations. Shai Held has offered an account of Heschel’s theology that attempts to unify it through the “call of transcendence” but provides no philosophical background to his analysis. That transcendence is used as a counterpart to Heidegger, as we shall see in our analysis of Who Is Man? does not occur to Held. Nor does it seem important enough for Held to get the title of the book correctly as he mistakenly calls it “What is Man?” in the list of abbreviations at the outset. I find the errors so varied and of such consequence in Held’s presentation that they are too numerous to mention in detail save one. Held claims that “Heschel’s distress in the face of technological modernity is to some extent resonant with Heidegger’s.” This flies in the face of the face of everything that will be demonstrated in this work and is repugnant to the thought of Heschel, as we shall see as I de-

 Abraham Heschel, A Passion for Truth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), p. .

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velop the ideas herein. Of the many other errors of significance in Held’s work I prefer to offer some of the most outstanding below in the notes.³² Unlike Held who is unaware of and uninformed of the philosophical issues at stake, Joseph Harp Britton, the author of Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety,³³ clearly demonstrates his acquaintance with the philosophical issues at stake. Unfortunately, as Kaplan and Held before him, Britton brings his own agenda to the examination of Heschel’s thought. Kaplan’s literary bias and Held’s postmodern minimalization of the traditions of distinctive philosophical analysis are also present in Britton’s work. In the mind of Britton, Heschel is seen as a pietist, in line with the tradition in which Britton himself is situated. This is not outlandish, as Man Is Not Alone and other passages examine the notion of piety and advocate its significance. But it is hardly half of the story. Consequently, the philosophical distinctions of which Britton is well aware are ultimately jettisoned in favor of theological ones and postmodern ones. The established interdependence of religion and philosophy in Heschel’s thinking³⁴ is skewed toward the theological, and in the end Britton concludes that Heschel is advocating on behalf of the “credibility” of God’s existence and the“pertinence” of this pious knowledge.³⁵ Both these conclusions fly in the face of Heschel’s positions and it is surprising that Britton is unaware of how far afield he has come in his assertions. Not only has Britton turned Heschel into a pietist, but he has made him into a postmodernist à la Gianni Vattimo, who postulates a meaning for “weak ontology.”³⁶ Of direct concern here are Britton’s few references to Heidegger, his lack of understanding of the depth of Heschel’s phenomenology and the depth to which

 Shai Held, The Call of Transcendence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ). See p.  for Held’s off-the-cuff remark about Heschel and Heidegger; see p.  for his reliance on Taylor’s characterization of selfhood which is Heidegerrian in opposition to Heschel; his misuse of Nietzsche’s use of crisis in comparison to Heschel (p. ); his misunderstanding of Heschel’s phenomenological approach that leads him to say that Heschel thinks human beings have a natural human responsiveness to God (p. ) and that Heschel’s misunderstands his own culturally conditioned positions (p. ); and his misunderstanding of anthropology as a propaedeutic to theology (p. ) and Held’s misunderstanding of the relationship between poetics and theology in Heschel’s thought (pp.  and ). These baseless assertions will be clarified in the course of this work, as they are essential for achieving any understanding of Heschel, who eschews and argues against the positions that Held ascribes to him. These will all be clarified in the course of the book.  Joseph Harp Britton, Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety (New York: Bloomsbury, ).  See my Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, Chapter .  Britton, part .  Ibid., p. .

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and with which Heschel argues on a philosophical level. Britton goes so far and in an unsubstantiated way to tell us that Heschel employs an anthropological viewpoint,³⁷ an idea that is unsubstantiated and is established in a forthcoming chapter here and on which Heschel even agrees with Heidegger.³⁸ This comment made in passing, because it has such deep repercussions for our understanding of Heschel’s response to Heidegger and the Holocaust, is troubling. All of these types of confusion and lack of precision will mislead even an astute reader and must be corrected, for they lead to an even greater misunderstanding. In my previous work on Heschel, on which Kaplan claims to base his analysis³⁹ and which Held argues against,⁴⁰ it was argued that the key idea to all of Heschel’s thinking is the idea of revelation which is presented in strong Husserlian terms and themes.⁴¹ One of the two most important statements in this vein appears in none other than Who Is Man? and is also entirely overlooked by Held. Consequently Held’s juxtaposing of ideas and verses is nothing more than that. The omission of phenomenology as a philosophical school or tool based on Husserl or seen as a critique of Heidegger, means that Held provides no analysis at all. When questioning the condition of the discontent of the self, Heschel says, Its most characteristic condition is discontent with sheer being, generated by a challenge which is not to be derived from being around, being-here-too; it questions and transcends human being. Just as consciousness always posits an idea, as Brentano and Husserl have shown, self-consciousness posits a challenge. Consciousness of the self comes about in being challenged, in being called upon, in the choice between refusal and response.⁴²

The issue of this “discontent with sheer being” while a prod against an entire philosophical tradition, stands out here against the background of Heidegger, who is ominously left unmentioned in Heschel’s choice for intentionality of

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. , , , , , and  – .  See Edward Kaplan, “Heschel as Philosopher: Phenomenology and the Rhetoric of Revelation,” Modern Judaism , no.  (February, ): pp.  – . See note  p. . Aside from the objections that I have raised in this chapter and will demonstrate in the following chapters, it is clear to me that Kaplan has a minimal understanding of philosophy and its history and little understanding of phenomenology as it applies to Heschel. His discussion has no bearing on Heschel’s philosophy, as Kaplan’s remarks are centered on its stylistic presentation and never begin to penetrate the content of Heschel’s ideas. It is a small but unsubstantiated leap from this stylistic presentation to the unfortunate confusion of philosophy and rhetoric in Heschel’s theology—a confusion that Heschel himself never allows.  Held, pp.  – .  Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation (Atlanta: Scholars Press, ).  Who Is Man?, pp.  – .

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ideas and phenomenology. The omission and the “discontent with sheer being” will be essential to the understanding of Who Is Man?, detailed in forthcoming chapters. The confusion over these issues, while significant in and of itself, leads to an even greater misunderstanding. It obscures the root of the problem of revelation for Heschel, its centrality and its philosophical value as a non–rhetorical insight⁴³ and as a position countering Held’s type of postmodern interpretation of Heschel which never rises to the level of analysis. At the root of Heschel’s analysis of revelation is the critique of metaphoric revelation and literal revelation in favor of his own idea of “responsive” revelation that is based on his understanding of midrash.⁴⁴ This leads to Heschel’s well-known but often misunderstood dictum, “As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a Midrash.”⁴⁵ Kaplan overlooks this crucial Heschelian position in favor of his own idea of metaphor and poetics,⁴⁶ which is not borne out by any of Heschel’s texts, and which leads to conclusions that ignore and obscure the profound philosophical issues with which Heschel is grappling. In light of Britton’s methodology it illustrates just how Britton, who is well aware of the philosophical issues, underestimates the intentional and phenomenological depth of Heschel’s ideas. Consequently, Britton’s normative, descriptive, theological interpretation of Heschel that relies on credibility and pertinence, is exactly what Heschel is arguing against. As Heschel himself says of the difference between philosophy and poetry on the second page of God in Search of Man, which he refers to as a philosophy of Judaism, In our quest for forgotten questions, the method and spirit of philosophical inquiry are of greater importance than theology, which is essentially descriptive, normative and historical. Philosophy may be defined as the art of asking the right questions. One of the marks of

 See God in Search, pp.  – . Heschel could not make it any clearer that his understanding of prophetic understatement at the basis of his theology of revelation has three philosophical aspects—the idea, the claim, and the result—which carefully exclude a rhetorical misunderstanding that Kaplan has adopted.  Abraham Heschel, God in Search, pp.  – . See the following articles clarifying Heschel’s position on this seminal point: Lawrence Perlman, “As a Report About Revelation, the Bible Itself Is a Midrash,” Conservative Judaism , no.  (Fall ), pp.  – , and Lawrence Perlman, “Revelation and Prayer: Heschel’s Meeting with God,” Conservative Judaism , no.  (Spring ), pp.  – .  God in Search, p. .  Edward Kaplan, “Heschel as Philosopher: Phenomenology and the Rhetoric of Revelation,” Modern Judaism , no.  (February ), pp.  – , “Abraham Heschel’s Poetics of Religious Thinking,” in John C. Merkle, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought (New York: Macmillan, ), pp.  – , and “Metaphor and Miracle: A. J. Heschel and the Holy Spirit,” Conservative Judaism , no.  (Winter ), pp.  – .

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philosophical thinking is that, in contrast to poetry, for example, it is not a self-sufficing pouring forth of insight, but the explicit statement of a problem and the attempt to offer an answer to a problem.⁴⁷

Poeticizing and metaphorizing Heschel’s ideas thoroughly depletes the idea of revelation, as Heschel referred to it,⁴⁸ and leads to a further diminishing of the philosophical content of the concept of man as analyzed in Who Is Man?. David Novak,⁴⁹ while aware of the phenomenological issues at hand in Heschel’s thinking, overemphasizes an aspect of Heschel’s thought to the detriment of our understanding its complexity. In an attempt to couple pathos and revelation, Novak argues that Heschel resorts to poetry.⁵⁰ This runs counter to everything that Heschel says of his method, of revelation and of pathos itself. In my first study it was established that Heschel is dealing with an intentional act of consciousness, one that is based on an ontological presupposition that gives insight into an objective aspect of reality. And, when analyzed correctly as he states clearly in God in Search of Man, it is an idea.⁵¹ Moreover, pathos, the content of revelation is, as Heschel himself says, a reasoned emotion. It is best to quote Heschel, as his language on this issue is clear and not given to being misinterpreted. It [pathos] is not a passion, an unreasoned emotion, but an act formed with intention, rooted in decision and determination…to repeat, its essential meaning is not to be seen in its psychological denotation, as standing for a state of mind, but in its theological connotation, signifying God as involved in history, as intimately affected by events in history, as living care.⁵²

The distinction may seem minor, but it is a world of difference especially since it leads Novak to claim that Heschel uses hyperbole when talking about revelation, when, in fact, Heschel has a clear and significant idea of prophetic understatement.⁵³ To read Heschel otherwise is to misunderstand Heschel’s phenomenology. Awe, wonder, the sublime, radical amazement are not feelings, but intentional acts of

 God in Search, p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  David Novak, “Heschel’s Phenomenology of Revelation,” Abraham Joshua Heschel: Philosophy, Theology and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. S. Krajewski and A. Lipszyc (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, ), pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  God in Search, pp.  ff.  Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Torchbooks, ), Vol. II, p. . See also pp.  – , where Heschel makes clear that religious emotion is “more than just feeling.”  See God in Search, pp. , , and most importantly  – .

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consciousness that may or may not lead to insight. Importantly, and this cannot be underscored enough, Heschel does not present this analysis because it feels good or makes others feel good. He presents it because he is arguing with other phenomenologies and attempting to overcome their objections, biases, and assumptions. This will become more evident when we disclose the elements of Heschel’s critique of Heidegger. And while revelation cannot be reduced to a form of knowledge, a conscious act of meaning may be understood by human beings. The establishment of an accurate philosophical context for Who Is Man? will evoke a historical connection heretofore ignored. The significance of the relationship between Heidegger’s and Heschel’s thinking and lives has only deepened and broadened as the passage of time highlights their character against the background of their accomplishments. Heidegger’s philosophical significance, in light of the continuing revelation of his Nazi past continues to grow. He is clearly a pivotal figure in twentieth-century thought and it is seminal that his ideas be analyzed in terms, if not Jewish, then at least compatible with a form of authentic Jewish thinking. It is rendered all the more meaningful when someone such as Heschel who has lived the experience, and lived to confront this barbarity of unprecedented proportions in the realm of ideas as well, as both a spectator to history and a shaper of its destiny through his own writings and actions, confronts Heidegger. In light of Heidegger’s silence concerning the Holocaust, historical research conducted in the last two decades has forced philosophers to reconsider their analysis of the thinker who is considered by many to be the greatest and most influential of the twentieth century. Central Heideggerian questions are seminal in current philosophical discussions and have thoroughly penetrated the humanities. Moreover, in its wake, Heidegger’s “destruction” of being⁵⁴ led to a post-structuralist literary critical approach to thought through Derrida and others, which has further altered approaches to religious thinking. While obviously unaware of the reworkings of Heidegger’s thought, Heschel stands in complete opposition to both Heidegger’s deconstruction and to any deconstruction of the process of thinking that has been taken up by Derrida and others. This will be taken up in the conclusion of this work. Still, even while philosophers have been slow to analyze Heidegger’s thought in the light of his Nazi past, Heschel was amongst the first to do so. In the thought of Abraham Heschel, this confluence of history, interpretation, and philosophical analysis vis-à-vis Heidegger’s work, produced an eclipse of humanity that reverberates well beyond Richard Rorty’s remark that “the

 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. .

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smell of Auschwitz will linger in Heidegger’s pages”⁵⁵ and beyond Rorty’s critique of Heidegger’s pragmatism.⁵⁶ In Heschel’s critique it is more than a moment of blindness or accidental allegiances in which Heidegger’s “destruction” coincided with the destruction of the Jewish people. Yet, nowhere in his account does Heschel refer to the issue of Heidegger’s Nazism directly, even though there have been at least three controversies⁵⁷ concerning Heidegger’s Nazism, the first and second of which Heschel would most certainly would have been aware.⁵⁸ If the relationship between Heschel’s and Heidegger’s thinking is crucial to understanding the philosophical religious tensions of the mid- to late twentieth century, why has it been ignored and misjudged? In part, the irony of Heschel’s and Heidegger’s juxtaposition was lost because of the elephant in the room. The Holocaust so central in each of their personal destinies is met largely with silence on Heidegger’s part, and with a certain kind of quietude on Heschel’s part. Moreover, while we refer to the murder of six million Jews as the Holocaust—a term of Greek origin referring to a burnt offering of sacrificial origins —as yet there is no common vocabulary for Heidegger and Heschel or those interested in their ideas, to confront this historical eruption. Again, irony has a role to play but not a decisive one, as we shall see in the analysis. As many Hebrew speakers and others are aware, Jews often refer to the event as the Shoah—literally—“destruction,” matching the term “destruction” that Heidegger uses for deconstruction. I say we must go beyond the irony, for it is the underlying concepts of deconstruction and being that reveal Heschel’s critique of Heidegger and indicate what Heschel means by “eclipse of humanity”—his most significant way of characterizing the Holocaust. As we consider the irony of Heidegger’s words and concepts in the fifth chapter of this work, it will become clear just how deaf to the irony Heidegger was.

 Richard Rorty, “A Master from Germany,” New York Times Book Review, May , , pp.  – .  Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency and Pragmatism,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, ), pp.  – .  See Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), pp.  – .  The first concerns Karl Lowith’s remarks in Les temps modernes in the s. See Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, p. . The second concerns issues raised before the Denazification Committee in , including issues raised by Karl Jaspers and letters exchanged with Herbert Marcuse (see Wolin, pp.  – ) and issues raised in France in . The third is centered around the publication of Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism but not limited to it, and includes reactions by many, including Sheehan and Rorty.

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To go beyond the irony of this historical and philosophical situation, one must answer the question posed by the editor of a translation of the “Letter on Humanism.” Perhaps most disturbing, can Heidegger invoke “malignancy” and “the rage of evil” without breaking his silence and offering some kind of reflection on the Extermination?⁵⁹

How could the greatest philosopher, whose thought penetrated the nihilism of the philosophical tradition⁶⁰ and that of his own time, be so blind to the nihilism of Nazism and his own preferred idea of National Socialism? How could a great philosopher, whose thought attempted to express the meaning of being, be so wrong about the meaning of being in his own time and space? And, how could he not admit his blindness? While many have asked these and similar questions without answering them fully, it will be argued here that any answer that matches the depth of Heidegger’s notion of being can only proceed if it includes a phenomenology of pathos that is indispensable to the notion of being. And it is the philosophical theology of Abraham Heschel as found in Who Is Man? that incorporates this notion of pathos that transcends being. As Heschel will argue in the face of Heidegger’s notion of being, being alone is not antithetical to barbarity and the existence of concentration camps that exist to eradicate humanity and murder innocent Jews and others.⁶¹ Perhaps more importantly, the irony of Heidegger’s and Heschel’s juxtaposition has been missed because some Heidegger scholars, and I don’t include the overtly apologetic ones in this group, have misplaced their criticism. The same editor who asks the question about “the Extermination” refers to the Letter on

 Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, ), p. .  There are innumerable studies and papers concerning Heidegger’s nihilism, its relation to Nietzsche, and its phenomenological meaning. I use nihilism here in the sense in which Blattner uses it as the self-concealing of being—that we cannot say what the truth of being is, and that it is not a mere cultural phenomenon, William Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp.  – .  There have been others in the past ten or twenty years who have asked the question that Heschel asked in . Approaching it from either an historical or philosophical perspective in Heschel’s eyes limits the question and renders the answer partial. The theological aspect of pathos and the limit of being, when introduced as Heschel’s critique of philosophy, yields a result that the following could not achieve. See Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Wolin, and Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy.

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Humanism as “splendid” and suggests we seek explanations therein to counter the evil we find in the world.⁶² Ian Thompson, in an article titled “Heidegger and National Socialism,”⁶³ rationalizes each aspect of Heidegger’s disdain for academic freedom, his ill-chosen comparison of the Shoah to mechanized agribusiness (of which I will have more to say later on), and his fundamental ontological mistakes that “would have corrected” or “redirected” National Socialism. Thompson claims that Heidegger’s political errors have nothing to do with his philosophy.⁶⁴ This in spite of Wolin’s work, continuing the work of Lowith that appeared in 1946, drawing a parallel between Heidegger’s philosophical terms and their usage in Heidegger’s political speeches of the day.⁶⁵ Moreover, Sheehan has demonstrated in his critique of Nolte just how far Heidegger’s philosophy and political engagement were joined and continued in the light of his reactionary conservative convictions.⁶⁶ In a more troubling vein, Theodore Kisiel on Heidegger’s politics and the Third Reich ends his essay with the following words, With the entire nation, and especially that “site of science” called the university, placed in the service of the total mobilization of the military-industrial complex in 1936 in preparation for the total war, the “movement” goes high-tech and becomes an unbending worldview. As such, it comes into contentions with the world view of capitalism and communism for the status of the dominant world power within the calculative scheme of an abstractive global geopolitics that levels all ethnic uniqueness and its pluralism, even one’s own. Its leaders become supreme technicians and its people the worker-soldiers of a gigantic global artifact. Fundamental questioning and deliberation on the sense and root of one’s home situation are put on hold. As early as 1937, Heidegger can predict, albeit privatissime, that “with the abolition of philosophy, the Germans—and this with the intention of fulfilling their essence as a people!—are committing suicide in world history.”⁶⁷

If this is the net effect of a scholarly account of Heidegger’s concern—the “suicide” of Germans in world history, a metaphor to be sure—and not the murder of six million Jews and the deaths of tens of millions from a war initiated by

 Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. D. Krell, p. .  A Companion to Heidegger, pp.  – .  Ian Thomson, “Heidegger and National Socialism,” A Companion to Heidegger, p. .  See Wolin, p.  for the parallels and Wolin, pp.  –  for Lowith’s essay, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism.”  See Thomas Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi,” The New York Review of Books Xl, nos.  –  (January , ), pp.  – .  Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Philosophical Geopolitics in the Third Reich,” pp.  – , in A Commentary to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ).

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the geopolitics of Germany and irrational hatred, then something is terribly amiss. Just what that is, is at the heart of Heschel’s concern. That this also sounds so eerily parallel to Heidegger’s remark as reported by Ernst Junger, “that rather than apologize for his political errors, he would wait for Hitler to come back to life and beg pardon for misleading Heidegger.”⁶⁸ How could Heidegger in the “Letter on Humanism,” written in 1946 with the full import of the concentration camps coming to light, have written these words? “German” is not spoken to the world so that the world might be reformed through the German essence; rather, it is spoken to the Germans so that from a fateful belongingness to the nations they might become world-historical along with them. The homeland of this historical dwelling is nearness to Being.⁶⁹

Moreover, how can Heidegger’s fascination and philosophical attachment to National Socialism be severed from his expectation of the fulfillment of Germany’s nearness to being through the hands of his Führer?⁷⁰ These unanswered questions and absences have also affected the thought of those who have come to drink at Heidegger’s well. In post-structuralist terms, questionable characterizations of this event have been raised. Shall we see the Shoah as a text or a fiction as it must be seen in the nexus of deconstructionist thinking? Is it an event like all other imagined events, which is present because of its metaphorical import—no different or of equal epochal meaning to all others? In a sense that will be born out in this study, these perceptions come to a head in the well-known statement of Lacoue-Labarthe that “Nazism is a humanism.”⁷¹ Nazism, according to him, is just another misguided enlightenment tradition. The universal underpinnings of humanism are really the forces that dominate humanity, and sufficient reason is an exercise in totalitarian thinking. Whether or not any of this goes beyond fiction (and the case will be made here that it does not) and has historical actuality, most of us can’t imagine the Enlightenment’s greatest philosophical spokesman, Immanuel Kant, being silent and sanctioning the dropping of gas canisters into chambers containing women and children, even though he believed war served a divine purpose.⁷²

 See Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi,” p. , and Sheehan’s note .  Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell, pp.  – .  See Thomas Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi,” specifically his conclusion on the deep attachment between Heidegger’s politics and his philosophy.  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique (Paris: C. Bourgois, ), p. .  Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Kant on History, ed. L. W. Beck (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, ), pp.  ff.

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The implicit argument that Heschel will make is that the search for the metaphysical underpinnings of the Holocaust is a fools’ errand when isolated from a certain religious perspective. Heschel wants to argue that a specific phenomenological attitude makes certain assumptions apparent, which contribute to insights about humanity—and that Heidegger discounted these assumptions without any consideration. These will be taken up in Chapter 3. Here it is worthwhile citing Heschel’s words concerning his supposed silence on the Shoah from Who Is Man?. The emphasis from the outset is not the problem of God, per se, or the problem of evil. It is the phenomenological relationship between the debasement of being human and the destruction of human being. When located in Heschel’s phenomenological context, his intention becomes clear. In pre-Nazi Germany the following statement of man was frequently quoted: “The human body contains a sufficient amount of fat to make seven cakes of soap, enough iron to make a medium-sized nail, a sufficient amount of phosphorous to equip two thousand matchheads, enough sulphur to rid one’s self of one’s fleas.” Perhaps there is a connection between this statement and what the Nazis actually did in the extermination camps: make soap of human flesh.⁷³

In Jewish thought and in the theological tradition, the work of Abraham Heschel stands outside of all these post-structuralist tendencies and is entrenched against the postmodernism of its day. Transplanted and reborn on the soil of America at the outbreak of the war,⁷⁴ Heschel is the most important and last exemplar of the practice of German Jewish philosophy and the most profound Jewish American thinker in a world that had been devoid of traditional nonfundamentalist voices. He is both essentially German and American in his thinking. It is too easy to misplace this juxtaposition, relying on his kerygmatic language, while being oblivious to his deeply rooted criticism of metaphysics, postmodernism, and the humanism that was displaced by Nazi Germany’s hatred. Heschel’s allegiance to both worlds, the German and the American, is a profound duality—more profound than the one claimed by Peter Eli Gordon for

 Who Is Man? p. .  The fact that Heschel’s thought spans the experience of Poland, Germany, and America, so deeply rooted in continental philosophy in direct relation to both Husserl and Heidegger, causes me to disagree with the characterization of Peter Eli Gordon that Rosenzweig’s work represents the culmination of the German Jewish tradition. See Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), p. xix. Heschel’s engagement with the issues of German philosophy and more specifically with Heidegger renders Gordon’s claim obsolete.

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Franz Rosenzweig.⁷⁵ It is complicated by a intense allegiance to his adopted home in America and his search for philosophical and theological truths in a new idiom. And while the idiom of Heschel’s writings is so American, the substance of the thought is deeply European. And while Who Is Man? does many things, it will be argued here that what it does in its entirety is engage Heidegger in a debate about the meaning of being and most centrally about the meaning of man. The audience is predominantly American, but there is no doubt that the issues that went into Heschel’s formation as a theologian and philosopher, and that are present in Who Is Man?, were primarily those he encountered in European continental philosophy, as did many transplanted European thinkers of his day.⁷⁶ We ignore this connection at the peril of misrepresenting Heschel and his thought. In its place, Heschel has been labeled a spiritual radical. Ignoring the philosophical underpinnings and junctures of his thought, is to surrender to an image of him to the middle part of the twentieth century that was marked by social and spiritual unrest in America. It is barely a partial representation or depiction of the scope of the man and his thinking. Heschel was the thinker and philosopher of religion who sensed the tripartite dynamic forces of destruction, interpretation, and inhumanity in the Shoah, ancient and modern philosophy, and the debasement of the biblical view of man. Coming as he does at the time of the murder of six million Jews and the rebirth of European forms and idioms of thought in America, it should be no surprise that he is motivated by a sense of loss of wisdom, truth of philosophy, and by the impotence of religion. In this context, it is hardly radical to ask if philosophy and religion can continue after the deaths of tens of millions by gassing, starvation, and incineration. In response to this lack of compassion for human life, Heschel attempted to create a non-fundamentalist theology of pathos, deepening our understanding of the calamity and destruction that nearly decimated the Jewish people and almost took his life, weakened Jewish ideas, imbued the course of human events with great suffering, and obscured the image of man. And he did this not by analyzing God or the meaning of being directly, but by analyzing man, as is indicated in the first sub-heading of Who Is Man?, “To think of man in human terms.”⁷⁷ In my first phenomenological study on Heschel’s thought, Heschel’s reliance on Husserl’s phenomenology and its basis for his core idea, the idea of revelation—a decidedly nonfundamentalist, nonmetaphorical concept—was demonstrated.

 Ibid., p. .  This is true for many like Heschel, such as his friend Tillich, and others such as Marcuse, Arendt, and Lowith.  Who Is Man?, p. .

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In this work I will show that these few seemingly insignificant references to Heidegger are in fact the cornerstone of the entire book and a barely noticeable issue which belies a deep, immense and full-fledged critique of Heidegger’s thought and its possibility for the future. It is no accident that Who Is Man? also contains Heschel’s single positive reference to Brentano and Husserl, while many implicit links to them are to be found in The Prophets published in 1962 and its German predecessor, Die Prophetie published in 1936.⁷⁸ To understand this Heschelian concern we need to situate Who Is Man? in the European philosophical tradition and in the Jewish tradition, analyze Heschel’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, and elaborate Heschel’s argument against Heidegger via the concepts that are explicit and implicit in the text. We will see that Heschel compares the philosophical concept of being which arises in Parmenides’ thought and culminates in Heidegger’s notion of being, with Heschel’s own notion of being, and how the former concept creates an eclipse of humanity according to Heschel, as located in Heidegger’s antihumanism. A casual reading of Who Is Man? will lead one to encounter terms and ideas that are clearly Heideggerian, such as Dasein, thrownness, and facticity. A careful reading will unearth direct criticisms of Heidegger’s ontological difference and a novel formulation by Heschel―the paradox of being human/human being―which is the kernel of the book and counters the meaning of Heidegger’s ontological difference.⁷⁹ This analysis will demonstrate that Heschel delivered a book that is a profound counterargument to Heidegger’s antihumanism, a reformulation of a basic religious idea in the wake of the Holocaust, a critique of deconstructionism, and a basis for any future study and conception of religious ideas. In short, it is my opinion that this little book, heretofore ignored, misunderstood and marginalized, by both those who think they have surpassed the old ideas of religious transcendence and by those who seek to emulate Heschel,⁸⁰ is the

 See Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, Chapter , for a description of the phenomenological link between these two works.  See Michael Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, trans. Michael McNeill (Albany: State University of New York Press, ) pp.  –  and  –  for an analysis of the problem that the ontological difference leaves in its wake in relation to facticity and moral debt, which is detached from all ontic debt, thus raising the question of “existential solipsism.”  The fact that we have barely yet separated the man and the ideas enough to perform the kind of analysis that needs to be done, is to be attributed mainly to those who claim to be Heschel’s adherents but have yet to pierce the significance of his ideas. It is here that most scholarship on Heschel fails. Analysis is often supplanted with circular reasoning, the philosophical context is displaced by attachment to theological commitments and insight, and insight, a philosophical mainstay of Heschel’s own thinking, is lost in a repetition of Heschel’s own phrases and words.

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single-most important work of Jewish ideas and religion in the twentieth century, and should take its rightful place in postwar discussions of religion. I am aware that some might argue that Heidegger and Judaism and Heidegger and Heschel have much in common. While I can’t address the scope of the first comparison here, it is at least incumbent upon me to address the second. Even the most obvious surface similarities between Heschel and Heidegger have gone unnoticed. Both Heidegger and Heschel are phemonenologists,⁸¹ use interrogatory,⁸² preconceptual,⁸³ hermeneutical⁸⁴ views of reality, focus on care⁸⁵ and history as the meaning of being,⁸⁶ and treat being as disclosing a meaning.⁸⁷ Most important for this study, Heidegger defines man as “the one who is looked at”⁸⁸ and Heschel says of man that he is the divine concern.⁸⁹ For Heschel, revelation evokes a response⁹⁰ and for Heidegger, thought is evoked by being.⁹¹ Others have incorporated Heidegger into their own ideas and analyses of Jewish thought,⁹² on account of these and other reasons. As my analysis will

 Heidegger, Being and Time, p.  ff; Heschel, Who Is Man?, pp.  – .  Heidegger, Being and Time, p.  ff; Heschel, God in Search, p. , Who Is Man?, p. .  Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. ,  – ; Heschel, Who Is Man?, p. .  Heidegger, Being and Time, pp.  – ; Heschel, God in Search, p. , “As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash” and Who Is Man?, pp.  and .  Heidegger, Being and Time, pp.  ff; Heschel, Who Is Man?, p. .  Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. ,  – ; Heschel, Who Is Man?, pp.  – .  Heidegger, Being and Time, pp.  and  – ; Heschel, Who Is Man?, pp.  – .  Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. , Parmenides (Frankfurt: Klostermann, ), p.  and Die Technik und die Kehre, th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, ), p. , and The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, ), p. .  See Who Is Man?, p. , God in Search, p. , Man Is Not Alone, pp.  – .  God in Search, p. .  What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, ), pp. , , and . See also Richardson, pp.  and .  See Allen Michael Scult, Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, ) and Eliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), both of which are aligned directly with Heidegger’s thought. Scult’s use of generalizations in attempting to make a correspondence between Aristotle, Heidegger, and Torah is unconvincing on so many levels. Wolfson’s use of Heidegger is premised on a misunderstanding of a seminal Heideggerian notion, as Wolfson applies it to his own phenomenology. Wolfson says, (p. ), “… the secondary stage of phenomenological analysis requires reflection on the intentional structure of consciousness. I share with phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice-Merleau Ponty the assumption that ‘things’ seen are constituted in consciousness.” There is no discussion in any positive sense in Heidegger’s writings of intentional consciousness, a concept entirely subjective in the Cartesian sense, which Heidegger denies. See Being and Time, pp.  –  and for a pointed indication of the difference between Husserl and Heidegger on “consciousness,” see Steven Galt Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy,” A Companion

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demonstrate, we have here a case of using words and concepts that are and sound similar, but which resound with diametrically opposed meanings. These divergences are centered around Heidegger’s use of Dasein and Heschel’s use of Man, as they relate to being. I say diametrically opposed and not diagonally opposed, as the above comparisons might suggest, because events have intervened in the pure analysis of ideas. The absence of humanity vis-à-vis the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as I to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, ), pp.  – , specifically pp.  – . Moreover, the difference between Wolfson’s anthropos (pp.  –), which is the crux of his analysis, is not equivalent in any way to Dasein (Crowell, p. ) and undermines his philosophical and phenomenological validation of iconic visualization. In addition, Heidegger’s rejection of the equivalence of Dasein and consciousness as directed at a readers’ misunderstanding of Being and Time must be considered, as Dreyfus notes (p. ). “But how could this … become an explicit question before every attempt had been made to liberate the determination of human nature from the concept of subjectivity… To characterize with a single term both the involvement of being in human nature and the essential relation of man to the openness (“there”) of being as such, the name of ‘being there [Dasein]’ was chosen… Any attempt, therefore to rethink Being and Time is thwarted as long as one is satisfied with the observation that, in this study, the term ‘being there’ is used in place of ‘consciousness’.” (“The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” ed. W. Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian Books, ), pp.  – . See also Pierre Keller, Husserl and Heidegger on Human Experience (Riverside: University of California Press, 2007), specifically pp. 119 – 123. Neil Gillman’s Sacred Fragments (New York: the Jewish Publication Society, 1990), is premised on the idea of scientific revolutions and myth advocated by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Gillman is attempting to split the difference between literal supernaturalism and unreflective naturalism (p. 25). I have cited his misuse of Heschel’s position elsewhere, “Revelation and Prayer: Heschel’s Meeting With God,” pp. 76 – 89. But what is of further concern is Kuhn’s dependence on Heidegger, which Gillman does not mention (which will be dealt with in the conclusion here). It is this dependence that I see as the ir-remedial flaw in Gillman’s thought which defends the nonliteralism of Torah as myth, yet allows some literalisms to be counted as truths that undermine Gillman’s original position. I have in mind Gillman’s position on death and resurrection: “Whatever my ultimate destiny, then, whatever God has in store for me at the end, must include my body. That is why any doctrine of the afterlife must deal with my body as well. Belief in bodily resurrection is, then, indispensable to any doctrine of the afterlife.” The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2000), p. 262. That modern Judaism’s most thoughtful theologian of myth has ended up with a literal view on resurrection has been entirely missed by every commentator. This indicates that Gillman either does not take myth as seriously as he says he does, which I don’t believe, or as I do, that he has not really laid out the difference between myth and literalism as clearly and as distinctly as he thinks he has. I believe that this difference has been missed because Gillman has ignored Kuhn’s and Geertz’s reliance on Heidegger’s notion of being, which is the basic point of Heschel’s criticism and will be explained further with regard to Gillman’s approach in the conclusion here.

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will demonstrate, has altered the question of man and the question of being and made one accessible and the other not merely obsolete, but accountable for the loss of being human. This is of urgent significance in the thought of Heidegger and Heschel, because Heidegger advances a certain neutrality in relation to the question of being and Heschel eschews any neutrality. And what is true of being in each of their cases is even more so true of Dasein and Adam. Lastly, and it cannot be underscored enough, the title of Heschel’s book, “Who Is Man?” is not a rhetorical device as his biographer would have us believe.⁹³ To see it as such is to miss entirely the question that provokes the philosophical and religious perplexity that Heschel expresses. It also ignores Heschel himself. As Heschel says in the text of Who Is Man? in the midst of his analysis of philosophy, “A question to be legitimate must have a chance of being answered.”⁹⁴ And as I will demonstrate, Heschel’s answer to the question is a direct critique of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, its ideation of an eclipse of humanity, and an actual historical eclipse of humanity with which it coincided. Are philosophy and religion possible after Auschwitz and Hiroshima? Heschel’s answer lies between a metaphoric and literal understanding of revelation. It lies beyond the irony of Heidegger’s deconstruction and the attempt of religion to abandon being human for the perceived safety of the usual or unusual questions about being. If philosophy and religion are possible after the Holocaust according to Heschel, then we must first understand who is being addressed and from which traditions they are being addressed in Who Is Man?. If, as Heschel warns us at the beginning of God in Search of Man, it “would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats,”⁹⁵ then we must analyze just how Heschel weaves his understanding of philosophy and religion in Who Is Man? and presents the questions that are paramount for a new direction.

 This stands in diametric opposition to any analysis by Edward Kaplan, who has put forth the idea that Heschel’s thought is rhetorical.  Who Is Man?, p. .  God in Search, p. .

2 Amidst the Traditions Who Is Man? is addressed to three audiences. The first is a modern Jewish philosophical one, whose most well-known proponent is Martin Buber.¹ The second audience, addressed most often and with the greatest depth, is the philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger. The third is a traditional Jewish audience, which doesn’t want to divorce Jewish thought from Jewish sources. These three audiences underlie the reason for the appearance of the book and tie its focus together. In explicating the audiences addressed and the sources used, the themes of the book become apparent in a way that is usual for Heschel’s thought, yet unusual for most other philosophical thinking. In most cases, a proposition is stated, its contradictory is put forth and the author makes his case. Heschel’s novel approach relies on a double sense of textuality―the philosophical and the Jewish religious tradition―and he thereby intertwines them in his own idiosyncratic way, as their hermeneutic rules and conventions differ greatly. This double-edged process both strengthens and weakens Heschel’s presentation. The absence of logical progression makes it seem as if no argument is being put forth or that a rhetorical one is being made. On the other hand, the intertwining of the traditions yields insights for each tradition that would otherwise be unavailable.

Martin Buber Martin Buber is never mentioned by name in the text, yet he is a central figure in it. The anomaly of directing a major motif of a work at the thought of another Jewish thinker without mentioning his name is not unusual for Heschel. There is an important precedent in this regard. In his most well-known work, God in Search of Man, Heschel clearly has the thought of Mordecai Kaplan in mind throughout without mentioning his name.  Only after I had finished this manuscript was I made aware of Maurice Friedman, “Buber, Heschel and Heidegger: Two Jewish Existentialists Confront a Great German Existentialist,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology  no.  (January ), pp.  – . There is much to be debated concerning the title itself. Mostly a collection reminiscences between Buber and the author and one between Heschel and the author, it had no influence on anything I wrote, as the article contains no analysis of ideas. It does serve one significant point. Heschel was well aware of Heidegger’s Nazi speeches and essays from Guido Schneeburger’s Nachlese zu Heidegger (Friedman, p. ).

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Kaplan’s Judaism As a Civilization, which had garnered a tremendous amount of attention in many religious circles with rabbis and students of the Jewish Theological Seminary and with Jewish congregations throughout North America, stood as a seminal work of the twentieth century. At the conclusion of God in Search of Man, after Heschel elucidates a theory of consciousness for a view of revelation opposed to naturalism, literalism, and mythopeism, Heschel writes about the Sabbath under the last subheading in the book, “The Art of Surpassing Civilization.” The World is contingent on creation, and the worth of history depends on redemption. To be a Jew is to affirm the world without being enslaved to it; to be a part of civilization and to go beyond it; to conquer space and to sanctify time. Judaism is the art of surpassing civilization, sanctification of time, sanctification of history. Civilization is on trial. Its future will depend upon how much of the Sabbath will penetrate its spirit.²

The question is not whether this is directed at Kaplan’s thought―it obviously is― but rather why is it done in anonymity? It is done so as not to create a conflict, argument or sense of debasement with another’s Jewish thought, no matter how much Heschel is in disagreement.³ This was most likely intensified because both Heschel and Kaplan taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary at the same time and maintained friendly relations.⁴ The assumption is that the informed reader will understand the allusion in any respect, and if the uniformed reader does not, yet is moved by Heschel’s position, then nothing is lost. The same is true of Who Is Man?. How so? First we must analyze the title. There are various moments in the text where Heschel elucidates the title, but those alone will not shed light on the issue, as they don’t refer to any antecedents. Again, the informed reader, the one who is involved in Jewish Thought and aware of its permutations at the time, will see in the title a play on words, or more precisely a twist of words, from an already existing title in the corpus of Jewish Philosophy. I have in mind two books published by Martin Buber. In 1947, Buber published Between Man and Man, his most serious philosophical work and a defense of positions taken in I and Thou. The last essay in Between Man and Man, titled “What Is Man?” appeared in German in 1938 as “Was ist Der Mensch?” and was undoubtedly

 God in Search, p. .  See Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, pp.  –  for another example, this one spoken in public, where Heschel refused to name Mordecai Kaplan, even though it was clear he was the referent.  See Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, pp. , , and  – .

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known to Heschel.⁵ In the difficult and lengthy essay, Buber attempts to answer the anthropological question of man as posed by Kant.⁶ As Buber phrases the issue in the “Foreword” to Between Man and Man, he is clearly taking an anthropological line. He says of the well-known essay “What Is Man? that served as the inaugural lecture course he gave at Hebrew University: This course shows, in the unfolding of the question about the essence of man, that it is beginning neither with the individual nor with the collectivity, but only with the reality of the mutual relation between man and man, that this essence can be grasped.⁷

Against that background, Buber stakes out his position in light of many who have preceded and followed Kant, and devotes twenty-one pages to Heidegger. Five years after the appearance of Between Man and Man, Martin Buber published a small book in 1952 based on lectures he delivered at American universities (just as Heschel following Buber originally delivered Who Is Man? in lectures at Stanford University), titled The Eclipse of God. ⁸ In part therein, when Buber discusses the eclipse of God, he mentions Heidegger. It is true that Heidegger holds out the promise, even though only as a possibility, of an intellectual transformation from which day may dawn again, and then “the appearing of God and the gods may begin again.⁹

 See Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, p. , where this is noted generally by my teacher Fritz Rothschild. See Kaplan, Prophetic Witness, pp.  –  for an account of the differences early in Heschel’s career and pp.  –  for an account of their differences on Hasidism. While Kaplan has touched the surface of some of Heschel’s antecedents, he has done so with little exactitude. I will clarify Heschel’s distinction from Scheler further on in this chapter because it is the most significant when it comes to describing man. Furthermore, it seems to me that the issue of revelation is at the core of Heschel’s disagreement with Buber. I would characterize it in this way: Buber adopts and reworks Kantian ideas to allow for the possibility of dialogue and revelation, which has no content. Heschel adopts and reworks Husserlian ideas to allow for the possibility of revelation in line with Husserl’s idea of intentionality of consciousness, both of which have a content. According to Kaplan, Heschel referred to Buber’s notion as “a vague encounter.” (Spiritual Radical, pp.  – ). See the following papers for an in-depth look at the central issues vis-à-vis Buber, Kant, and Heschel: Lawrence Perlman, “Buber’s Anti-Kantianism,” AJS Review , no.  (March ), pp.  –  and Lawrence Perlman, “Heschel’s Critique of Kant,” in Jacob Neusner, ed., From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism, Vol.  (Atlanta: Scholars Press, ), pp.  – .  Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith (London: Collins, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God (New York: Harper and Row, ).  Ibid., p. .

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This is followed in the next paragraph with the following words: “Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God―such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing.”¹⁰ Post-Holocaust thought according to Buber is driven by two necessities. First, we must come to terms with the eclipse of God, and second, we must see the answer in anthropological terms as an answer to the question―what is man?. And both are challenged by the thought of Heidegger. Even from my brief outline in the first chapter, we can see how Heschel has addressed these questions directly in the negative. He believes that post-Holocaust thought is neither about the eclipse of God, nor is the question premised on anthropological thought. The question for him is not “what is man?” but “who is man?,” and the historical hour is not characterized by the eclipse of God but by the eclipse of humanity.¹¹ And in each instance, Heidegger is prominently featured in the question and in the answer for Buber and for Heschel. There is another important aspect that Hugo Ott’s research has brought to light concerning the question “what is man?” In 1933, Heidegger’s friend Heinrich Ochsner recommended to Heidegger “one of the best and most profound books to have appeared in Germany in the last few years.”¹² Reviewed in the Frankfurter Zeitung, the book he recommended was Theodor Haecker’s What Is Man?. By attacking contemporary philosophy and ideology that defended the Christian notion of Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image …,” Haecker earned the opprobrium of Heidegger. As Ott has demonstrated, Heidegger responded to Haecker amidst other Christian doctrines in the summer course, “An Introduction to Metaphysics” in 1935, which was published in 1953.¹³ While we cannot definitely prove that Heschel was aware of this book and of Heidegger’s direct attack on its author, both the public nature of the review and the clear context in which Heidegger treats the question in 1935 and then in 1953 indicate that Heschel was most likely aware of the work and Heidegger’s reaction to it, placing Heschel’s question “who is man?” directly in this context. The parallel to the case of Heschel’s anonymous critique of Mordecai Kaplan is directly born out in the case of Martin Buber and the absence of his name. When Heschel was trying to gain a position teaching Jewish Thought in Europe,

 Ibid., p. .  David Forman-Barzilai attempts to distinguish Buber’s use of the eclipse of God from the hidden God, “Agonism in Faith: Martin Buber’s Eternal Thou after the Holocaust,” Modern Judaism , no.  (May ), pp.  – . There is much merit to his approach, but it doesn’t answer the larger question. If we live, according to Buber, in a time of the eclipse of God in general, how does this relate to the Holocaust, which is surely part of the historical time in which we live?  Ott, p. .  Ibid., p. .

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he was directly dependent upon Buber.¹⁴ In Jewish and secular circles, Buber was viewed as the preeminent spokesman of Jewish religious philosophy. Whether it would have been unseemly to mention Buber by name or detrimental to his advancement, Heschel clearly focused on the same issue as Buber but from a different perspective. Even though Heschel’s disagreement with Buber’s general approach to Jewish thought was known, the depth and specificity of it would only be evident to an informed and careful reader.¹⁵ It is also evident, when considering the origins of the sensibility of Who Is Man? in this new context, that the disagreement with Buber was profound and delicate for Heschel to disclose publicly. The antecedents of Who Is Man? lie in the essay titled “The Meaning of This Hour,” first delivered in 1938, which coincided with Buber’s departure from Frankfurt to Jerusalem. The essay was revised in 1943¹⁶ and then added as the sixth and last chapter of the book Man’s Quest for God in 1954. There, Heschel claims that we have ignored God¹⁷ and that “the mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God.”¹⁸ The themes that are full blown in Who Is Man? are first mentioned here and stand in opposition to Buber’s eclipse of God. Heschel explicitly links the war and the destruction of Jewish life and humanity to a lack of depth in humanity: “The outbreak of war was no surprise. It came as a long expected sequel to a spiritual disaster.”¹⁹ Evil is pronounced: ― “over the gates of the world in which we live is the escutcheon of the demons,”²⁰ and human beings are no longer human: “Fellowmen turned out to be evil ghosts, monstrous and weird.”²¹ The most essential issue is human accountability: “Ashamed and dismayed. We ask: Who is responsible?”²² The problem is not just of the moment, but of the scope of human history which hangs over the heads of humanity.²³ Our world seems not unlike a pit of snakes. We did not sink into the pit in 1939 or 1933. We descended into it generations ago, and the snakes have sent their venom into the blood-

 Kaplan, Prophetic Witness, pp.  – .  See Kaplan, Prophetic Witness, p. , n. , n. , and p. , n.  for statements typifying Heschel’s evaluation of Buber.  See Fritz Rothschild, Between God and Man (New York: The Free Press, ), p. , n. .  Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Man’s Quest for God, p.   Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .

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stream of humanity, gradually paralyzing us, numbing us, numbing nerve after nerve, dulling our minds, darkening our vision.²⁴

And most directly foreshadowing the issue of man’s image in Who Is Man?, Heschel says in an earlier essay, “Only in His presence shall we learn that the glory of man is not in his will to power, but in his power of compassion. Man reflects either the image of His presence or that of a beast.”²⁵ It would be another twenty-two years before Heschel would flesh out these ideas on a grand philosophical scale, but they were indubitably contextualized within the same stream of thought as Martin Buber. The gap of twenty-two years, while filled with many other ideas, is directly linked to the beginning of Who Is Man? and provides the impetus for the appearance of the book. In clarifying his proposition and the genesis of its appearance, Heschel relates the philosophical issue to the historical moment, just as he had done in “The Meaning of This Hour.” He takes up the old theme in Who Is Man? in its generative state. We must start from the beginning. The most vital problems cannot be settled vicariously. No solution is established once and for all… In asking the question about man, I have in mind not only a question about the essence but also a question about the concrete situation in which we find ourselves, a situation that puts the problem of man in a new light. The issue is old, yet the perspective is one of emergency. New in this age is an unparalleled awareness of the terrifying seriousness of the human situation. Questions we seriously ask today would have seemed absurd twenty years ago, such as, for example: Are we the last generation? Is this the very last hour for Western civilization? Philosophy cannot be the same after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.²⁶

That this is the same theme is clear. The context is still vague because its antiBuberian nature has been neglected. However, in at least two additional cases, the texts overtly relate to Buberian themes. In challenging the question about man, Heschel asserts that explanations such as anthropology falter and that accepting this failure is the only way to approach the problem of man. “What is man?” is an old question that has been surpassed both by events and by meaning. It must give way to the question, “Who is man?”

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Who Is Man?, p. .

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Even the form in which we ask the question about man is biased by our own conception of man as a thing. We ask: What is man? Yet the true question should be: Who is man?* As a thing man is explicable; as a person he is both a mystery and a surprise. As a thing he is finite; as a person he is inexhaustible. The popular definitions cited above offer an answer to the question “What is man?” in terms of his facticity, as a thing of space. The question “Who is man?” is a question of worth, a question of position and status within the order of beings.#²⁷

It is worthy of note that both the notes, * and #, that Heschel uses as proof texts are taken from the Bible and the Rabbinic tradition respectively, and they are employed to counter Buber’s thinking.²⁸ This insistence on the nature of the question is repeated again some fortyfour pages further on in the book: “We have questioned the adequacy of the formulation, ‘What is man?’”²⁹ Here, both the thing-hood and the idea of meaning are called into question apart from their verifiable nature³⁰―in other words, apart from the Kantian explication of the problem of man and the question from which Buber begins his analysis.³¹

 Ibid., p. .  Heschel’s notes on page , in which I designate by the * sign and the # sign his references to the biblical and rabbinic traditions as a validation of the question “who is man?” that he proposes. I will explain further in this chapter the role of biblical and rabbinic thinking, but here it is significant to note that they are enlisted as an anti-Buberian strategy, and as proof texts for Heschel’s philosophical venture.”* ‘What is man?’ means what sort of thing is he? ‘Who’ is a pronoun asking for the identification of a person or persons. The biblical question: ‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him…” (Psalm :), “What is man, that Thou dost make so much of him …” (Job :) really means what is the worth of man …?” “# The question ‘Who is man?’ (phrased in the category of substance) is by no means the only possible question in a reflection about man. In an old rabbinic text, three other questions are suggested: ‘Whence did you come?’ ‘Whither are you going?’ ‘Before whom are you destined to give account?’ And yet these questions presuppose the knowledge of an answer to the question: ‘Who is man?’  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., “In asking it we leave the level of logical and strictly verifiable thinking and climb to the level of mystery.”  It is important to note, since this statement appears in a Kantian and Buberian context, that the rest of it applies to another unnamed interlocuter―Rudolph Otto. The quotation continues on p.  of Who Is Man?, “The meaning of human being, however is not a property like hot and cold which can be experienced through sense perception.” Neither ideas nor perceptions yield an experience, which is worthy of the question Heschel is asking. This has been overlooked by Neil Gillman in his assertion that Heschel’s thought is directly related to Rudolph Otto (Sacred Fragments, p. xvi). Otto’s attempt to uphold the rational and the non-rational as occasions of the holy (The Idea of the Holy, trans., John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, ), pp.  –  must rely on a Kantian notion of pure reason―a notion that Heschel completely denies. In other words, Otto attempts to explain the relationship between rational and non-ra-

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From Parmenides to Heidegger The bulk of Who Is Man? concerns itself with the question of being, reflected in the philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger. Heschel’s attention, while sometimes taken up with the question of being qua being, is always involved with the more particular question of being qua being human. From the point of view of the philosophical tradition, Heschel does not proceed historically or logically. He proceeds according to his own interrogatory needs. This means that any attempt to read Who Is Man? as a logical text is doomed to failure. It also means that merely trying to abstract a methodological progression by analyzing the chapter headings or by summarizing the chapters is shallow at best, and misleading at worst.³² The claim by Edward Kaplan that Who Is Man? should be considered as a systematic theology entirely misses the effect of the criticism of the philosophical tradition, and Heschel’s decidedly unsystematic perplexity in the situation in which he finds himself. As Heschel says almost at the outset, the act of verbalization “must not be equated with the problem confronting us.”³³ Thus, it should not be surprising that from the beginning of the book, we find allusions and references to such diverse thinkers as Spinoza and Darwin on the third page, or as I noted previously, Aristotle and Benjamin Franklin, when Heschel needs to make an emphatic point. There is simply no progression, logical or historical, nor is there a hierarchy of importance in the order in which philosophers and thinkers are mentioned in the course of the text. Consistent philosophical references can only be regarded vis-à-vis the manner in which the question of being has overshadowed the question of human being. For example, on the third page of Who Is Man?, when emphasizing his theme, Heschel employs a technique that he has used before. He uses a play on words to indicate his interrogatory problem with Spinoza by averring, “We can attain adequate understanding of man only if we think of man in human terms, more humano, and abstain from employing categories developed in the investigation of lower forms of life.” ³⁴ This play on words reverberates from a text in Man Is Not Alone where He-

tional factors in the idea of the divine. Heschel denies any such explanation and any applicable “idea” of the divine.  This is the method that Edward Kaplan suggests for reading the book (Spiritual Radical, p. ): “The main topic of each of the six untitled chapters emerged from the subheads that outlined the conceptual armature of his system. Heschel’s readers might even review its main lines simply by reading the table of contents, which listed all of the subheads.”  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., p. .

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schel says, “the Bible was not written more geometrico”³⁵―a reference to Spinoza’s style and method in the Ethics. The logical problem of Spinoza’s notion of being or humanity is not the prime issue. The consistent approach to the question that is being asked by and of the biblical tradition is the fulcrum. Spinoza is not a central figure because Heschel has turned a Spinozan concept against him, and methodologically, it is not at all important when it appears. It is crucial that the reader achieve an insight into the interrogatory nature of the outlook of the biblical text and of the tradition that flows from that text, as well as the manner in which Spinoza’s “system” flies in its face. It is only on this point that it makes sense to refer to the Darwinian thinker, Sir Arthur Keith, in the same breath as Heschel refers to Spinoza in Who Is Man? ³⁶ Human distinctiveness, Heschel is claiming, cannot be captured by analyzing lower forms of nature or of animals.³⁷ The text of Who Is Man? abounds in such references and misplaced logical contexts. There is another significant example of this kind of interrogatory interpretation that Heschel uses to illustrate the difference between the philosophical tradition and the biblical notion of human being. As he approaches the climax of the book, the ultimate reality of human being is questioned. Heschel, who has elaborated a deontological idea of being,³⁸ wants to put it into bold relief over against the philosophical tradition. This time, human being is crystallized with a play on Descartes’ well-known dictum, “I think therefore I am.” Heschel, turning it on its head, as he moves away from the claims of consciousness that depend on pure ontology says: Man is inescapably, essentially challenged on all levels of his existence. It is in his being challenged that he discovers himself as a human being. Do I exist as a human being? My answer is: I am commanded―therefore I am. There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, of being called upon at certain moments to reciprocate, to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.³⁹

Human being is only open to a certain kind of insight when placed against the background of the philosophical tradition. Without naming Descartes in another passage, Heschel juxtaposes the being of response and the being of subjective consciousness:

    

Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (New York: Harper and Row, ), p. . Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid. See Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, pp.  – , for an analysis of this approach. Who Is Man?, p. .

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The loss of the sense of significant being is due to the loss of the commandment of being. Being is obedience, a response. “Thou art” precedes “I am .” I am because I am called upon to be.⁴⁰

There is no issue of logical analysis that will yield the insight that Heschel wants to evoke, so he weaves the strands of consciousness that are available without imposing any pure methodology upon them. Any statement that includes the thought “I am,” is a marvel and an act of astonishment, which means that the “I” is “an epistemological pretext.”⁴¹ And that is what is lacking in Descartes’ methodology. This thought is reexamined again, without logical consequence, near the end of the book, where Heschel raises the question “Do I exist as a human being?”.⁴² Only in an interrogatory context does the question allude to the meaning of the Cartesian challenge―which is answered, once again, as “I am commanded,” ergo I exist. This time the thought is in the context of reciprocity and care of being human. And once again, there is no logical methodology at work. Rather, there is an interrogatory methodology that opens up insight into the presymbolic, pretheological, and preconceptual moments of faith.⁴³ This means that there will always be an interdependence between philosophy and theology throughout Heschel’s work, no matter the issue at hand. Or, as he says immediately after the passage, “Thou art” precedes “I am.” Being, as said above, is not the only dimension in which human existence finds itself. Characteristic of human existence is the mutual involvement of being and meaning.⁴⁴

This analysis indicates a much larger issue. If, as I have shown, the philosophical tradition will be reworked at every turn, then why doesn’t Heschel simply begin the book with his critique of Heidegger instead of waiting until it approaches the final chapters? Why does he wait until more than half the book is over until he mentions Heidegger by name? And why does he intersperse Heideggerian concepts throughout the book without clearly calling attention to them? In the cases I cited above, both that of Spinoza and Descartes are obvious even to a novice philosophical reader. In many other cases that I will cite, the

 Ibid., p..  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  See Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation, Chapters Two and Three for an analysis of this interdependence.  Who Is Man?, p. .

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philosophers are named clearly, and little, if anything, of their ideas is woven into a later part of the text. There is only one apparent explanation. Heschel’s texts function on many levels. They were widely read by many philosophically unschooled readers and traditionally uneducated Jews. Yet, they were very influential despite these readers’ lack of knowledge. Moreover, they were and are still read in more knowledgeable circles having gained and still gaining currency. Like almost all his other texts, Who Is Man? is layered not in terms of logical progression, but in terms of depth of insight. Presumably, the deeper the knowledge of philosophy and Jewish sources, the deeper the reader is capable of achieving insight. This has the added bonus of not overburdening the unschooled reader, who would otherwise be easily defeated by philosophical concepts presented in a logically dependent fashion. There is just enough for the reader to sink his or her teeth into, without feeling they are grasping at straws, and at the same time, a more knowledgeable reader can penetrate the obvious depth of the argument based on his or her own familiarity with the philosophical and religious traditions. This is the vantage point from which Heidegger’s presence must be analyzed. Heidegger’s obtuseness is legendary. It would be safe to assume that few of Heschel’s readers had much experience reading Being and Time or The Letter on Humanism, which, as I hope to demonstrate, are essential texts in Heschel’s critique of Heidegger. Only those who are adept and schooled in the tradition could hope to penetrate the depth of Heschel’s remarks in this light, and connect them to Heschel’s sense of the cul-de-sac that the philosophical tradition had entered with Heidegger’s reworking of being from Parmenides, until Heschel’s own work and the crisis of the Holocaust. More importantly, none of the philosophers mentioned in the book represents the crisis of the Shoah and the danger toward human being, as does Heidegger. While Heschel builds his case against the overshadowing of human being by being via his own use of insight, the depth of the argument becomes more apparent. And that argument is with the philosopher, whose thought sits squarely at the junction of the philosophical and historical failure to protect human being in the face of the events that altered our naiveté about being human. And that philosopher is Heidegger. The other philosophers and thinkers mentioned in Who Is Man?, while influential and significant, do not reach this same depth. Consequently, they appear more in terms of definitions or as facets of the problem of defining human being, or as part of the progression leading up to Heidegger. The beginning of the second chapter of the book titled “Some Definitions of Man” is the clearest example of Heschel’s use of this vein of thought. Compactly,

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in the space of five pages,⁴⁵ Heschel mentions Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Protagoras, Menander and Diogenes―all referencing the human need for self-knowledge. The example of Socrates’ quotation from the Phaedrus (230) is typical of Heschel’s modus operandi. Socrates and Phaedrus are walking in search of a certain tree and Phaedrus asks him if he accepts myths, to which Socrates answers that he doesn’t take up his time with extraneous matters because he does not yet, but wants to, know himself in accord with the Delphic maxim. Am I a monster more complicated and more furious than the serpent Typhon, or a creature of a gentler and simple sort, to whom Nature has given a divine and quiet lot?⁴⁶

The text is used by Heschel as a foil for his own question. Accordingly, neither Socrates’ definitions nor dispositions are satisfactory. In inviting the reader to contemplate some of the history of the thought concerning human beings, Heschel is sharpening and differentiating his own thinking. To this end, Heschel follows Socrates’ quotation with the following. However, what we seek to know about man is not only his disposition, the facts of life, but also his vocation, the goals of life. Beholding him piecemeal, we may come upon his kinship to animality. Seen as a whole, however, the situation of human being is one in which the facts and goals, disposition and thirst for meaning are intertwined.⁴⁷

As he progresses through the Delphic maxim to Protagoras’ view that “Man is the measure of all things,” Heschel claims we have confused ultimate problems and immediate problems.⁴⁸ These naturalist solutions have a blind spot.⁴⁹ If man is a measure of something, Heschel asks, then what is the measure of man?⁵⁰ In flipping the ancient Greek tradition on its head, Heschel does something of staggering proportions, and which has never received the commentary it deserves. Additionally, it clearly references postmodernism, which I take to be indicative mainly of Heidegger. It is best to quote Heschel in full so that the extent of his remark is evident. Protagoras maintained: “Man is the measure of all things.” This naturalist principle has been shattered more than ever in our own age by the question: What is the measure of

     

Ibid., pp.  – . Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid. Ibid., pp.  – . Ibid., p. . Ibid.

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man? Postmodern man is more deeply perplexed about the nature of man than were his ancestors.⁵¹

I know of no other reference in the entire corpus of Heschel’s thought to “postmodern man.” And while there might be other instances, the issue is immense in this context. Evidently, Heschel believes he is addressing a post modern audience and his thought is a form of postmodernism―albeit in the form of critique. This is unheralded. And there is no more significant post modern thinker at the time of the appearance of Who Is Man? than Martin Heidegger. Moreover, it warrants a certain kind of treatment that I interjected in the first chapter with the presence of Lacoue-Labarthe, and which will be brought to bear in the final chapter as we analyze some post Heideggerian attempts to reemphasize being at the expense of human being. But more of that later. It is not until the forth chapter of Who Is Man?, where Heschel highlights the question of meaning, that the full force of the difference of being, as conceived by biblical man and the Greek philosophical tradition, comes to the fore. Biblical man “does not begin with being.”⁵² He begins with creation.⁵³ In contradistinction, Heschel avows that the Greeks are involved in an “ontocentric predicament”⁵⁴ because they are enchanted by the given and incapable of conceiving “the annihilation of the given.”⁵⁵ In this context, Parmenides is cited, and the full context of the question of being from Parmenides to Heidegger is highlighted. In a section titled Being and Living, Heschel cites the beginning of the sixth stanza of Parmenides’ On Nature: To Parmenides not-being is inconceivable (“Nothingness is not possible”); to the biblical mind, nothingness or the end of being is not impossible.⁵⁶

In and of itself, this citation is of great significance in understanding the difference between the ontological approach, which accepts being as ultimate, and the biblical approach that does not.⁵⁷ But its importance is of even greater significance because of two highlighted yet uncited references made amidst these ideas and passages, which are made directly to the thought of Heidegger as it

      

Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp.  – . Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. .

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appears in Being and Time. The first deals with “nothingness”⁵⁸ and the second with “thrownness.”⁵⁹ Heschel’s argument involves the predicament faced by living man, as opposed to the man who is concerned by sheer being. It is best to let Heschel speak for himself: The dilemma faced by the living man is whether the ultimate transcendence is alive or not alive. Making the option for the ultimacy of being as being, the status of man as a living being becomes precarious. If the ultimate is sheer being, the human living has nothing to relate himself to as living. He can only relate himself to nothing. What surrounds him is a void where all life is left behind, where values and thoughts are devoid of all relevance and reference. Facing being as being, man “discovers himself confronted by the Nothingness, the possible impossibility of his existence.”⁶⁰

This crucial passage, marked in quotations, is taken from Part II of Being and Time,⁶¹ where Heidegger discusses a potential existential projection of an authentic existential being-toward-death that is anxiety. It is preceded by a remark about thrownness that also catches Heschel’s attention, as Heidegger addresses Dasein and throwness immediately following the previously cited passage: How is it existentially possible for this constant threat [death] to be genuinely disclosed? All understanding is accompanied by a state-of-mind. Dasein’s mood brings it face to face with the thrownness of its “that it is there.”⁶²

Heschel immediately follows his citation of Heidegger’s anxiety toward death and nothingness with the following one on “thrownness.” Heschel’s critical tone is unmistakable in the light of his own biblical thinking: Man may see himself between “thrownness” at the one end and death at the other and so maintain; Out of Nothingness I came and into Nothingness I shall return. My existence draws its reality from Nothing and is destined to be dissolved in Nothing.⁶³

The phraseology and style used here by Heschel to criticize Heidegger is in fact a paraphrase of the well-known dictum of Akaviah ben Mahalalel in The Ethics of the Fathers 3:1,

     

Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Being and Time, p. . Ibid. Who Is Man?, pp.  – .

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Ponder three things and you will avoid falling into sin: Know your origin, your destination, and before Whom you will be required to give an accounting. Your origin? A putrid drop. Your destination? A place of dust, worms and maggots. Before Whom will you be required to give an accounting? Before the King of kings, the Holy One, praised-be-He.

The fact that Heschel implies the usage of a rabbinic text is significant and will be analyzed in the last section of this chapter. Of note here, is the content of the rabbinic statement that doesn’t seem to be in disagreement with Heschel’s criticism of Heidegger. “Nothingness” and “Nothing” are hardly differentiated from “a putrid drop,” and “A place of dust, worms and maggots.” Clearly, the distinction is transcendence of being in God’s presence and the implication that being, as Heschel claimed, is different in the Greek and Heideggerian tradition from the biblical tradition. It is that difference that needs to be unpacked and will be in the next chapter. Here, our purpose is to recognize the admixture and crucible of traditions that Heschel is using and directing at Heidegger. In the context of the entire book, these citations of the philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger, and the question of being set up the crucial framework into which Heschel pours his own foundation for the relationship of being and being human. It is clear that the philosophical tradition is being called into question as a whole. It is also clear that neither Parmenides nor other Greek thinkers, nor Nietzsche are the main issue at hand. Neither Parmenides nor Nietzsche could have foreseen Auschwitz and the failure of being in the face of being human. It should also be equally clear that Heidegger, a self-proclaimed Nazi and the single greatest commentator on the question of being since Aristotle, lived and played a role in its midst. So when Heschel asserts, Heidegger’s rhetorical question, “Has the Dasein, as such, ever freely decided and will it ever be able to decide as to whether to come into existence or not?” has been answered long ago: “It is against your will that you live, and it is against your will that you are bound to give an account…” The transcendence of human being is disclosed here as life imposed upon, as imposition to give account, as imposition of freedom. The transcendence of being is commandment, being here and now is obedience.⁶⁴

he is in fact, doing many things. Again, he is establishing a rabbinic critique. The text that was established “long ago” is taken from The Ethics of the Fathers, 4:29.  Ibid., p. .

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Seminally, he his referring to an idea of transcendence, as he did above, which by implication is missing in the thought of Heidegger. The third thing Heschel is doing is indicating that the issue at the crux of the matter between himself and Heidegger is the issue of Dasein―man. With one exception, the other overt philosophical references point toward the problem of postmodernism. That exception is Augustine. But, the citation by Heschel fits the previously noted force of the ancient Greeks. It is definitional and germane to the question at hand. Mentioned in conjunction with the citation I offered as indicative of Heschel’s anti-Buberian slant, Augustine’s self-certainty of the soul evades the question, “who is man?”⁶⁵ by placing the issue of “what is man?” at the forefront. Again, the juxtaposition against the outlook of Buber, uncanny as it is, serves the methodological depth of Heschel’s strategy. That strategy is, the downplaying of any real or perceived logical progression and historical causation in lieu of insight into the question at hand, and the relation of the question to our philosophical predicament. The dilemma, which is emphasized, is the shattering of specious claims about humanity after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, where and when human beings were annihilated on a previously inexperienced scale. The remaining philosophical citations fit into Heschel’s critique of postmodern man’s predicament. Of course he is aware of the historical background from Descartes to Heidegger, this issue of consciousness and the significance of philosophical anthropology. But here, Heschel is addressing the question, not in terms of their logical or purely epistemological arguments, but in terms of their dispossession of human being. It is in this sense that Heschel criticizes the modern thinkers included in Who Is Man?. Descartes’ attempt to secure knowledge in consciousness is thus nothing more than another fragmentation of human being. Its precision is an illusion of a limited sense of being that constructs meaning in consciousness. Similarly, Kant is criticized for the same shortcoming, not from an epistemological point of view, but rather from an ethical and human one: Man is not an all-inclusive end to himself. The second maxim of Kant’s, never to use human beings merely as means but to regard them also as ends, only suggests how a person ought to be treated by other people, not how he ought to treat himself. For if a person thinks that he is an end to himself, then he will use others as means… To a person who regards himself as an absolute end a thousand lives will not be more than his own life.⁶⁶

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .

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In other respects, Heschel does object to Kantian epistemological positions here, but only as they relate to presymbolic and preconceptual moments of faith. I have documented these elaborate criticisms elsewhere.⁶⁷ But in Who Is Man? they are not the seminal issue. The bifurcation of human interests is the significant point upon which the argument turns. In another section of the book, Heschel says, in obvious reference to Kant and others, The fundamental problem of ethics has been expressed as the question: What ought I to do? The weakness of this formulation is in separating doing from the sheer being of the “I,” as if the ethical problem were a special and added aspect of a person’s existence. However, the moral issue is deeper and more intimately related to the self than doing. The very question: What ought I to do? is a moral act. It is not a problem added to the self; it is the self as a problem.⁶⁸

This is no less true for Heschel’s reference to Schleiermacher, where the ontological and epistemological concerns serve the human ones. Heschel says, Ever since Schleiermacher it has been customary in considering the nature of religion to start with the human self and to characterize religion as a feeling of dependence, reverence, etc. What is overlooked is the unique aspect of religious consciousness of being a recipient, of being exposed, overwhelmed by a presence which surpasses our ability to feel. What characterizes the religious man is faith in God’s transitive concern for humanity, faith in God’s commitment to man, in terms of which he seeks to shape his life and attempts to find sense in history.⁶⁹

This rejection of “absolute dependence” appears again, without reference to Schleiermacher, but in rejection of an ontological description of religion in favor of Heschel’s deontological approach: Religion has been defined as a feeling of absolute dependence. We come closer to an understanding of religion by defining one of its roots as a sense of personal indebtedness. God is not only a power we depend on, He is a God who demands.⁷⁰

This consistent refrain―that human being is shortchanged by modernists who rely on sensory experience to the detriment of awe because of the “imponderable”―is echoed in Heschel’s criticism of Freud. In a subsection titled “The Essence of Being Human,” Heschel says,

   

See “Heschel’s Critique of Kant.” Who Is Man? p. . Ibid., pp.  – . Ibid., p. .

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According to Freud, the deepest essence of man is the organism’s instincts, and their satisfaction man’s authentic occupation. However, what is defined here relates to bios (life): it does not relate to existence, which embraces both bios and being human. The vital drives of food, sex, and power, as well as the mental functions aimed at satisfying them, are as characteristic of animals as they are of man. Being human is a characteristic of a being who faces the question: After satisfaction, what? The circle of need and satisfaction, of desire and pleasure, is too narrow for the fullness of his existence. Satisfaction is a sensory experience bringing about an end to desire. Appreciation is an imponderable experience, an opening up, the beginning of a thirst that knows no final satisfaction.⁷¹

It is also worth noting that this passage is hardly a criticism of existentialism. On the contrary, it is as strong a basis for existentialism as one could expect, albeit one admixed with a sense of appreciation. What is true of Heschel’s view of Freud is even more the case as we approach Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche. Camus’ valorization of the problem of suicide is abhorrent to Heschel on many grounds. Yet Heschel, with great sagacity so as not to overstate his case, turns Camus’ sensitivity on its head, noting that in an age of six million martyrs, the absurdity of suicide is an existential affront: The most important decision a thinker can make is reflected in what he comes to consider the most important problem. According to Albert Camus, “There is only one really serious philosophical problem: and that is suicide.” May I differ and suggest that there is only one serious problem: and that is martyrdom. Is there anything worth dying for? We can only live the truth if we have the power to die for it. Suicide is escape from evil and surrender to absurdity. A martyr is a witness to the holy in spite of evil absurdity.⁷²

Camus’ musing in The Myth of Sisyphus is a misplaced sense of pathos according to Heschel, as the subsection “Pathos” in which it is found indicates, not an epistemological problem.⁷³ Camus’ absurdity begins from the wrong premise. In Heschel’s eyes, being is preceded by concern for being.⁷⁴ Logos and pathos are coupled in a manner that is not open to logical perception or precision.⁷⁵ The drama of creation and corruption is not ultimately subject to man’s willfulness because the possibility of redemption is always present.⁷⁶ What is true of Camus’ misplaced valorization of suicide is also true of Nietzsche’s outlook;

     

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.,

pp.  – . p. . pp.  – .

p. .

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Nietzsche’s formula for the greatness of a human being is amor fati. Jewish tradition would suggest as the formula for the greatness of a man his capacity for kiddush hashem, readiness to die for the sake of God, for the sake of the Name. ⁷⁷

Heschel neither identifies the sources of Nietzsche’s notion as The Gay Science or Ecce Homo, where amor fati is discussed, nor does Heschel consider the Nietzschean context in which these ideas are given epistemological credence. Rather, Heschel applies them in a context that is essentially human in a way that Nietzsche simply does not consider. Again, this is true of each of the philosophical positions that Heschel has juxtaposed against his own. Since Heschel hasn’t clarified the epistemological or ontological premises of his own position in one place, it is often assumed he has neither. The task will be taken up in the third chapter, where I will clarify Heschel’s context in the light of an essential Heideggerian position―that of the ontological difference. Again, it must be done this way because that is how Heschel conceives it. The depth of the problem of man is viewed in its entirety against the backdrop of Heidegger because neither Freud, Camus, nor Nietzsche participated in the Shoah as a destructive presence as did Heidegger. Yet, Nietzsche is still on Heschel’s mind at the close of the third chapter in Who Is Man? In the subsection “Sanctity,” continuing the theme of serving interests greater than the individual, Heschel pits an existential view of sanctity against a famous Nietzschean concept without naming him: The acceptance of the sacred is an existential paradox: it is saying “yes” to a no; it is the antithesis of the will to power; it may contradict interests and stand in the way of satisfying inner drives.⁷⁸

Of interest here is the way Heschel characterizes Nietzsche’s concept. He presents it more as a psychologically motivating factor in human behavior, and less as metaphysical concept. Heschel clearly distances himself from social Darwinian interpretations, which had gained currency in the thought of Nazis such as Alfred Baumler,⁷⁹ but which were roundly rejected by Heidegger.⁸⁰ In no way does Heschel want to diminish the argument’s philosophical force by seeing it as

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Alfred Baumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, ) and Nietzsches Philosophie in Selbstzegunissen. Ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Alfred Baeumler (Leipzig: Reclam, ).  See Heidegger’s, Nietzsche : and the analysis of Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence, pp.  – , and Hans Sluga, “Heidegger’s Nietzsche,” A Companion to Heidegger, pp.  – .

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a cultural phenomenon. Rather, he wants to face it head on with his own philosophical objections. The philosophical context in which Heschel delivers Who Is Man? is not limited to the outright references in the text. It is impossible to read it without considering other Nietzschean doctrines that are unmentioned but hover over the work. Nietzsche’s famous construction of the overman seems to be directly at odds with Heschel’s plea for preciousness⁸¹ and a separation from animal desire.⁸² The excessive force that characterizes the overman is directly at odds with the quietude of the religious personality that Heschel proposes. Nor is it conceivable to read the text without referencing Nietzsche’s famous words from The Genealogy of Morals, where he expresses his fatigue with man,⁸³ over against Heschel, who marvels at man, the pinnacle of creation. While this exhausts the overt references in Who Is Man? to the philosophical tradition and to the context in which the book fits, there are other authors and works that have a bearing, as well. The first that comes to mind is Max Scheler’s work. Scheler’s On the Eternal in Man and Man’s Place in Nature stand in bold relief. Edward Kaplan assumes, yet does not provide any analysis or textual indications, that Schleiermacher, Otto, and Scheler influenced Heschel,⁸⁴ which is clearly not the case for the first two thinkers, and is also untrue of Scheler, as is outrightly suggested. It is perhaps assumed that Heschel agrees with Scheler because Heschel uses similar language about sympathy and adopts Scheler’s classification of kinds of sympathy.⁸⁵ This is based, as Heschel’s footnote indicates, on Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy. ⁸⁶ It is not true of Scheler’s influence because Scheler, while he attempts to understand the problem of man to himself, begins from an anthropological standpoint that Heschel rejects: We are the first epoch in which man has become fully and thoroughly “problematic” to himself; in which he no longer knows what he essentially is, but at the same time knows that he does not know.⁸⁷

 Who Is Man?, p.   Ibid., pp.  – .  Freidrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, ), Part I, Section , pp.  – .  Kaplan, Prophetic Witness, pp. ,  – , and p. , n. .  Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, Vol. II (New York: Harper Torchbooks, ), pp.  – .  Ibid., note . See Kaplan, Prophetic Witness, p. , where he states that Heschel uses Scheler’s idea of sympathy to reject the neo-Kantian understanding of prophecy that held sway at the time.  See Buber, Between Man and Man, p. .

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This sounds very much like the beginning of Who Is Man?: “In Sharp contrast, man is a problem intrinsically and under all circumstances. To be human is to be a problem.”⁸⁸ Still, the main question for Scheler is focused on what man is, not on who man is, as it is for Heschel. Further, when we analyze their significant positions, we see a clear divergence. Scheler firmly avows that man is a tabula rasa: Only by being willing to make a complete tabula rasa of all traditions about this question, [man’s consciousness about himself] and by learning to look in extreme methodological aloofness and astonishment on the being called man, can we reach tenable insights again.⁸⁹

Heschel clearly disavows that position. According to Heschel, man is a palimpsest, not a tabula rasa. A beginning without any intentionality is a philosophical impossibility, according to Heschel. The experience of awe precedes the world of faith⁹⁰ and leaves a lasting impression on man: We do not have to discover the world of faith; we only have to recover it. It is not a terra incognita, an unknown land; it is a forgotten land, and our relation to God is a palimpsest rather than a tabula rasa.⁹¹

Scheler’s anthropological attitude resonates in other thinkers unmentioned by Heschel, but who are important in the philosophical context and landscape. Christian thinkers, such as Berdyaev and Brunner, take up the anthropological position that Heschel rejects. According to Berdyaev, who cites Scheler, the “problem of man is central to the epoch… man wants to know, who he is, from whence he came, whither he goeth and to what is he destined.”⁹² Emil Brunner’s Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology is committed to a “general or natural revelation,”⁹³ which is evident in a “completely theological anthropology”⁹⁴ that is Christian. Both of these authors’ positions are clearly

 Who Is Man? p. .  See Buber, Between Man and Man, p. , and Martin Buber, “The Philosophical Anthropology of Max Scheler, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , no.  (December ), pp.  – .  God in Search, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Nikolai Berdyaev, “The Problem of Man: Toward a Construct of Christian Anthropology,” http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/_.html.  Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, ), p. .  Ibid.

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at odds with Heschel’s formulation and inclination, while they are undoubtedly attempting to face the same situation and answer the same question about man. Heschel’s interrogatory understanding of being and man is at the root of his divergence from these thinkers. The philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger is the general framework of the problem of man. In contrast, Heschel considers alternative understandings of the concept of being, which is essential to this tradition; however, he is consumed with the question of human being he designates as “who is man?.” At the crossroads of history and the philosophical tradition, Heschel asks this question in light of the overshadowing of human being by being, and given the absence of the self-evidence of the humanity of man that ensues from that experience.⁹⁵ The phrasing of Heschel’s question, “who is man?,” rejects the usual anthropological underpinnings that are associated with it, and have been associated with it throughout the philosophical tradition. Heschel carries out this interrogatory outlook neither to blur the philosophical distinctions, nor to ignore them. Rather, it is done to shake loose some of the assumptions that Heschel sees as having been obscured in the philosophical tradition, as well as to make room for the third audience to whom Who Is Man? is addressed. It is done to evoke a meaning from the biblical tradition that is otherwise philosophically unavailable, and to highlight a major difference with Heidegger that sets the tone for Being and Time. However, before we consider Heidegger’s statement of the question, we must finish the explanation of the Jewish sources Heschel uses as proof texts, and then outline a basic phenomenological difference between Heidegger and Heschel that is striking in its comparison and indicative of their basic divergence. Still, before we can begin to understand the specific nature in which Heschel phrases the question, we must devote our attention to an explicit denial on his part. Prima facie, it appears that Heschel wrote Who Is Man? as a religious anthropology, as it is religious and it is about man. Yet, when we compare Who Is Man? to Heschel’s predecessors and contemporaries in both the philosophical and religious traditions, we see a basic difference. This difference is also highlighted when we compare Who Is Man? to a successor of Heschel. In Neil Gillman’s Sacred Fragments and The Death of Death, where Heschel’s dictum, “As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash” is adopted,⁹⁶ we can see a deep division. Gillman identifies myth with midrash,⁹⁷ which Heschel rejects, and

 Who Is Man?, p. .  Sacred Fragments, pp.  – , and  – , and The Death of Death, pp.  – .  Sacred Fragments, pp.  – .

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then argues that death is overcome by a religious view of anthropology.⁹⁸ According to Gillman, the ultimate religious belief concerning the resurrection of the dead rests on an adapted version of Heschel’s revelation, tempered by a view of anthropology. This is clearly a direction Heschel refuses to follow. He refuses it equally from the obvious point of revelation, and from the less obvious point of anthropology. The identification of myth with midrash, and the creation of man with anthropology, leads to a fragmentary understanding of who man is, as is evident from the title of Gillman’s well known, Sacred Fragments. While these issues will be undertaken in the last chapter of this work―because it is a basic issue that surfaces with postmodernism and with which Heschel completely disagrees―it is instructive to note Heschel’s two-fold rejection of myth and anthropology at this juncture, when it comes to man. Right from the beginning of Who Is Man? Heschel expressly tells the reader that he is not interested in anthropology. He is investigating a “reality” and “situation,”⁹⁹ which is unlike any other scientific investigation: We are concerned with the totality of man’s existence, not only or primarily with some of its aspects. Vast scientific efforts are devoted to the exploration of various aspects of human life―for example, anthropology, economics, linguistics, medicine, physiology, political science, psychology, sociology. Yet any specialized study of man treating each function and drive in isolation tends to look upon the totality of the person from the point of view of a particular function or drive. Such procedures have, indeed, resulted in an increasing atomization of our knowledge of man, in the fragmentation of the personality, in metonymical misunderstandings, in mistaking the part for the whole. Is it possible to comprehend one impulse separately, disregarding the interdependence of all impulses within the wholeness of the person?¹⁰⁰

Heschel makes this anti-anthropological bent crystal clear in yet another text that elaborates upon his disagreement with the rational tradition from Aristotle to Benjamin Franklin. He says, This tendency―so widespread in anthropological reflection―to comprehend man in comparison with the animal, from the perspective of what we know about the animal, is bound to yield answers which are unrelated to our question. To be sure, anatomy and physiology display innumerable points of resemblance between man and animal. Yet, for all the similarity in comparison and functions, the contrasts are even more remarkable. In asking the question about man our problem is not the undeniable fact of his animality but the

 See The Death of Death, pp.  – , where anthropological arguments from both body and soul are asserted to support his idea of the resurrection of the dead.  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., p. .

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enigma of what he does, because and in spite of, with and apart from, his animality. The question about man is not provoked by what we have in common with the animal kingdom, nor is it a function derived from what is animal in man.¹⁰¹

To call Heschel’s thinking religious anthropology is clearly to misunderstand his question. It is no less authentic to refer to it as a variation of anthropology, for he clearly intends otherwise. In passing, Kaplan refers to Heschel’s outlook as “sacred humanism,”¹⁰² which conceals as much as it reveals because it cannot locate the philosophical nature of the question. The answer is yet to be elaborated―and must be consistent with his principles, as I hope to demonstrate―but the context and goal remain evident. This rejection of anthropology is important for two reasons. First it is in direct opposition to Buber’s undertaking in “What Is Man?” There, Buber is investigating the “mature” anthropological problem,¹⁰³ which relies on sociology and the soul.¹⁰⁴ Obviously to Heschel, this kind of atomization and bifurcation is unacceptable. Moreover, beyond this Buberian denial, Heschel is telling us something special about the relationship of the whole man to being that has eluded the philosophical tradition, thus putting his question of being in a special light. Heschel spells this out after he specifies his concern with the totality of man’s existence, on the following page: Something is meant by human being which involves more than just being; something is at stake in human being which is obscured, suppressed, disregarded, or distorted. How to penetrate the shell of his adjustments and to inquire whether adjustment is his ultimate vocation? We study human behavior; we must not disregard human bewilderment. We analyze human expression; we must not disregard the inability to express what we sense. We know more about man’s possessions than about his moods. We describe deeds; we must not fail to explore how one relates inwardly to what one does.¹⁰⁵

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp.  – . That Kaplan misses the philosophical context is highlighted by his historical note, explaining that the lectures at Stanford that formed the basis of the book were delivered as a set of three (Kaplan, Vol II, p. ): “In the Likeness and Unlikeness of God,” “In Search of Meaning,” and “Existence and Exaltation.” The polarity of the first and the philosophical notions of meaning and existence escape Kaplan’s analysis. As phenomenological issues, they reside in consciousness not as formed ideological opinions, but as indications of meaning that lead to insight. Treating or mistreating them as anything outside of these categories renders them meaningless as either poetic approximations of something significant, or as logical or genetic ideas formed apart from experience, neither of which Heschel supports.  Buber, Between Man and Man, p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Who Is Man?, p. .

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While the question of being is central, it is significant in a special way that has been unnoticed. The question of being in “The Meaning of This Hour” and in Who Is Man?, is not only a question about human being in philosophical terms, but also a question in crisis. A straightforward Aristotelian analysis of being and human being in terms of a rational animal, even though it enters into the text twice,¹⁰⁶ is not the analysis that is central to Heschel. That kind of analysis locates the problem, but does not fully define it. The depth of the problem concerns the crisis of philosophy up to and including the moment that Heschel is writing, and that crisis is predominantly a modern European one, which has definite antecedents that are present in Who Is Man?. The clearest way of understanding this context is to begin with Husserl. Just as any philosophical introduction to Heschel must first come to terms with his use of Husserl’s notion of intentionality, any understanding of the crisis of being must also begin with Husserl. In 1935, three years before Heschel’s “The Meaning of This Hour” appeared, Husserl wrote “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man.”¹⁰⁷ He delivered it as a lecture in Vienna, while in exile from Nazi Germany. While its solution is not at all close in tenor or substance to either “The Meaning of This Hour” or Who Is Man?, its focus and sensibility are directly related. Husserl begins the essay with the following words: In this lecture I will venture to awaken new interest in the oft-treated theme of the European crisis by developing the philosophico-historical idea (or the teleological sense) of European man. In so far as in thus developing the topic I bring out the essential function that philosophy and its ramifications in our sciences have to perform in this process, the European crisis will also be given added clarification.¹⁰⁸

Where Heschel and Husserl disagree on the merits of a scientific explication, they agree with the central issue of man, the crisis, and its historical, philosophical context in which a solution might become available.¹⁰⁹ Husserl’s analysis is premised on the fact that European man has not lived up to his philosophical destiny.¹¹⁰ Consequently, he cannot cure his spirit, which is not open to the heal-

 Ibid., pp.  and .  Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, ).  Ibid., p. .  They both perform transcendental reductions, removing the crisis of man from the natural attitude that circumvents the relativism of psychology or history.  Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, p. .

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ing of natural sciences.¹¹¹ Husserl proposes that only a strict scientific study of philosophy will fulfill the human spirit and approach the rational ideal,¹¹² a defense of the ancient Greek distinction between knowledge and opinion.¹¹³ Heschel’s context of crisis depends on Husserl’s placement―but not on its description―for Heschel clearly doesn’t believe in the achievement of a rational ideal. It should go without saying, but unfortunately has been neglected, that Heschel writing after the Shoah is not susceptible to that naïve solution. Moreover, Heschel’s insight into the human situation is born out of crisis and out of the asymmetry of the rational and non-rational, as he tells us in Who Is Man?: The most valuable insights into the human situation have been gained not through patient introspection or systematic scrutiny, but rather through surprise and shock of dramatic failures. Indeed, it is usually in the wake of frustration, in moments of crisis and self-disillusionment, and rarely out of astonishment at man’s glorious achievements, that radical reflection comes to pass.¹¹⁴

Crisis, for Heschel, is a rite of passage, not unlike the one from childhood to adolescence and to maturity.¹¹⁵ It is present in the genesis of the question about man, alongside the heartache and embarrassment of his need to ask this question anew, without receiving a final answer.¹¹⁶ It belies a state of emergency in which the basic assumptions about human being have been shown to be specious and have been smashed.¹¹⁷ It is also unsurprising that Buber’s famous essay “What Is Man?” contains the language of crisis. It is prominently displayed at the beginning of the second section of the essay “Modern Attempts,” which begins with the subsection, “The Crisis and Its Expression.”¹¹⁸ Buber acknowledges a crisis of sociological nature and of that of the soul.¹¹⁹ The first crisis is typified by the decay of old organic forms,¹²⁰ and the second by the fact that man lags behind his works and is no longer able to master the world.¹²¹

 See Quentin Lauer’s analysis, pp.  –  and Husserl’s own words, pp.  – .  Ibid., pp.  – .  See Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), p. .  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., .  Ibid.  Ibid.  Buber, Between Man and Man, p. .  Ibid., pp.  –   Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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This self-characterization of crisis in Who Is Man? is akin to the manner in which significant commentators have read Heidegger’s works, and the emphasis on the question of being. Thomas Sheehan’s slightly hyperbolic description captures the sensitivity and impetus for the appearance of Being and Time: Like many German intellectuals after the Great War, Heidegger thought Western civilization was on the verge of total collapse. (His Bosch-like vision of the impending apocalypse is cited at the beginning of this essay.) For Heidegger, Europe had entered upon the climactic―in fact, the “eschatological”―phase of a “forgottenness of Being” that had plagued the West since Plato. Having experienced the exhaustion of the Platonic-Christian tradition of meaning, the West was stumbling like a drunken Dmitri Karamazov into the dark night of a global technology that Nietzsche had long predicted and that Heidegger thought Ernst Junger had accurately described in his essay “Die totale Mobilmachung” and his book “Der Arbeiter.”¹²²

John Caputo sees the same underlying presence in Heidegger. Heidegger is not only analyzing, he is, as Foucault says, “writing a history of the present―how we arrived at this crisis.”¹²³ Carol White sees Heidegger’s crisis of being as stretching all the way back to Parmenides and Plato. Here, she emphasizes the Greek root of crisis indicating “discernment” and “decision.” In the case of Parmenides, she considers that Heidegger thinks Parmenides is fully aware of the crisis of being, while in Plato’s case he is not, leading to a sense of how to deal with essences in Parmenides, case and knowing manifest essences in Plato’s.¹²⁴ Nevertheless, Heidegger’s “crisis” is both ancient and modern, and thoroughly historical. Heidegger’s well-known rector speech is a clear example of the ancient and modern emphasis on crisis, typifying Heidegger’s outlook, that would have been known to Heschel. Emphasizing the essence of the German university and the will to achieve it, Heidegger portrays clearly the crisis he envisions toward the end of the speech: But neither will anyone ask us whether we will it or do not will it when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams, when this moribund pseudocivilization collapses into itself, pulling all forces into confusion and allowing them to suffocate in madness.¹²⁵

 Thomas Sheehan, The New York Review of Books XXXV, no.  (June , ), p. .  Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, p. .  Carol White, “Heidegger and the Greeks,” A Companion to Heidegger, ed. H. Drefyus and M. Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, ), p. .  Wolin, p. .

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This crisis of madness is to be countered by a threefold bond, riddled with xenophobic attitudes. The bonds are of: 1) the ethnic and national community, 2) the bond of “the honor and destiny of the nation in the midst of the other peoples of the world,” and 3) the bond “that binds the students to the spiritual mission of the German Volk.”¹²⁶ Thus far, it is clear that Heidegger and Heschel have totally different outlooks. Heidegger asserts that the question of being has been forgotten, whereas Heschel avers that human being has been forgotten. Heidegger claims that any way toward an authentic understanding of Dasein must first come to terms with the reason the question of being has been forgotten, and what that entails. Heschel claims that human being has been overshadowed by being, and that being itself, not its forgetting, is directly responsible for the illusion that we understand human being. This context of crisis is the basic one that unravels virtually every philosophical appearance in Who Is Man?. Heschel reads each philosopher as one who has put his eggs in the wrong basket. Whether it is Nietzsche, Sartre, or Freud that Heschel is questioning, he does so from this foundation. Again, while we have yet to look at the answers that must be aligned with the consistent and constant context Heschel constructs for the entire book, the questions are most indicative of the interrogatory nature of Heschel’s thought. Therefore, we must disentangle the questions from within the crises as they are presented. Undoubtedly then, the collision course with Heidegger, who summed up the past two thousand years of philosophy as the forgetfulness of being, is at the center of Heschel’s questioning and construction as he attempts to shift the crisis from being to human being. This collision is not without historical indications. As stated above in relation to the interrogatory nature of Heschel and Heidegger’s thinking, the historian Hugo Ott has noted Heidegger’s own discomfort with questions that relate man to the essence of being. Ott has traced it to a book referred to Heidegger by his friend Heinrich Ochsner, and written by Theodor Haecker called, What Is Man?. ¹²⁷ Considering its context and the nature of the crisis of man and humanism, Ott argues convincingly that Heidegger read Haecker’s use of Genesis 1:26 as an attack on contemporary philosophy and ideology. So offended by humanism imbued with Christianity, Heidegger produced his summer lecture in 1935 (and published in 1953), “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” as a critique of Haecker. Not believing that the answer to the question “what is man?” is inscribed in the heavens, Heidegger demanded that we follow in the footsteps of

 Ibid., p. .  Ott, pp.  – .

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Heraclitus and Parmenides: “But then the essence and modality of being-human can only be defined with reference to the essence of being.”¹²⁸ Herein lies the crisis as Heschel frames it in relation to being: Can man only be defined in relation to being as Heidegger asserts? Most of the philosophical argumentation in Who Is Man? is taken up with this question and its answer, and will be prominently featured in the following chapters. For now, we must be content with the context of crisis in which Heschel’s conceptions of man appear, if we are to be able to set forth the questions he answers.

The Jewish Tradition There is a rare facet of Who Is Man? that exists without exception. The only proof texts that Heschel uses are taken from the Torah and Rabbinic tradition. This is in line with the major theme of the book and Heschel’s understanding of man―Adam. Heschel is arguing that both the philosophical tradition, and even some within the Jewish tradition (as we have seen in Buber’s case), have devalued the biblical notion of man: It is an accepted fact that the Bible has given the world a new concept of God. What is not realized is the fact that the Bible has given the world a new vision of man. The Bible is not a book about God; it is a book about man.¹²⁹

From the point of view of textuality and proof texts, this means that Who Is Man? is undeniably a Jewish book. This consistency on Heschel’s part has lead several thinkers to misjudge his philosophical import. Edward Kaplan approvingly cites Arthur Cohen’s evaluation of Heschel’s thought as a form of rhetoric.¹³⁰ No doubt, the consistent usage of religious proof texts lacking deductive reasoning is one of the basic causes for this mis-categorization. Yet as I have shown in the

 Ibid., p. .  Who Is Man?, p. .  Edward Kaplan, “Heschel’s Poetics of Religious Thinking,” Modern Judaism , no.  (), pp.  – ), and Arthur Cohen, The Natural and Supernatural Jew (New York: Pantheon Books, ), pp.  – . See p. , where Cohen argues in the classical sense that Heschel’s rhetoric is both his strength and undoing. Cohen’s attempt at analyzing Heschel’s “rhetoric” is hampered by Cohen’s lack of phenomenological treatment of the ineffable (p. ), where he considers aphorism, illustration, psychological analysis, and existential arguments as Heschel’s modus operandi. Within these limits, the ineffable cannot be understood, nor can the sublime, which as I will make clear in the next chapter, serve as a non-utilitarian basis for experiencing the ineffable in differentiation to the phenomenology of Heidegger.

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previous chapter, Heschel’s arguments are directed at specific ideas, and he uses other ideas to counter them. Regarding Heidegger, Heschel uses ideas that revolve around the concept of man and the notion of transcendence. The proof texts are not a replacement for, or a mere disparagement of reasoning. They are, as I will demonstrate in this section, an insight into the presence of concepts embedded in the depth of human being, as evoked in the Torah and rabbinic literature. Why is this idea of biblical man important in addition to the philosophical and anthropological bases for understanding man that Heschel has rejected and have been noted above? If, as Heschel has claimed, the great insight of the Bible is about man, then how is it to be understood? It cannot be understood as a scientific notion whether anthropological, political or cultural. Undoubtedly aware of the purpose and beginning of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, which begins with an examination of the biblical verse, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen. 1:26),” Heschel chose an entirely different route. Why? The simple answer is that being human, as Heschel stated, is no longer selfevident. The convergence of the Shoah, the debasement of the Bible, and the impotence of the philosophical tradition leads Heschel back to the original source of man’s creation and valuation to establish the insight about man that has been forgotten. So when Heschel provides a proof text from the biblical or rabbinic tradition, he is evoking a response, as his idea of revelation states,¹³¹ a meaning of transcendent being that is otherwise unavailable. In his words, The image of man is larger than the frame into which he was contracted. We have underestimated the nature of man… As a thing man is explicable; as a person he is both a mystery and a surprise. As a thing he is finite; as a person he is inexhaustible.¹³²

It is an essence of man denoted in the historical situation in which the exegete―Heschel―finds himself. In other words, it is a significance born in cri God in Search, pp.  – , “The human mind is a repository of a variety of ideas, some of which are definite and expressive while others resist definition and remain ineffable. Correspondingly, there are two kinds of words: descriptive words which stand in a fixed relation to conventional and definite meanings, such as concrete nouns, chair, table or the terms of science; and indicative words which stand in a fluid relation to ineffable meaning and, instead of describing, merely intimate something which we intuit but cannot fully comprehend. The content of words such as God, time, beauty, eternity cannot be faithfully imagined or reproduced in our minds. Still they convey a wealth of meaning to the ineffable. Their function is not to call up a definition in our minds but to introduce us to a reality which they signify. The function of descriptive words is to evoke an idea which we already possess in our minds, to evoke preconceived meanings. Indicative words have another function. What they call forth is not so much a memory but a response, ideas unheard of, meanings not fully realized before.”  Who Is Man?, pp.  – .

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sis, not a rational or descriptive proof that has a scientific underpinning. In this vein, the proof texts in Who Is Man? are used as deontological counters to the ontocentric predicament in which the philosophical tradition find itself. It is also significant to note when the proof texts appear. Most of the biblical and rabbinic references occur from the fifth chapter onward, which deal with the dimension of meaning. There are, however, two exceptions. The first is a footnote toward the end of the second chapter, which deals with definitions of man and contains citations from Psalm 8:4 and Job 7:17. A second reference is made to a passage in Sanhedrin 37a, which precedes a reference to Kant in which Heschel seeks to establish the morality of the question “What ought I to do,” as a problem inherent in the self, not one added to the self as an ideological issue. The location of the vast majority of biblical and rabbinic references occur in relation to the postmodern ideas and philosophers identified by Heschel, much the same way as the above mentioned one is used in relation to Kant. These references can also be seen in a specific context that is introduced in Chapter Four. There, Heschel spends most of his time establishing an ontological difference between biblical man and the philosophical tradition, which starts with Parmenides and ends with Heidegger. Heschel is clearly establishing an alternative exegesis for the meaning of man in the face of postmodern man, whose perplexity has set him adrift. The biblical exegesis is thoroughly infused in the later part of the book and is typified by this statement: A major difference between ontological and biblical thinking is that the first seeks to relate the human being to a transcendence called being as such, whereas the second, realizing that human being is more than being, that human being is living being, seeks to relate man to divine living, to a transcendence called the living God. The cardinal difference underlying these two approaches is that the first, or ontological, approach accepts being as the ultimate, whereas the biblical approach accepts living as the ultimately real.¹³³

The notable differences between biblical thinking and ontological thinking that follow in this significant divide include: “The Biblical man does not begin with being, but with the surprise of being,”¹³⁴ “Thus, whereas ontology asks about being as being, theology asks about being as creation, about being as a divine act.”¹³⁵ “The Greeks formulated the search of meaning as man in search of a thought; the Hebrews formulated the search of meaning as God’s thought (or

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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concern) in search of man…”¹³⁶ “The Bible maintains that the question about God is a question of God.”¹³⁷ “Essential to biblical religion is the awareness of God’s interest in man, the awareness of a covenant…”¹³⁸ “To the biblical man was given the understanding that beyond all mystery is meaning. God is neither plain meaning nor just mystery. God is meaning that transcends mystery, meaning that mystery alludes to, meaning that speaks through mystery.”¹³⁹ “Biblical religion is in a sense rebellion against the tyranny of things, a revolt against the confinement in the world. Man is given the choice of being lost in the world or of being a partner in mastering and redeeming the world… According to the Bible, the conquest of nature is a means to an end; man’s mastery is a privilege that must be neither misunderstood nor abused.”¹⁴⁰

This last citation is perhaps the best example of Heschel’s use of biblical exegesis in a philosophical context. As a distinction between the Greek tradition of being and the biblical view of living as the ultimately real and meaningful, Heschel introduces a midrash that inverts the Promethean myth: Man is from the beginning not submerged in nature nor totally derived from it. Turning beast, he becomes a cannibal. He is not simply in nature. He is free and capable of rising above nature, of conquering and controlling it. In the Prometheus myth man steals fire against the will of the gods; in the Bible man has the divine mandate to rise above nature. In this spirit, it is said in the Midrash that God taught Adam the art of making fire.¹⁴¹

This use of exegesis, neither anti-rational nor mystified beyond understanding, is typical of Heschel’s essentialist highlighting of the differences in the question of being in Greek tradition and the biblical tradition. Biblical and rabbinic proof texts are interjected in this context. Human being, which lives with the polarity of God’s transcendence and immanence, His distance and indwelling greatness¹⁴² is revealed in the well-known words of Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” Heschel’s employment of the quote is a phenomenological evocation of the presence of God that allows human being to discover the world as an allusion to God.¹⁴³ In the case of Adam, this kind of usage of biblical texts is a philosophical allusion. In a discussion that juxtaposes Heidegger’s use of Dasein and the Bible’s un-

       

Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., Ibid.

p. . p. . pp.  – . p. . p. .

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derstanding of creation,¹⁴⁴ Heschel reveals the sense of commandment that lies dormant in the consciousness of being for human beings. Playing the “is” of Heidegger’s “thrownesss” against the “ought” of the Bible’s “let there be” as an act of creation, Heschel evokes a meaning of commandment in the first consciousness of Adam. Adam, Heschel claims, comes to understand that to be is to obey, that the enduring moment of creation is a response to a command: I have not brought my being into being. Nor was I thrown into being. My being is obeying the saying, “Let there be!” Commandment and expectation lie dormant in the consciousness of being human. What Adam first hears is a command.¹⁴⁵

Heschel further expresses Adam’s polarity through an allusion to the biblical verses surrounding Adam’s confrontation with the snake, and through Psalm 8:5. The essence of creation is not that it has rendered Adam’s consciousness ideal once and for all, thereby exiling absurdity and nothingness.¹⁴⁶ Rather, the essence of creation is that Adam senses his seesawing between “animality and divinity.”¹⁴⁷ In the words of Psalm 8, Adam is “a little lower than the Divine.” This is not a mere religious description of existential angst. It is, as Heschel indicates at the end of the section where the quotes are found, a matter of human being, being challenged by the task of being more like the divine and less like the animals. It is a sense of being in which being challenged is the operative function, and not a Heideggerian description of Dasein, which has not chosen its being because it is “thrown.” In other words, the proof texts set out the essential framework of understanding Heschel’s question about Heidegger, to wit, “Has the Dasein, as such, ever freely decided and will it ever be able to decide as to whether to come into existence or not.” This is not an empty question. The direct answer to the question, as Heschel sees it, is the famous rabbinic saying from Pirke Avot 4:29: “It is against your will that you are born, it is against your will that you live, and it is against your will that you are bound to give an account.”¹⁴⁸ However, the depth from which to understand the difference of the ontological viewpoints vis-à-vis being, is revealed in the exegesis of the biblical texts.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. . “An isolated self, ‘consciousness in general,’ human nature in the sense of self-sufficient, spontaneous behavior, uninfluenced by intellectual and social factors, is an abstraction.”  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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Psalm 148:8, “like the wind and storm, fulfilling His word” is used in this same vein. Reading it without the nuance Heschel intends, makes it sound as nothing more than a vague promise that God’s presence will grow in stature unable to be ignored. But conjoined to the analysis of awe that precedes it, the text indicates it is an evocation of the sense of being in which man does more than situate himself. It is evocative of the sense of being in which man is a task to himself, in which the self is a challenge, and in which a response is demanded. This living sense of being, typical of biblical thought, is an openness of an otherwise closed heart. As Heschel says following the proof text, “Indeed, the dead emptiness in the heart is unbearable to the living man. We cannot survive unless we know what is asked of us.”¹⁴⁹ Continuing this line of evocative thought, Psalm 116:12 on the following page is used to encapsulate the indebtedness that is “a response to transcendent requiredness.”¹⁵⁰ Asking in the words of Psalm 116:12 “How shall I ever repay to the Lord all his bounties to me!” is not a mere rhetorical device―in essence―I cannot. Rather, it is a prodding of the conscience to let embarrassment seep into our thoughts about being, for there is an incongruity in human being of character and challenge and all the ideas that ensue.¹⁵¹ And without a sense of this incongruity in being itself, a religious commitment is impossible. The ensuing quotation to Psalm 116 from Job 9:11, is used to establish this line of thinking. Taken from its plain meaning, the passage from Job is given a phenomenological twist within the biblical sense of being. Only a sense of being that requires embarrassment will lead to man’s understanding of his being created in the image of God. There is no linear knowledge that reveals it. It can be known only from within man’s incongruity of being. Heschel makes this clear in the context in which the passage appears: Embarrassment not only precedes religious commitment; it is the touchstone of religious existence. How embarrassing for man to have been created in the likeness of God and to be unable to recognize him! In the words of Job: Lo, He passes by me and I see Him not; He moves on, but I do not perceive Him.¹⁵²

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., “Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, of perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension. Experiencing the evanescence of time, one realizes the absurdity of man’s sense of sovereignty. In the face of the immense misery of the human species, one realizes the insufficiency of all human effort to relieve it. On the face of one’s inner anguish, one realizes the fallacy of absolute expediency.”  Ibid., p. .

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The dissolution of the self, preceded by a lack of embarrassment, is encapsulated in a sense of triviality and banality.¹⁵³ The self, submerged in anonymity,¹⁵⁴ is unaware of the significance of creation that is directed at it. Heschel’s citation of Genesis 1:25, the creation of living beings, “And God saw that it was good,” exemplifies his use of biblical sources. Heschel claims that the citation is neither informative nor descriptive of how the world came into being, thus removing it from the realm of rhetoric and apologetics.¹⁵⁵ Having come into being, the Bible expresses the glory of the world in words of appreciation, which demands that man reconcile God’s perspective with our human experience.¹⁵⁶ Being as a task is celebratory, neither to be shunned nor ignored.¹⁵⁷ In this context then, the rabbinic remark quoted in the name of Rabbi Akiva, which concludes the book, is neither a rhetorical flourish nor a grasp at positive thinking in the light of the eclipse of humanity. Akiva, one of the great scholars and martyrs of ancient rabbinic culture, is said to have offered his students the words, “A song every day, A song every day.”¹⁵⁸ Being, from the point of view of the Bible,¹⁵⁹ or more concisely, human being, is involved in the drama of redemption. Man is capable of pushing the world closer to justice through compassion with each and every action. There is a nascent moment of celebration in the biblical attitude toward being from the point of view of awe, which allows human being “to reduce or enhance the power of evil.”¹⁶⁰ It is clear from these citations and their contexts that Heschel’s approach to biblical significance in the light of the category of being is neither rhetorical, nor anti-rational. Similarly, this is true of literary allusions to other Jewish texts, such as the reference to Jonah on the final page of the book: “Man in his anxiety is a messenger who forgot the message.”¹⁶¹ This is also true of the allusion to kabbalistic thought on the previous page: “God is both present and absent. To celebrate is to invoke His presence concealed in His absence.”¹⁶² Finally, there is another significant way in which this third audience, the philosophical and religious Jewish one, is addressed. Heschel is both a German thinker and an American thinker, residing simultaneously in both traditions. His earli         

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid.,

pp.  – . p. .

pp.  – . p. . pp.  – . p. . p. .

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est important work, Die Prophetie, written in German as his doctoral thesis, became the basis of his English Americanized volumes, The Prophets. But more than just the basis of this volume, Die Prophetie included the basic philosophical issues that Heschel would wrestle with his entire career. His notion of intentionality, pathos, the meaning of prophecy and revelatory experience―to name but a few issues―form the kernel of his work on both sides of the Atlantic, and obviously begin in Germany. To see Heschel as either one or the other, German or American, is to misunderstand his place within continental Philosophy, or to overemphasize his Americanized engagement in social issues. Heschel’s biographer falls into this trap because while Kaplan has noted the personal and philosophical contacts Heschel had before arriving in America, Kaplan has not elucidated Heschel’s inherited European philosophical issues clearly enough, and has relied too prematurely on the “radical” nature of Heschel’s spiritualism and politics in his new home, America.¹⁶³ Perhaps Edward Kaplan’s outlook is overly affected by his own interactions with Heschel, which had determined his outlook long before he looked at the historical and philosophical record.¹⁶⁴ Characterizations aside, it is one of my goals that in the following chapters this volume, will serve to illustrate Heschel’s profound engagement with Heidegger’s thought and its significance by unearthing those philosophical ideas and objections. Furthermore, as many intellectual and religious refugees who were fortunate enough to escape the violence and rage of Nazi Germany and her allies, Heschel was forced to live in two worlds. Events occurred, decisions were made and consequences were taken in stride in the course of his life, which he could not have imagined. The educational training, background and cultural assimilation of Europe, in a positive sense, was clearly disrupted for Heschel as it was for many others. However, the assumption that a new homeland means an entirely new frame of mind is absurd. If anything, Heschel transplanted the roots of his thinking to American soil,

 See Kaplan, Vol. , p. x. It seems clear to me that Kaplan has rendered a biographical picture of Heschel that is in line with Kaplan’s experiences and interactions with Heschel. He says, “I first met Heschel in  while earning a Ph.D. in French literature at Columbia University. I participated with Heschel in the anti-Vietnam war movement, had long, earnest discussions, shared with him family and religious events, and also published extensively on Heschel’s works.” Absent is a more profound and objective image of Heschel’s thought, and the significance of his actions as they relate to ideas that span the entirety of western philosophy and religion.  Kaplan, Vol. II, p. xii, “I had met Heschel in  while earning a Ph.D. in French literature at Columbia University. He spoke with me for two hours in his office at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and we formed a special bond, not an uncommon experience as I later learned. He invited me to walk with him on Shabbat afternoons, filled with long, ambulatory conversations, and I participated with him in the religious opposition to the Vietnam War. From Heschel I learned how worship, even mystical inwardness, could lead to, even incite, ethical commitment.”

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and as his brilliance allowed, he was capable of expressing them again in a new language and for a new audience without severing the age-old ties. Heschel was one of the few significant thinkers of the twentieth century whose influence, significance, and presence spanned traditions simultaneously, when the audience was capable of taking into consideration the depth and breadth of the philosophical issues Heschel interjected into his texts. The argument here is that while many conversations are going on in Who Is Man?, the most significant, the deepest, is the effect of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein on religious thought. That it would preoccupy Heschel some twenty-six years after he fled Nazi Germany, and well after the appearance of Man Is Not Alone (1951) and God in Search of Man (1955), which are clearly directed at American Englishspeaking audiences, demands that we see him in both the German and American religious philosophical traditions, and be slow to characterize the man until we have understood his ideas. This analysis reveals how Heschel bridges two traditions that have either been naively held as one, or sadly characterized as being ultimately unbridgeable. The philosophical tradition of being from Parmenides to Heidegger, when opened to a certain kind of criticism and the biblical tradition, when removed from either a symbolic or literal understanding, is capable of providing insight together. Just how this is accomplished has yet to be explained, but that it is carried out through an analysis of Heschel’s use of sources is evident. It is my intention to answer this basic yet difficult question. It is not by accident that Heschel picks Heidegger as the main target of criticism in this book, which casts a net of significance over all his other works. Just as Heschel and Heidegger stand in each of their traditions as re-interpreters of the question of being, they also assign a significant difference to the question of phenomenology. As I have demonstrated in an earlier work, Heschel’s understanding and use of phenomenology follows the outline of Husserl. Heidegger’s turn from Husserl is well known,¹⁶⁵ signifying in Husserl’s eyes, the transformation of the transcendental ego into Dasein, a psychological anthropology. Just as the question of being solidifies a vast disagreement between Heidegger and Heschel, so too does the question of phenomenology. We must then turn to this difference, 1) to unearth Heschel’s ability to intertwine traditions that Heidegger refused to intertwine, and 2) to establish the basis for Heschel’s critique of Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein. In their respective phenomenological beginnings, lie the attitudes and structures that dominate their conclusions, most importantly

 See H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, ), pp.  –  for a presentation of the historical break between Husserl and Heidegger.

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concerning Dasein and Adam, and make one, Heidegger, an unapologetic Nazi and the other, Heschel, a redemption-affirming Jew.

3 First Phenomenology – in the Cobbler’s Workshop Heidegger’s phenomenology is a well-known facet of his thinking. According to him, phenomenology is the method of ontology.¹ The question of the meaning of being must be treated phenomenologically, as this is the only way of coming to terms with the things themselves.² If carried out otherwise, Heidegger asserts we are doing nothing more than creating standpoints, which lead us away from the things-themselves.³ For Heidegger, “phenomenology means to let that which shows itself to be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”⁴ Phenomenology, according to him, must stick to the how at all costs, unlike other “sciences,” which designate the objects under research or the subject matter derived from the investigation. This turn away from Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, coupled with the desire to deny the problem of the existence of the external world,⁵ forms the dividing line between Heidegger’s and Heschel’s thinking. As Husserl noted in the final edition of the Jahrbuch, Based on misunderstandings and fundamentally upon the fact that one misinterprets my phenomenology backwards from a level which it was its very purpose to overcome, in other words, that one has failed to understand the fundamental novelty of the phenomenological reduction and hence the progress from mundane subjectivity (i. e., man) to transcen-

 Being and Time, pp.  – .  Ibid., pp.  – . There is considerable disagreement in the secondary literature about this basic question, i. e., whether or not it is the question of being or the question of the meaning of being. While I think that Sheehan’s explanation of the question is the most plausible one, making the question a question about the meaning of being (A Companion to Heidegger, “Dasein,” pp.  – ), it is not tackled in Heschel’s thinking. It is clear that Heschel opposes both Heidegger’s understanding of being and his understanding of meaning, yet he does not address the distinction qua Heidegger directly or indirectly, Who Is Man?, p. , in the section titled The dimension of meaning― “We have expressed the problem of man in the form of asking: What is being human? Two other themes implied in our problem must be considered now: 1. What is being? 2. What is the meaning of human being?” See also p. 52. “The problem of being and the problem of the meaning of being are not coextensive…”  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  See Dreyfus, pp.  –  and pp.  –  for a discussion on how Heidegger turns the question of the external world on its head from the usual Cartesian manner of understanding the problem.

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dental subjectivity; consequently that one has remained stuck in anthropology, whether empirical or a priori, which according to my doctrine has not yet reached the genuinely philosophical level, and whose interpretation as philosophy means a lapse into “transcendental anthropologism” or “psychologism.”⁶

The question of whether the external world exists, at the root of section 43a in Being and Time ⁷ and Heidegger’s insistence that that it is not an appropriate question for Dasein, indicates that Heidegger never applies the phenomenological reduction to Dasein and the elements that constitute its environment.⁸ This stands in direct opposition to Who Is Man?, which applies the phenomenological reduction to humanity and the constituents of man’s existence, as we shall shortly see through the beginnings and application of Heschel’s phenomenology. Heschel’s phenomenology hardly registers consideration by his many adherents and critical readers. Borrowing from Husserl’s phenomenology, which centered on consciousness and its objects, Heschel’s phenomenology is easily overwhelmed by his evocative language, which is often construed as being poetic. This misunderstanding is magnified because Heschel limits his overt references to phenomenology. Only twice does he refer to Brentano and Husserl by name. As I have worked out and presented the fine points of Heschel’s application of phenomenology to his concept of revelation, I will not repeat them here. A new tack will be taken. We will cull, from his sources, overt characterizations that are directed at Heidegger and stand in opposition to Heidegger. It is significant to draw this phenomenological line of disagreement between them, for two outstanding reasons. First, neither Heidegger nor Heschel are verificationists.⁹ Yet, unlike Heidegger, while Heschel refers to the external world objectively, he still never finds it necessary to provide proof for its existence. Hence there is a great divide be-

 Spiegelberg, p. , and Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phenomenologische Forschung (Halle: Max Neimeyer, XI ),  and Husserliana V, .  Being and Time, pp.  – .  See Blattner, pp.  – , for an evaluation of Heidegger’s use of a phenomenological reduction in his lectures, not in his published work, and the distinction between suspending belief and leading back to being from entities. Blattner, pp.  – , based on these distinctions provides a credible analysis of the possible way in which Husserl and Heidegger might share a phenomenological outlook.  See Heidegger, Being and Time Sect  and Heschel, Who Is Man?, p. , “The question [of the meaning of being] refers to the transcendence of being; it affirms what is beyond, over, and above being. In asking it, we leave the level of logical and strictly verifiable thinking and climb to the level of mystery.” See Neil Gillman, “Epistemological Tensions in Heschel’s Thought,” Conservative Judaism , nos.  –  (Winter/Spring ), pp.  – , especially page  where Gillman admits his discomfort with the lack of verification in Heschel’s thought. I will draw out Gillman’s own problems with verification, in the final chapter.

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tween Heidegger and Heschel when it comes to reducing or leading us back from entities to their being.¹⁰ There must, according to Heidegger, be a way of following entities back to being. This aspect of phenomenology stands at the center of Heidegger’s phenomenology as a strictly positive maneuver, whether it can be adequately achieved or not.¹¹ In the case of Heschel, once the phenomenological reduction of Husserl is employed, there is no amount of nor any kind of reduction that can lead us back to being. Second, Heidegger assumes, without demonstration but with selfvalidating maneuvers, that phenomenology can supply a sense of neutrality because it has no standpoint: Thus our treatise does not subscribe to a “standpoint” or represent any special “direction”; for phenomenology is nothing of either sort, nor can it become so as long as it understands itself.¹²

This is echoed most importantly in Heidegger’s discussion concerning past religious attempts to understand being that are to be superseded by his own, and which remain neutral. Theology and other forms, unlike phenomenology, “designate the objects of their respective sciences according to the subject-matter which they comprise at the time.”¹³ Heidegger’s phenomenology does neither: “The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled.”¹⁴ Heschel reminds us throughout his writing that all thinking proceeds from a “standpoint.” The most succinct presentation of this idea is found in the first few pages of God in Search of Man, where situational thinking is phenomenologically unpacked.¹⁵ More important for our purposes, this alludes to a significant remark which, without any context, seems besides the point. In the introduction to The Prophets, which appeared in 1962 and was preceded by Die Prophetie in 1936, continuing all the way through the appearance of Who Is Man? in 1965, Heschel claimed fidelity to phenomenology. However, one finds a strange remark in the earlier work, where Heschel claims he cannot accept impartiality as a philosophical principle: While I still maintain the soundness of the method described above, which in important aspects reflects the method of phenomenology, I have long since become wary of impartial-

 See Blattner, p. , where he puts this in context for Heidegger.  See Edgar C. Boedeker, “Phenomenology,” A Companion to Heidegger, pp.  – , especially the conclusion, pp.  – , where he argues that Heidegger relinquished that idea.  Being and Time, p. .  Ibid.  Ibid.  See pp.  – , God in Search.

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ity, which is itself a way of being partial. The prophet’s existence is either irrelevant or relevant. If irrelevant I cannot be truly involved in it; if relevant then my impartiality is but a pretense. Reflection may succeed in isolating an object; reflection itself cannot be isolated. Reflection is part of a situation.¹⁶

I take this remark to signal a turn in Heschel’s understanding of phenomenology and in particular his continuance of Husserl’s founding principles and his rejection of Heidegger’s twist on Husserl’s original direction. This is supported further on in the seminal introduction to The Prophets, and has direct bearing here. Referring to thinking, which is isolated and revolves around the Ding an sich, Heschel points to Kant and less obviously, but more importantly, to Heidegger as the context demonstrates: In the academic environment in which I spent my student years philosophy had become an isolated, self-subsisting, self-indulgent entity, a Ding an sich, encouraging suspicion instead of love of wisdom. The answers offered were unrelated to the problems, indifferent to the travail of a person who became aware of man’s suspended sensitivity in the face of stupendous challenge, indifferent to a situation in which good and evil became irrelevant, in which man became increasingly callous to catastrophe and ready to suspend the principle of truth. I was slowly led to the realization that some of the terms, motivations, and concerns which dominate our thinking may prove destructive of the roots of human responsibility and treasonable to the ultimate ground of human solidarity.¹⁷

Apart from Heidegger’s technical discussion of phenomenology at the beginning of Being and Time relating to Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, Heidegger presents a functional description of phenomenology in a unique way. Phenomenology is a method of uncovering the question of being in Dasein (there-being),¹⁸ which is an entity that is constituted by the inquiry itself as one of its modes of being.¹⁹ As such, Dasein is the kind of entity whose being is explicitly understood in making its ontical distinctiveness ontological.²⁰ Consequently, being in a world is essentially something that belongs to Dasein, which determines the fact that fundamental ontology must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein. Heidegger’s move away from the dualism of Cartesian methodology, in which there is a conformity between the knower and the known,²¹ means that any analysis of Dasein must be accessible in the everyday world. No longer an

     

The Prophets, Vol. , p. xii. Ibid., p. xiv. Being and Time, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Being and Time, pp. ,  – ,  – ,  – ,  – .

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entity discovered through subjective self-reflection, the self is a reflected entity in the world. In Heidegger’s own words, “this means that it is to be shown as it is proximally and for the most part―in its average everydayness.”²² To this end, Heidegger gives examples of a cobbler’s workshop to indicate how phenomenology works―how “Dasein is reflected back from the interrelated things, the world in which it partakes. Thus a “phenomenological description of the ‘world’ will mean to exhibit the being of those entities which are present-athand within the world, and to fix it in concepts which are categorical.”²³ For Dasein, this means that the “world” closest to us is its environment,²⁴ and the phenomenology of the being of those entities “we also call our ‘dealings.’”²⁵ In keeping with his anti-Cartesian outlook, Heidegger reminds the reader that this is not “a bare cognition but rather that kind of concern that manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge’.”²⁶ This is ultimately significant for an understanding of Heidegger’s phenomenology because “the phenomenological question applies in the first instance to the being of those entities which we encounter in such concern.”²⁷ These are not mere things that Heidegger refers to but “equipment.”²⁸ It is in this context that we are introduced to Heidegger’s Cobbler’s workshop. First evoked in a lecture in a summer course in 1925,²⁹ its significance for phenomenology is restated in Being and Time, when Heidegger subjects “environmentality” and “worldhood” to analysis. The crux of the issue in this section of Being and Time is the establishment of method when “looking” at things, for their mere outward appearance has no access to being.³⁰ The phenomenological method can only be established when we encounter the “manipulability” of equipment³¹―the hammer, in the cobbler’s case―which possesses a certain “readiness-to-hand.”³² This non-theoretical or pre-ontological understanding is the structure that Dasein in its non-abstract way makes transparent. At the basis of all intelligibility, as Dreyfus has claimed, is “a phenomenology of ‘mind-

 Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), p. .  Being and Time, p. .  Ibid.  Ibid.

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less’ everyday coping skills.”³³ Phenomenology is an interpretation of the structure of being in which the apophantic nature of interpretation allows “entities to show themselves from themselves just as they are in themselves.”³⁴ The tool itself becomes invisible while the work becomes the object of concern.³⁵ Dasein, as the entity that is characterized by an understanding of its own being and the being of other entities, is the most significant entity for ontological analysis, and as such, is the being that is capable of a temporal concern, which is fundamental to the question of being. All of the structures of the being of Dasein, equiprimordially present in its existence, constitute the “who” of Dasein.³⁶ The basis for questioning being as seen in the workshop analysis provides a basis for understanding human existence as being in the world. Consequently, the utility of work is indispensable to its understanding and the meaning of the being of entities can only be temporal. Heschel’s understanding of phenomenology stands in direct opposition to Heidegger’s. Moreover, whether planned or unplanned, its unfolding is also done through the example of a cobbler’s workshop. I tend to believe it is planned, as there is another famous example of a cobbler used in the history of philosophy. And while we have no reference to the well-known example used by John Locke of the Prince and the Cobbler in analyzing human identity,³⁷ Heschel’s knowledge of the entire history of philosophy is wide and deep. Heschel’s example of a cobbler is taken from Hasidic lore. While it is not my intention to argue the significance of Heschel’s overall understanding and usage of Hasidic sources, it is clear in this case, and it is a fundamental one, that there is a phenomenological kernel at work. At the beginning of Man’s Quest for God (1954), a penetrating study in the use of symbolism and the meaning of prayer, Heschel relates the following story: About a hundred years ago, Rabbi Isaac Meir Alter of Ger pondered over the question of what a certain shoemaker of his acquaintance should do about his morning prayer. His customers were poor men who owned only one pair of shoes. The shoemaker used to pick up their shoes at a late evening hour, work on them all night and part of the morning, in order to deliver them before their owners had to go to work. When should the shoemaker say his morning prayer? Should he pray quickly the first thing in the morning, and then go back to

 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Boston: MIT Press; ), p. .  Being and Time, Sect , Companion to Heidegger p. .  See Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), pp.  – .  Being and Time, p. .  See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: E.P. Dutton, ), Book , Chapter , Section .

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work? Or should he let the appointed hour of prayer go by and, every once in a while, raising his hammer from the shoes, utter a sigh: “Woe unto me, I haven’t prayed yet!”? Perhaps that sigh is worth more than prayer itself.³⁸

What is the phenomenological significance here? There is clearly no effort on Heschel’s part to identify praying or prayer with a natural occurrence, as there is no utility in the action. In fact, it is a denial of utility, as “a sigh,” a wordless evocation of meaning, stands in opposition to the assertion of any cause and effect. This is a kind of an epoché―a bracketing of any natural process, natural language, or worldly assertion. There is no attempt to prove the effectiveness of prayer or the accomplishment of any objective. On the contrary, Heschel relates the Hasidic tale to evoke a sense of the inner life of the one who considers prayer a meaningful commitment. The aim is to lay bare an act of consciousness that begins where expression ends.³⁹ It is an essential act in the sense of examining the limits of expression and ineffability,⁴⁰ and maintaining the primacy of an inward act of consciousness that is formed by human intention.⁴¹ Immediate⁴² and without euphemism,⁴³ prayer is not a final achievement, but an expression of ineffability itself, not a means of selfexpression.⁴⁴ And while it is not the place here to fully examine the way this is carried out, this “tale,” which sets the aim and tone of the book, is consistent with another prime use of phenomenology in Heschel’s work. The first paragraphs of another main work in Heschel’s oeuvre strike exactly the same chords as are struck here, but from another perspective. The first two paragraphs of Man Is Not Alone (1951),⁴⁵ Heschel’s first major publication in America and his initial foray into the philosophy of religion, begin along similar phenomenological lines without informing the reader: There are three aspects of nature which command man’s attention: power, loveliness, grandeur. Power he exploits, loveliness he enjoys, grandeur fills him with awe. We take it for granted that man’s mind should be sensitive to nature’s loveliness. We take it equally for granted that a person who is not affected by the vision of earth and sky, who has no eyes to see the grandeur of nature and to sense the sublime, however vaguely, is not human.

       

Man’s Quest for God, pp.  – . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp.  – . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Heschel, Man Is Not Alone.

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But why? What does it do for us? The awareness of grandeur does not serve any social or biological purpose; man is very rarely able to portray his appreciation of the sublime to others or to add it to his scientific knowledge. Nor is its perception pleasing to the senses or gratifying to our vanity. Why, then, expose ourselves to the disquieting provocation of something that defies our drive to know, to some which may even fill us with fright, melancholy or resignation? Still we insist that it is unworthy of man not to take notice of the sublime.⁴⁶

Heschel employs this tripartite division of knowledge for a specific end. It is clear that the bracketing of nature by man’s response to grandeur has no utility whatsoever. It has no social, biological, political, or scientific use. Moreover, grandeur and access to the sublime is a foundational human experience. Its distinctiveness is such that without it, our self-conscious sense of our own humanity departs. This non a-priori foundational experience carries over to Who Is Man?, and continues Heschel’s critique of Heidegger. In the chapter immediately following Heschel’s critique of philosophy and being from Parmenides to Heidegger, Heschel introduces a phenomenological distinction that has immediate bearing on his difference from Heidegger. Chapter Five of Who Is Man? begins with the juxtaposition of the thought that has an end, and that which does not. Echoing the sentiments in the first paragraphs of Man Is Not Alone, Heschel says here, There are two primary ways in which man relates himself to the world that surrounds him: manipulation and appreciation. In the first way he sees in what surrounds him things to be handled, forces to be managed, objects to be put to use. In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired.⁴⁷

In other words, there is a type of phenomenological description of the world that Heidegger makes, and there is another kind that Heschel makes. In the Heideggerian one, the cobbler is located through the things he uses and handles. In the Heschelian one, the cobbler, perplexed⁴⁸ and provoked by his circumstances, understands that it is imperative to express some sense of the grandeur of which he is aware. In the immediacy of that moment, the Heschelian phenomenology denotes his humanity and the humanity of others before any act of discernment or analysis is possible. In the Heideggerian instance, phenomenology cannot be divorced from

 Ibid., p. .  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., p. : “To understand the meaning of the problem and to appreciate its urgency, we must keep alive in our reflection the of stress and strain in which it comes to pass, genesis and birth pangs, motivation, the face of perplexity, the varieties of experiencing it, the necessity of confronting and being pre-occupied with it.”

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its utilitarian roots. There may be a sense of wonder added to it or rediscovered,⁴⁹ but it is not awakened in its origin. In the Heschelian purview, phenomenology must be divorced from any utilitarian availability at all costs. Wonder and the sense of grandeur constitute both the original experience and the humanity of the subject, whose act of consciousness awakens to the sublime. Whereas for Heidegger the pre-ontological is the domain of understanding entities, this cannot be the case for Heschel. And where the instrumentality of things defines their ontological categorical nature for Heidegger,⁵⁰ for Heschel they obscure who man is. For Heschel, the pre-ontological is filled with an awareness of the sublime, and Who Is Man? makes several references to the unavailability of the sublime and the “who” of man when manipulation of tools takes place.⁵¹ The most telling of these sources in relation to Heidegger is in the fourth chapter of Who Is Man?, dedicated to the question of meaning. There, we see that Heschel is directing the depth of his critique toward Heidegger, and focusing his attention on two issues: that of being and meaning, and that of an intentionality of consciousness. For as he understands Heidegger, Heschel asserts that the instrumentality of tools cannot bridge an elemental gap in human life and cannot permit intentionality in consciousness: But what is there at stake in human life that may be gambled away. It is the meaning of life. In all acts he performs, man raises a claim to meaning. The trees he plants, the tools he invents, are answers to a need or purpose. In its very essence, consciousness is a dedication to design. Committed to the task of coalescing being with meaning, things with ideas, the mind is driven to ponder whether meaning is something it may invent, something that ought to be attained, or whether there is meaning to existence as it is, to existence as existence, independent of what we may add to it. In other words, is there meaning only to what man does, but none to what he is? Becoming conscious of himself he does not stop at knowing: “I am”; he is driven to know “who” he is. Man may, indeed, be characterized as a subject in quest of a predicate, as a being in quest of a meaning of life, of all of life, not only particular actions or single episodes which happen now and then.⁵²

The consequences of these different phenomenological treatments are significant. Heidegger’s allegiance to the everydayness of the world, as analyzed in the cobbler’s workshop, is a negative phenomenological value to Heschel that has a direct effect on the diminishment of being human. This is an elemental,

 Being and Time, p. , “Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascinated by the world with which it is concerned.” Wonder is always subject to the historical. See also Richardson, p.  and p.  where wonder is analyzed as a re-valuation in the revelation of non-being.  See Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, pp.  – .  See Who Is Man?, pp. , , , , and  – .  Ibid., p. .

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non-fundamental move in phenomenology, according to Heschel. For Heschel, unlike Heidegger, phenomenology provokes an immediate choice centering on manipulation or celebration. In Heschel’s eyes, “everydayness” becomes a sign for the loss of significance in human being: The power of being human is easily dissolved in the process of excessive trivialization. Banality and triteness, the by-products of repetitiveness, continue to strangle or corrode the sense of significant being. Submerged in everydayness, man begins to treat all hours alike. The days are drab, the nights revolt in the helplessness of despair. All moments are stillborn, all hours seem stale. There is neither wonder nor praise. What is left is disenchantment, the disintegration of being human.⁵³

To Heidegger, phenomenology is a dis-embedding of the self from itself.⁵⁴ For Heschel, phenomenology is an act of consciousness in which man, “neither submerged in nature nor totally derived from it,”⁵⁵ has access to human nature, but must equally question the meaning of being human, for being human and human being are neither equally logical nor equally meaningful,⁵⁶ nor do they equally indicate the preciousness of human life.⁵⁷ Heidegger’s phenomenology must treat Dasein as it treats every other entity. It must never take it out of its “everydayness.” Dasein’s reflection cannot depart from its existence: “The kind of being toward which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call ‘existence’

 Ibid., pp.  – .  See Dreyfus, p. , for an explanation of the difference between awareness and self-awareness, which doesn’t exist, because self and world belong together in a single entity, Dasein. There is, according to him, no self-referential experience of acting, only the awareness that self and world are a single entity in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world (Heidegger, Basic Problems, ). Keeping in line with Dreyfus’s pragmatic approach, mental states do not exist or have any fundamental significance. Dasein, unlike the self, is absorbed activity in the world. Richardson, less emphatic of Heidegger’s pragmatism, pp. 89 – 91, explains this dis-embedding of the self as a retrieval and re-collection of itself from ontic distractions. Keller, p. 158, tries to merge the pragmatist and existentialist sides of Heidegger by analyzing the social role that Das Man plays in Heidegger’s thought. That we are led to accept uncritically the identity and beliefs we have about ourselves and the world is by virtue of roles of socialization that have been foisted upon us. Blattner, pp. 275 – 276, in keeping with his theory that Heidegger is a temporal idealist, argues that Dasein and the world are not identical and therefore the self or individual is not “atomistic,” which I take to mean is not an entirely distinct being numerically unlike the world he or she inhabits.  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .

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[Existenz].”⁵⁸ It is only as a possibility of itself that Dasein is understood, and because its existence precedes its essence, its being will always be paramount.⁵⁹ Heidegger is consistent on this issue in his analysis of Dasein. To Dasein, being in a world is something that belongs essentially. Thus, Dasein’s understanding of being pertains with equal primordiality to an understanding of the being of those entities, which becomes accessible within the world and to itself. So whenever an ontology takes for its theme entities whose character of being is other than that of Dasein, it has its own foundation and motivation in Dasein’s own ontical structure in which a pre-ontological understanding of Being is comprised as a definite characteristic.⁶⁰ Heschel’s phenomenology precludes just this kind of existential centrality. Being human is never a mere reflection of worldliness. Human existence can never have an essential role over and above human essence. Heschel’s phenomenology of awe cannot exist in an hermeneutic circle as does Heidegger’s⁶¹ because the provocation and incomprehensibility of awe cannot be leveled in ontological sameness. Heschel says, “In our reflection we must go back to where we stand in awe before sheer being. The world is not just here. It shocks us into amazement.”⁶² This means that human being, unlike Dasein, cannot be analyzed within the hermeneutic circle because there is always something left over in being human that forces any analysis out of an enclosed circle. Further, in direct contradiction to Heidegger’s premise about self-knowledge and awareness, Heschel says in Who Is Man? that human being is unlike all other being: Man as we encounter him is already stamped by an image, an artifact. Human being in distinction from all other beings is endowed with consciousness of its own being, not only with awareness of the presence of other beings. Consciousness-of implies awareness of one’s special position in relation to other beings. Any conception as to what I am going to do with myself presupposes my having an image of myself.⁶³

In arguing for the implications of consciousness rather than the non-self-awareness of Dasein, Heschel is not drawing a distinction between a fundamental spiritual relevance and all other ways of thinking. Rather, he is arguing, contra Heidegger, that when “facticity” is applied to human being―the fact that any entity

     

Being and Time, p. . Ibid., pp.  – . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp.  – , and  – . Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid., pp.  – .

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understands its destiny as tied with other beings in the world⁶⁴―the image of man is lost because “facticity” is a stunted concept. Not only does man not have a nature, but also facticity can never define Dasein’s way of being:⁶⁵ Is it not right to suggest that the agony of the contemporary man is the agony of a spiritually stunted man? The image of man is larger than the frame into which he was contracted; we have underestimated the nature of man. Even the form in which we ask the question about man is biased by our own conception of man as a thing. We ask: What is man? Yet the true question should be: Who is Man? As a thing man is explicable; as a person he is both a mystery and a surprise. As a thing he is finite; as a person he is inexhaustible. The popular definitions cited above offer an answer to the question “What is man?” in terms of his facticity, as a thing of space. The question “Who is man?” is a question of worth, a question of position and status within the order of beings.⁶⁶

And while this passage also serves as a rejoinder to Buber’s thinking, it is a seminal and clear demarcation between Heschel and Heidegger, where Heidegger argues explicitly for the “facticity” of Dasein in Being and Time: Dasein understands its ownmost Being in the sense of a certain “factual Being-present-athand.” And yet the “factuality” of the fact [Tatsache] of one’s own Dasein is at bottom quite different ontologically from the factual occurrence of some kind of mineral, for example. Whenever Dasein is, it is as a fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s “facticity.”⁶⁷

Heidegger’s phenomenology is infused with anxiety while Heschel’s, in opposition, is premised on awe and cannot be divorced from it. Heidegger establishes the centrality of anxiety in Division 1 of Being and Time, “As a state of mind which will satisfy these methodological requirements, the phenomenon of anxi-

 Being and Time, p. . See Dreyfus, pp.  –  for the culturally unpacked meaning of facticity that separates it from factuality.  It is instructive at this point to contrast Heschel’s use of Heidegger’s “facticity” with Sartre’s. It makes that much more clear the focus of Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, which is based on facticity and Dasein qua humanity. When Sartre speaks of facticity it has two basic interests. It is directed at consciousness and contingency. “This perpetually evanescent contingency of the initself which, without ever allowing itself to be apprehended, haunts the for-itself and reattaches it to being-in-itself―this contingency is what we shall call the facticity of the for-itself. It is this facticity which permits us to say that the for-itself is, that it exists, although we can never realize the facticity, and although we always apprehend it through the for-itself.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans., H. E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, ), p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Being and Time, p. .

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ety will be made basic for our analysis.”⁶⁸ It is the primordial disclosure of the being of Dasein.⁶⁹ Awe in Heschel’s analysis of man is a phenomenological avenue into the mystery of being. It is not something that comes after faith, but precedes it and continuously and continually senses the ultimate meaning of being. It is an avenue into the meaning of the mystery of being, which is reliable―albeit radically amazing⁷⁰―as it is unconnected to the relations in which meaning is embedded,⁷¹ as was Heidegger’s notion: All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of mystery that staggers our ability to sense it. No one can ridicule the stars, or poke fun at an atomic explosion. No one can debunk the man who committed suicide in order to call the attention of the world to the Nazi atrocities. Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe. Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe. Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition; faith is attachment to transcendence, to the meaning beyond the mystery. Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.⁷²

The Ontological Difference As we dig deeper into the comparisons between Heidegger’s and Heschel’s use of phenomenology, we must examine the basic difference in their respective ontologies. At the heart of Heidegger’s question of being is the centrality of “the ontological difference.” While identified by Heidegger formally in The Basic Prob-

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  See God in Search, pp.  –  especially p. , “What fills us with radical amazement is not the relations in which everything is embedded but the fact that even the minimum of perception is a maximum of enigma. The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all.”  Ibid.  Who Is Man?, pp.  – .

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lems of Phenomenology, ⁷³ this concept creeps into Heidegger’s inquiry after he has denied the meaning of the universality, indefinability, and self-evidence of being as a formulation for fundamental ontology.⁷⁴ The formal structure of the inquiry must begin with the fact that “The being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity.”⁷⁵ This means that Dasein, which alone grasps this difference, has through it an understanding of itself, the world, and the things in the world.⁷⁶ The forgottenness of this distinction is what has led metaphysics astray and given rise to theology.⁷⁷ Heidegger’s formal method, apart from the above mentioned, is a process of inquiry into the disclosure of the difference between being and beings. To put it positively, being cannot be without beings, and beings cannot be without being.⁷⁸ Lafont has put it another way: “the meaningful and the factual are mutually irreducible.”⁷⁹ This distinction must be an absolute one, for if it ever collapses, we necessarily revert, as every other thinker has, to an inquiry into the nature of beings and not being.⁸⁰ In direct opposition to Heidegger’s context of the ontological difference, Heschel, in a play on Heidegger’s words, introduces another concept into our inquiry into being. The difference in their thinking originates in the context of the question of being. As we have seen, Heidegger’s originates in the difference between being and beings. Heschel’s ontological commitment lies in the difference between human being and being human, a distinction that is often lost in his seemingly stylistic language, and mistaken for poetry: Being human is a most precarious condition. It is not a substance but a presence, a whisper calling in the wilderness. Man is hard of inner hearing, but he has sharp, avid eyes. The power he unlocks surpasses the power that he is, dazzling him. He has a capacity for extravagance, sumptuousness, presumption. His power is explosive. Human being is bound-

 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), pp.  and .  Being and Time, pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  “Hermeneutics,” A Companion to Heidegger, p. . Lafont explicates the assumptions that Heidegger makes in turning away from metaphysical realism to a hermeneutic transformation of transcendental philosophy, pp.  – .  See Richardson, pp.  –  for an explanation of the nature of forgottenness in relation to metaphysics.  See Richardson, From Phenomenology, pp.  and  – , in which he explains the negativity of the ontological difference and the fact that being can be thought but it cannot be by itself.  A Companion to Heidegger, p. .  See Sluga’s analysis of Introduction to Metaphysics where he takes the problems of metaphysics beyond the thrownness of Dasein from Being and Time, A Companion to Heidegger, pp.  – . Heschel’s opposition is clearly limited to the first use of thrownness, as I will make clear.

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less, but being human is respect for bounds. The human situation may be characterized as a polarity of human being and being human.⁸¹

Human being must find the grounds on which to base being human.⁸² Facing Auschwitz and Hiroshima Heschel asks, In other words, does human being belong to human “nature” as a necessity of being or is it an epiphenomenon, a superimposed veneer easily rubbed off?⁸³ Heschel asks this question because neither conclusion is logically fulfilling. Humanly and historically, there is a difference between the two, yet they cannot fulfill our ontology separately. And the requiredness of being human as situated in the fundamentals of human existence is essential, yielding a degree of selfunderstanding.⁸⁴ While we have a vague sense of being human, that doesn’t mean that it is invalid.⁸⁵ It has an experiential dimension that seems fleeting in the face of permanent meanings. Yet being human is not a neutral fact,⁸⁶ but an answer to or indicative of ultimate meaning.⁸⁷ Heschel lays open the precariousness of the formulation at the end of the first chapter of Who Is Man?: Our inquiry must begin with an analysis of the content of this awareness. Is there a pattern to be found in man’s understanding of this basic insight? What do we mean when we say “being human”? Do we face changing meanings of permanent insights or permanent meanings of changing insights? Can we agree at least in rejecting alternatives to certain meanings we cherish? Can we agree on a notion of what contradicts being human? We assume that the term “human” retains some sameness of meaning when used repeatedly on different occasions. Are there any permanent, necessary, or constitutive features of the desideratum? How shall we articulate exactly what is sensed by us vaguely?⁸⁸

Heschel’s preliminary answer to the question is methodological and constitutive, in keeping with his phenomenological outlook and his opposition to Heidegger. Instead of an “ontological difference,” Heschel presupposes an “ontological connective.” Instead of an absolute demarcation in the question of being that must run its course through the entirety of any thought increasing the likelihood that Dasein will be displaced by being, Heschel focuses on an absolute interdepend-

       

Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. .

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ence that refuses to subjugate man to being. Moreover, it questions the “facticity” implied in Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein: In his facticity man’s notions of being human are both vague and confused; they are more frequently reflected in moods than in decisions. Are these notions then, devoid of ontological validity? People continue to consume food long before they are aware of the necessity of nutrition. Yet it would be misleading to regard the consumption of food as a mere psychological need. The liquidation of being human would inevitably lead to the liquidation of human being. There is the ontological connective between human being and being human. Awareness, for example, of life’s significance is not just a psychological need, it is part of man’s being human.⁸⁹

Heschel’s opposition to the “ontological difference” brings to light another significant and direct criticism that Heschel has of Heidegger. It begins with Heidegger’s characterization of the inquiry into being and its vagueness. Since Heidegger’s inquiry has a formal structure,⁹⁰ he is at pains to deal with the “vagueness” in the question which itself had been forgotten. Moreover, the possibility of clarifying the question at the outset cannot be presumed.⁹¹ In response to these difficulties Heidegger must still maintain the fundamentality of the question: We do not know what “Being” means. But even if we ask, “What is Being?”, we keep within an understanding of the “is” though we are unable to fix conceptually what that “is” signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague average understanding of Being is still a Fact. ⁹²

This “Fact” that Heidegger considers unassailable characterizes ontology in a definite manner, whether or not the answer to the inquiry is available. The question of being, aside from supplying the a priori conditions of all the sciences, must provide the possibility of all ontologies, which are prior to the ontical sciences. The “Fact” that Heidegger is arguing for has a purity that no other concept has. The fundamentality of all ontologies must be pure in a way that the ontical sciences are not pure: Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.⁹³

    

Ibid., p. . Being and Time, pp.  – . Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. .

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Heschel in direct contradiction to Heidegger, and based on his use of the human being/being human connective as opposed to the “ontological difference,” argues that ontology can never be a pure fact. The opposition to Heidegger is unmistakable, as Heschel directly refers to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, “man’s being-there”: I suggest that although it is possible and legitimate to ponder being in general, it is futile and impossible to ponder human being in general, the being of the human species, since my understanding of, and my relation to, my own being always intrudes into any reflection about the being of the human species. There is only one way of comprehending man’s being-there, and that is by way of inspecting my own being. What does my own being mean to me? What confronts me when I ponder my being here-and-now? My own being can never be comprehended as a sample of pure ontology. It can never be thought of as a pure fact.⁹⁴

Heschel’s opposition to Heidegger on this point is not a tangential issue. On the contrary, it is the essential issue. Neither being as a general notion nor as a pure ontological fact is capable of overcoming the inherent mystery of being. When being is understood as absolute transcendence, as Heidegger and his Greek precursor Parmenides do, Heschel claims we are led into an indissoluble puzzle.⁹⁵ Heschel labels this “the ontocentric predicament.”⁹⁶ This concept has its origins in a section of The Prophets,⁹⁷ antedating Who Is Man? by three years, but is applied there directly to Parmenides and the early Greeks. In Who Is Man? it is expanded in context to apply to Greek thinking, including Heidegger: The biblical man does not begin with being, but with the surprise of being. The biblical man is free of what may be called the ontocentric predicament. Being is not all to him. He is not enchanted by the given, granting the alternative, namely, the annihilation of the given. To Parmenides, not being is inconceivable (“Nothingness is not possible”); to the biblical mind, nothingness or the end of being is not impossible. Realizing the contingency of being, it could never identify being with ultimate reality. Being points to the question of how being is possible. The act of bringing being into being, creation, stands higher in the ladder of problems than being. Creation is not a transparent concept. But is the concept of being as being distinguished by lucidity? Creation is a mystery; being as being an abstraction.⁹⁸

    

Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . The Prophets, Vol. , pp.  – . Who Is Man?, pp.  – .

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While this section seems to be in agreement with a basic position that ensues from Heidegger’s ontology, such as the contingency of being⁹⁹ and the Leibnizian question that Heidegger makes his own “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?,”¹⁰⁰ Heschel has something else in mind. We can see from his phraseology that the treatment of “being” and “nothing” is entirely different. Heschel puts it this way: “Why is there being at all instead of nothing?”¹⁰¹ It is clear that Heschel thinks the philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger has placed an unwarranted emphasis on being that has created the ontocentric predicament. The ultimacy of being, according to Heschel, “is a petitio principii; it mistakes a problem for a solution.”¹⁰² This echoes Heidegger’s tendency to equate being and nothing in the lecture “What is Metaphysics?” “Pure Being and Pure Nothing are therefore the same.” This proposition of Hegel’s (Science of Logic, Vol I, Werke III, 74) is correct. Being and Nothing do not belong together, not because both―from the point of view of the Hegelian concept of thought agree in their indeterminateness and immediacy, but rather because Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into nothing.¹⁰³

Heschel has no such tendency. He merely says, “We can never think of being without conceiving the possibility of its non being.”¹⁰⁴ Heschel conceives of being and nothing as a pair of concepts not an ultimate concept.¹⁰⁵ As a pair they are in a polar tension, which characterizes all of Heschel’s thinking,¹⁰⁶

 See Lafont’s analysis of Heidegger’s ontology and the axioms she derives from it, A Campanion, pp.  –   “What Is Metaphysics?” ed. D. F. Krell, p. .  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., p. .  “What is Metaphysics?” p. .  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., p. .  God in Search, p. , “Jewish thinking and living can only be adequately understood in terms of a dialectic pattern, containing opposite or contrasted properties. As in a magnet, the ends of which have opposite magnetic qualities, these terms are opposite to one another and exemplify a polarity which lies at the very heart of Judaism, the polarity of ideas and events, of mitzvah and sin, of kavanah and deed, of regularity and spontaneity, of uniformity and individuality, of halacha and agada, of law and inwardness, of love and fear, of understanding and obedience, of joy and discipline, of the good and the evil drive, of time and eternity, of this world and the world to come, of revelation and response, of insight and information, of empathy and self-expression, of creed and faith, of the word and that which is beyond the words, of man’s quest for God and God in search of man. Even God’s relation to the world is characterized by the polarity of justice and mercy, providence and concealment, the promise of reward and the demand to serve Him for His sake. Taken abstractly, all these terms seem to be mutually exclu-

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because “Both concepts are transcended by the mystery of being.”¹⁰⁷ Lafont’s five-point analysis of the ontological difference, without employing Heschel’s ontological position, bears this out. Her fourth and fifth points put in stark relief much of the problem that Heschel dwells on in the last three chapters of Who Is Man? 4. Understanding the transcendental priority in hermeneutic terms; “there is being only in an understanding of being” (Being and Time: 212). Therefore, “what determines entities as entities” is “that on the basis of which entities are … understood” (Being and Time: 6) 5. To recognize the detranscendentalized status of the understanding of being (as contingent, historically variable, plural, etc.): “what determines entities as entities” is merely “that on the basis of which entities are always already understood” (Being and Time: 6, emphasis added). This follows from the fact that “the meaning of being can never be contrasted with entities” (Being and Time: 152).¹⁰⁸

Lafont sees clearly an implication that Heschel saw as the kernel of his argument against Heidegger. She phrases it in the absence of her own ontological position, but it resonates nonetheless. She avows that the basis of Heidegger’s hermeneutic change in transcendental philosophy “is traced back to Dasein’s fore-structure of understanding.”¹⁰⁹ While other commentators have advanced significant theses that help understand the bind Heidegger has entered with his understanding of Dasein,¹¹⁰ Heschel centers his argument on the loss of transcendence and on the ontological structure of Dasein. Heschel, in agreement with the position Lafont takes, has phrased it differently. As we shall soon see, he argued within the bounds of his ontological commitment against the transcendental bias of the philosophers of being and most directly against Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein. While we have only touched briefly on Heschel’s opposition to Dasein, we will shortly unearth his opposition to the absence of transcendence and the “thrownness” of Dasein. Led by his opposition to sive, yet in actual living they involve each other; the separation of the two is fatal to both… Since each of the two principles moves in the opposite direction, equilibrium can only be maintained if both are of equal force. But such a condition is rarely attained. Polarity is an essential trait of all things. Tension, contrast, and contradiction characterize all of reality.”  Who Is Man?, p. .  A Companion to Heidegger, p. .  Lafont, p. .  William Blattner’s work is a good example of the divergences in Heidegger’s thinking. The joining of being and time, where time is the horizon of any understanding of being, is at the center of his thesis. Blattner outrightly rejects any ideal interpretation of being as it is related to Dasein (pp.  – ). In its place, he argues for originary temporality as the basis of time and characterizes Heidegger as a “temporal idealist” (p. ). The divergence is that according to Blattner, Heidegger’s thesis cannot give an accurate portrayal of ordinary time (Chapter , especially pp.  –).

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the nothingness that emerges from an understanding of pure being, Heschel relates it directly to Heidegger’s notion of thrownness. In the text from Heschel that accomplishes this, all words in quotation are taken from Being and Time.¹¹¹ The quotation derives from Division II, 53, “The Existential Projection of an Authentic Being-toward-death.”¹¹² Citing Heidegger,¹¹³ Heschel says, If the ultimate is sheer being, the human living has nothing to relate himself to as living. He can only relate himself to nothing. What surrounds him is a void where all life is left behind, where values and thoughts are devoid of all relevance and reference. Facing being as being, man “discovers himself confronted by the Nothingness, the possible impossibility of his existence.” Man may see himself between “thrownness” at one end and death at the other and so maintain: Out of Nothingness I came and into Nothingness I shall return. My existence draws its reality from Nothing and is destined to be dissolved in Nothing.¹¹⁴

The sentence in quotation marks is taken from Heidegger’s discussion of the freedom toward death and its relation to anxiety where anxiety is the Dasein’s ownmost individualized being.¹¹⁵ It is highlighted by Heschel to emphasize how “nothing,” when juxtaposed with sheer being as Heidegger does, eclipses man as living and deprives him of any relationship through the mystery of being to the surprise of being and to the biblical understanding of being as creation.¹¹⁶ But before we can follow Heschel’s thinking here, another Heschelian distinction must be examined. The distinction between living and being is crucial to understanding his opposition to Heidegger. As Haar has explained, Heidegger, in opposition to the Lebensphilosophie typified in Bergson and Dilthey, distances himself from the distinction that Heschel embraces.¹¹⁷ Heidegger says that “Life is neither pure being at hand [Vorhandensein] nor is it Dasein.”¹¹⁸ Heidegger’s negative and privative treatment of life is crucial for Heschel, who treats life in positive, substantialist terms. Since man is between thrownness and death according to Heidegger, Heschel concludes that “living” must be insubstantial for Heidegger, and each point of Heidegger’s analysis is inescapably caught in that net once sheer

 The quotation derives from Division II, , Being and Time, “The Existential Projection of an Authentic Being toward Death.”  Being and Time, pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  Who Is Man?, pp.  – .  Being and Time, p. .  Who Is Man?, pp.  – .  Haar, pp. xxix.  Ibid.

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being has overcome living. This means that where comportment toward entities provided the first analysis of being and Dasein for Heidegger, the “state of mind”¹¹⁹ that leads to man’s surrender to being is disclosed in his mood¹²⁰ as being-in-the-world.¹²¹ This mood must be matched in thinking with a submission to being.¹²² This letting be or submission (Gelassenheit)¹²³ is directly opposed by Heschel, who places a phenomenological structure of imposition in its place: “The transcendence of human being is disclosed here as life imposed upon, as imposition to give account, as imposition of freedom. The transcendence of being is commandment, being here and now is obedience.”¹²⁴ A submissive world, according to Heschel, accounts for a recession in human consciousness that leads to human being’s being reduced to consumerism and manipulation: It is a submissive world that modern man is in the habit of sensing, and he seems content with the riches of thinghood. Space is the limit of his ambitions, and there is little he desires besides it. Correspondingly, man’s consciousness recedes more and more in the process of reducing his status to that of a consumer and manipulator.¹²⁵

This is followed by a litany of differences that submission creates in human being, which are directly applicable to the notions of Heidegger and his postmodernist followers: Exclusive manipulation results in the dissolution of awareness of all transcendence. Promise becomes pretext, God becomes a symbol, truth a fiction, loyalty tentative, the holy a mere convention. Man’s very existence devours all transcendence. Instead of facing the grandeur of the cosmos, he explains it away; …¹²⁶

 Being and Time, pp.  – .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  This is made clear in Being and Time, I, , where Heidegger says, “Dasein, in so far as it is, has always submitted itself already to a ‘world’ which it encounters, and this submission belongs essentially to its Being” (pp.  – ). See Richardson, p. .  See Being and Time, pp.  and . For an in depth analysis of the effect of Gelassenheit on willing in Heidegger’s thought, see Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, ), specifically pp. xxv–xxx.  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .

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Now we can appreciate the depth of Heschel’s remarks concerning the statement from Division II, 53 of Being and Time. The Heideggerian authentic being toward death (which is not actual death but failure),¹²⁷ contravenes Heschel’s sense of living being. Whereas Heidegger begins his analysis of Dasein with inauthenticity and the fear of death, Heschel claims that this is a mistaken beginning: Man’s plight, as said above, is not due to the fear of non-being, to the fear of death, but to the fear of living, because all living is branded with the unerasable shock at absurdity, cruelty, and callousness experienced in the past. A human being is a being in fear of pain, in fear of being put to shame.¹²⁸

It is within this anti-Heideggerian context that Heschel tells us that the proper theme for the study of man is the problem of living. Heschel goes so far as to name Heidegger specifically and to recall a basic Heideggerian notion: As sheer being man dissolves in anonymity. But man is not only being, he is also living, and if he were simply to “surrender to being,” as Heidegger calls upon us to do, he would abdicate his power to decide and reduce his living to being.¹²⁹

What Heschel has in mind concerning the problem of living is not a mere truism applied to daily schedules, accounts of money, affairs of the heart, or a way of comporting oneself with entities. What he means is that the problem of living is as deep as the mystery of being because he thinks that “the deed is the distillation of the self.”¹³⁰ Provoked, jeopardized, and perplexed, human living has the task of “putting being into shape, lending form to sheer being.”¹³¹ There is an insufficiency in being that can only be counteracted by human deeds.¹³² The intransitive nature of being is equally as significant as the passive dimension.¹³³ Within the Heideggerian framework according to Heschel, “Being as being is intransitive, going-on-ness, continuity.”¹³⁴ But within Heschel’s phenomenological outlook, “significant being is transitive, going beyond  Blattner, p. , “It [death] does not refer to the ending of a human life, but rather to an existential condition in which Dasein is not able to understand itself.” See also, p. , n  and pp.  – , n .  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., “Insufficiency of mere being drives man to more-than-being, to bring into being, to come into meaning. We transcend being by bringing into being―thoughts, things, offspring, deeds.”  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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itself, centrifugal.¹³⁵ Consequently, the attainment of meaning signifies that “Man is challenged not to surrender to mere being. Being is to be surpassed by living.”¹³⁶ Where Heidegger supports the entirety of Dasein as being-in-theworld, the problem for being human is how to live by being explicitly. In direct opposition to Heidegger, Heschel says, “Being human is living-in-the-world.”¹³⁷ These Heschelian positions come to a head in a section titled “Being-challenged-in-the-world” in Chapter Six of Who Is Man?, which follows upon the heels of the outright references to Heidegger. The challenge of being rather than the submission to being is the hallmark of being human. Man cannot be reduced to self-sufficient being of any kind.¹³⁸ Any attempt at self-understanding that ignores the pathology of the self because it does not come to terms with the power that evokes being human¹³⁹ is less than human.¹⁴⁰ This challenge cannot be rendered as a self-inflicted wound, myth, drive, or attitude.¹⁴¹ Being challenged is an essential mode of human being.¹⁴² Consequently, when Heschel says “Human living is being-challenged-in-theworld, not simply being in the world,”¹⁴³ he is crystallizing the entire argument between himself and Heidegger. The argument all along has been to highlight and contravene the significance of Dasein by contrasting it with the biblical notion of Adam. In pursuing this goal, Heschel has phenomenologically rendered the significance of Man by subjecting him to analysis via the ontological connective of human being/being human, as opposed to Heidegger’s ontological difference that leads to an existential analytic of Dasein. Without the establishment of this context, the last few pages of the book where Heschel discusses commandment, human embarrassment, and celebration can easily be mistaken for mere poetry and insubstantial inspiration―a rhetorical flourish unconnected to the ontological and phenomenological notions he has advanced against Heidegger. On the contrary, celebration, embarrassment, and commandment are phenomenological insights onto the essential polarity that faces human being. They represent a hermeneutic phenomenological reality. As Heschel says at

        

Ibid. Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.

p. . p. .

pp.  – . p. .

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the beginning of his analysis, “Being human, I repeat, is inherent as a desideratum in human being. It is not given explicitly but is interpreted by experience.”¹⁴⁴ Two examples will suffice. First, between the awareness of the grandeur of being and the fulfillment of a deed lies the distillation of the self, which Heschel has argued all along is not a mere extension of being. There is a decided lack of symmetry that must be faced, a challenge that arises between awareness of grandeur and our ignorance of it:¹⁴⁵ Embarrassment is the awareness of an incongruity of character and challenge, or perceptivity and reality, of knowledge and understanding, of mystery and comprehension. Experiencing the evanescence of time, one realizes the absurdity of man’s sense of sovereignty. In the face of the immense misery of the human species, one realizes the insufficiency of all human effort to relieve it. In the face of one’s inner anguish, one realizes the fallacy of absolute expediency… Embarrassment not only precedes religious commitment; it is the touchstone of religious existence.¹⁴⁶

This is clearly not a description of a moment of faith, but rather a precursor to such a moment. It is an essential insight into the formation of human being that every other ontological perspective has ignored, misjudged, or turned aside with a lack of seriousness. According to Heschel, it means that intelligibility is imbued at its base with an overabundance of meaning. Living transcendence cannot be rendered as an idea, but it can be engaged: “Transcendence can never be an object of possession or of comprehension. Yet man can relate himself and be engaged to it.”¹⁴⁷ As such, intelligibility is a cognitive act that involves value judgments.¹⁴⁸ Still, human being faces an ineffable positivity that cannot be made commensurate with the categories of the mind. Of being itself all we can positively say is: being is ineffable. The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. My power of probing is easily exhausted, my words fade, but what I sense is not emptiness but inexhaustible abundance, ineffable abundance. What I face I cannot utter or phrase in language. But the richness of my facing the abundance of being endows me with marvelous reward: a sense of the ineffable.¹⁴⁹

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. , “Religion depends upon what man does with his ultimate embarrassment. It is the awareness that the world is too great for him, the awareness of the grandeur and mystery of being, the awareness of being present at the unfolding of an inconceivable eternal saga.”  Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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The second example that denies Heschel’s position as merely rhetorical, pertains to a moral dimension. Michael Haar has perceptively noticed that when Heidegger speaks about “the voice of conscience” it should not be identified with moral conscience.¹⁵⁰ The call that Dasein hears is about its being and not about its doing. Consequently, there is no sense in which indebtedness can be considered as a moral good or evil for Heidegger.¹⁵¹ Furthermore, Haar clarifies that Dasein is both caller and called, which is, at best, an auto-affection in which debt “must be detached from any relation to a duty [Sollen] or a law [Gesetz] in which respect someone feels guilt [Schuld].”¹⁵² Heschel’s phenomenological analysis stands in direct opposition to this Heideggerian position. Being must be conjoined to living and must be completed by deeds. Response can therefore never be merely self-serving or an auto-affection, because being-challenged-in-the-world means responding to a debt: Indebtedness is given with our very being. It is not derived from conceptions; it lives in us as an awareness before it is conceptualized or clarified in content. It means having a task, being called. Its content is gratitude for a gift received. It is more than a biological give and take relationship. Indebtedness is the pathos of being human, self-awareness of the self as committed; it is given with the awareness of existence. Man cannot think of himself as human without being conscious of his indebtedness. This is not a mere feeling, but rather a constitutive feature of being human. To eradicate it would be to destroy what is human in man.¹⁵³

This passage is remarkable on two levels. First it turns any rhetorical interpretation of Heschel on its head. It is clear Heschel means his criticism ontologically from within his own phenomenological boundaries. To put it another way, Heidegger’s existential analytic has an ontological predisposition that is negative and insubstantial, through and through. The existential analytic cannot relate to a moral conscience. Heschel’s existential predisposition in which being and living are interdependent allows and demands, however precariously, that existence is imbued in being human and indebtedness is the essence of that depth. Second, and more important for the major thrust of Heschel’s argument against Heidegger, the ontological eradication of indebtedness that is connected to either a law or an expectation has dire repercussions. Any authentic human existence that disconnects that relation destroys what is human in man. This destruction is not biological, or psychological, et cetera, but is ontological: “There

   

Haar, p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. . Who Is Man?, p. .

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is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man.”¹⁵⁴ It means that human pathos cannot operate in a self that is imbued with that kind of disconnect. It signifies the ultimate disfigurement of man’s image of himself because his humanity has been eclipsed by his auto-affection. Such a man has no concept of “ends which are in need of us.”¹⁵⁵ The ontological significance of these positions is more clearly highlighted when we investigate the origin of meaning for both Heidegger and Heschel. As opposed to the obliviousness rooted in Dasein at its inception, meaning for man according to Heschel is a climactic thought, rooted in the mystery of being human. It has no linear nor circular motion as Heidegger’s hermeneutic does, but is achieved through insight. Taken from the earlier work, Man Is Not Alone (1951),¹⁵⁶ where it is used to characterize insight, in Who Is Man?, the following passage is used to relate transcendent meaning to being: It is not by analogy or by inference that we become aware of it [meaning]. It is rather sensed as something immediately given, logically and psychologically prior to judgment, to the assimilation of subject matter to mental categories; a universal insight into an objective aspect of reality, of which all men are at all times capable; not the froth of ignorance but the climax of thought, indigenous to the climate that prevails at the summit of intellectual endeavor.¹⁵⁷

This realization is central to human being because of the role that transcendence plays both in Heidegger’s and Heschel’s thinking, which is mirrored in many of Heschel’s oppositions. As we will see, this has a great impact on each thinker’s notion of Dasein and Adam as transcendence is understood and employed. But it is clear that these differences emanate from the earliest awareness that phenomenology awakes. Each thinker’s characterization of what is pre-conceptual will point them in different directions―Heidegger, toward the available and our comportment with the available, and Heschel, toward a positive understanding of the ineffable, absent any symbolization. This Heschelian pre-conceptual thinking takes up an entire chapter in God in Search of Man and echoes in each of his books: The encounter with reality does not take place on the level of concepts through channels of logical categories; concepts are second thoughts. All conceptualization is symbolization, an act of accommodation of reality to the human mind. The living encounter with reality takes place on a level that precedes conceptualization, on a level that is responsive, immediate, preconceptual, and presymbolic. ¹⁵⁸

    

Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Man Is Not Alone, p. . Who Is Man?, p. . God in Search, p. .

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Picking up on Heidegger’s view of intelligibility that is characterized by “mindless coping skills,” Heschel claims that moderns begin their thinking in oblivion: This seems to be the malady of man: His normal consciousness is a state of oblivion, a state of suspended sensitivity. As a result, we see only camouflage and concealment. We do not understand what we do; we do not see what we face.¹⁵⁹

Nowhere is this “normal consciousness” more evident than in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” where he addresses “the turning” (Kehre) that has confounded commentators. Explaining the abandonment of subjectivity that marks the difference between Being and Time and his later thinking, Heidegger emphasizes the origin of oblivion: This turning is not a change of standpoint from Being and Time, but in it the thinking that was sought first arrives at the location of that dimension out of which Being and Time is experienced, that is to say, experienced from the fundamental experience of the oblivion of being.¹⁶⁰

In a paragraph that directly precedes Heschel’s criticism of oblivion we are provided a window into the difference of these modes of thinking. According to Heschel, Being and oblivion have introduced another type of isolation―the isolation that accompanies manipulation: The tragedy of modern man is that he thinks alone. He broods about his own affairs rather than thinking for all being. He has moved out of the realm of God’s creation into the realm of man’s manipulation.¹⁶¹

We are now in a position to see the significance of the main question of the book. In the last paragraph of the book, when Heschel asks the question from the perspective of the Bible,¹⁶² “Who is man?,” he is doing more than restating an ancient notion or being rhetorical. He is creating a phenomenological notion of man in contradistinction to the phenomenology of Dasein that Heidegger creates in Being and Time. He is doing it not by opposing faith to philosophy, but by questioning the tradition of being from Parmenides to Heidegger. He is also doing it in the present-day historical context in which the Holocaust has rendered being as evil. The final words of the answer to the question “Who is man?” are unmistakable reminders that this is

   

Who Is Man?, p. . Letter on Humanism, pp.  – . Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid., p. .

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not a mere abstraction but a concrete rejoinder to history and to the situation in which Heschel and biblical man find themselves: By whatever we do, by every act we carry out, we either advance or obstruct the drama of redemption; we either reduce or enhance the power of evil.¹⁶³

Having outlined the context within which Heschel is operating, we are now equipped to place Dasein and Adam under the same microscope. And in so doing, we will see that Who Is Man? is a direct answer to Being and Time and the “Letter on Humanism.”

 Ibid.

4 Dasein and Adam Our analysis until this point has demonstrated that the central problem of Who Is Man? begins with a criticism of Heidegger’s phenomenology and his notion of being. Hovering in the midst of these concepts, both Heidegger and Heschel place the notion of Dasein and Adam respectively. In so far as this is accurate, it is but half of the story. The significance, role, and meaning of both Dasein and Adam are not ancillary to either Heidegger’s or Heschel’s thinking. It is central, and we must therefore begin the unearthing of their centrality, so as to enable an understanding of what it means to be a self for each of them, and why Heschel has gone as far as he has in criticizing Heidegger, the figure Heschel views as the epitome of postmodern thinking. In fact, if we are to make sense of Heschel’s notion at all, we must come to terms with the fact that his criticism of Heidegger has far outstripped any criticism Heschel has leveled at any other thinker. Simultaneously, we must not lose sight of the irony that each of them has presented us with a novel idea out of the traditions in which they are based, and the respective ontologies which they claim to have reinterpreted. There is an unusual symmetry in some of Heidegger’s and Heschel’s thinking, which cannot be disregarded, and which indicates that much of Heschel’s context for the problem of man is indeed the context that Heidegger establishes. Before the proper analysis begins, it must be noted that Heschel’s opposition to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is not based on historical models. That is to say, Heschel does not take into account the many historical antecedents that influenced Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. He may or may not have been aware of them, but the historical record is not at issue. Heidegger’s use of the term Dasein, a neologism that seems unheard of, has always presented scholars with a barrier. As Dreyfus notes, Dasein has a twofold purpose: to indicate being in human nature and to reflect the essential relation of man to the “there” of being.¹ Consequently, the use of Dasein has given the notion a sense of having an entirely novel and original content. In the last two decades, many scholars have come to realize that this is not the case. The use of the term has perhaps concealed much of its meaning since its antecedents have been uncriticized. As scholars have delved into the evolution of Heidegger’s thought, many of the antecedents of Dasein have come to life.

 See Dreyfus, p. .

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They range from the ancient to the modern. Plato,² Aristotle,³ Kierkegaard,⁴ Dilthey,⁵ Neitzsche,⁶ and Junger⁷ are prominent in the philosophical tradition. Paul,⁸ Augustine,⁹ and Luther¹⁰ stand out as influences on the meaning of Dasein in the religious tradition. While Heschel has much to say about many of these thinkers, he does not criticize Heidegger directly or indirectly for choosing them. Heschel remains consistent in his approach to Dasein. According to him, the ontological implications of being and Dasein within the tradition culminating in Heidegger’s thought have created and injected a new, unforeseen destructive meaning into philosophical discourse and life. Together, history and philosophy have taken a destructive turn and have had a catastrophic effect on man. There is another consideration, which is outstanding from the inception of juxtaposing Heidegger’s notion of Dasein and Heschel’s idea of Adam. As Heschel leaves Dasein in its original state, with one exception cited above (Who Is Man? p. 34), we must do the same since we have no direct evidence to do otherwise. Dasein has many shades of meaning, depending on its context and upon the context of the individual doing the reading and interrogating.¹¹ Coming to an absolute understanding of these usages and contexts would be misleading because the issue is not an absolute one, but one that is relative to Heschel’s understanding. If in the end there is an inconsistency, misrepresentation, or misconception on Heschel’s part, then that must be pointed out. The heart of Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein begins with his rejection of an implied ancient Greek and Christian anthropology. The inadequate ontolog-

 See Rockmore, p.   See Brian D. Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p.  and p.  n. .  Ibid., p.  and p. , n. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  See Zimmerman, pp.  – .  See Ingraffia, pp. ,  – ; and Thomas J. Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,  – ,” The Personalist LX, no.  (), pp.  – .  See Ingraffia, p. .  Ibid., pp. , .  Many significant commentators have wrestled with the issue of translation of Dasein and other Heideggerian terms. See Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, pp. ix / xii and  – ; Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, pp. viii–xiv; Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), pp. xix / xxxix; Haar, p. xiii; William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, pp.  – ; Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, ), pp.  – ; and Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” pp.  – , , pp.  – .

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ical foundations¹² of each of these approaches, the Greek and the theological, have led the question of Dasein’s being “off the track.”¹³ Yet Heidegger never stops to consider that a Jewish attitude to man might be entirely different from the one that he claims has been inherited from Christianity and the ancient world. He is blind to the fact that the biblical text he claims he is surpassing is a Jewish text, transmitted in Hebrew and interpreted as such for hundreds of years, orally and in written form, before either the early Christians or ancient Greeks left their own mark on biblical interpretation. At the inception of the interrogation of Dasein, Heidegger raises two points against traditional anthropology. The first is that man is defined as a rational being, “something living which has reason.”¹⁴ Heidegger criticizes this “reason” for its presence-at-hand, which makes it an endowment and leaves man―as a compound or a unity―just as obscure with or without the definition.¹⁵ The second point is elaborated upon in greater depth. It is raised against the well-known passage from Genesis 1:26, which Heidegger quotes in Greek. Man, the “ens finitum,” in this mode of thinking “is more than a mere something endowed with intelligence.”¹⁶ Quoting Calvin and Zwingli, Heidegger argues that either approach assumes that man’s being is self-evident. In modern times according to Heidegger, the res cogitans, consciousness, or the interconnectedness of experience, serve as undetermined ontological points of methodological departure, which lead back to the lack of ontological foundations of man’s being. This failure is true of psychology, anthropology, and biology according to Heidegger.¹⁷ And it is true because, Life, in its own right, is a kind of being; but essentially it is accessible only in Dasein. The ontology of life is accomplished by way of a privative Interpretation; it determines what must be the case if there can be anything like mere-aliveness [Nur-noch-leben]. Life is not a mere Beingpresent-at-hand, nor is it Dasein. In turn, Dasein is never to be defined ontologically by regarding it as life (in an ontologically indefinite manner) plus something else.¹⁸

This passage is remarkable on several levels when juxtaposed with Who Is Man?. First, as I mentioned above, some of it rings true for Heschel. As we saw from the first chapter of Who Is Man?, Heschel denies the rational, psychological, biolog-

      

Being and Time, p. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid.

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ical, and anthropological definitions of man. Yet, as we just saw in relation to Heschel’s juxtaposition of living and being in the previous chapter, he denies them for a different reason altogether. Heidegger’s ontological difference allows him to separate completely the notions of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, where the occurentness of the ready-to-hand has no worldly determination,¹⁹ and therefore an unsubstantiated sense of the being of Dasein. Consequently, “life” is not present-at-hand, nor can Dasein be defined through it. Heschel’s ontological connective signifies that living and being are interdependent, and that “living” is a presence for man that is a part of his being. Heidegger’s ontological thinking tries to relate human being “to a transcendence called being as such.”²⁰ According to Heschel, biblical thinking is “realizing that human being is more than being, that human being is living being, seeks to relate man to divine living, to a transcendence called the living God.”²¹ When the world and being are subject to the analysis of the available as is done through the ready-to-hand, we come face to face with the death of transcendence, as Heschel claims in a passage directly attacking Heidegger without mentioning his name: Fellowship depends upon appreciation, while manipulation is the cause of alienation: objects and I apart, things stand dead and I am alone. What is more decisive: a life of manipulation distorts the image of the world. Reality is equated with availability: what I can manipulate is, what I cannot manipulate is not. A life of manipulation is the death of transcendence.²²

This criticism is echoed a second time, and more clearly related to Heidegger’s view of the submissiveness of the world, while being broad enough to speak to the ills of the modern predilection for things: It is a submissive world that modern man is in the habit of sensing, and he seems content with the riches of thinghood. Space is the limit of his ambitions, and there is little he desires besides it. Correspondingly, man’s consciousness recedes more and more in the process of reducing his status to that of a consumer and manipulator. He has enclosed himself in the availability of things, with the shutters down and no sight of what is beyond availability.²³

Heschel’s entire focus, the image of man that Heidegger depletes of divine transcendence in the context of the Greek and the Christian biblical traditions, is a

    

See A Companion to Heidegger, pp.  – . Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .

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reaction to this section of Being and Time. The crucial significance of the passage in Genesis 1:26 concerning man as an entity endowed with reason or transcendence from Being and Time, is at the very center of Who Is Man?. The attack upon the Bible that Heschel wrote of elsewhere²⁴ and his own restatement of the position at the end of Who Is Man? regarding the notion of man as central to the Bible, indicates that this passage from Being and Time is the impetus for Who Is Man? It is the all-encompassing issue, the crucial fulcrum upon which Heidegger has erected his own understanding of Dasein as a replacement for a biblical understanding of man. Still, the passage serves as a double foil for Heschel. One of the consequences of Heidegger’s methodology accomplishes the same result as Heschel’s―to see man as a rational entity―and Heschel is aware of that significant fact. Yet, a second consequence of Heidegger’s methodology is destructive of the image of man as signified in the Bible. It is clearly Heschel’s intention to accept the first consequence for entirely different reasons and to argue the second without compromising an inch. It therefore seems reasonable to go so far as to say that Who Is Man? is a response to this passage in Being and Time. Moreover, the application of Heidegger’s methodology to the existential analytic of Dasein indicates the centrality of the notion that prompts Heschel’s application of the ontological connective to biblical man. At the crosscurrents of methodology, analysis, and historical fact, Heschel stands in firm opposition to Heidegger and has argued that Heidegger’s position is symptomatic of postmodern man’s ontocentric predicament, shamelessness, and failure of conscience. The references to the Holocaust are unmistakable, as is the linkage between the impetus for the book and the analysis that has been carried out until this point. Additionally, as has been more than adequately documented in the last thirty years, Heidegger’s failure of conscience was immense. In the light of his overarching goal Heschel says, This is an age in which it is impossible to think about the human situation without shame, anguish, and disgust, in which it is impossible to experience enjoyment without grief and unending heartache, to observe personal triumphs without pangs of embarrassment. Why do we ask the question about man? Because the knowledge about man which we had accepted as self-evident has proved to be a mass of bubbles bursting at the slightest increase in temperature. Some of us live in dismay caused by what man has revealed about himself.

 See The Prophets, Vol. II, pp.  – ; Man Is Not Alone, p. ; God in Search, pp.  – . For Heschel’s reaction to Christian trends in desanctifying the Bible, see Kaplan, Spiritual Radical, pp.  – .

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The sickness of our age is the failure of conscience rather than the failure of nerve. Our conscience is not the same. Stultified by its own bankruptcy, staggered by the immense complexity of its challenge, it becomes subject to automation.²⁵

The basis of Heschel’s critique of Dasein in light of historical events―the failure of conscience, being human, and the shameless treatment of human beings as ends of automation in the factory of destruction known as the Holocaust―echoes sharply in another utterance of Heidegger’s. Heschel’s and Heidegger’s issues are so similar but their conclusions are diametrically opposed. In one of Heidegger’s few known references to the Holocaust, he says the following in 1966 (finally published in 1976 upon his death), a year after the appearance of Who Is Man?. Agriculture today is a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of countries, the same as the manufacture of atomic bombs.²⁶

This outrageous comparison must be analyzed correctly, not only because Heschel finds it entirety unacceptable, but also precisely because Heschel himself has compared Auschwitz and atomic bombs to assumptions about humanity, as we have already seen. Where Heidegger has done so without any connection to being human is clear in the statement above, Heschel has done it on the opposite footing. The negativity, and hence loss of humanity, is built into Heidegger’s analogy, whereas the hope of humanity is celebrated in Heschel’s analysis. And while Heidegger has made the analogy as a critique of techne,²⁷ Heschel has introduced it as a critique of man. In Heidegger’s case, it is reduced to a mode of symbolism; in Heschel’s case, it is a stubborn, empirical, and historical event that defies rationalization. We must specify the difference of Heidegger’s existential analysis as self-interpreting but not existential in any conscious sense²⁸ and Heschel’s analysis to the fullest. Then we can see that in certain specific terms Heschel will argue, as we have preliminarily seen, that these doctrines themselves are responsible for the eclipse of humanity and a kind of brutality that he traces back to phenomenological beginnings and to the question of being as Heidegger has posed them. The disparity between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and Heschel’s ontology leads us to the crux of the difference in their analysis. Dasein is the entity that

   

Who Is Man?, pp.  – . Cited in Der Spiegel, August , , p. . See Wolin, pp.  – . See Dreyfus, pp.  –  for the background as to how these may be confused.

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is subject to fundamental ontology. The first sentence of the first chapter of the first division of Being and Time considers the “what” of Dasein: “We are ourselves the entities to be analysed.” As the next sentences that follow on this referential definition aver,²⁹ Dasein is a distinctive entity for two reasons. First, it is mine, and second, Dasein comports itself toward its being.³⁰ In other words, Dasein is characterized by “mineness” and “existence.” Yet as Haar has noted, there is a decentering in this formulation, as the professed aim is not anthropological but rather a means of posing the question of being anew.³¹ Mineness is never a closed existence as it must always remain open to being. Man, according to Heschel, is never subject to mere being, but is a being living in the tension between being and living, centered in that tension. As such, man is also given a referential definition, but he is not confined by his existence. He has a non-ephemeral self, but as an entity, his self is open to transcendence in a way that surpasses his existence. Just how that happens will be essential to Heschel’s undertaking. This means that Dasein and Man can only be understood, can only be analyzed, for what or who they are, based on the way in which they are interrogated. For Heidegger, this is typified but not limited to his well-known statement that “the essence of Dasein lies in its existence.” For Heschel, this means that the essence of man is a polarity and a tension that cannot be resolved in existence. Within these parameters, the rest of this chapter will present just how Heidegger and Heschel carry out their analyses, that are the bases upon which we understand Dasein and Man, respectively. Heidegger follows his main characterization of Dasein with the declaration that “The Essence of Dasein lies in its existence.”³² This means above all that there are no essential properties that designate the “what” of Dasein. When an entity is designated as Dasein, according to Heidegger, we are expressing its Being.³³ The formal meaning of Dasein’s existence is that Dasein determines itself “in the light of a possibility which it is itself and which in its very Being, it somehow understands.”³⁴ This indicates a unique quality about Dasein. It is “ontically distinctive because it is ontological.”³⁵

      

See Blattner, p. . Being and Time, p. . Haar, p. xxv. Being and Time, p. . Ibid. See Dreyfus, pp.  – . Being and Time, p. . Ibid., p. .

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The existence of Dasein is uncovered in its everyday self-interpretation. There are no necessary or sufficient explanations that can signify man as a conscious subject or self.³⁶ There is no “between” in which Dasein appears phenomenally framed by entities, for there is no “cement” nor “schema’’ that can effectuate the rejoining of a split phenomena.³⁷ The opposite is the case. As Heidegger has stated, “The existential nature of man is the reason why man can represent beings as such, and why he can be conscious of them. All consciousness presupposes … existence as the essentia of man.”³⁸ Dasein is the being whose openness to being is the “there” of all being, including itself: When we talk in an ontically figurative way of the lumen naturale in man, we have in mind nothing other than the existential-ontological structure of this entity, that it is in such a way as to be its “there.” To say that it is illuminated [erleuchtet] means that as Being-in-theworld it is cleared [gelichtet] in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing… By its very nature Dasein brings its “there” along with it. If it lacks its “there,” it is not factically the entity which is essentially Dasein; indeed, it is not Dasein at all. Dasein is its disclosedness. ³⁹

Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein will be furnished by an analysis of “the various activities that are specific manifestations of existential structures.”⁴⁰ This is the basis of Division One of Being and Time. Dasein “understands” itself not as a cognitive event, but by demonstrating its ability to manage or be capable of something.⁴¹ Dasein’s combination of facticity, which seems to have an indeterminate origin, as the existential analytic removes us from natural entities⁴² and existence, has another aspect that must be considered as an extreme condition. Dasein alone is marked phenomenologically by death and anxiety. It is finite and imbued with an ekstatic sense of being. At the end of Division One and the beginning of Division Two of Being and Time, we come to see that this Existential Analytic is in fact preparatory. Once the essence of Dasein is revealed as care, Heidegger claims we are capable of an insight into the concrete makeup of existence and the meaning of being: “By work-

 Dreyfus, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Heidegger, “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics” ed. W. Kauffman, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian Books, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  Dreyfus, pp.  – .  Blattner, p. .  Haar, p. .

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ing out the phenomenon of care, we have given ourselves an insight into its equiprimordial connection with Dasein’s facticity and its falling.”⁴³ Thus, the existential analysis of Dasein reveals a tri-partite ontological structure in Dasein. As Haar aptly notes, temporality begins as a unitary structure of the three dimensions of time and then must become “temporality as the opening of oneself for oneself as projection.”⁴⁴ First, Dasein is existential and futural. That is to say it is concerned with potentialities of being.⁴⁵ Second, Dasein is “thrown.” Its understanding of the world is a projection of its being-thrown into the world, which is already there, and it finds itself in its thrownness, submitting “to that world which is already disclosed with its own Being.”⁴⁶ Thrownness “is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.”⁴⁷ The third dimension of Dasein is its “fallenness.” Dasein is indeterminate because it is in the midst of beings, both Dasein and not Dasein. It is present to itself and also alongside other beings. It is ontically preoccupied with the world, oblivious to its ontological being―it is fallen.⁴⁸ This existential structure of analyzing Dasein forms the basis of the central part of Heschel’s critique of Heidegger in Who Is Man?. Each of the three dimensions of Heidegger’s tri-partite view of Dasein rely on assumptions and contain conclusions to which Heschel is opposed. As we have seen, the issues of being, submission, and presence-to-hand are all considered and incorporated into Heschel’s opposition. But when we look deeper into the operation of Heidegger’s existential analytic, there is a more profound element at work. Dasein’s finitude arises and faces an immediate problem within the analytic. Dasein is denoted as finite transcendence. Heidegger’s analysis is a recollection of forgotten transcendence.⁴⁹ In opposition to traditional metaphysics, which reasons from entities to being and conceives of transcendence as a dimension added to the self, Heidegger assumes the unity of the phenomena of Dasein as an existential structure. This means that the ontic and ontological dimensions of Dasein―its existential and exisitentiell structures―while different, are unified. Further, the basis of the unity is finite transcendence. This means that the only way that Dasein can achieve its authentic self is by recollecting its existential dimension of itself.

      

Being and Time, pp.  – . Haar, p. . Being and Time, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . See Richardson, pp.  – . Ibid., p. .

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This novel use of transcendence is at the heart of Heschel’s disagreement with Heidegger’s view of existential analysis. When Heschel cites the passage⁵⁰ from Being and Time and calls it rhetorical, Heidegger’s rhetorical question, “Has the Dasein, as such, ever freely decided and will it ever be able to decide as to whether to come into existence or not?” has been answered long ago: “It is against your will that you are born, it is against your will that you live, and it is against your will that you are bound to give an account…”⁵¹

he is pointing to an aspect of the ontocentric predicament. And the aspect he is pointing to is transcendence. The quotation from Heschel continues: The transcendence of human being is disclosed here as life imposed upon, as imposition to give account, as imposition of freedom. The transcendence of being is commandment, being here and now is obedience.⁵²

According to Heschel, Dasein is blind to the imposition of its being because its existential analysis works with an unavailing concept of transcendence the entire time. So when Heidegger says in “Letter on Humanism,” Because we say that the Being of man consists in “being-in-the-world” people find that man is downgraded to a merely terrestrial being, whereupon philosophy sinks into positivism. For what is more “logical” than that whoever asserts the worldliness of human being holds only his life as valid, denies the beyond, and renounces all “Transcendence”?⁵³

he is noting the centrality of the problem. Also, we can see that Heschel’s problem with Heideggger’s transcendence is not answered by Heidegger’s posing of the issue. Furthermore, Heschel has gone to great lengths to pose his own concepts in opposition to the ones that support Heidegger’s idea of transcendence. Specifically, we have seen Heschel oppose Heidegger’s being-in-the-world with the notion of being-challenged-in-the-world, so that Heschel’s criticism of Heidegger’s use of transcendence would not be groundless and without due consideration for its roots. Heschel’s critique of the notion of transcendence in the Greek and philosophical traditions comes to a head in Chapter Five of Who Is Man? in a section called “Disavowal of Transcendence.” This section is laced with allusions to the

   

Being and Time, p. . Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid. Letter on Humanism, p. .

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submissive aspect of Heidegger’s thought.⁵⁴ Just prior to this section, toward the end of Chapter Four, Heschel ties together the phenomenological and analytical aspect of his own use of transcendence in a section called “Transcendent Meaning.”⁵⁵ While I have had occasion to point out the pre-ontological nature of the meaning in relation to intelligibility, the significance of transcendence was omitted so as to follow the argument against Heidegger and allow it to become more evident. Here, the phenomenological and analytic context that leads to the imposition of transcendence is clear once we see Heschel’s direction: The Awareness of transcendent meaning comes with the sense of the ineffable. The imperative of awe is its certificate of evidence, a universal response which we experience not because we desire to, but because we are stunned and cannot brave the impact of the sublime. It is a meaning wrapped in mystery.⁵⁶

The finitude of transcendence is the first element that Heschel finds objectionable. Heidegger’s finite transcendence, revealed by Dasein’s interrogatory being, is found directly in the crosshairs of Heschel’s thinking: Transcendent meaning is a meaning that surpasses our comprehension. A finite meaning that would fit perfectly our categories would not be an ultimate explanation and would be an answer unrelated to our ultimate question. A finite meaning that claims to be an ultimate answer is specious.⁵⁷

According to Heschel, infinite meaning is responsive in the sense of phenomenological awe.⁵⁸ It indicates something that is beyond what is given in thing or thought.⁵⁹ This is unlike Heidegger’s analysis of the difference between the ready-to-hand and the present-to-hand, and Heschel’s analysis seems to have Heidegger directly in mind when he says, It [transcendent meaning] is not to be grasped as though it were something in the world which appeared before us. Rather it is that in which the world appears to us. It is not an object―not a self-subsistent, timeless idea or value; it is a presence.⁶⁰

      

Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., pp.  – . Ibid., p. .

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The responsive nature of revelation in Heschel’s theological thought⁶¹ is matched by the phenomenological responsiveness of transcendent meaning in his philosophical critique. They both preclude any reliance on metaphysics. This was emphasized in God in Search of Man ⁶² and is emphasized again in Who Is Man? in relation to the Greek question of being. There is a tri-partite interdependence at work in Heschel’s thought brought to a head here. The first is between philosophy and religion, the second is between revelation and transcendent meaning, and the third is the emphasis in Who is Man? between a singular Jewish book called Torah and its universally applicable notion of Adam unlimited to any one people. It is not only reminiscent of the polarity of being and non-being in Heschel’s thought and theology,⁶³ but is also definitive in the sense of providing an avenue, but not a description or logic, to the ultimacy of being that cannot be resolved in existence. Most important for the line of thinking in Who Is Man?, the responsive nature of revelation is paradigmatic of the polarity between human being and being human. Adam is open to transcendence, which is not self-effectuated as is the case with Dasein. Within the context of transcendence, Heschel compares his sense of obedience for Adam, with Heidegger’s understanding of submission to being for Dasein. Transcendence and meaning in the Heideggerian sense are self-appropriated, a part of an initial identity that is analyzed through Ereignis. Ereignis is an event that is not a relation,⁶⁴ or as Sheehan says, it is “the interface of Da- and -sein.”⁶⁵ As Sheehan notes, Heidegger’s openness in this event is an “ineluctable condition of our essence.”⁶⁶ In the Heschelian model, transcendence and meaning are revealed beyond being as an imposition, but never as an ontologically unavoidable or inescapable event. Man’s participation is never a given, nor is God’s participation determined by man’s predisposition. For Heschel, at the core of this comparison is the idea that phenomenology, through a sense of awe and the awareness of the sublime, is an imposition on human consciousness. In a non-fundamental sense, grandeur overwhelms the subject but does not erase him or her. In contrast to Heidegger, man is responsive  See God in Search, pp.  – ; and Perlman, “As a Report about Revelation, the Bible Itself Is a Midrash,” pp.  – ; Perlman, “Revelation and Prayer, pp.  – ; and Lawrence Perlman, “Text, Myth and Midrash: Unearthing Theological Foundations,” CCAR (Winter ), pp.  – .  God in Search, pp.  – .  See God in Search, pp.  –  where these theological tensions, mainly aggada and halacha, are worked out in relation to philosophical assumptions and fundamentalist Jewish positions.  See Haar, p. .  Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” p. .  Ibid., p. .

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through a sense of obligation and indebtedness that cannot be reduced either to being, or Dasein, or a combination of the two. This is so because transcendence in the Heschelian sense is never auto-effected. Transcendent meaning can only be accounted for by that which moves being. In Heidegger’s case, it is care,⁶⁷ a self-effectuating insight “into the concrete makeup of existence.”⁶⁸ We are given to understand this through the call of conscience⁶⁹ that foundationally gives us to understand the disclosedness that constitutes Dasein.⁷⁰ We are summoned in silent discourse not to be lost in the They [Das Man].⁷¹ Heschel deems that being is accounted for by pathos. While they sound similar, they are removed from each other by the foundational phenomenology that separates them, and by the transitive meaning of pathos. Heidegger, when speaking of conscience, says that it too comes from beyond.⁷² But it is precisely the nature of this beyond that Heschel queries. Heidegger states it clearly: Indeed the call is something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. “It” calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me.⁷³

As Heschel makes clear in a passage that seems directly aimed at Heidegger, there is more than the duality of existential analysis in the account of pathos for being: What accounts for being? Pathos, a transcendent, transitive concern. The locus of moral values is in a setting defined by the presence of transcendent concern. Life is tridimensional; every act can be evaluated by two coordinate axes, in which the abscissa is man, the ordinate is God.⁷⁴

But before we can illustrate the difference between Heideggerian care and Heschelian pathos, Heideggerian self-appropriation and Heschelian coming into being as reciprocity, we must first investigate another dimension of Dasein.        

Being and Time, pp.  – . Ibid., p. . See Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, pp.  – . Being and Time, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp.  – . Ibid., p. . Being and Time, p. . Who Is Man?, p. .

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That dimension is the “who” of Dasein, which Heidegger indicates as Das Man (the one).⁷⁵ It is central in Heidegger’s phenomenological account, as it is the link that assumes he does not fall prey to the supposed transcendental solipsism of Husserl, and establishes human being as a shared social activity.⁷⁶ How each of them address this basic question of “the who” of human being, and how Heschel will deviate from Heidegger’s analyses, will indicate their respective differences when it comes to the meaning of being qua Dasein and qua Adam. Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of the everyday and its attendant covering up of the meaning of being is centered around the question of Das Man. It is so because if Heidegger can answer the question of who man is, he must first remove man “from his hitherto metaphysical realm of abode.”⁷⁷ If the meaning of being-in-the-world is forgotten, then the subject who does the forgetting is an amorphous aspect of social reality, an unowned self. Therefore, being with others is imbued with distantiality,⁷⁸ and means that Dasein is subject to these indefinite others.⁷⁹ In this context, Heidegger comes to a basic realization about the “who.” Heidegger says, “The ‘who’ is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst], not some people [einege], and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the ‘they’ [das Man].”⁸⁰ It is this “they” that disburdens Dasein of its being.⁸¹ Heidegger views man, who neither falls into the categories of substance nor anthropocentrism, as openness, the ek-sistent relation to being, which as discoveries and disclosures “of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way.”⁸² In this way, Dasein’s essence is a temporal one, which he perhaps never comes to understand because he lives in the midst and not in

 Dreyfus argues, Being-in-the-World, p. xi, that the usual translation of Das Man as “the They” suggests we are not part of Das Man and therefore opts for “the one.”  See Dreyfus, pp.  –  for the historical background to this issue as it is influenced by Kierkegaard and Dilthey and as Dreyfus claims is misinterpreted by Olafson and Sartre. See Blattner, pp.  – , for a clearer picture of the more positive meaning of Kierkegaard’s influence of “the crowd” on Heidegger’s Das Man and the role it plays in unifying understanding and absorption in Heidegger’s phenomenology.  Haar, p. .  Being and Time, p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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the center of entities, including himself. Dasein is qualified not so much by its possession of abilities, but rather by its dispossession.⁸³ In following his existential analysis completely, Heidegger has rendered a conclusion that is in line with his phenomenological thinking. There is no alteration of the self as a condition of the self, which implies a subjectivity that must remain absent from his foundational thinking. At best, there is an existential change in the “they”: Authentic Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the “they”; it is rather an existentiell modification of the “they”―of the “they” as an essential existentiale.⁸⁴

There is a movement from the ontic to the ontological and from the existentiell to the existential, but this movement is not without a significant problem as Heidegger warns immediately following: But in that case there is ontologically a gap separating the selfsameness of the authentically existing Self from the identity of that “I” which maintains itself throughout it manifold experiences.⁸⁵

According to Heidegger, this phenomenological attitude brings with it a distinct insight. Man knows that he exists, but with this knowledge comes a further understanding, one that in Heideggerian language, he tries to level, average, or distance.⁸⁶ This “publicness” of the they is insensitive to “every difference of level and of genuineness and thus never gets to the ‘heart of the matter,’”⁸⁷ because he doesn’t want to face the unwelcome thought that he exists alone. As to existing, meaning cannot refer to an individual subject, or for that matter any absolute source. Heidegger says simply, “Man alone exists,” which means “He is the entity that he is only in having lost being and in finding it again, so as to lose it anew.”⁸⁸ As a significant aside, it is not difficult to see another link with Heschel’s thought as early as 1951 with the publication of Man Is Not Alone. While that book contains few critiques of Heidegger and is mostly a phenomenological examination of the sublime as we have seen above, it is clearly based on the rec-

     

Haar, p. . Being and Time, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid. Haar, p. .

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ognition that Heidegger’s existential analysis is a major provocation for the appearance of Man Is Not Alone. Turning our attention back to the issue at hand, we ought to consider whether man is nothing more than a moment in the self-disclosure of being,⁸⁹ a neutral being who is never individual.⁹⁰ The answer to this question is buried in Heidegger’s understanding of Das Man. In his forgetfulness of being, Das Man comports himself inauthentically toward death. This means that for Dasein to understand itself as Dasein, it must have an authentic relation to death. Without this understanding, Dasein cannot grasp its own temporality. Das Man has the attitude of fleeing in the face of death. The problem of Dasein and finitude turns upon the way in which Dasein is able to move from the inauthenticity of Das Man to its self-transcending transcendence, authentic Dasein.⁹¹ Heidegger calls this movement “tearing oneself free.”⁹² Dasein as a projection of itself, aware of its existence, runs ahead of itself,⁹³ taking on its ownmost possibility, which is the possibility of death. Dasein’s singularity⁹⁴ is of the kind that is aware of the possibility of death as failure, not as biological demise, and the freedom attained is a freedom from the abyss of losing oneself.⁹⁵ As such, Dasein is detached from the One, “released from the illusions of the ‘One’ [the They], factical, certain of itself and anxious.”⁹⁶

 Haar, p. .  See Dreyfus, pp.  – , where he cogently questions the “realest subject of everydayness” and puts the issue squarely amidst its Hegelian pre-existing “spirit,” conscious individuality, or the intelligibility of cultural norms (p. ). Realizing there is no answer, Dreyfus relies on the hermeneutic description of phenomenology (p. ). See Blattner, p. , where he argues that the unattainability-characteristics of Dasein entail that it cannot decide to be one thing or not. In simpler language as he clarifies, pp.  – , “Dasein is not hard-wired to be someone, that it does not have an essence, which is unavoidable. The question ‘who am I,’ cannot be answered because ‘Dasein’s existentiality entails that this question can never be settled, and thus that it can never inalienably be some human possibility.’”  Haar, p. , puts this aptly. “And as anxiety is the mood of this threat [death], we ought to experience a constant anxiety! It is indeed a question of voluntarism―the theme of resoluteness makes it even more evident―that can be translated by a will to will. Not a will to death, but a will to disclose oneself to the extreme limit, to the point of losing oneself, to the abyss of ‘freedom,’ that is, of a self-transcending transcendence. Not a will to death, but “taking death to be true,” catching it at its own game, getting the better of it, beating it on its own ground.”  Being and Time, p. ; Haar, p. .  Haar, pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .

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It is this detachment that allows Heidegger to see Dasein as a unitary phenomenon: “Dasein is its disclosedness.”⁹⁷ This means, “That as Being-in-theworld it is cleared [geleichtet] in itself, not through any other entity, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing,”⁹⁸ and that “By its very nature, Dasein brings its ‘there’ along with it.”⁹⁹ However this may be, Heidegger is aware that a difficulty persists. Ambiguity is not only a part of the factical dimension of Dasein, but is also established as a potentiality for being, “and in the way Dasein projects itself and presents itself with possibilities.”¹⁰⁰ This dimension of Dasein is implied in being with one another―the kind of being of Das Man. In fact ambiguity is not the only aspect that characterizes Dasein’s being in its everydayness. Idle talk and curiosity function similarly, as well.¹⁰¹ These three aspects help compose the being of Dasein. Together, these three aspects reveal a basic kind of being of Dasein that Heidegger calls “falling.”¹⁰² This is neither a negative nor privative dimension, according to Heidegger, but an indication that Dasein is “proximally and for the most part alongside the world of its concern.”¹⁰³ It is through moods or attunement that Dasein unreflectively and spontaneously becomes aware of its own being as a there―it becomes aware how it is.¹⁰⁴ Heidegger calls the ontological−existential sense in which Dasein is delivered over to its there, even when evading the there, thrownness. Since this is a fundamental aspect of Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, it is necessary to present the entire quotation: This characteristic of Dasein’s Being―this “that it is”―is veiled in its “whence” and “whither,” yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the “thrownness” of this entity into its “there”; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the “there.” The expression “thrownnness” is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.¹⁰⁵

In other words, we are already in a world that is disclosed to us in our moods, which are prior to all cognition and volition, and which arise out of Being-in-

 Being and Time, p. .  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp.  – . See Blattner’s (pp.  – ) use of where-you’re-at-ness to deplete mood of a singular mental state.  Being and Time, p. .

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the-world, neither merely as a state of mind nor as a reflective apprehension, but as a disclosure.¹⁰⁶ In our submission to this disclosure, something matters to us.¹⁰⁷ Concern is disclosed to Dasein: Our Being alongside entities within-the-world is concern, and this is Being which uncovers. To Dasein’s disclosedness, however, discourse belongs essentially. Dasein expresses itself [spricht sich aus]: it expresses itself as a Being-toward entities―a Being-toward which uncovers. And in assertion it expresses itself as such about entities which have been uncovered Assertion communicates entities in the “how” of their uncoveredness.¹⁰⁸

The being that can account for Dasein is care. This does not mean, as Heidegger makes abundantly clear, that care is “an isolated attitude of the I towards itself.”¹⁰⁹ Rather, “Care as a primordial structural totality, lies ‘before’ [vor] every factical ‘attitude’ and ‘situation’ of Dasein, and it does so existentially a priori; this means that it always lies in them.”¹¹⁰ This means that the structure of care is temporal in that Dasein is “already in, ahead of itself and amidst,”¹¹¹ thrown, falling, and projecting. It has a temporal ekstatic structure,¹¹² which means that “the activity of clearing is outside itself in opening up the past, present and future.”¹¹³ Heidegger summarizes this in Division II in the section titled “Temporality and Everydayness”: We have defined Dasein’s being as “care.” The ontological meaning of “care” is temporality. We have shown that temporality constitutes the disclosedness of the “there,” and we have shown how it does so. In the disclosedness of the “there” the world is disclosed along with it. The unity of significance―that is, the ontological constitution of the world―must then likewise be grounded in temporality. The existential-temporal condition for the possibility of the world lies in the fact that temporality, as an ecstatical unity, has something like a horizon… The horizon of temporality as a whole determines that whereupon [woraufhin] factically existing entities are essentially disclosed.¹¹⁴

Heschel thoroughly opposes Heidegger’s horizontal schema and structure of Dasein disclosed in temporality. In Heschelian terms, pathos has no structure. Man is not a unitary phenomenon in the way in which Dasein is. For Heschel, human being can-

        

Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. . Being and Time, pp.  – . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .

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not be related to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction that is called existence. The Heschelian view of the self is not of being outside itself, or ekstatic. Rather, the self is a distillation via a deed.¹¹⁵ And since the self is not unified in being, perplexity remains a feature of being human even though “We can do justice to human being by relating it to the transcendent care for being.”¹¹⁶ For Heidegger, the “who” is the neuter of Das Man. For Heschel, however, there is not, nor is there any possibility of there being, anything neutral about human being in any dimension. In language that is squarely directed at Heidegger, Heschel says, The being of the human being is not the being of a neutral fact, “just being,” but rather a relationship of human being to meaning. Since being human is a necessity of human being, a distinction must be made between two ways of reflection. With other objects it is possible to reflect on their pure being, unrelated to meaning, thrown into the world. With humanity, it is impossible to reflect about its being without regard to its meaning. We can think of human being only in terms of meaning: it is either devoid of, or indicative of, ultimate meaning.¹¹⁷

In terms relating to consciousness, a decidedly non-Heideggerian interest, Heschel draws a similar conclusion, reaffirming his own phenomenological outlook as it pertains to being human, and echoing his disagreement with Das Man or “an everybody” as he refers to it here: My own being, placed as it is in the midst of many beings, is not simply being here too, being around, being part of the environment. It is at the very center of my consciousness that I am distinct. It is through the awareness that I am not only an everybody that I can evolve as a self, as somebody, as a person, a something that cannot be repeated, something for which there is no duplicate, no substitute. It is in the awareness of my being somebody that freedom comes to pass.¹¹⁸

Again, several pages following the above quote in Who Is Man?, Heschel separates uniqueness from thrownness, without using the term to describe a mode of being human that is unpredictable and has no sense that it just has to come to terms with a situation in which it already exists. The course of his life is, accordingly, unpredictable; no person can write his autobiography in advance… Generalization, by means of which theories evolve, fails in trying to understand

   

Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p.  – .

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man. For in dealing with a particular man, I do not come upon a generality but upon an individuality, a person. It is precisely the exclusive application of generalities to human situations that accounts for many of our failures… A major mode of being human is uniqueness. Every human being has something to say, to think, or to do which is unprecedented. It is the crust, the make-up, the conformity, that tends to reduce existence to a generality… Being human is a novelty―not a mere repetition or extension of the past, but an anticipation of things to come. Being human is a surprise, not a foregone conclusion. A person has a capacity to create events. Every person is a disclosure, an example of exclusiveness.¹¹⁹

In terms of Dasein, as Heidegger makes clear in Introduction to Metaphysics, the ultimate issue for being is non-being: “why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”¹²⁰ Since Dasein is transcendence, being and non-being are one. But Heschel, who criticized this concept of transcendence, cannot accept the primordiality of the oneness that exists for being and non-being. Being and non-being are surpassed by logos and pathos. Consequently, it is of great import that, according to Heidegger, the revelation of non-being lies at the basis of all wonder. For Heschel, pathos and logos lie at the base of all wonder. The world and the transcendence of pathos impel human being to wonder in the face of the sublime, not merely in the presence of nothingness. This is thoroughly consistent with Heschel’s phenomenology, as we saw at the beginning of Man Is Not Alone. While Heschel employs unmistakable religious language in asserting God’s care for being and that “God’s care defeats man’s defiance,”¹²¹ we must remember that he is communicating in both traditions, and the philosophical import lies in the basic polarity that human being faces. God and world are not opposite poles forcing us to choose one or the other,¹²² but rather human being is “involved in a drama dependent upon the polarity of creation and corruption. Just as creation goes on all the time, redemption goes on all the time.”¹²³ In this context, the final chapter of Who Is Man? puts forth its constructive phenomenology of human living, and Heschel makes it abundantly clear that the interlocuter has been Heidegger all along. Refusing to “‘surrender to sheer being,’ as Heidegger calls upon us to do,”¹²⁴ Heschel outlines “an understanding of the singularity of human living.”¹²⁵ This is in opposition to a singular phenomenological structure of Dasein.

      

Ibid., p. . Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. . Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid.

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It is easy to miss Heschel’s import without having considered the Heideggerian background against which it is written. In addition, it is easy to miss the import because Heschel freely moves between his own religious and philosophical viewpoints. He does this not because he chooses to ignore their difference, but because his concept of man is revealed in their ontological connection. The section headings of the final chapter of Who Is Man?, which I have commented on as necessity has dictated in this analysis, have one thing in common. “How to Live,” “To Be is to Obey,” “Continuity, “ “The Preciousness of being human,” “Being challenged-in-the-world,” “Requiredness,” “Indebtedness,” “The experience of being asked,” “I am commanded―therefore I am,” “Embarrassment,” “And Celebration”―these are the visions of being human that emerge out of the polarity of existence that Heschel has heretofore described. They do not indicate a unitary phenomenon as Dasein does, nor do they indicate a being whose singularity is a composition of many related fragments. Rather, they indicate an ontological presupposition about being a whole person, who lives in travail with God’s desire for redemption. When Heschel asks in the final paragraph “Who is Man?,” he is not invoking a rhetorical flourish to a question of mere faith. When he says, A being in travail with God’s dreams and designs, with God’s dream of a world redeemed, of reconciliation of heaven and earth, of a mankind which is truly His image, reflecting His wisdom, justice and compassion.¹²⁶

he is invoking a standpoint of phenomenological meaning that indicates the transcendence of pathos of which human being is capable here and now, and points to an exclusive meaning for every individual. Moreover, based on his critique of Heidegger’s structure of Dasein, Heschel is saying that Adam, the image of God, cannot have any redemptive understanding or awareness of authentic being except within the polarities he has described.

 Ibid., p. .

5 The Eclipse of Humanity Heschel’s critique of Dasein is the precursor to his critique of humanism in Heidegger’s thought. Unlike many of the previous critiques of Heidegger’s view of humanism, Heschel’s is thoroughgoing. Lowith¹ and Croce and others,² who referred to Heidegger’s thought as lacking humanity and a prostitution of philosophy, took stock of the ideas in Heidegger’s writings and of their historical context and objected with insight but not with rigor. The issue in Heschel’s approach is that it does not proceed in a logical manner from subject to subject. Rather, it proceeds from within the midrashic structure of his own writing. Perhaps for this reason, more than any other, it has gone unnoticed. However, that it is present, fully informed, and at the base of his entire philosophical venture is no longer unknown. Wolin offers a reading of Heidegger that doesn’t omit the anti-modernist temperament of Being and Time, and begins with “everydayness” and extends to Das Man and other expressions of inauthenticity. He sees Heidegger’s semi-autonomist grasp of Western metaphysics as the obstacle to his wholesale identification with Nazism.³ Now that we can point to the full-grounded nature of Heschel’s critique, which appeared along these lines almost twenty-five years earlier, the question that must be asked, akin to Wolin’s assertion is: Is there any profit to reading Heidegger once his humanism is fully exposed? Or as Wolin has himself characterized the debate: Is every overturning and reinscription of Heidegger’s foundational philosophy and politics a severe relativization of Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism?⁴ Wolin answers in the affirmative,⁵ yet he sees Heidegger’s discourse on Spirit as hanging by a thread within the tradition. Wolin’s language, while different in usage from Heschel’s “eclipse of humanity,” is not that removed from the central issue in Heschel’s critique. Whereas Wolin must come to terms solely with the philosophical tradition, Heschel must do so from within his own particular blending of the religious and philosophical traditions. The conclusion of the second chapter of my undertaking here underscores Heschel’s parameters and his intentions and indicates the trajectory of his criticism. In this “spirit,” the last two chapters of this work will be devoted to a question of a “tradition” that might hang by a thread or which obstructs our view of  Karl Lowith, Heidegger, Denker in durftiger Zeit (nd ed.; Gottingen, ).  Benedetto Croce in “La Critica: Revista di letteratura, storia e filosofia,” (Naples)  ():  – . See Farias, p. . See Rockmore, pp.  and  for his characterization of Croce’s perceptive, but isolated, criticism of Heidegger.  Wolin, p. xvii.  Ibid., pp. xii / xiii.  Ibid.

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humanity, inducing an “eclipse.” Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, unlike Wolin’s, might come to a different conclusion, not because they dispute the facts, but because they dispute the phenomenological origins of the critique and the character of actions extending from them. If, as Heschel has suggested, there doesn’t seem to be a remedial turning point in Heidegger’s view of humanism, then a significant question arises. Can Heschel communicate, or can we address Wolin’s concern to indicate what tips the balance of Heidegger’s benefit to the negative―thereby indicating that it should be read at least to save us from future errors? First, we must begin with a clear depiction of Heidegger’s notion of humanism. Heidegger’s main claims about humanism are found in Letter on Humanism (1946), a response to the inquiry of the philosopher and admirer, Jean de Beaufret, who was exposed as a Holocaust denier.⁶ This letter obviously appeared at an ominous time for Heidegger, Heschel and the world community. Heidegger and de Beaufret’s acquaintance, and the appearance of Letter on Humanism coincided with the denazification committees that led to the revocation of Heidegger’s teaching privileges. While I know of no historical basis for this claim, it seems reasonable to assume that the appearance of Letter on Humanism in this historical climate must have been a great shock to Heschel.⁷ The events of the Holocaust were being made public after the war and the Nuremberg Trials followed fifteen years later. Having survived the destruction of the Nazis by fleeing Europe, while most of his family perished, and then to have Heidegger, a representative and spokesman for Nazism, defend a position against traditional claims about humanism, no doubt propelled much of Heschel’s thinking. The historical record doesn’t contradict this assumption, and as we have seen up until this point, Heschel’s writings support it. In this chapter I shall investigate Heidegger’s and Heschel’s views of humanism and examine exactly what Heschel means when he claims there has been an eclipse of humanity. While the philosophical overtones of Heidegger’s response to de Beaufretare are directed mainly at Sartre and Cartesian subjectivism,⁸ there is a strong element in the essay that continues Heidegger’s turn away from theology indicated in section 9 of Being and Time, which Heschel opposed. There is

 See Farias, p. .  For the historical background to The Letter and its relation to Sartre, see Karsten Harries, “The Antinomy of Being: Heidegger’s Critique of Humanism,” The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. Steven Crowell (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), pp.  – .  See the editor’s introduction to the essay, Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, pp.  – .

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also an apologetic element of Letter on Humanism that mentions “malignancy” and the “rage of evil”⁹ that must be considered in light of certain notions of evil that Heschel included in Who Is Man?. Heidegger’s response to Beaufret was obviously made as criticisms of Heidegger’s positions came to the forefront, thus requiring justification. Heidegger confronted and acknowledged this head on when he wrote, “Because we are speaking against ‘humanism’ people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality.”¹⁰ In a similar vein, we can see that Heidegger’s defense is made in response to the claim that he is supporting atheism. Like his concept of Dasein that he believes to be neutral, Heidegger believes that he has not encroached on the domain of religion because his ontological commitments have prevented just that action: With the existential determination of the essence of man, therefore, nothing is decided about the “existence of God” or his “non-being,” no more than about the possibility or impossibility of gods. Thus it is not only rash but also an error in procedure to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of man from the relation of his essence to the truth of Being is atheism. And what is more, this arbitrary classification betrays a lack of careful reading.¹¹

We will begin our analysis with the significance of this quotation because it is directly related to the issue that Heschel raised throughout his critique of Heidegger. There are two important points to take notice of in Who Is Man? in relation to this Heideggerian notion. First, it is significant that the idea and experience of “brutality” in Who Is Man? receives ample treatment. Moreover, it receives this treatment in a context that points directly at Heidegger. In the section “Reciprocity,” Heschel says the following: The degree to which one is sensitive to other people’s suffering, to other people’s humanity, is the index of one’s own humanity. It is the root not only for social living but also of the study of humanities. The vital presupposition of the philosopher’s question about man is his care for man. The opposite of humanity is brutality, the failure to acknowledge the humanity of one’s fellow man, the failure to be sensitive to his needs, to his situation. Brutality is often due to a failure of imagination as well as the tendency to treat a person as a generality, to regard a person as an average man.¹²

 Letter on Humanism, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Who Is Man?, pp.  – .

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On many levels, this points at Heidegger, the philosopher of care, the philosopher whose analysis of Dasein must begin with Dasein’s averageness (Das Man), the thinker who has presupposed the everydayness of Dasein, and the thinker who has decried situational thinking for the question of the meaning of being. It is in the lines in the second paragraph following the above quotation where Heschel again points to the shortcoming of Heidegger’s question of being and its desire to create a new relationship between existence and essence through an analysis of Dasein: The central problem in terms of biblical thinking is not: “What is ‘to be’?” but rather: “How to be and how not to be?” The issue we face is not the dichotomy of being and mis-being, but that of righteousness and unrighteous being. The tension is not between existence and essence but between existence and performance… What distinguishes a human being is that his problem is how to be and how not to be. Indeed, man alone is motivated by the awareness of the insufficiency of sheer being, of sheer living. Man alone is open to the problem of how to be and how not to be on all levels of his existence.¹³

In this context, the insufficiency of being takes on an additional meaning. Whereas it had applied previously to the question of the meaning of being, it is now applied to the question of the meaning of humanity. Heschel is now arguing, contra Heidegger, that the absence of humanity is an absence of care for others. Care is not merely an analytic existential question, according to Heschel; it is a living embodiment in humanity. And without the dimension of life, humanity opens itself to brutality and being is diminished: Man achieves fullness of being in fellowship, in care for others. He expands his existence by “bearing his fellow-man’s burden.” As we have said, animals are concerned for their own needs; the degree of our being human stands in direct proportion to the degree in which we care for others.¹⁴

Second, when Heidegger says that there has been an errant reading of his work, he has a definite idea in mind, which is attached to the quotation above. That statement ends with the following text, serving as a proof that everyone and anyone who would claim Heidegger’s humanism is divorced from beliefs about God is mistaken. Heidegger continues with the following: No one bothers to notice that in my essay “On the Essence of Ground” the following appears: “Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as being-in-the-world no decision,

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid.

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whether positive or negative, is made concerning a possible being toward God. It is, however, the case that through an illumination of transcendence we first achieve an adequate concept of Dasein, with respect to which it can now be asked how the relationship of Dasein to God is ontologically ordered.”¹⁵

This has tremendous import for Heschel. As we have seen in the previous chapter, at the heart of Heschel’s opposition to Heidegger’s question of being and the adequacy of the concept of Dasein, is Heidegger’s notion of transcendence. Again, there is no proof from the historical record as formulated until now, but the significance and clarity with which Heschel criticizes Heidegger, combined with the issues Heschel chooses, illustrate the depth and familiarity that Heschel had with Heidegger’s writings. Whether we will ever know with certainty that Heschel opposed Heidegger based on this text, it seems clear with regard to it that Heschel’s opposition was tailor made. Rather than make ad hominem attacks or criticize Heidegger for emphases that may or may not have been interpreted accurately, Heschel confronted Heidegger in the best possible fashion―with the terms Heidegger himself set out and the ones upon which he intended his argument to be established. This is of paramount importance when considering the influence Letter on Humanism had for Heidegger’s followers and critics, and the influence it obviously had upon Heschel. According to Hannah Arendt, Letter on Humanism was Heidegger’s “most splendid effort.”¹⁶ And while it may have been so from his followers point of view, at least in the religious humanist tradition represented by Heschel, Letter on Humanism seems to be a low mark, an after-the-fact rationalization for the tacit acceptance and silence that Heidegger extended to the grossest denigration of humanism in history. While we have yet to delve into some of Heidegger’s exact meanings for humanism, our initial foray indicates this much. The appearance of The Letter, the denazification process, and the defense of the adequacy of the notion of Dasein cannot be severed from the humanism imbedded therein. It cannot be severed from the content, the process, the events, and the man who put it forth and supported it, when a lack of humanity was revealed at the heart of the greatest mass cruelty carried out in human history and in the name of the glory and greatness of the German people as Heidegger conceived of them. A close reading of The Letter in light of Who Is Man? should yield the same results as have been adduced from comparing its texts to Being and Time. Hence, when Heidegger compares his notion of transcendence in The Letter, as he sit-

 Letter on Humanism, p. .  Ibid., p. .

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uates it in his existential analytic and compares it to a “Christian sense,”¹⁷ there is no surprise that we find once again the basis of Heschel’s critique, and this time with regard to humanism. At the heart of the issue is the relationship of “being-in-the-world” to the transcendent, where “‘world’ does not in any way imply earthly as opposed to heavenly being, nor the ‘worldly’ as opposed to the spiritual.”¹⁸ Heidegger has consistently maintained before and after “the Turn,” that “Man is and is man, insofar as he is the ek-sisting one.”¹⁹ Thrown into the openness of being, Dasein is the clearing, a beyond, in which ek-sistence unfolds. As such, the basic trait of humanism is being-in-the-world. This schema is precisely at the heart of Heschel’s critique of the ontocentric predicament, where being is considered the all, and what is human is unspecified by any singularity, a neuter with regard to creation, ethics, and pathos. Heschel’s notion of being-challenged-in-the-world, born out of a non-utilitarian phenomenology, sees this humanism as a void. And as an absence of pathos in the face of an unwarranted, all-encompassing being, it leads to brutality. Moreover, it is clear from the context of Heidegger’s remarks where this schema is related in The Letter, that he is sensitive to a claim about the decided lack of content in his notion of humanity. The concluding words of the paragraph that lays this out go as follows: Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a “subject,” whether this is taken as “I” or “we.” Nor is he ever simply a mere subject which always simultaneously is related to objects, so that his essence lies in the subject–object relation. Rather, before all this, man in his essence is ek-sistent into the openness of Being, into the open region that clears the “between” within which a “relation” of subject to object can “be.”²⁰

This Heideggerian preontological description of humanity is exactly what Heschel criticized as obliviousness of consciousness.²¹ Unable to face the sensitivity of being human because of its attachment to everyday usages, tools, and comportments, living being is sidestepped and oblivion is embraced. Existence, according to Heidegger, is the only dimension that allows the inquiry into transcendence; hence, traditional inquiries into the reality of God must follow this path. According to Heschel, based on his own idea of phenomenological significance, existence is a partial portal between any possible relationship between man and

    

Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Chapter  above.

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God. Without human living, existence is a hopeless unspecific dimension in which human being cannot be valued, and any questions about the intuition of God’s presence are doomed to failure. This critique of Heidegger is not limited to ontological questions, as Heidegger attaches the issue of values and law to any possible ontological order between Dasein and God. For Heidegger, any possible subjectivity in being is an obstacle to the openness of existence, and The Letter extends it emphatically to both dimensions of values and law: To think against values is not to maintain that everything interpreted as a “value”―“culture,” “art,” “science,” “human dignity,” “world,” and “God”―is valueless. Rather, it is important finally to realize that precisely through the characterization of something as “a value” what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. But what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets being: be valid―solely as the objects of its doing. The bizarre effort to prove the objectivity of values does not know what it is doing. When one proclaims “God” the altogether “highest value,” this is a degradation of God’s essence. Here as elsewhere thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being. To think against values therefore does not mean to beat the drum for the valuelessness and nullity of beings. It means rather to bring the clearing of the truth of Being before thinking, as against subjectivizing beings into mere objects.²²

Similarly, the openness of existence must overcome any significance of law that can be realized in words. As a matter of fact, any reliance on words to specify a law is an affront to language itself, as Heidegger makes clear in the paragraph of The Letter that famously links language and being: Only in so far as man, ek-sisting into the truth of Being, belongs to being can there come from being itself the assignment of those directives that must become law and rule for man. In Greek, to assign is nemein. Nomos is not only law but more originally the assignment contained in the dispensation of Being. Only the assignment is capable of dispatching man into being. Only such dispatching is capable of supporting and obligating. Otherwise all law remains merely something fabricated by human reason. More essential than instituting rules is that man find the way to his abode in the truth of Being. This abode first yields the experience of something we can hold on to. The truth of being offers a hold for all conduct. “Hold” in our language means protective heed. Being is the protective heed that holds man in his ek-sistent essence to the truth of such protective heed―in such a way that it house ek-sistence in language. Thus language is at once the house of being and the home of human being. Only because language is the home of the essence

 Ibid., p. .

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of man can historical mankind and human beings not be at home in their language, so that for them language becomes a mere container for their sundry preoccupations.²³

Heschel’s criticism of thrownness, existence, and being is not a mere conceptual deviation from Heidegger’s thinking. It sets the basis for a far greater problem and sets the tone directly for the problem of humanity, which Heschel sees as an eclipse in Heidegger’s thinking. For as the last few pages of The Letter emphasize, once the house of being is appropriated for all dwelling, the humanity of man is negatived by an “upsurgence.”²⁴ And yet thinking never creates the house of Being. Thinking conducts historical ek-sistence, that is, the humanitas of homo humanus, into the realm of the upsurgence of healing [des heilens].²⁵

This is a moment of great significance in Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, for it bridges two aspects of being. It is here that Heidegger contextualizes evil as a malice of rage occurring alongside healing and being as the “provenance of nihilation.”²⁶ And with the utmost brevity and clarity, Heidegger states what has all along been the underlying motivation for The Letter and the most determining factor for his view on humanism: The nihilating in Being is the essence of what I call the nothing. Hence, because it thinks being, thinking thinks the nothing.²⁷

It is thus not at all ironic that the term humanism and its cognates disappear from these final pages of The Letter; however, it is highly auspicious for the biblical approach of Heschel. Thinking humanism, like being thinking being, must always think the nothing. We might profess friendship, kindness, and all manner of healing amongst beings, but being can never indicate a positive content in humanism because “nihilation”―the surpassing of any metaphysical content in being―must always have its say. As such, man can never be essential for himself, but for a notion of being that must eclipse man’s essence. That man is more than a rational being is true for both Heidegger and Heschel.²⁸ The question is: what does “more” mean? Their divergence from phe-

     

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., Ibid.,

p. . p. .

p. . p.  and Who Is Man?, p. .

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nomenological principles onward has defined the effulgence of human being, and has taken them in entirely different directions, such that Heschel views Heidegger’s underlying intentionality as an eclipse of humanity. Moreover, Heschel ties this eclipse to an ontocentric predicament in Heidegger’s thinking and to a definite historical event, the Holocaust, in the course of human history, which resonates in both of their lives. In the wake of the event, for the most part, Heidegger makes little attempt to overcome the nihilating silence in the face of the Holocaust. He cannot overcome a silence that would betray being. As we will see shortly, even when he attempts to overcome the silence, it ultimately illustrates Heschel’s point concerning the eclipse. Heschel, whose phenomenology of insight cannot remain silent in the face of being, refuses to nihilate the gap between evil and human being. Consequently, for Heschel, being human is a significant phenomenological fact for consciousness, history, and for any philosophy that follows Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Being cannot demand silence. Language is not the abode of being and man is never indifferent to himself or neutral to his essence. It is worth quoting Heschel in full, as we can now see that the context of his remark is his critique of Heidegger. The basic inquiry of Who Is Man?, stated at the outset, “is to explore modes of being which characterize the uniqueness of being human.”²⁹ His thesis statement is immediately followed by these words: Man is never neutral or indifferent in relation to his own self. Love and knowledge, value judgment and factual description cannot be kept apart in establishing self-knowledge. Selfknowledge embodies either acceptance or rejection. One’s relationship to the self is inconceivable without possession of certain standards or preferences of value.³⁰

Even though the self is a compound being, the self is singular in terms of the demand for pathos, and man in being-challenged-to-be can achieve a wholeness that is otherwise unavailable to any other form of being. The question of selfhood still remains to be elaborated in terms of Heidegger’s Das Man and Heschel’s Man, for they lead directly to the possibility of humanity. Heidegger, in beginning with an unvarnished portrayal of Das Man, follows the path he has set from the phenomenological everydayness, which is determinative for Being and Time. Heschel begins his notion of Man well before Who Is Man? It has poetic value in Der Shem Ha meFurash, published in 1934, but it coalesces in terms of idea, history, and biblical thinking at a precise moment in his writing in 1938. We must turn to both Heidegger’s and Heschel’s notions to

 Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid.

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finalize the significant gap that lies between them and to come to a more profound understanding of Heschel’s critique of the eclipse. Das Man, the one or the they, is Heidegger’s first association with a self. It appears in Chapter IV of Being and Time as a basic element of the book. Yet, it is clearly not the conception of the self that most thinkers conceive. Dreyfus rightfully approaches the issue from the perspective of solipsism.³¹ The question posed is this: Does meaning originate and reside in each particular Dasein? Following the decided lack of singularity and separateness embedded in the notion of Dasein, Heidegger must bridge the chasm between inauthentic being and authentic being. If everydayness is the phenomenological portal to the understanding of Dasein, then there must be some phenomenon that is part of the shared public and historical practices, which conveys that meaning.³² Influenced by Dilthey and Kierkegaard in two opposite directions respectively―the public/historical and the idea that truth is being apart from the crowd―Heidegger introduces his concept Das Man.³³ Das Man is the beginning of a self-referential movement in Dasein that attempts to cope with meaningful comportment in a social world. While it may have conscious experiences, they are not the basis of its existence. Mental states are the final Cartesian assumptions that Heidegger attempts to subjugate in order to clarify and make evident the coping that goes on in the everyday world.³⁴ Apart from the Cartesian and Husserlian attempt to begin from individual mental

 Dreyfus, pp.  – .  Being and Time, p. : “All the structures of being which belong to Dasein, together with the phenomenon which provides the answer to this question of the ‘who’, are ways of its Being. To characterize these ontologically is to do so existentially. We must therefore pose the question correctly and outline the procedure for bringing into view a broader phenomenal domain of Dasein’s everydayness.”  Dreyfus, p. .  Ibid., p. . “Or to put it even more starkly, ‘One is’ what one does. ()[]. This can be viewed as a sort of behaviorism, the sort found in Wittgenstein, and perhaps in Gilbert Ryle, as long as one remembers that the behavior in question is not meaningless physical movements of some object, but the directed, significant, concernful comportment of human beings going about their business in a meaningful social world… It is important at this point to remember that Heidegger, like Wittgenstein, is not denying conscious experiences. Like Wittgenstein, he is trying to get rid of a certain picture of the self as containing a self-contained stream of experiences that are its essential content. What Heidegger denies is the foundational significance of mental states. He points out that what is ‘given’ to reflection does not have the priority in everyday life that it has in Cartesian philosophy. As we have seen, Dasein encounters itself for the most part in the transparent coping that occupies most of its day, not in practical deliberation followed by purposeful actions guided by self-referential intentions in actions.”

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states, Heidegger wants to establish that the equipment and roles of society are there for anyone―Das Man.³⁵ This means that as an existentiale, Das Man is average and conforming in terms of comportment. Further, there is no belief or conceptual schema about what one does that elicits intellectual necessity or explicitness.³⁶ There can be no metaphysical ground or appearance of foundation that makes intelligibility real.³⁷ This paves the way for Heidegger’s assertion that the individual person cannot be the source of everyday significance. Dasein, stripped of immanence and subjectivity, is a “coherent pattern of the comportment required by public ‘roles’ and activities―an embodiment of the one.”³⁸ Consequently, the one “is the ‘realest subject’ of everydayness.”³⁹ Since Dasein is neither an ego nor a collection of private experiences, Heidegger is able to say, “The self of everyday Dasein is a one’s self… As a one’sself, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the ‘one,’ and must find itself.”⁴⁰ And when it finds itself, it comes to a startling conclusion. “The self … is primarily and usually inauthentic, the one’s-self. Being-in-the-world is always fallen.”⁴¹ Dasein, because of the falling away of the one, is a nullity.⁴² It lacks resoluteness and is faced with anxiety, or an “experience of the oblivion of being,”⁴³ because we constantly seek a metaphysical ground for meaning when there is none. Whether or not this anxiety, rootlessness, and lack of definition of the self may ever come to an end seems beside the point, as even the later Heidegger abandons the quest to save individuals.⁴⁴ At best, culture is worth saving in the face of nihilism because the roles and activities it exhibits are at the basis of any and every being.⁴⁵

 Dreyfus, pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.; Being and Time, p. .  Dreyfus, p. ; Being and Time, p. .  Dreyfus, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Haar, p. , traces the evolution of the lack of individuation back to the Beitrage ( – ), where the “I” is always ontic and substantial. While Heschel does agree with the outcome, he clearly sees Being and Time as the origin of the problem when it is placed in the context of his own religious view of man.  Dreyfus, p. .

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Haar correctly sees this new duality between the inauthentic and authentic Dasein as replacing the age-old Christian duality of nature/grace and body/spirit.⁴⁶ The religious movement between man’s nature and man’s transcendence has been reformulated in Heideggerian terms as a unitary essence of man―what belongs to Dasein and what doesn’t.⁴⁷ Nature has been transformed in “facticity” and the human body is encountered only as the limit of the “world.”⁴⁸ According to Haar, the net effect is that through deconstruction, Dasein has decentered man. Being-in-the-world as thrown and fallen is a new starting point apart from the age-old subject and object scissions. Dasein is the clearing of being, but not a recognizable essence unto itself. Man is never natural in any recognizable sense. He or she is always conflicted in the unitary openness to being, never ultimately knowing that which is authentic or non-authentic. As Haar stated, being is “a strange interiority that expels us from our own ‘I’.”⁴⁹ In Heschelian terms, man can never recognize the imprint of the Divine because “living,” “conscience,” and “reason” have been removed from his essence. Man, in the Heideggerian constellation, has been eclipsed. He has no surety that his humanity is real, nor can he ever have such a touchstone. The entirety of Heidegger’s deconstruction of philosophy similarly upholds this perception of Heidegger’s humanism. Humanism in the positive sense that Heidegger criticizes, begins with Plato’s metaphysics because man is always associated with the animal rationale: The beginnings of metaphysics in Plato’s thought also marks the beginning of “humanism.” This term is to be seen as essential to this discussion and therefore understood in its broadest possible meaning. In this sense “humanism” refers to the process encompassed by the beginning, development and end of metaphysics, whereby man moves in all kinds of different ways, but always knowingly, toward a center of being in the world. The term “man” can refer here to mankind or humanity in general, the individual or the community, a nation or a group of nations. Within the fixed metaphysical framework of being in the world the aim is always the same: to lead “man” as defined here, the animal rationale, to the liberation of his capacities, the certainty of his destiny and the safeguarding of his “life.” This may take the form of shaping his “moral” attitudes, redeeming his mortal soul, developing his creative powers, training his intellect, cultivating his personality, awakening his public spirit, disciplining the body―or a suitable combination of some or all of these “humanisms.” Each of these endeavors is a metaphysically determined attempt to encompass man in greater or smaller orbits. As metaphysics comes to perfection, so too

   

Haar, p. xxiv. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. .

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“humanism” (or anthropology, to use the Greek term) strives to take the most forward and extreme―which is to say, absolute―“positions.”⁵⁰

It is Heschel’s insight into the history of philosophy and the significance of phenomenology that led him away from the fateful error that Heidegger decries, and simultaneously lets Heschel surpass the utilitarian beginnings of Dasein’s analysis. Eschewing the definition of man as a rational animal, Heschel has provided a notion of man based on insight, developed with pathos, and who has a sense of humanity that is imbued with these essential qualities. In contrast, Heidegger’s deconstruction of humanity leads to a bewildering silence in the face of incontrovertible facts. Taken within the context of being-inthe-world, the silence following the Holocaust is nothing more than an extension of Gelassenheit, or the need to let things be, an act of submission. Taken within the context of the Holocaust, Heidegger’s revision of his own record and his silence are nothing more than moral turpitude. Heidegger’s infamous comment about the Holocaust in light of mechanization and agriculture is indicative of a mind that cannot understand its own failings. This is more than Heideggerian anxiety and an insensitive reflection upon the intentionality of Das Man. The deconstruction of humanity, when combined with the Holocaust, is indicative of moral depravity through an equivalence that is inane. Within the context of Heidegger’s remark about the crematoria and agriculture, any possible humanism that Heidegger might uncover is rendered absurd and evil. The analogy, entered into the canon of philosophy in a 1949 lecture entitled “Das Gestell,” bears this out: Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry―in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.⁵¹

The eclipse of which Heschel speaks is evident in this remark. The deconstruction of technology has rendered Heidegger blind to the difference between manufacturing say, eggs in chicken coops, and human corpses in crematoria. Human being becomes debased because being human is neglected. Humanity is a content-less mass because destiny belongs only to being.⁵² Humanism is a direction-

 Ott, pp.  – .  See Farias, p. n.  and Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” pp.  – .  Letter on Humanism, p. . “History does not take place primarily as a happening. And its happening is not evanescence. The happening of history occurs essentially as the destiny of the truth of Being and from it. Being comes to destiny in that It, Being, gives itself.”

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less movement because homelessness is only “the abandonment of Being by beings.”⁵³ Humanism is no more than an empty sound⁵⁴ because humanism cannot be apprehended when “what matters is not man simply as such.”⁵⁵ Whether one processes Heidegger’s remark as disregarding the fate of Jews, or as an attempt to understand it in terms of the mechanization of life and death,⁵⁶ the analogy cannot be reinterpreted because the precise human element that is missing―being human―cannot be created out of nothing. The readmission of a jettisoned concept in Heideggerian terms would be an affront to being. It would mean that metaphysics has overcome being and not the opposite, which is the desired end. In another lecture of the same period as “Das Gestell,” “Die Gefahr”―“The Danger”―Heidegger’s underlying reliance on the meaning of death for the essence of man comes to the forefront in relation to those who perished in the Holocaust. It is precisely because death is essential that a moral equivalence and blindness rise to the surface: Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They succumb. They are done in. Do they die? They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of manufacturing corpses. Do they die? They are liquidated inconspicuously in extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished people are perishing from hunger in China. But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes our own essence possible.⁵⁷

Death by liquidation is not morally reprehensible because of murder. It is not reprehensible because it was set in motion and largely carried out by Heidegger’s fellow countrymen. Rather, it is reprehensible because those who were exterminated in camps were denied the possibility of making their essence real because they weren’t able to endure. They were denied the possibility of dying peacefully in their beds, when death supposedly makes our essence possible.

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Giorgio Agamben has argued in the Heideggerian tradition that the greatness of human potentiality is in its poverty―an abyss of human impotentiality of which humans alone are capable. As a kind of being-toward death, this is a reworking of the humanism that Heidegger examined in relation to technology, “On Potentiality,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), p. .  Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” pp.  – , specifically p. .

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When these Heideggerian passages are juxtaposed to passages in Who Is Man?, Heschel’s writing takes on a new light. What might seem like a mere insight or a kerygmatic statement is at least that, in addition to being a remonstration against Heidegger’s position. One gets the eerie feeling that Heschel’s use of “liquidation” is not a mere accident: Just as death is the liquidation of being, dehumanization is the liquidation of being human. What qualifies a being to be called human?⁵⁸

Heschel’s essentialist answer is an attempt to draw out living being. There is no definition that can fathom the depth of being human,⁵⁹ but there is an understatement in self-awareness, just as there was an understated meaning embedded in the idea of revelation: “The minimum of self-awareness comes to expression in the words: I am. But who is I? And what does it mean to be?”⁶⁰ Heschel’s living I is incapable of rationalization, as opposed to the self, whose essence is possible because of the essence of death, which is a mere pretext: “The I is an epistemological pretext, a pseudonym for what we do not know.” But according to Heschel in the rest of the quotation, this knowledge that we do not possess is not a privation or a nihilation of being. Continuing his phenomenological thinking, Heschel says, “‘I am’ is a marvel, a source of astonishment. One can never recover from the surprise of just being here and now.”⁶¹ As existential fundamentals,⁶² these modes of living, of being human, are latent in the substance of self-understanding.⁶³ Simply put, they are part of the essential depth of being human, of being alive.⁶⁴ Since it is not an explicitly substantiated presence, Heschel’s experience of the self is always vulnerable in the worst way imaginable. It faces a choice between manipulation or an act of radical amazement―a confirmation of a hermeneutical phenomenological reality that demands transcendence. The self is capable of being lost in the everyday manipulation of the world. It must constantly face its greatest challenge―its own singularity―or face its eclipse. As an existen-

 Who Is Man?, p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. : “They are not simply given in man’s consciousness, nor are they properties derived from his biological nature. His sheer being does not guarentee them. However they may be claimed of him, expected of him. They emerge as manifestly true when a person begins to ponder the latent substance of his self-understanding.”  Ibid., p. .

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tial experiential reality, the self is challenged to rise out of anonymity, or face an eclipse that renders it unspecific in an unrepeatable moment: The self is always in danger of being submerged in anonymity, of becoming a thing. To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment and to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again.⁶⁵

Fear, anxiety, insult, and failure are, in Heschel’s analysis, responses not to something essential about death, as they were for Heidegger, but rather to our inability to live or to know what to do with being⁶⁶―how to be. Man’s plight, as said above, is not due to the fear of non-being, to the fear of death, but to the fear of living, because all living is branded with the unerasable shock at absurdity, cruelty, and callousness experienced in the past. A human being is a being in fear of pain, in fear of being put to shame.⁶⁷

Whereas Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein relies heavily on the cultural milieu in which it finds itself, Heschel’s analysis of Adam is imbued with a significant sense of the ancestral past. Heidegger’s sense of Dasein, the open, is basically an openness to the here and now, while Heschel’s sense of Adam cannot be limited by the here and now. The self, as Heschel argues, must transcend the here and the now. The self is capable of doing this not because, as Dasein was projected into the future, but because Heschel understands the self as a distillation of the past. The here, which renders the self of Adam understandable, is open to a sense of intentionality that goes beyond any and all forms of culture: We cannot, on the other hand, analyze man as a being only here and now. Not only here, because his situation is intentional with the situation of other men scattered far and wide all over the world.⁶⁸

The Heschelian self is not contained in a space dominated by acquired cultural practices and comportment in a social setting that cannot be its limit. Similarly, when it comes to time, the Heschelian self is imbued with thoughts and experiences that have long preceded it. This is also true of the here and now because man’s total

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. : “Being human, as said above, is an act not a thing. Its chief characteristic is not being but what is done with being.”  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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existence is, in a sense, a summation of past generations, a distillation of experiences and thoughts of his ancestors⁶⁹ and “because his situation is intentional with the situation of other men scattered far and wide all over the world.”⁷⁰ This phenomenological view of the self is based neither in a mystical moment of enlightenment, nor in a temporal being sensed in the ecstatic flow of time. This Heschelian self is a historical being of flesh and blood, a being who has been invested with the past, and whose humanity is challenged to be an investor for the future: The authentic individual is neither an end nor a beginning but a link between the ages, both memory and expectation. Every moment is a new beginning within a continuum of history. It is fallacious to segregate a moment and not to sense its involvement in both past and future. Humbly the past defers to the future, but it refuses to be discarded. Only he who is an heir is qualified to be a pioneer.⁷¹

Heidegger’s imageless man renders any autonomous history of humanity impossible.⁷² There is no “I” who accomplishes anything in history. Being claims man in the epoch in which he is addressed and truth demands a certain communication and grounding of humanity.⁷³ In this epoch, humanity accepts to preserve the truth that claims it. That is, humanity in the Heideggerian schema must transition from historical being, to historial being, and can only be determined by its epochality.⁷⁴ As Haar has pointed out, there are four historial images of humanity: the Greek, the Medieval/Christian, the modern, and the planetary.⁷⁵ There is no attempt to uncover a notion of biblical man, and Greek man serves as the basis for all future men.⁷⁶ While the first three are of significance, it is the fourth, planetary man, that has the most bearing on Heidegger’s and Heschel’s relationship vis-à-vis the eclipse of humanity because it is in this fourth epoch that the Holocaust occurred. Sometimes named the “man of the atomic age” or “the functionary of Technology,”⁷⁷ there is a significant meaning conveyed in this epoch. Planetary man is filled with a technological errancy on a world scale.⁷⁸ He is enframed by          

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Haar, p. Ibid. Ibid., p. Ibid., p. Ibid., p. Ibid., p. Ibid.

. . . . .

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technology and infinitely driven to identify with the expansion of the means of production.⁷⁹ Yet man in this epoch is the being of Ereignis that is capable of “apperceiving the light of being in its extreme veiledness, in the essence of Technology.”⁸⁰ Whereas the Greeks were attuned to being in wonder, it is our modern attunement of terror in the face of technology that characterizes our historial being.⁸¹ And yet terror as an attunement has fallen short. In spite of Heidegger’s expectation, as Heschel has revealed and as history has unfolded, both Heidegger and the German nation were blind to the errancy of technology when it came to the murder of six million Jews and millions of others. In light of Heidegger’s statements equivocating the agricultural industry with the liquidation of human beings in crematoria and essential death making our own essence possible―are we capable of understanding the depth of the eclipse Heschel perceives? It is apparent not only in the analysis of Dasein and the authenticity of the self therein, but also is a phenomenon within the very age of being that Heidegger himself has described. The eclipse is also aptly captured in Heidegger’s final Der Spiegel interview, published five days after his death and more than a decade after Heschel verbalized his thoughts on it. In the context of the Der Spiegel interview, Heidegger’s meaning is unambiguous, so I quote it verbatim: SPIEGEL: Why should we be so powerfully overwhelmed by technicity that … ? Heidegger: I don’t say [we are] “overwhelmed” [by it]. I say that up to the present we have not yet found a way to respond to the essence of technicity. SPIEGEL: But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us? Heidegger: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time

 See Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. . His explanation builds in historical involvement.  Haar, p. .  Ibid., p. .

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ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us]―the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.⁸² The ultimacy of technicity’s uprooting of man is clearly stated in contrast to the reality of atomic bombs. Death, real death, not the failure of Dasein or its anxiety at that failure, is brushed aside. For Heidegger, the inhuman face of destruction on an unparalleled scale is minimized by the displacement of technicity. Now when we reconsider Heschel’s remark in Who Is Man? from 1965, it takes on a more profound significance. When Heschel argues that philosophy cannot be the same after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, he is determining the profundity of evil in the face of technology and indicating its inhumanity. As he has argued consistently from his principles against Heidegger, the greatest issue that faces man is inhumanity, not a displacement because of technology. Heidegger’s attack on metaphysical humanism has reached far beyond an ideal eclipse of humanity. It is not only a personal failure on his part, but is also an underscoring of an ethos pervasive in his entire analysis of being in whichever period we enjoin it. Heidegger’s humanism as ekstatic temporality is a deplacement of being human, and ironically a belittling of human being. In an attempt to situate man in being, Heidegger has depleted being human of any worth.⁸³

 Martin Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel  (May ):  – . Trans. by W. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (), ed. T. Sheehan (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, ), pp.  – .  It is interesting to compare the outcome of Heschel’s analysis with Haar’s. While they share many common conclusions, their different point of references produce one very significant point of contention. Haar concludes (p. ) that Heidegger’s antihumanism is a rupture with anthropocentrism. Consequently, Haar will only go so far as to say that it is Heidegger’s ontological estrangement that makes him a stranger in his own essence and renders Heidegger’s man, un-heimlich, “a stranger in his own essence” and not “inhuman.” Heschel has come to his conclusion because he has analyzed man as something more than his capabilities and faculties. Heschel has conceived of man as unfragmented, as whole person, not as the sum of his parts or faculties. Consequently the non-human in Heschel’s eyes can be transformed into the inhuman. In Haar’s analysis, the non-human is a privation, a poverty of being human. In Heschel’s analysis, the non-human is not a privation, but is a inadequacy related directly to being human, and its corruption is destructive of the whole person when an eclipse of humanity takes place. Haar sees the non-human as a suppression of the ipseity of the individual (p. ). Heschel sees the non-human as a suppression of being human and of pathos and comes to the realization that the demonic is human being without pathos, i. e. human being without the impulse to be human. The role of the demonic will be evaluated in the final chapter as it relates to a significant aspect of Heschel’s thought, postmodernism, and the Holocaust.

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There is of course a knee-jerk reaction to this analysis, which should be examined. When it comes to historical events, it is easy to attribute causes and effects where they do not belong. Heidegger participated in Nazism, for which he was justly punished after the war. His attempts to revise the events are widely viewed with skepticism―justly so. Similarly, attempts to elevate the role that he played must be viewed with a healthy measure of criticism. But, if the question is whether we can see grounds within Heidegger’s description of being that support the devaluation of being human and coincide with the greatest moral failure of the twentieth century, then the answer is yes. Again, the context must be made clear, and that is partially why I began this study with an analysis of Heidegger’s and Heschel’s phenomenologies. The context is not a causative one. Yet, it is definitely more significant than the admission of Rorty, when he said that whenever Heidegger would be read, it would be read with the stench of smoke: “The smell of smoke from the crematories … [will] linger on their pages.”⁸⁴ And it is so because that kind of myth-making in which language is hyperbolized and the event and actions surrounding it is turned into a metaphor, is one of Heschel’s main objections. If the context is not causative, however, then what exactly is it? The context is descriptive in the intentional sense. Heidegger’s Being and Time did not cause the Holocaust and Heschel’s Who Is Man? did not explain why, from a divine perspective, it occurred. The context is one in which the conditions of inhumanity can be analyzed in thought and can be seen as an extension of the actions of individuals who bore the thoughts and proposed them for others. It is an evocation of the presence of being. An indication of how man, understanding his situation, can chose how to be human. The depth of human intentionality is the object of Heschel’s analysis. Therefore, when he connects death, liquidation, being, and dehumanization―“Just as death is the liquidation of being, dehumanization is the liquidation of being human”⁸⁵―he is not rendering a scientific judgment as to the causality implied by the Holocaust. Neither is he explaining an historical event with rational categories that may or may not have a logical connection. Nor is he postulating any modes of moral behavior. In fact, Heschel is not involved in explanation of any kind, a possible affront to the philosophic mind, but is fulfilling an essential understanding of the depth of human existence in his own eyes: To ex-plain means to make plain. Yet the roots of existence are never plain, never flat; existence is anchored in depth. One cannot study the life of a tree by excavating its roots.

 New York Times, May , .  Who Is Man?, p. .

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What follows is an attempt to describe some modes of being human which every reader as a human being will recognize and accept as essential. They represent a requiredness rather than a fabrication of the mind; not postulates of morality but fundamentals of human existence. Failure in nurturing the essential sensibilities results in the decay of the humanity of the individual man.⁸⁶

There are no possible sociological, political, or cultural extrapolations that can provide ultimate meaning, or relate to the ultimacy of life and death in the event. This is evident from the genesis of the discussion of Heschel’s phenomenology in Chapters 2 and 3, which specified phenomenological awareness as devoid of such elements. That is not to say that no extrapolations can be made. It is instead to say, as Heschel does above, that any extrapolations must be made either from the humanizing of or from the decay of humanity vis-à-vis the individual. The image of man is both singular and comprehensive.⁸⁷ Moral responsibility begins and ends in this juxtaposition and extends to historical realities. Heschel is unfolding an insight into the depth of being human, or the failure of being human, and illustrating its connection to a historical event: Man’s being human is constituted by his essential sensibilities, by his modes of response to the realities he is aware of―to the being that I am, to the beings that surround me, to the being that transcends me―or, more specifically, by how he relates to the existence that he is, to the existence of his fellow men, to what is given in his immediate surroundings, to that which is but is not immediately given.⁸⁸

The final public address contained in the Der Spiegel article published five days after Heidegger’s death, and some four years after Heschel’s death, was also filled with a sense of spiritual insolvency. How could Heidegger, who devoted his entire life to a single question, remain so filled with dreadful doubt and then displace it upon a god? I quote it at length because of that fact and the nature of causality referred to, of which Heschel was mindful. It invokes a sense of “destruction” so essential to Heidegger’s thought, the irony of which is lost on him: SPIEGEL:

Well, we have to say that indeed we prefer to be here, and in our age we surely will not have to leave for elsewhere. But who knows if man is determined to be upon this earth? It is thinkable that man has absolutely no determination at all. After all, one might see it to be one

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. , “In our reflection we shall consider what man means to himself as well as what man means to his fellow man.”  Ibid., p. .

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Heidegger:

SPIEGEL:

Heidegger: SPIEGEL:

Heidegger: SPIEGEL:

Heidegger:

SPIEGEL:

Heidegger: SPIEGEL:

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of man’s possibilities that he reach out from this earth toward other planets. We have by no means come that far, of course―but where is it written that he has his place here? As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition. Contemporary literature, for example, is largely destructive. The word “destructive” in this case is bothersome, especially insofar as, thanks to you and your philosophy, the word has been given a comprehensive context of meaning that is nihilistic [in tone]. It is jarring to hear the word “destructive” used with regard to literature, which apparently you are able to see―or are compelled to see―as completely a part of this nihilism. Let me say that the literature I have in mind is not nihilistic in the sense that I give to that word. Obviously, you see a world movement―this is the way you, too, have expressed it―that either is bringing about an absolutely technical state or has done so already. That’s right. Fine. Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action? If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.27 Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking? We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him]. But can we help?

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Heidegger: The first help might be the readying of this readiness. It is not through man that the world can be what it is and how it is―but also not without man. In my view, this goes together with the fact that what I call “Being” (that long traditional, highly ambiguous, now worn-out word) has need of man in order that its revelation, its appearance as truth, and its [various] forms may come to pass. The essence of technicity I see in what I call “pos-ure” (Ge-Sull), an often ridiculed and perhaps awkward expression. To say that pos-ure holds sway means that man is posed, enjoined and challenged by a power that becomes manifest in the essence of technicity―a power that man himself does not control. Thought asks no more than this: that it help us achieve this insight. Philosophy is at an end. SPIEGEL: Yet, nonetheless, in former times (and not only in former times) philosophy was thought to accomplish a great deal indirectly―directly only seldom―but was able indirectly to do much, to help new currents break through. If we think only of the great names of German thought, like Kant and Hegel down through Nietzsche (not to mention Marx), it can be shown that in roundabout ways philosophy has had a tremendous effect. Do you mean now that this effectiveness of philosophy is at an end? And if you say that the old philosophy is dead―that there is no such thing any more, do you also include the thought that this effectiveness of philosophy, if it was ever there in the past, is in our day, at least, no longer there? Heidegger: A mediated effectiveness is possible through another [kind of] thinking, but no direct one―in the sense that thought will change the world in any causal way, so to speak. SPIEGEL: Excuse me, we do not wish to philosophize―we are not up to that―but we have here the point of contact between politics and philosophy. That is why you notice that we are drawn into a dialogue of this kind. You have just said that philosophy and the individual would be able to do nothing but…⁸⁹ To a devoted Jew, conversant in the entire history of thought within his own and Western secular tradition, who personally had been touched by the furor of the Holocaust, and who devoted his entire life to raising the expectations of human behavior, these words would have been incredibly hollow. Perhaps mostly so be-

 Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” pp.  – .

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cause of the speaker’s lack of conviction and the irrelevance of his thoughts leading up to them. When we read Heschel’s words in this light and against this background, they resonate with a deep meaning that had not been previously considered. Heschel’s perception of Heidegger is most aptly summed up when Heschel discusses the meaning of the eclipse. When discussing man’s feelings of unworthiness either before God or man, Heschel says, The tragedy of this creeping self-disparagement is in its cultivation of the doubt whether man is worthy of being saved. Massive defamation of man may spell the doom of us all. Moral annihilation leads to physical extermination. If man is contemptible, why be upset about the extinction of the human species? The eclipse of humanity, the inability to sense our spiritual relevance, to sense our being involved in the moral task is itself a dreadful punishment.⁹⁰

As Heschel has argued throughout Who Is Man?, Adam is neither a substance nor anthropocentric being. And while Heschel has this much in common with Heidegger, as they have diverged from the very moment of their phenomenological descriptions, they have put forth entirely differing notions of man that are incompatible. Heidegger’s attempt at analyzing eksistence has concluded that man is “openness, transcendence, an ek-static relation to being.”⁹¹ Devoid of powers, faculties, and properties,⁹² man is unaware of his own essence. Heschel’s analysis, on the other hand, has brought man to the moment of insight, a capability that he is aware of exercising and which renders the singularity of his essence. For Heidegger, the temporal aspect of care means that man is pushed toward an ideal he can never reach. For Heschel, the historical aspect of pathos means that man is challenged to achieve his essence beyond the being of his existence. Man is a creature of pathos whose sympathy and empathy transcend being, thereby indicating an essence of being human that is appreciable, understandable, and possible of being carried out. Again, when we juxtapose Heidegger’s final public words with Who Is Man?, we are capable of gaining new insight into Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, not-

 Who Is Man?, p. .  Haar, p. .  Ibid., p. . “We are rendered capable of thought by that power that desires that we may be who we are. Rather than the ‘capability’ or faculty (Vermogen is the term used by Kant, who speaks of die Vernunft als Vermogen) being originarily ours, all our faculties are not only referred to the desiring capability of being as their source, but are taken up into it. The essence of every human capability is relocated in the silent power, the ‘quiet force’ (stille Kraft) of being, which itself is capability (Vermogen) par excellence. Man finds himself dispossessed of his faculties.”

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withstanding the fact that Heidegger’s words appeared in print, four years after Heschel’s death. The net effect of Heidegger’s thinking is awakening a readiness to wait for a god. While this flies in the face of his life’s work and ironically sounds like the Christian doctrine of the second coming, the impotence of action comes to the fore. In the face of technicity and its destruction of tradition, Heidegger can only rely on a god, who he has long ago jettisoned, and ask individuals to whom he has denied any singular humanism, to wait. And this waiting can only fly on the face of every turning and opening in the thought of Heidegger. Heschel, who has argued for God’s pathos and the need to reorient humanity, demands that we act and that we consider the meaning of each and every act. Each individual is a repository of the image of the divine, whose freedom is the challenge to be human. Heschel, who had every reason to become pessimistic in the face of the destruction of humanity, has advanced a new and more profound interpretation of being human. He has asked and answered what he perceives to be the question of our time against the background of Heidegger’s proposal for Dasein, which creates an eclipse: Who is man? A being in travail with God’s dreams and designs, with God’s dream of a world redeemed, of reconciliation of heaven and earth, of a mankind which is truly His image, reflecting His wisdom, justice, and compassion. God’s dream is not to be alone, to have mankind as a partner in the drama of continuous creation. By whatever we do, by every act we carry out, we either advance or obstruct the drama of redemption; we either reduce or enhance the power of evil.⁹³

This analysis leaves us with an indisputable fact. Both Heidegger and Heschel eschew humanism. But they do this for entirely different reasons. Heidegger rejects it because it has been considered in the history of philosophy as a metaphysical issue. While Heschel agrees with Heidegger on this point, he has another contention that elicits a new depth in the critique of humanism. Humanism according to Heschel must lack insight. It must remain untouched by any phenomenology of awe and wonder and give way to anthropological, political and cultural descriptions which lack depth. In diverging from Heidegger’s nihilating attitude, Heschel creates a new vision of man―a vision in which humanity not humanism is paramount. Furthermore and of historical moment, it is a vision that indicates that when humanity is deprived of content, it leads to barbarity.

 Who Is Man?, p. .

6 Heschel and the Postmodernists: (Are the Demonic and Death Real?) Several significant conclusions emerge from this study. First, Heschel has oriented the major thrust of his philosophy against postmodernism. This is mainly seen by his reaction to Heidegger’s work, though it is not necessarily limited to it. Second, Heschel believes, as Heidegger does, that one of the main reasons for the fall of humanism is due to a reliance on metaphysics. Their agreement is limited to this one main point. Third, postmodernist humanism in Heidegger’s formulation contributes to an ethos that dehumanizes man and removes the previously self-evident worth of human life, helping us to understand some of the collective and individual actions that are part of the Holocaust. This is not a scientific, political, or sociological judgment, but a phenomenological insight into the meaning of human life with inevitable effects. While many have read Heschel as an inspiring pietistic rabbinic figure or as a neo-Hasidic figure, he clearly inhabits a specific tradition largely determined by continental European philosophy. It began with his adoption of Husserl’s phenomenological ideas as applied to revelation. It is furthered by his critique of man within the postmodern tradition including Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, and Heidegger. Heidegger, whose influence was felt at the crossroads of a great historical upheaval and its aftermath, is no doubt singled out for this reason, and for his deconstruction of being, a movement of single import within and without philosophy. More than any single factor, this overly pietistic, neo-Hasidic misreading of Heschel, often by those who claim to be his most ardent students and followers, has contributed to a serious neglect of his ideas, their import, and their place in the history of philosophy. This is even more exaggerated when this misreading overshadows his thoughts on contemporary philosophy and the Holocaust. Continuing in the vein of this study’s aforementioned conclusions, it must be noted that the final words of Who Is Man? are about the reality of evil in human conduct. This is neither a gratuitous nor an insignificant remark in relation to the conclusions I have drawn regarding Heschel and postmodernism, as well as the Holocaust and Heidegger. In fact, it is central to the argument. This chapter will examine their import. Moreover, it must be noted that Heschel’s conjoining of barbarity and evil in 1965 followed closely on the heels of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study in the Banality of Evil, which had been published in 1963. In one important sense we can see how Who Is Man? is an argument against Arendt’s neutrality as an independent observer who has separated barbarity from evil by arguing for

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banality and the minimilization of its horror and lack of humanity. A new historical work has, in fact, brought these facts and biases to light. The study by Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer,¹ illustrates Eichmann’s antisemitism that surpassed his attachment to bureaucracy and hence banality. Stangneth explodes the myth created by Arendt that Eichmann did not really know what he was doing and that he “had no criminal motives.”² This neutral stance and underestimation of evil is indicative of many philosophers who have exercised unusually poor judgment and shortsightedness when ideas and civilization have clashed, leading to a debasement of civilization and to the real suffering of human beings. In the case of Arendt who spares the Holocaust as the absolute of evil in favor of totalitarianism, the “objective” record is being readjusted. Systems of thought, à la Hegel or Marx, have rarely been able to interpret or examine historical events and human suffering from the point of view of the individual. It is therefore unsurprising, given this inability in combination with Heidegger’s reworking of his own historical record after the Holocaust, that a strong and at times raucous debate has ensued when considering Heidegger’s legacy. It is beyond the scope of this work to consider each and every criticism or reworking of Heidegger’s thought in the postmodern tradition as it applies to the Holocaust, and then juxtapose them to Heschel’s ideas. Nevertheless, it is clearly within the scope of this work to evaluate some of Heidegger’s most characteristic thoughts, as they are themselves within the projected purview of Heschel’s reflections and important to Heidegger’s. In this respect, then, I will look at some of the thoughts of Derrida, Caputo, and Rorty, whose elaborations on Heidegger have been considerable, and are significant parts of the tradition that has solidified around Heidegger. It is also imperative to look at the negative dialectic of Adorno (with whom Heschel was personally acquainted, as he was with Max Horkheimer)³ and the theological ideas of Emil Fackenheim and Neil Gillman, a Jewish postmodernist, who has reworked Heschel’s idea of revelation in the context of individuality, such that it unnacceptably blurs Heschel’s clear distinctions vis-à-vis revelation and man. We will also touch upon others who play a less significant role in this story.

 Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. R. Martin (New York: Knopf, ).  For a review of Stangneth’s book see Richard Wolin, “The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend,” Jewish Review of Books (Fall ).  See Kaplan, Spiritual Radical … , pp.  – .

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At the outset, from the philosophical tradition’s point of view, we must clarify the meaning of postmodernism. I understand two significant meanings attached to the term. The first is situated in the history of philosophy, and the second leans more toward literary traditions. I mention them in this order because I understand the gravity of their significance to be found in this priority. This is true, I believe, not only per se but also in this particular case. The philosophical boundaries of postmodernism are paramount to the juxtaposition of Heidegger and Heschel, and to each of them individually. Heidegger’s postmodern influence is well known. It is to be hoped that Heschel’s criticism of postmodernism will become more widely considered. My division and prioritizing should not be interpreted to mean that philosophy and literature have absolute and clear limitations that keep them from cross-fertilizing each other’s significance. For the purposes of this discussion I am proceeding in this fashion because for the most part it is the manner in which Heschel’s confrontation with postmodernism occurs.⁴ To this end it is helpful to begin with the work of Peter Dews, who composed an important but not well-known work in 1987, entitled Logics of Disintegration. In this seminal but not widely read work, Dews argued that the post-structuralist thought that was identified with postmodernism was in fact the outgrowth of an earlier philosophical tradition, and that it was itself “bound to certain vulnerable and unquestioned assumptions.”⁵ In his study, Dews set before himself the following: The fundamental issue here, of course, is the sense in which a philosophical position which assumes the foundations of the classical forms of critique to be necessarily and oppressively identitarian can itself continue to perform a critical function. Can post-structuralism dismiss the claims of critical theory (in the sense of its titles) while continuing to satisfy these claims (in the sense of its demands)?⁶

While Dews is actively sorting out issues that have their own internal philosophical concern,⁷ with a cut-off date in the late 1970s, he has identified a beginning, which should influence any discussion of postmodernism. Dews argues that in spite of postmodernism’s seeming originality and its apparent remoteness from a previous discussion in the history of philosophy, postmodernism in the form of Derrida’s critique has antecedents in the debate between Fichte and Schelling:⁸

 It also coincides with my own outlook on the significance of postmodernism.  Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York: Verso, ), p. xvii.  Ibid., p. xvii.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. xvi.

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At the very least, I hope to have shown that the strategy of Derrida’s critique of transcendental philosophy, and the problems which this strategy raises, are not entirely unprecedented, and that the assumption―central to the whole pattern of post-structural thinking―that the concept of the subject implies an immobile, self-identical, and constitutive center of experience seriously underplays the complexity and subtlety of the ways in which subjectivity has been explored within the Western philosophical tradition.⁹

Dews’s statement easily summarizes Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, made more than twenty years earlier. The context is different and the admixture of traditions is more complex, but these words could easily have been written by Heschel. Due to the focused and limited use that Dews employs, they have the merit of being right to the point. And while Dews applies this perspective to his understanding of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Lyotard, it is the logic of disintegration, a term borrowed from Adorno, that determines his philosophical critique. The usual hodgepodge of secondary criticisms that rely on moral grounds that have to do with breaks in tradition, totalizing absolute truth, inconsistencies, and reckless integrities are not as determinative.¹⁰

What, Then, Is a Logic of Disintegration? A logic of disintegration is a disparity between reality and its concept, whereby the forced harmony and identity of thing and concept fails, and no reconciliation is put in its place. Rather, an awareness of the inadequacy is assumed in perception.¹¹ In reaction to Marx and Hegel, and pertinent to the discussion here, Adorno argues that the inability to conceive of nonidentity is in fact an attack on the individual.¹²

 Ibid..  Ibid., p. xvii.  T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, ), Part , Negative Dialectis: Concepts and Categories.  See Brian O’Connor, “Adorno’s Reconception of the Dialectic,” in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, ), pp.  – , most specifically p. . “Adorno sees the negative dialectic as a ‘logic … of disintegration,’ of the disintegration of the apparent identity between concept and reality. It establishes that there are unrecognized contradictions between the two that are obscured by identity claims. In so doing it releases the thing or object from its forced and harmonizing identity or conceptualization, thereby bringing about a ‘confrontation between concept and thing. According to Adorno this process is one in which critique immanently engages with these conceptualizations in order, as he describes it, ‘to grasp, through their form and meaning, the contradiction between their objective idea’―what it is that these conceptualizations describe―‘and that pretension’―the claims to objectivity in the conceptualizations. This process does not simply end, however,

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This is significant to Heschel’s critique of Heidegger in another seminal way. Just as we have seen that Heschel posits an ontological predicament that identifies being and being human to the detriment of being human, Adorno sees an “irremovable nonidentity between subject and object.”¹³ The disparity that Dews points out between self-centered constitutive experience and self-identity in critiques of transcental philosophy, which, as we have also seen in Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, has been carried out in further criticism by others. Zimmerman, for instance, uses it to illuminate Heidegger’s analysis of the connection, and eventual appearance of the foundational and productive metaphysics of Plato, through modern technology and the encouraging of inauthentic working.¹⁴ Surrounding these issues, Zimmerman sheds light on the question of being, and on Heidegger’s historical circumstances, as well as on his engagement with National Socialism.¹⁵ In the same vein, Zimmerman points out Joseph Margolis’s critique of Heidegger, wherein Heidegger “manages to ignore the concrete history of actual existence and actual inquiry.”¹⁶ Similarly, Richard J. Bernstein, unintentionally echoing Heschel’s thoughts presented here, asks, “How radically different is Heidegger’s conception of the privileged relation between being and humanity from the onto-theo-logical idea of the special relation between God and man, a relation which endows man alone with reason, logos, consciousness.”¹⁷ Derrida and Caputo respond to these critiques, and conclude that Heidegger has retained some of the subjectivist metaphysics that he has claimed to deconstruct.¹⁸ Yet, instead of ignoring or putting deconstruction aside, both Derrida and Caputo attempt a deconstruction of deconstruction. In this maneuver with the rejection of the ‘pretension’ of the concept. Rather, Adorno writes, it ‘seeks to transform this knowledge into a heightened perception of the thing itself.’ The sense of the ‘thing,’ the ‘matter,’ the ‘object,’ is heightened by our experience of failure to encapsulate it. The thing appears more complex than our conceptualization seemed to allow. For Adorno, in fact, this experience contributes ultimately to a reconciliation of subject and object in that the subject’s ‘heightened perception of the thing’ means that it has become conscious of ways in which it has misrepresented the object: ‘It is up to dialectical cognition to pursue the inadequacy of thought and thing, to experience it in the thing.’”  Negative Dialects, ; Gesammelte Schriften, , . See O’Connor, p. .  Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, pp. xv – xvi.  Ibid., p. xvii.  Joseph Margolis, “Pragmatism, Transcendental Arguments and the Technological,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Paul T. Durbin and Friedrich Rapp (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., ), p. . See Wolin, p.  n.  for further citations pro and con Heidegger’s humanism.  Zimmerman, p.  and Richard J. Bernstein, “Metaphysics, Critique and Utopia,” Review of Metaphysics,  (December, ), pp.  – .  Zimmerman, pp.  – .

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they incorporate some of the positions that Heschel has criticized. Most specifically, the moral and human positions that Derrida and Caputo sense have been challenged in the course of actual events―most notably the Holocaust―make them appropriate and essential interlocuters for any understanding of Heschel’s potential interaction with postmodernism.

Derrida In Derrida’s Of Spirit, published in 1987 and followed in an English translation two years later, we encounter a troubling development. While the topic may be the spiritual (geistig) in Heidegger’s thought and in the role that avoidance plays in its uncovering, the occasion is the Holocaust. The first sentence announces a mythic proportion, “I shall speak of ghost, [revenant], of flame, and of ashes,” and the second joins it to Heidegger’s thought, “And what, for Heidegger, avoiding means.”¹⁹ Thrust into a metaphysical, spiritual vortex, the attentive reader must confront a sense of epochality that does not meet actual events. Derrida is not speaking of real lives and of real suffering. He has, from the first sentence, mythologized death. And by the second sentence he has entwined it with a concept of Dasein that is attached to Heideggerian being, with the corresponding ontological limitations we have revealed: I insist on this point of departure in the possibility of the Fragen not only for the reasons I pointed out at the start. A few years later, when the references to spirit are no longer held in the discourse of Destruktion and in the analytic of Dasein, when the words Geist and geistig are no longer avoided, but rather celebrated, spirit itself will be defined by this manifestation and this force of the question. Of the question, then, in the name of which the same words are avoided in Sein und Zeit, when he says he must avoid them, Heidegger is right to emphasize that he does not do so out of caprice, stubbornness, or concern for terminological oddness.²⁰ The terms of this series: spirit, but also soul or psyche, consciousness, ego, reason, subject―and Heidegger adds on life and man too―block any interrogation on the Being of Dasein.²¹

This Derridian shift between myth and reality plays itself out in Derrida’s version of Heidegger’s thought, and hence in Derrida’s own ideas. When Derrida comes to characterizing Sein und Zeit, he first poses the undertaking this way:

 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. .  Being and Time, pp.  – .  Derrida, p. .

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Of course, it is from this subjective determination of spirit that a delimitation [Abgrenzung] must disengage, one could say liberate, the existential analytic of Dasein. Dasein finds itself given the task of preparing a philosophical treatise on the question “What is man?”²²

Yet, barely two pages further, the question undergoes a subtle but significant alteration, against which Heschel has clearly warned. Referring to this section of Sein und Zeit Derrida says, These terms and these concepts have thus no rights in an analytic of Dasein which seeks to determine the entity which we ourselves are. Heidegger announces, then, that he is going to avoid them (vermeiden). In order to say what we are, who we are, it appears indispensable to avoid all the concepts in the subjective or subjectal series: in particular that of spirit (#10, p. 46).

Derrida then says, Now who are we? Here, let us not forget, we are first and only determined from the opening to the question of Being. Even if Being must be given to us for that to be the case, we are only at this point, and know of “us” only this: the power or rather the possibility of questioning, the experience of questioning.²³

This wavering between what is spiritual and what is not, is but a brief introduction to a philosophical problem that “avoidance” serves. These subjective terms must be avoided at all costs, because they hark back to the Cartesian “position of the subjectum.”²⁴ Herein, however, lies Derrida’s if not Heidegger’s avoidance of singular suffering. For if subjectivity is the bane of spirit, then all its modalities are, as well. If my suffering, your suffering, or their suffering is infused with any subjective element, it must be avoided. If the Holocaust is about the suffering in non-mythological terms of six million Jews, of each and every man woman and child individually, it must be avoided. Consequently, when Derrida provides his interpretation of the famous passage of The Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), where the spirit of Europe is placed in the vice between Russia and America and their metaphysicality is equivalized regarding “their character-of-world,” Derrida denies that Heidegger sees a crisis and by extension, that Derrida himself does too.²⁵ The destitution of spirit has a remarkable character, according to Derrida, and it has a remarkable origin in keeping with the character of avoidance. It has an explicit Heideg   

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. . p. . p. . pp.  – .

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gerian demonic quality that resides in Cartesian certainty. It is labeled foreign,²⁶ an indication that any other form of spirit or bearer of human existence is to be seen in this light―a malignancy in the socialization of Dasein: Moreover, a little later in the same passage, Heidegger names the demonic. Evidently not the Evil Genius of Descartes (which is, however, in German böse Geist). The hyperbolic hypothesis of the Evil Genius, to the contrary, gives way precisely before that which constitutes evil for Heidegger, the one who haunts spirit in all the forms of its destitution: the certainty of the cogito in the position of the subjectum and therefore absence of originary questioning, scientific methodologism, leveling, predominance of the quantitative, of extension and of number―so many motifs which are “Cartesian” in type. All of that, which accepts lie and destruction, is evil, the foreigner; foreign to spirit in spirit. When Heidegger names the demonic (Einfuhrung, p. 35 [46]), he specifies, in a brief parenthesis: in the sense of destructive malignity (im Sinne des zerstorerisch Boseartigen). Spiritual essence of evil.²⁷

To a careful or sensitive reader the equivalence of foreignness with evil has an unmistakably harsh historical tone reminiscent of Nazism, given that a few pages later we are reminded of the privileged spiritual quality of the German language.²⁸ And, in its twin relation with Greek, German alone possesses the excellence to name itself,²⁹ as the being resolved to the essence of being.³⁰ Derrida, not unaware of the arrogance and hubris of these remarks and of similar ones made in the Der Spiegel interview―which Derrida attributes partially to naiveté―notes them and refuses to pass judgment. It is this refusal that determines Derrida’s understanding of Heidegger’s silence and his own justification of a double meaning “of spirit”–that it both has and has not power,³¹ that it is a haunting because the possibility of destitution is always present.³² Evil cannot be analyzed, decomposed, or dissolved. And when we finally arrive at Derrida’s evocation of Heideggerian spirit, of the spirit Derrida can make his own, the words are a jarring reversal, a dissolving not of evil but of actual history. The ninth chapter Of Spirit begins with the following:

 The original French uses the term l’etranger, which could mean either “stranger” or “foreigner.” “Stranger” obviously has less of a political overtone than “foreigner,” but both convey the alienation and non-inclusion of someone different. Furthermore, Derrida uses them interchangeably in “Of Hospitality.” Moreover, the context is clearly one in which there is an irreconcilable significance. One is either of spirit, in spirit, or not.  Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.

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What is spirit? Everything suggests that, from as early as 1933, the date at which, lifting the last quotation marks, he begins to talk of spirit and in the manner of spirit, Heidegger never stopped interrogating the Being of Geist. What is spirit? Final reply, in 1953: fire, flame, burning, conflagration.³³

This deconstruction is neither figure nor metaphor.³⁴ And evil is of spirit and not of matter.³⁵ And following the doubleness of its character, Derrida, based on Heidegger’s text, sees gentleness and destruction as spirit deploying its essence: Thus understood, spirit deploys its essence (west) in the possibility of gentleness and destruction. Gentleness does not submit to some repression (schlagt keineswegs nieder) the being-outside-itself of conflagration (des Entflammenden), but holds it gathered (versammelt) in the peace of friendship. Destruction comes from the frenzy which consumes (verzehrt) itself on its own insurrection and in this way pushes the evil one (das Bosartige betreibt). Evil is always the evil of a spirit. Evil, and its malignity, is not the sensible, the material. No more is it of a simply “spiritual” nature (“geisteger” Nature). Evil is spiritual (geistlich) [ … ]. (p. 60 [179])³⁶

The doubleness of character has been taken over by being. Unlike polarity in Heschel’s thought, which cannot be rendered nil, Derrida sees doubleness as overwhelmed by the violence of revelation in Heidegger. Evil has a primordial metaphysical origin in Schelling’s Of Human Freedom,³⁷ and Derrida offers an apologetic thematization of evil as he ignores the abstract tearing of “Spirit” and its violence.³⁸ The primordial will of spirit means that evil cannot be material as it must first and foremost be of being.³⁹ And the conflagration that to many a Jewish or non-Jewish reader invokes murder and death of both body and spirit, can only mean for Derrida the making of room for spirit and the deplacement of God. To the extent that the essence of spirit resides in conflagration (in Entflammenden) it breaks the path (bricht er Bahn), makes its clearing and sets it on the road. As flame, spirit is the tempest (Sturm) which “storms the sky” (“den Himmel sturmt”) and gives itself over

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid..  Gillian Rose, “Of Derrida’s Spirit,” New Literary History , no. , Reconsiderations (Spring ), p. .  Rose, p. . See Rose, p. , where she traces the originary evil in Heidegger’s thought that refuses to think its origin but assigns to evil a prelegitimate participation in cosmic force.  Derrida, p. .

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to “ousting God” (“Gott erjagt”). Spirit pursues (jagt) the soul on the way (in das Unterwegs)… [Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 60 [170 – 180]).⁴⁰

It is in this deconstruction, beyond irony and without empathy, that spirit has been transformed in the face of actual death. Instead of indicating its nadir, conflagration points toward the depth of spirit. Instead of denoting actual living, conflagration points toward a spiritual ghostlike death. And instead of enlivening sympathy for fellow human being, spirit is a haunting of the ghosts whose memory cannot be forgotten. That they cannot be forgotten is of little consequence, however, when we realize that they cannot be valued either, because their actual living was never part of the discussion, and therefore their dying is of little significance. This absence of actual living has direct consequences in the moral realm. As Gillian Rose has clearly argued,⁴¹ the mystification of authority has determined any singularity, universality, or particularity of justice as a founding violence. If deconstruction is justice for Derrida,⁴² then it conserves violence in its originality.⁴³ And when this type of justice contends with the Holocaust, it reduces it to a divine literal biblical “manifestation and sacrifice”⁴⁴ beyond deconstruction because “Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructable.” And when Derrida calls for a path of thought at the end of Of Spirit, it is a primordial dishonesty because law and violence cannot be thought of in this mystification. Just as the binary opposition between Nazism and non-Nazism cannot be reworked without effacing their differences, as Wolin shows,⁴⁵ violent means, and the incomprehensible gassing and burning of human beings cannot co-exist in any modern sense of law. As Rose notes, there is no way to tell the difference between false messiahs and tyrants. And there is no way to separate nationalist, fascist fantasies from pure formal law.⁴⁶ That there is no determination or demarcation between tyranny and justice prefigures another demarcation that does not exist in actual living, and has significant ramifications that contrast sharply with Heschel. Heschel’s main ideas, on revelation, man, and pathos are intertwined in a polarity not only of their own but also in a polarity of traditions. In Heschel’s thought this polarity is as

 Ibid.  Rose, pp.  – .  See Rose, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  See Wolin, pp. xii/xiii where he compares Derrida’s attempt at equating Heidegger’s inaugural lecture as National Socialist rector of Freiburg University with writings by Husserl and Paul Valery.  Ibid., p. .

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much rabbinic as it is philosophical. Polarity presents a challenge to rabbinic literalism just as it does to philosophical naiveté concerning being. Heschel’s ideas must be read in this double context without surrender to the limits of its polarity, and with the unmitigated involvement of the Jewish and philosophical traditions, without any possibility of displacement. Derrida demands to be read as a displacement of tradition. Just as Holocaust deconstruction must deal with ghosts, so deconstruction itself must deal with the memory of tradition as, “There’s no deconstruction without the memory of the tradition.” Not in other words, but exactly―there is no living tradition. Similarly there is only text, as Derrida’s well-known quip asserts. And there is nothing outside text. Whereas for Heschel, when discussing the significance of selfknowledge he says, The paradox is that man is an obscure text to himself. He knows that something is meant by what he is, by what he does, but he remains perplexed when called upon to interpret his own being… Man must interpret them [texts] in terms larger than his inner life.⁴⁷

The equivalence of everything and text for Heschel would be tantamount to asserting that text is the equivalent of being. And as great as the biblical, rabbinic, and medieval traditions of interpretations are for Heschel, there is a greater significance in being human, which emerges beyond man’s mere inner life as an indication of self-knowledge. For Derrida, the deconstruction of all reality and the disappearance of tradition means that there is only a non-demarcated mélange of tropes that await deconstruction. And the single-most significant one for human individuality, in the case of Derrida, is the Jew-Greek. But just who is this Jew-Greek? As we have seen, his individuality and singularity is suspect. He or she doesn’t exist and he or she stands neither here nor there. In the words of Derrida’s favorite, James Joyce, “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.” A Jew-Greek doesn’t live in a tradition. He or she is recalled as being a variant of one or another traditions. He or she is a projection of a narrative, and nothing more. As Derrida said of himself, “I consider my own thought, paradoxically as neither Greek, nor Jewish. I often feel that the questions I attempt to formulate on the outskirts of the Greek philosophical tradition have as their ’other’ the model of the Jew, that is, the Jew-as-other.” But this is odd. According to Derrida, the Jew has no singularity as Jew, and whether this is located between Heidegger and Levinas, as some claim, or be-

 Who Is Man?, p. .

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tween Kant and Hegel, as Miriam Leonard argues,⁴⁸ the outcome is the same. Jewish singularity is an impossibility. And Derrida’s followers consider and evaluate this process. In this line, Lyotard, Derrida’s apparent heir, can only conceive of the wandering Jew, a psychotic being neither given to pleasure nor to reality.⁴⁹ And apart from the usual romanticism of Christianity displacing Jewish singularity in favor of a Christian Jesus, Jews become the open wound of the West that reaches its apex with the rise of Nazism, which renders the Jew amenable to objectivization and annihilation.⁵⁰ Another of Derrida’s followers has provided an alternative, which bears mentioning for several reasons.⁵¹ Lacoue-Labarthe, reacting to Holderlin’s romanticism and Heidegger’s use of it, injected a death of God interpretation into the mix:⁵² In effect, God died at Auschwitz, in any case the God of the Greco-Christian West. And it is not by any sort of chance that those whom one wanted to annihilate were the witnesses, in this West, to another origin of God that has been venerated and thought there–if this is even, perhaps, [witnessing] to another God, remaining free from his Hellenistic and Roman captivity and impeding thereby the program of the accomplishment [of nihilism]. This is why the event, the extermination, is with regard to the West the terrible revelation of its essence.⁵³

Arguing that Holderlin’s understanding of caesura, the radical break between God and man created an abyss through human hubris, Lacoue-Labarthe approaches Heschel’s understanding without the latter’s grounding in humanity. And it cannot be grounded in humanity, according to Heschel, because it is a mere symbol of what happened. The god of symbolism is no longer a personal being, but an it, which is the abyss. Being can only be measured against epochality, a world historical process, which is never anchored in being human. The same problem of symbolism is buried in Lyotard’s Heidegger and the Jews. ⁵⁴ Heidegger’s ontological difference signifies that the Jew is “Other” and

 Miriam Leonard (ed.), Derrida and Antiquity: Classical Presences (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp.  – .  Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, ), p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  See Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, pp.  –  for an analysis of Derrida’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s link and difference.  See Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, pp.  – .  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, ), pp. – .  I am indebted to Richard Wolin for this analysis, pp.  – .

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“dissimilar.” Unable to be assimilated into the logos or ratio of the West, the Jew’s fate in culture is one of “forgetting” and “repression.” So Auschwitz is, when it comes to the Jews a Veleugnung―denial⁵⁵―not mass murder of human beings who are singled out as Jewish. Ironically, caesura and symbolism are present in another Jewish thinker’s approach, without the denial of mass murder. This is revealed in another attempt by a postmodern Jewish thinker who wants to bypass Heschel’s analysis so as to uphold his own postmodern sensibilities. In The Tremendum, Arthur Cohen uses the caesura as a phenomenological comment, indicating his own past avoidance that he seeks to overcome.⁵⁶ For Cohen, caesura is the formal indicator that makes the Holocaust “special, separable, ontic.”⁵⁷ In attempting to bridge it, Cohen states: What I undertake is a redefinition of the reality of God and his relations to the world and man, but as well a reinvestment of the passive receptiveness of the world and the active freedom of man with significant meaning.⁵⁸

Turning aside from Heschel’s phenomenology,⁵⁹ by using the rhetoric of being and the “passive receptiveness of the world,” which is akin to Heidegger’s thrownness, Cohen missed the subtlety of Heschel’s argument and classified it as mere rhetoric. The phenomenological analysis of Who Is Man? is totally lost on Cohen, who sees Heschel’s supposed neo-Orthodoxy as making the Holocaust “beside the point of theological labor.”⁶⁰ In so doing, Cohen has injected a Heideggerian “passiveness” into man and the world, which eclipses being human and sets Cohen’s phenomenological investigation down a significant but unavailing path. The fatal consequence for Cohen is that in saving the Jewish people, he has lost the individual. Only the Jewish people is eternal and consequently has no temporality.⁶¹ In his own words: What I am struggling to identify is a proper distinction between the historicity of the individual and the eternity of the people, the fortuity of individual becoming and the necessity

 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. .  Cohen, The Tremendum (New York: Crossroad, ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p.  and Arthur Cohen, The Natural and Supernatural Jew (New York: Pantheon Books, ), pp.  – .  Cohen, The Tremendum, p. .  Ibid., p. .

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of the people, the endless variety and growth of the individual and the holy being of the people: theologically formulated, the individual is the work of creation, the people is the auditor of revelation. Adam is the stem of the race, but Israel is the stem of mankind.⁶²

In spite of this noble ideal, we are left with a stunning reversal. Adam is a racial epithet, unforeseen and indefensible, within the entire corpus of Jewish thought, except at its very extreme margins, which are sometimes akin to Cohen’s mystical leanings.⁶³ Adam, to put it into Heschelian terms, is no longer capable of expressing humanity outside of the people of Israel. And while Cohen’s analysis is not a bigoted one, it is a diminishment and trivialization of Adam, who is capable of human being and being human. Adam is present both at creation and revelation because the Jewish people has made its image in his, acknowledging their prehistory in Adam. And because pre-history and history can never be undone, Heschel rejects the ethnocentric and purely sociological determinations that place Israel beyond being human. It is Adam, in God’s image, who prohibits the valorizing of ethnocentric being. It is Heschel, who reminds us that all religions are responding to the ineffable and all men are capable of its insight at all times,⁶⁴ and hence all human beings are capable of living beyond the bounds of ethnocentricity.

Caputo John Caputo, following the Heideggerian tradition influenced by Derrida, picks up the seminality of the Jew-Greek.⁶⁵ And just as Derrida was influenced in this direction by Levinas,⁶⁶ so too is Caputo. The difference, however, is that Caputo identifies the problem as a movement away from our “concrete responsibilities toward one another.”⁶⁷ Caputo locates the problem in Heidegger’s turning away from Luther and Kierkegaard and Heidegger’s treatment of Aristotle “as a fading echo of the primordially early Greek.”⁶⁸ The mystification of the ethical and political realms in Heidegger’s thought that takes up much of the 1930s is

 Ibid.  Ibid., pp.  – .  Man Is Not Alone, p. .  John Caputo, Demythologyzing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), p. , “In formulating my confrontation with Heidegger in terms of Heidegger’s exclusion of the ‘jewgreek,’ I use the expression Derrida has borrowed from James Joyce.”  See Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), pp.  – . Derrida refers to the influence as a “dislocation of the Greek logos.”  Demythologyzing Heidegger, p. .  Ibid.

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not a mere turn in Heidegger according to Caputo, but it is “a scandalous neutralization of concrete human grief and suffering.”⁶⁹ Caputo’s answer to the question of why this kind of turn takes place, is where he continues Derrida’s thinking, but within the bounds of Caputo’s own deconstruction. Caputo’s study wants to relocate the Jew-Greek in the tradition of the myth of being. The exclusion and silencing of everything in Heidegger that is not originally, purely, and primordially Greek leads to “hellish political activities and deplorable political judgements.”⁷⁰ And just as Derrida sees Levinas as the other that shocks philosophy, Caputo sees Levinas as the other that shocks being through his account of justice―a Jew-Greek myth of justice that denies the purity of Heidegger’s vision of the ancient world.⁷¹ Caputo’s deconstruction does two things simultaneously. First, it allows him to inject a realm of ideas into the question of being that others have not been able to accomplish. He sees injustice explicitly and as a failure of Heidegger’s thought and personal life. Yet, in his haste to create an admixture without dealing with ontological commitments, Caputo’s first reflection must overlook the singularity of man. Within his deconstruction, the Jew-Greek is an historical ideal, and not a real living being. This lack of reality leads to a disastrous consequence. Because no one is real and Dasein’s responsibility can only be formalized ontologically, “its everyday sense of being responsible for some wrong that has befallen others is removed.”⁷² Second, the history that Dasein can deconstruct can only be a transcendental function when a projection of Being becomes apparent.⁷³ Meaning, according to Caputo, is only a condition of possibility, not something constituted and historically actual. The meaning of being “cannot have historical instantiation.”⁷⁴ What this inadvertently means is that while Caputo accepts that no epoch is rightly privileged in Heidegger’s search for meaning, as they are all different, including his own, it comes with a rather dark consequence. It must mean as well, that no epochs are better or worse than any other. And herein lies a gap in Caputo’s vision that Heschel vocalized with regard to Heidegger. Don’t we want to say that Nazism is worse? Don’t we want to conclude that the deaths of six million Jews at the hands of loyal Nazis with the imprimatur of the German nation and other antisemites, denotes an epoch that is worse?

     

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

pp.  – . p. . p. . p. .

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Would not the previous generations and centuries, their unacceptable antisemitic actions notwithstanding, have been preferable to the epoch in which one million children were gassed and incinerated? Caputo’s transcendentalizing of Dasein and of history has saved a myth but has depleted everyday life of warmth and kindness. And while warmth and kindness are often not considered values within a philosophical paradigm of being, Dasein, whose temporality is the clue to the meaning of being,⁷⁵ should at least be the repository of human affection. Just as Caputo recognizes that Heidegger’s thought never rises to include the victim, that the sublime cannot be heard in the call of being,⁷⁶ Caputo also recognizes that Heideggerian gas chambers cannot be different than farm tractors.⁷⁷ Their essence must equally be capable of opening up to the call of being.⁷⁸ And since the victim never is, the victim remains a matter of indifference. It is at this point that Caputo’s deconstruction turns on Derrida and Levinas. For somehow Caputo, to his credit as a human being but to his discredit as a thinker, without explanation, finds that position unacceptable. The victims of the gas chambers need justice and the question is, how will justice be framed in a deconstructed political-ethical environment?⁷⁹ What kind of myth is the justice that in its deconstruction cannot belong to anyone? This forces Caputo to avow: In saying justice is a myth I am not saying that justice is a “fiction” in the sense of LacoueLabarthe, a mimetic myth, a myth of imitating and making, a fictus, a work of formative plastic art. The myth of justice is not the myth of an ideal pattern, a heavenly archetype. It is the myth of another sort, a way of mythologizing differently, one that I am groping here to identify, a myth of a nonmimetic, nonrepresentational sort, a myth that has to do not with making but with action, not a mytho-technics but a mytho-praxis. The myth of justice is not the myth of an ideal form or perfect model which we strive haltingly to imitate here on earth. As it is not a myth of a beautiful form so it is not a myth of a First Beginning whose shining splendor we long to see return. It is the myth of what is unrepresentable, invisible, inactual, impossible―and it is more likely to consort with what is ugly than beautiful, forgotten than remembered, dishonored than honored, excluded than included… But the myth of justice is a tale we tell about something that belongs to time immemorial and an un-heard-of place. Philosophy dwells in the elements of universals, of archai, of principia, while the stories of justice have to do with particular men and women―like Antigone or Abraham―whose life and works bring us up short and give us pause, descending upon us with a shock.⁸⁰

     

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., Ibid.,

p. . pp.  – . p. . p. . p. .

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So as much as Caputo distances himself from Heidegger and his victimless sense of being, Caputo incorporates a deconstructive instinct that Heschel has pointed to as the phenomenological problem. The sublime must have its sway. It may be invisible, but it is neither non-actual nor impossible. The sublime, as Heschel so clearly based his entire phenomenology upon, is a first beginning. It alone is emptied of desires and inclinations to utility, power, or beauty. According to Heschel, the sublime alone is the calling card of being, which addresses the singular individual and challenges him or her to respond with depth and justice. This first beginning in Heschelian terms is not only a faith-driven idea of creation, but also it is more importantly for the nexus of issues raised here, a first beginning of being human/human being. It is a first arousal of wonderment that when acted upon raises human being to the plane of being human. It is a response that demands being to be shared across the spectrum of individuals, and is actual wherever a community weighs and ponders the limits of its application and incorporates their consensus into everyday living. And when Caputo asserts the singularity of justice that is missing from Heidegger’s call, Caputo too cannot cross a certain barrier: The stories of justice have to do with the radically singular. Radical singularity, of course, is, strictly speaking, not quite possible; it is impossible to address the singular in an absolutely singular way. Storytelling, like every form of discursivity, slips back inevitably, structurally, into the element of the universal, of the iterable and repeatable.⁸¹

Caputo, on account of his phenomenological commitment, is held back by the need for the discursive. Dasein must be the place where things appear in their being as this or that.⁸² Heschel, whose depth of the sublime cannot be limited, is released from the need for the discursive.⁸³ And when Caputo tries to come to terms with evil and ethics in Heidegger, Caputo drives himself to a flawed analogy. Arguing the anteriority and or fundamentality of thought in Heidegger that displaces the ethical,⁸⁴ Caputo criticizes the critics: “To make ethical complaints about analyses that are not conducted on an ethical plane in the first place ap-

 Ibid., pp.  – .  See Sheehan, “How Not to Read Heidegger,” pp.  – , where he explains this syntheticdifferential activity as a necessity of being thrown.  Heschel, God in Search, p. . “The roots of ultimate insights are found, as said above, not on the level of discursive thinking, but on the level of wonder and radical amazement, in the depth of awe, in our sensitivity to the mystery, in our awareness of the ineffable. It is on the level on which the great things happen to the soul, where the unique insights of art, religion and philosophy come into being.”  Caputo, p. .

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pears to miss the whole point of what is being said; it is like complaining that geometry is insensitive to human suffering.”⁸⁵ Amidst this rhetorical flourish, Caputo does two things, which say something important about insensitivity to evil and determine his own treatment of the subject, which he calls hyperbolic justice. First, Caputo wants us to believe that the relationship between Heideggerian thought and ethics is like that between geometry and insensitivity for human suffering. The entirety of Heschel’s analysis in Who Is Man? has indicated the speciousness of this argument. The ontological connection between being human and human being has rendered such comparisons null and void. Heschel would ask, can any thought after Auschwitz and Hiroshima be insensitive to human suffering? That geometry is carried out in such a manner is as indicative of its lack of human depth, as being a desirable paradigm for human knowledge. Second, as if reconsidering, Caputo rejects a space or time that is pre-ethical.⁸⁶ Caputo takes on the obligatory character of ethics and asserts it is already there―it is there as soon as there is Dasein and world. Ethics is, according to Caputo, as Levinas has argued, “first” philosophy.⁸⁷ It is best to let Caputo speak for himself, as he speaks of holocausts and evil arriving at an ethical position: To put it in terms that I would prefer, the space of obligation is opened up by the factical life, by the plurality of living bodies, by the commerce and intercourse of bodies with bodies, and above all, in these times, in the times of holocausts and of killing fields, by bodies in pain―but no less by thriving and flourishing bodies, by bodies at play.⁸⁸

It is pain that allows for the difference between what is essential and what is not: “Pain is the threshold that opens up the divide of human space.”⁸⁹ And in this manner, Caputo remythologizes Heidegger, world history, and the history of the JewGreek, albeit with strong Christian overtones, recalling the ultimate suffering of the suffering servant, Jesus. Nonetheless, as Caputo admits, there is no way to stand clear of myth to get to the other side.⁹⁰ And he asserts that the problem with the myth of being is that it has forgotten that justice is part of the call of

     

Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. .

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being.⁹¹ What is needed is a Hebraic imagination, a desire to hear the call of justice.⁹² This sounds eerily like Heschel―a view in which prophetic consciousness as justice cannot be severed from being, in which the errancy of thousands of years of human civilization can be accounted for by its absence. Yet, the depth that typifies Heschel’s thinking is different. It is a depth that is characterized not by extolling myth that leads Caputo to a hyperbolic state of justice. Rather, Heschel’s justice is both responsive and non-mythological at once and carried out through specific actions. And as we know from the end of Who Is Man? it is celebration―a song―or a sense of quiet exaltation that makes being human worthwhile, not bodily pain that raises us to the ethical dimension. There is no frailty of action in Heschel’s thought, no willingness to ignore principles as Caputo, basing himself upon Derrida, demands.⁹³ For Heschel, deeds are the bridge between piety and faith and between sensitivity and vision.⁹⁴ The dimension of existence in which grandeur and a true self are attained is in the deed’s dimension.⁹⁵ Further, the presence of evil amidst power and piety is the most dangerous of all demarcations. In the third section of God in Search of Man, which is an analysis of deeds following the analysis of God and Revelation in sections One and Two, Heschel echoes the concern he would later incorporate in Who Is Man? By the will alone man becomes the most destructive of all beings. This is our predicament: our power may become our undoing. We stand on a razor’s edge. It is so easy to hurt, to destroy, to insult, to kill. Giving birth to one child is a mystery; bringing death to millions is but a skill. It is not quite within the power of the human will to generate life; it is quite within the power of the will to destroy life.⁹⁶

The sensitivity of piety and faith brings with it the full recognition of the power of deeds and, by extension, the reality of evil. In Heschel’s thought, there is no displacement of myth, no movement from act to translation, which must go  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  God in Search, p. .  Ibid., p. . “It is in deeds that man becomes aware of what his life really is, of his power to harm and to hurt, to wreck and to ruin; of his ability to derive joy and bestow it upon others; to relieve and increase his own and other people’s tensions. It is in the employment of his will, not in reflection, that he meets his own self as it is; not as he should like it to be. In his deeds man expresses his immanent as well as his suppressed desires, spelling even that which he cannot apprehend. What he may not dare to think, he often utters in deeds. The heart is revealed in deeds.”  Ibid., p. .

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through a deconstruction that obliterates actuality. And as much as Caputo wants to base his essential justice on bodily pain, he inadvertently abstracts it by subjugating it to hyperbole. Into every act of demythologizing is embedded an unavoidable remythologizing tendency.⁹⁷ If justice is hyperbolic, then so too are pain and evil. If justice is a myth, then so too are pain and evil. There cannot be any metaphysical stopping point along the way to justice. Nor can there be any in regards to pain and evil. For Caputo, hyperbolic justice arises because deconstruction is infinitely sensitive.⁹⁸ Indeed as it is infinitely sensitive, it is neither effable nor ineffable⁹⁹―it is a myth of proper names, a radical singularity “directed at whoever bears a proper name.”¹⁰⁰ And while Caputo sees this move as a Derridian remaking of Levinas,¹⁰¹ a prophet amongst the postmoderns,¹⁰² akin to Amos the prophet demanding that justice flow like water over the land,¹⁰³ the parallel to Heschel is most instructive. Caputo’s remythologizing of Derrida and Levinas is imbued with a willful overstatement vis-à-vis prophecy. It is more than can be imagined, and while not prophetic discourse, it is “not far away from prophetic discourse.”¹⁰⁴ It is an affirmation without limit.¹⁰⁵ Heschel’s discourse, by contrast, is an understatement. He warns us in every possible context and with utter consistency that “Whatever we know is inade-

 Caputo’s metaphysical admission is telling, p. . “The question is, can this be the status enjoyed by ‘undeconstructable’ justice? I would say most assuredly not, and for the following reason. For Levinas, the commanding claim of the Other who comes from beyond is nothing visible, for it cannot have to do with the paganism, the sacré, of earth and sky; it is otherwise than earth and sky, otherwise than physis. So we are not to think that it is beyond being in the manner of something merely normative, a mere value that has been superadded to facts and that somehow fails to be (sein) even as it has normative validity (gelten). It is not beyond Being, because it is less than Being but rather because it is more than Being, because it exceeds Being. It is beyond being because it is so radically, so absolutely, so fully, that it cannot be contained by Being (so long as Being means physis). That is why it is preeminently and paradigmatically metaphysical. Would it not be an ironic outcome for Derrida, for deconstruction, to eventuate in the affirmation of what is eminently and preeminently metaphysical?”  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .

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quate; whatever we say is an understatement.”¹⁰⁶ This is true of God,¹⁰⁷ revelation,¹⁰⁸ and the self.¹⁰⁹ Moreover, there is a direct connection to action in Heschel’s thought that is lacking in the postmodern sense. As was elucidated previously, Derrida and Caputo emphasize the frailty of deeds, whereas Heschel sees deeds as a link to divine likeness.¹¹⁰ And yet Heschel rejects the hyperbolizing, mythologizing tendencies of the postmoderns. To Heschel, the overstatement of infinite sensitivity would be infinite embarrassment, not a wonder of doing¹¹¹ or an insight into the ineffable.¹¹² Heidegger’s rejection of metaphysical humanism notwithstanding, and Derrida’s and Caputo’s attempt to ameliorate it, leads to a conclusion no one wants to own because humanism cannot be reconstructed once human action is withdrawn from being.¹¹³ Consequently, when Heschel analyzes the prophecy of Amos, unlike the postmoderns who see hyperbole, Heschel sees sympathy, agreement, and intimacy. Heschel’s Amos is amidst a polarity that informs every aspect of Heschel’s thought, rather than a postmodern metaphysical myth. Amos is a prophet not because there is an undeconstructable justice that is available to him. According to Heschel, Amos is a prophet because he has “compassion for man and sympathy for God,”¹¹⁴ in terms of living. Caputo’s Derridian infinite sensitivity is an-archic “for it has to do with the im/ possible singular.”¹¹⁵ Since it responds to the anarchic, it courts ineffability. It is not far from it, but not engaged to it, as Heschel’s vision is.¹¹⁶ Justice is available to Caputo only through stories―impossible stories.¹¹⁷ And even though it is driven by singularity, justice is ultimately “unrepresentable, unmakeable, unmodalable.”¹¹⁸ Heschel’s sense of justice begins from a sense that is beyond being. Postmodernism in its ontological guise asks, “What is being?”¹¹⁹ Biblical religion

 God in Search, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p, .  Ibid., pp.  – .  See Sheehan’s description of metaphysical humanism and humanism in relation to Wolin and Derrida, “A Normal Nazi,” pp.  – .  The Prophets, Vol. I, p. .  Caputo, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .

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asks, “What is expected of me? Or in the language of the Bible: What is required of me?”¹²⁰ According to Heschel, biblical actions are covenantal, direct, and must meet “an objective challenge to overcome inequity, injustice, helplessness, suffering, carelessness, oppression.”¹²¹ Justice is a sublime worthiness,¹²² originating in Heschel’s phenomenological expectations.¹²³ It is essential to being human, and renders singularity possible and obligatory.¹²⁴ The consequence of this Heschelian justice is made explicit when contrasted with postmodern impossibility. Imposition and impossibility collide in the crucible of the demonic. According to Heschel, “Being human is an imposition of human being on human nature.”¹²⁵ Without this recognition, the depth of evil is unapparent. The what of being can only see the animality in contradistinction to the human. The requirement of being human means that “The opposite of the human is not the animal but the demonic.”¹²⁶ Evil is the absence of self-transcendence, measured in the depth of actions that deepen being human. Adam, as God’s image, is a being in travail. Without the possibility of acting in measurably just ways, he is less than an animal. He has relinquished his humanity to evil. Caputo’s stories are impressions. They possess neither the midrashic sensitivity and authenticity of Heschel’s events, nor any recognizable hermeneutic. For Caputo, the AIDS patient is equated with the leper; the mad and possessed are identified. In short, every marginalized group is equated with the lost sheep of Israel.¹²⁷ And importantly, Heidegger is criticized because he purged the ancient world of the Hebrews and claimed Parmenides, not Abraham, exclusively as the father of everyone. Heidegger abandoned the Jew-Greek. Caputo claims that Heideggerian forgetting was an impossibility because he had too many reminders,¹²⁸ and the marginalized were “systematically neutralized by essentializing thinking.”¹²⁹ In this light, Caputo calls for a demythologizing and remythologyzing of Heidegger, with heart―this time without purity of an aboriginal beginning, but with

         

Ibid.. Ibid. Man Is Not Alone, p. , “[I]t is unworthy of man not to take notice of the sublime.” Ibid. Ibid., p, . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Caputo, p. . Ibid., pp.  – . Ibid.

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an allegiance to those who are laid low.¹³⁰ And while Caputo’s instincts are inclusive and well meaning, his blindness toward evil is no less troubling. Blindness on account of essentialist thinking, or notions of purity that debase singularity, or deep-seated lack of compassion is in the end no different than the blindness attached to hyperbolic justice. Kindness can kill as well as save and if one can’t render a difference between them, then neither has much attraction. If hyperbole merely overshadows evil,¹³¹ then is it not of the demonic itself? Evil is absent because hyperbolic justice has replaced it, not because evil has been overcome in and through singular actions.

Rorty Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger exists on an entirely different level than that of Derrida and Caputo. Unlike them, Rorty takes a recognizable philosophical position against Heidegger and defends his own choice. Where Heidegger sees Platonism as leading to a mistaken pragmatism, Rorty accepts and defends the limits of pragmatism emanating from the ancient Greek thinker. The choice between Heidegger and Rorty is one between apprehending being, or getting in touch with it, and relieving and benefitting the condition of man.¹³² Plato’s quest is the quest of certainty, and the pragmatist is determined to inject desire into the quest so that any identity of knowledge and a non-human order of ideas disappears.¹³³ This bifurcated hermeneutic allows Rorty to read Being and Time as a pragmatic document that, once it has de-intellectualized understanding, makes being and truth equiprimordial.¹³⁴ Shorn of mathematical dialectics and unified positivistic science, Rorty’s Heidegger sees the major thinkers in the tradition of philosophy as so many power plays, desiring that “truth may become evident, undeniable, clearly present to the mind.”¹³⁵ While much of Rorty’s rereading is within the philosophical tradition, he also provides a significant insight into Heidegger’s use of poetry that brings Heidegger’s  Ibid.  Caputo, p. , “The oddity and impurity of the jewgreek is its focus on what has been ‘excluded,’ its hyperbolic sensitivity to the claim of the other, its demand for justice for the least among us, for the despised, the different, the dispossessed, and the helpless.” Furthermore, Caputo’s constant reference to the what of man―the jewgreek as “it”―while I sense is not meant to demean, is at least indicative of the issues I have raised and at worst, of an inability to see a person.  A Companion to Heidegger, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.

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thinking into contrast with Heschel.¹³⁶ Heidegger’s quasi-poem, “Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens,” contains the line “Being’s poem, just begun, is man.”¹³⁷ Rorty holds the view that the philosophical tradition has emphasized realities over words while the poetic tradition, as adopted by Heidegger, has emphasized that the words do matter. They form a context which we may or may not get involved with, but once involved with the metaphors, the fate of the audience is determined.¹³⁸ This means that Dasein is rife with contingency in the grip of the words we use, whether they be live or dead metaphors. And the difference according to Rorty, between Heidegger’s use of philosophy and poetry is that the inquiry into Being, “which resists the technical interpretation of thinking”¹³⁹ is an attention getter. It directs “our attention to the difference between inquiry and poetry, between struggling for power and accepting contingency.”¹⁴⁰ Rorty claims that Heidegger wants to demonstrate “what a culture might be like in which poetry rather than philosophy-cum-science was the paradigmatic human activity.”¹⁴¹ This interpretation has immense implications when contrasted with Heschel. Beginning in 1929, Heschel published several poems.¹⁴² In 1933 he published a volume of poetry in Yiddish, Der Shem Hameforash: Mentsch―The Ineffable Name of God: Man. A quick perusal of some of the lines opens up the poet’s world, the ideas of which become the kernel of his philosophy of religion. In “I and Thou,” Heschel says, “I live in me and in You.” In “The Most Precious Word” Heschel says: My only possession is this very word. I would more quickly Forget my own name Than forget Yours.

Unlike Rorty’s Heidegger who inhabits a poetic milieu in lieu of the philosophical tradition, the early Heschel inhabits the poetic to find the human. Unlike Rorty’s Heidegger whose being is neither creator nor voice, Heschel’s God is the ineffable presence in which and through which all beings have meaning. Un-

 Gordon Tucker has, in a preliminary way, raised theological issues based on his understanding of Rorty and Heschel. I have dealt with these elsewhere, “Revelation and Prayer: Heschel’s Meeting With God,” pp.  – .  A Companion to Heidegger, p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid.  See Kaplan, Prophetic Witness, pp.  – .

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like Heidegger’s Dasein who is the contingent locus of being, Heschel’s man is the image of a Being who is beyond contingency. Unlike Heidegger’s being and Dasein which are revealed without surprise or wonder in Ereignis, the ineffability of Heschel’s God is revealed as an act of radical amazement―a surprise―in unadorned humanity. Dasein is a poetic moment. Adam is the image of pathos. When Heidegger describes being brought into language, it is the original moment of poetizing.¹⁴³ When Heschel says that God spoke, he tells us that calling it poetic imagination would be a perversion¹⁴⁴ of grandeur and mystery.¹⁴⁵ Rorty’s Heidegger understands being as a final vocabulary that is not constructed but is there―something into which we are thrown.¹⁴⁶ Heschel’s being is subject to language because it cannot exhaust the mystery; “the universe does not reveal its secret to us, and what it says is not expressed in the language of man. The ultimate meaning of man is not to be derived from ultimate being.”¹⁴⁷ Rorty’s Heidegger sees metaphysics as inauthentic poetry, and poetry as an anti-poetry, “a sequence of metaphors whose authors thought of them as escapes from metaphoricity.”¹⁴⁸ Heschel’s being is ineffable where words fade in the face of its abundance and cannot be uttered or phrased in language.¹⁴⁹ And metaphors are never true in and of themselves because “The truth is that what is literally true to us is a metaphor compared with what is metaphysically real to God.”¹⁵⁰ This excursus into language and poetry is not ancillary to Rorty’s larger issue of Heidegger’s dislike of pragmatism. Nor is it ancillary to Rorty’s support of pragmatism and historical significance in the form that Rorty used in criticizing Heidegger in 1998, asserting that “Heidegger’s books will be read for centuries to come, but the smell of smoke from the crematories―the “grave in the air―will linger on their pages.”¹⁵¹ Much of Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger relates to the point that was made above concerning Caputo and his reliance on Heidegger’s notion of epochs―precisely, their equivalence. Rorty, using passages from Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology, illustrates unresolved tensions in Heidegger’s ontological and historical thinking. Does Heidegger have the right to feel nostalgia for

        

See Richardson, pp.  – . God in Search, p. . Ibid., p. . A Companion to Heidegger, p. . Who Is Man?, p. . A Companion to Heidegger, p. . Who Is Man?, p. . God in Search, p. . “A Master From Germany,” New York Times Book Review, May , .

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the Greeks and their undivided ontological/ontic view of being? Is Heidegger telling us a story about the contingencies of vocabularies or about the belatedness of our age?¹⁵² Can the two stories be blended into one? Rorty’s answer is that they cannot. The answer is a portal into the larger question about being, pragmatism, and the inhumanity of the crematoria and how to read Heidegger after many of the facts have been exposed. Is it enough to point out his personal shortcomings, as Rorty does, and then read him as a great philosopher of powerful originality? Just how do we read Rorty’s Heidegger and, by extension, Rorty, and breathe in the smell of smoke in their pages? Is this another metaphor? And if it is, isn’t it just another attempt to render “knowledge as the accuracy of representation,” which Rorty claims he opposes? I hope that what I have been saying has made clear why I chose “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” as a title. It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations―some accurate, some not―and capable of being studied by pure non-empirical methods.¹⁵³

Rorty’s inconsistency notwithstanding, how does he deal with the inconsistencies of history? It is best to use Rorty’s words themselves, for he touches, albeit directly but gingerly, on Heschel’s subject matter: I read this confusing passage [from Basic Problems, p. 10] about philosophy and world-view as an early expression of the tension between saying that each epoch in the “history of Being”―each stage in the transition from the Greeks to the moderns―is on an ontological par, and saying that the Greeks’ relation to being was somehow closer than ours, that our “forgetting of Being” and lack of “primordiality” is responsible for the barbaric and frenzied character of the modern world.¹⁵⁴

First is the context. Rorty’s understanding of this schism in Heidegger’s thought relates back to Heidegger’s suspension of verificationism and its possible relation to Dasein. Rorty clearly states that Dasein is authentic only when it knows it is thrown and hence only when it surrenders the desire for verification.¹⁵⁵ According to Rorty, the distinction that comes into play once this is acknowledged, is between Dasein and the animal:

 A Companion to Heidegger, p. .  Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), p. .  A Companion to Heidegger, pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .

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So only then is there a Da, a clearing, a lighting up. Before that we were just animals that had developed complicated practices, practices we explained and commended to one another in the words of a final vocabulary which nobody dreamt of questioning. Afterward, we are divided into inauthentic Dasein, which is still just a complexly behaving animal in so far as it hasn’t yet realized that its Being is an issue for it, and authentic Dasein, made up of Thinkers and Poets who know that there is an open space surrounding present-day social practices.¹⁵⁶

The divide between Dasein and animals is the divide between “letting beings be” and the ascendancy of technical mastery.¹⁵⁷ I find the nexus of Rorty’s analysis accurate but quite beside the point. If the question is how does a culture turn humanity into barbarism, no matter how accurate the description of Heidegger, the question simply cannot be answered as contextualized. Rorty wants us to follow Heidegger’s usual juxtaposition of vocabulary, unconcealedness, and being: Beyond the world made available by your elementary words there is the silence of other, equally elementary, words, as yet unspoken. If I understand him, Heidegger is saying that the ability to hear your own elementary words is the ability to hear them against the background of that silence, to be aware of that silence. To be primordial is thus the ability to know that when you seize upon an understanding of Being, when you build a house for Being by speaking a language, you are automatically giving up a lot of other possible understandings of Being, and leaving a lot of differently designed houses unbuilt.¹⁵⁸

Here, the divide between Rorty and Heidegger rears its head. It is based on a cultural understanding. Rorty wants to allow pragmatism through the side door of Heidegger’s sense of being, and still Rorty is disturbed by the animality embedded in Dasein. According to Rorty, Heidegger’s view of “cosmopolitanism, technology and polymathy are enemies of thinking.”¹⁵⁹ As enemies they make it harder to hear elementary thinking. Common sense is more apt to be accepted uncritically in the twentieth century as opposed to the fifth century BCE in Greece. It is at this juncture that Rorty poses what he calls the $64 question: Here we face the $64 question in all its starkness, a question which can be rephrased as follows: can we pragmatists appropriate all of Heidegger except his nostalgia, or is his nostalgia integral to the story he is telling? Can we agree with him about the dialectical necessity of the transition from Plato to Dewey, and about the need to restore force to the most

   

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .

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elementary words of Being, while nevertheless insisting that we in the twentieth century are in an exceptionally good position to do the latter? Can pragmatism do justice to poetry as well as to inquiry? Can it let us hear as well as use?¹⁶⁰

Rorty’s answer, predictably by his own admission, is yes. We need go no further in the exposition that links Dewey and Heidegger. It is not the issue in question. The issue concerns Dasein, animality, and utopianism. The subtext of Rorty’s entire exposition on Heidegger has been his own desire for a social democratic utopia―at best, a concept distasteful to Heidegger, which Rorty wants to retain alongside of Heidegger’s analysis of being. In placing Heidegger and Dewey in the same universe of discourse with a compatible vocabulary, Rorty does two things that fly in the face of Heschel’s critique. First he accepts a turn from humanism to Gelassenheit―letting things be.¹⁶¹ Second, Rorty sees this turn as an infinite one, as “there are no a priori or destined limits to our imagination or achievement.”¹⁶² Again Rorty is upfront, seeing this as an attempt to marry scientific humility with the sense of spiritual freedom of the romantic,¹⁶³ held together by a “Whitmanesque sense that our democratic community is held together by nothing less fragile than social hope.”¹⁶⁴ Heschel, who participated wholeheartedly in the social democracy of his day, would not recognize himself in these words nor the import of their philosophical thinking. It is with full historical experience and intellectual openness that Heschel asserts that the assumptions “about humanity have proved to be specious, have been smashed.”¹⁶⁵ It is not in hope that they were dashed but in “facing staggering cruelty and the threat of disaster.”¹⁶⁶ Rorty’s romance and postmodernism’s fragility of action are not redemptive, but are a diversion in the midst of this cruelty. One either stands against it or accepts it. Auschwitz was not a halfway measure in support of evil, and Rorty’s inability to face Heidegger’s evil but not his nostalgia is a significant loss that casts a dark shadow on humanism. In reworking Heidegger through Dewey’s utopianism, Rorty has done nothing more than sidestep evil. His belief in metaphors of smoke and writing have pushed aside the suffering of humanity. His reliance on Dewey’s sense of contin-

      

Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid.

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gency and “attention to daily detail”¹⁶⁷ that abhors decisive events¹⁶⁸ cuts both ways. It speaks well of Heidegger by injecting humility into his quest for the meaning of being, but it condemns by averting its eyes from the murder of millions of innocents―a decisive event by most reasonable people’s standards. Of this Heschel says simply, “What has long been regarded as commonplace has proved to be utopianism.”¹⁶⁹ As much as Rorty has embued Heidegger with Dewey’s sense of contingency for man, he has not gone far enough, in the words of Heschel, to unite the problem of truth with the problem of living, which has “resulted in reason’s isolationism, in utopian and irrelevant conceptions of man.”¹⁷⁰ This failure is also argued forcefully on a philosophical level in Who Is Man? where the emphasis lies on man’s image. While they both agree that being human is never a mere reflection of worldliness, being human, according to Heschel, invokes a transcendent ineffable image. But, according to the basic tenets of Rorty’s edification, man can never have an image, for philosophy is mirrorless.¹⁷¹ In the final paragraph of Who Is Man?, Heschel addresses these postmodernist failings―the notion that actions are fragile and that evil is not real. Heschel rejects both positions adamantly. This theme is echoed in God in Search of Man, as well.¹⁷² In Heschel’s notion of the ineffable, deeds are forceful and evil is real, not a metaphor for a lack of gratitude or love. And while philosophy for Rorty is a kind of therapy,¹⁷³ for Heschel it is decidedly a search for wisdom,¹⁷⁴ and marked paradoxically by the limit of wisdom in relation to awe.¹⁷⁵ Rorty’s fear is that issues of personhood in a non-therapeutic philosophy will only convince the philosopher to be irrelevant to contemporary culture.¹⁷⁶ In a similar but more nuanced and profound way, Heschel deems that personhood without wisdom is the shortest and most direct link to barbarity, emphasizing the behaviorism that seemed to be essential to Rorty but is overshadowed at a crucial moment. Whether one accepts or rejects Heschel’s theological stance, he has put forward a coherent, thorough critique of postmodernism and its divergence from

         

A Companion to Heidegger, p. . Ibid., pp.  – . Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid., p. . Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp.  – . God in Search, pp.  – . Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. xiii / xiv. Who Is Man?, pp. , , , and . Ibid., pp.  and . Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. .

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philosophical wisdom, most specifically of Heidegger against the background of the Holocaust and the notion of being. Again, we must turn to his final words in Who Is Man?, and see them in this new context: Who is man? A being in travail with God’s dreams and designs, with God’s dream of a world redeemed, of reconciliation of heaven and earth, of a mankind which is truly His image, reflecting His wisdom, justice and compassion. God’s dream is not to be alone, to have mankind as a partner in the drama of continuous creation. By whatever we do, by every act we carry out, we either advance or obstruct the drama of redemption; we either reduce or enhance the power of evil.”¹⁷⁷

Evil, in Heschel’s eyes, is the central problem of history,¹⁷⁸ and still a boundary that is confronted in each image of man. Phenomenologically, evil is not subject to shame or embarrassment because it is indivisible.¹⁷⁹ Goodness is overshadowed as there is no room either in private or in public conscience when evil rids itself of perplexity. It is not ultimate,¹⁸⁰ yet it intrudes into every sphere of the good and holy.¹⁸¹ Self-effacement can be a means of greater corruption than enslavement to the ego.¹⁸² The attempt to flee to being without maintaining a sober realization of ourselves and others’ needs and anxieties, is a fool’s errand. The realization that evil penetrates every sphere of life cannot be overcome with a solution: We do not know how to solve the problem of evil, but we are not exempt from dealing with evils. The power of evil does not vitiate the reality of good.¹⁸³

Evil can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis in which the self has a sense of its tautologous reality: For man, to be human is an existential tautology. In order to be a man, man must be more than a man. The self is spiritually immature; it grows in the concern for the non-self. And in this way it combats the reality of evil. This is the profound paradox and redeeming feature of human existence. There is no joy for the self within the self. Joy is found in giving rather than acquiring; in serving rather than in taking.¹⁸⁴

 Who Is Man?, p. .  God in Search, p. .  Man’s Quest for God, p. , “The war has outlasted the victory of arms as we failed to conquer the infamy of the soul: the indifference to crime, when committed against others. For evil is indivisible. It is the same in thought and in speech, in private and in social life.”  Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  God in Search, p. .  Ibid., p. .

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Fackenheim and Adorno In the years since Heschel’s death, Jewish thought has inclined itself toward certain aspects of postmodern thinking. All areas of Jewish thought have participated in this upsurge. Yerushalmi’s important historical work, Zakhor stands out. Susan Handelman’s The Slayers of Moses delves into many of the literary repercussions. In theology, Eugene Borowitz’s Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew comes to mind. Daniel Breslauer’s Toward a Jewish Morality: Speaking of a Postmodern Jewish Ethics, has addressed many issues. The Holocaust and Jewish thought have been given attention by Michael Morgan in Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America. Jewish sociological thought has been reinterpreted by Steven M. Cohen and Arnold Eisen in The Sovereign Self: Jewish Identity in Post-Modern America. In adopting certain postmodern tropes, the disparity between human being and being human has lost its footing in the biblical antecedent―Adam. In losing this footing, not only has it lost an image, but it has also lost a sense of the epochality in thought, a sense in which events have phenomenological antecedents. When events are reduced to mere mythic indications or isolated individuals, actual human reactions are overwhelmed. History may be a struggle for meaning against the absurd, a challenge for good to redeem evil, but it can no longer be a record of the suffering of individuals or the meaning embedded in the attainments of their actions. This calls to mind reactions by two philosophers, one overtly Jewish and concerned with Jewish issues and the other unconcerned. Emil Fackenheim wondered aloud why it was that the entirety of Christianity could be based on the suffering and death of one Jew but Christianity could so easily ignore the deaths of six million Jews. For Fackenheim this is a partial indication of a Jewish need to reenter history. And while Fackenheim understands and incorporates the midrashic framework into his thinking,¹⁸⁵ the actuality of history,¹⁸⁶ a critique of explanation as a means of understanding revelation,¹⁸⁷ and the significance of abiding astonishment (in Heschel’s case,―wonder)¹⁸⁸ as Heschel does, Fackenheim accomplishes it within a different context. Based as it is on Buber’s dialog-

 Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, ), pp. v,  – , and .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., pp.  – .

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ical thinking,¹⁸⁹ Fackenheim presents a fragmentary dialectic view of meaning, which ultimately resides in metaphor.¹⁹⁰ In this adoption, Fackenheim alternates between a quasi-mythological understanding, and one which eschews it.¹⁹¹ This self-professed Kierkegaardian “immediacy after reflection”¹⁹² leads Fackenheim to emphasize dialectical and systemic questions over and above those that are addressed to a perplexed humanity qua being human. Ultimately, these considerations force Fackenheim to demythologize and remythologize Jewish history within a Hegelian context,¹⁹³ all of which distances Fackenheim, as it did Buber, from the central questions: who is man and, what is the significance of Adam throughout history? Consequently the basic question for Fackenheim always relates to an eclipse of God,¹⁹⁴ and never an eclipse of humanity. And even though an unnoticed symbolism and ambivalence toward midrash creeps into his thought, Fackenheim’s question of Christians points to an eternal significance for Christianity from that moment on.¹⁹⁵ From another perspective, but echoing the ontological connectedness that Heschel pursued, Adorno concluded that deconstruction cannot forget suffering and that the loss of identity doesn’t let non-identity play its proper role. In Heschel’s terms, this means that an eclipse of humanity emanating from the loss of singular human being will ultimately be incapable of pathos. It is not surprising then that both Adorno and Heschel place so much importance on the role of philosophy after Auschwitz.¹⁹⁶ Unlike Heschel’s imperative that emanates from existential modes of being human,¹⁹⁷ Adorno’s attitude continues his negative dialectic. In the condition of human unfreedom, thought and

 Ibid., pp.  – , , and .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken, ), pp.  – .  God’s Presence in History, pp.  – .  Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, ), pp.  – .  Lambert Zuidervaart, “Theodor W. Adorno,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter  Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win/entries/adorno/, Section , “Ethics and Metaphysics after Auschwitz.” See Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp.  – and J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp.  – .  Who Is Man?, p. .

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action must be arranged so that “Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen.”¹⁹⁸ In light of this negative dialectic there are significant limitations to Adorno’s approach, which must be taken into consideration. Adorno’s dialectic of enlightment, wherein rational progress becomes irrational and the domination of society and culture becomes inevitable, is summarized in the double perspective: “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”¹⁹⁹ As judgments concerning historical tendencies,²⁰⁰ rather than natural categories that are fixed in consciousness or nature, Adorno wants to indicate a concept that exists in the self-reflection of thought,²⁰¹ before myth and enlightenment can corrupt bodily needs and desires as instruments of reason. This means that memory, for Adorno, “is threatened with eclipse by certain allegedly more rational forms,”²⁰² and that when we fail to know something or other, it amounts to an act of forgetting, “To a destruction of memory.”²⁰³ In effect, when memory is destroyed, it is not a mere forgetting as in something having slipped the mind, but rather something indicative of the effect of limited consciousness.²⁰⁴ It is a lack of affinity. When juxtaposed with the real suffering of individuals we have what Adorno calls an “effacement of memory.”²⁰⁵ So, when we consider cases of “avoidance” in the Heideggerian or Derridian sense, when all the evidence points to a rationally available fact which is denied, Adorno claims it is done for the purposes of conforming and getting along.²⁰⁶ This is a mild “unconscious defensiveness against guilt.”²⁰⁷ When looked at in light of the Holocaust, as Adorno does, Adorno sees this effacement of Jews as having its origins in the political and economic consciousness of Germany.²⁰⁸ There is

 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, ), p. .  M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (), ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ) (GS ), p. xviii.  Zuidervaart, Theodor W. Adorno, Section , Dialectic of Enlightment.  Ibid.  Brian O’Connor, “Adorno on the Destruction of Memory,” ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, ), p. .  Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid. See Theodor Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” p. ; Gesammelte Schriften, ., .  Ibid.  Ibid. See Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” p. ; Gesammelte Schriften, ., .

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no condition in Adorno’s thinking that can positively address a more reflective attitude by antisemites toward Jews. Adorno’s dialectic must remain negative in the sense that “genuine experience is made possible by that which exceeds the grasp of thought and sensibility”―“the nonidentical” (das Nichtdentische).²⁰⁹ When placed alongside Heschel’s critique of Heidegger, this sounds amazingly akin to Heschel’s analysis, but with one exception. The exception is phenomenological and injects itself clearly into the discussion when we see the outcome viv-à-vis the Holocaust. Adorno begins with a phenomenological analysis of social and historical conditions. There is no natural or ontological necessity in his outlook. Heschel begins his phenomenological analysis apart from social, historical, psychological, or anthropological criteria. Adorno’s dialectic, committed to a philosophical materialism that is historical and critical yet not dogmatic,²¹⁰ can never set aside a negative, non-identical viewpoint. Heschel’s method is neither material nor spiritual, and supplies a critique of criticism that allows it to respond in awe and wonder to all the elements of human experience. Adorno’s dialectic seeks “to use the strength of the subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity.”²¹¹ Heschel’s method seeks to restore the image of man, which is part of his self-conscious being and makes the humanity of man unique. When we apply these methodologies and attitudes, we come to two very divergent attitudes toward the Holocaust. For Adorno, the Holocaust is not an aberration. The pursuit of freedom and enlightenment signal a concomitant devolution in society, law, and the economy. This is true for all cultural forms. Mindless art and shallow entertainment are no more deviant than the Holocaust. The blind domination that human being evinces is an irrational fear of the unknown.²¹² From Heschel’s perspective, the Holocaust is an event unlike other events because of the depth of its attempt to eclipse humanity―the image of God. The Holocaust in Heschel’s eyes is not a mere flight of reason toward irrationality. It is a loss of humanity in which the subject, or perpetrator, has lost his foundational image of himself, and projected this loss upon the Jewish people who were the originators of the image―the perceived cause for the perpetrator’s own subjective guilt, which can only be expunged by removing the embodiment of the image. Put into an epistemic framework, the difference between Adorno and Heschel becomes sharper. At the heart of a logic of disintegration is a contradiction.

   

Luidervaart, “Theodor Adorno, “ Section , Negative Dialectics. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., Section , Dialectic of Enlightenment.

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Reality is knowable as a dialectical rationality.²¹³ Neither logic nor rhetoric can make this evident. Only a self-reflective agent, who experiences contradictions as a fidelity to objects, can gain an affinity with reality as opposed to a resolution in the unity of consciousness.²¹⁴ Experience in the fullest sense is the lack of suppression, neglect, or forgetfulness in spite of our desire to suppress etc… objects under convenient totalizing concepts.²¹⁵ This means that, for Adorno, the Holocaust, as an experience must be regained in memory mimetically between the knower and the known.²¹⁶ Within the purview of Heschel’s epistemic considerations, the Holocaust cannot be retrieved mimetically―nor should it be. The Holocaust as an eclipse, not of reason, but of humanity, like all other events, must be considered within the paradox, not contradiction, of human being/being human. It must allow absurdity to be subject to open transcendence:²¹⁷ Indeed the concern for meaning of human being is what constitutes the truth of being human. Its ontological relevance is rooted in the very being of man, since human being devoid of the possibility of being human is an absurdity.²¹⁸ But, unlike all other events, the Holocaust strikes at the heart of reality, as it eclipses the method of self-knowledge gained in the ontological connectiveness that is the content and point of Who Is Man?. There is nothing to regain mimetically, according to Heschel. No amount of affinity between objects and subjects can erase the dehumanizing inherent in the event. In the aftermath of the event, there is a possible act of pathos that can be evoked in the consciousness of individuals and groups and a deepening of appreciation for our collective humanity. In its aftermath, we are still subject to perplexity and confusion; however, having gained a new perspective, we can transcend absurd modes of the being of humanity and share a dimension of significance “disclosing a fellowship of being related to a concern for meaning,”²¹⁹ that surpasses any idea of the mind.²²⁰ The failure of philosophy for Heschel is not a mere failure of the instrumentality of reason as it was for Adorno, which certainly has a part in the debasement of individuals. The failure of philosophy is a displacement of humanity within the meaning of being, which brings with it a false sense of the transcen-

       

O’Connor, p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid. Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid. Who Is Man?, p. . Ibid.

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dent that is reduced to an object of acknowledgement.²²¹ Epistemically, the ineffable is neither a reconciliation of subject and object nor a negative experience. Deeper than the abyss of despair, the ineffable is a positive addition to the mind in which humanity can be engaged,²²² an “honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality,”²²³ a search for significant being.²²⁴

Gillman Before we understand the outcome of these previous comparisons in relation to Neil Gillman’s reworking of Heschel, two significant notions need to be stated from the point of view of the Jewish tradition and its encounter with postmodern thinking after Heschel’s death. First, Judaism clearly does not favor a particular philosophy. Individual interpreters grounded in their own ideas, narratives, and backgrounds make their own choices while the tradition is silent. Jewish commentators and philosophers alike have tried to elicit a consistent position from Jewish sources, yet we must recognize that no one of them has excluded any others. Just as Maimonides borrowed Aristotelian and neo-Platonic ideas in his day, or as Hermann Cohen did with Kant, so too does Heschel with Husserlian phenomenology. The issue is not merely the borrowing per se, as any scholar can see, but the degree to which the intended borrowing usurps, overwhelms, adequately expresses, or authentically renders meanings that are emphasized or emerge from the tradition, as opposed to those that alter received texts and make them unrecognizable within the fabric of received traditions. Second, there is an issue that envelops modern Judaism and postmodern thought. That is the reality of the subject and any possible role it might have. For significant forms of postmodern thought, this means that there is no recognizable primary subject who thinks. This is oddly mirrored in modern Judaism by the fact that there is no specific writer of the Torah. This indeterminacy of the subject should not be confused between the modern/postmodern Jewish religious tradition and the postmodern literary/philosophical tradition that has no affiliations nor any allegiances. Ever since the sixteenth century, when the authorship of the Hebrew Bible was called into question from a literary and philosophical viewpoint and when the seeds of postmodernism were sown in the art    

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. . pp.  – . p. . p. .

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criticism of the late 1800s, it has been too easy to assume parallels and crosspollination. The lack of a recognized author of the Bible and the thoughtful refutation of objectivity and authorial presence are not the same thing. Again, a reliable scholar of the Jewish tradition would recognize this historical and religious fact, having been acquainted with the Talmudic statements in Baba Batra 14b – 15a and other portions, where the possibilities of authorship of the Torah are discussed. There is no rejection of objectivity in this Talmudic section nor any other―overt or implied, but rather a response to inner problems in the text and the living tradition. Heschel must be read in this light. His entire theory of revelation is a response to the fact, a criticism of the fantasy that there is one objective inner truth in the text. Conversely he rejects the idea that there are no meaningful objective truths evoked in the interaction of the text and man. He has no problem with objectivity per se.²²⁵ His dictum, “As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash,” is a refutation of the idea that because there is no one author, it then follows there is no intentionality in the text. Furthermore, his entire idea of man is a response to the deconstruction of man that follows from objective impossibility and subjective irreality. Heschel accepts the premise that man is an amalgamation of interests, but that in no way diminishes the singularity of man’s being, which has its origins in a creative act of consciousness, devoid of any utilitarian cultural meaning. Heschel’s own words close to the beginning of Who Is Man? phrase this succinctly, but without the necessary context and explanation: Man is not free to choose whether or not he wants to attain knowledge about himself. He necessarily and under all circumstances possesses a degree of such knowledge, preconceptions, and standards of self-interpretation. The paradox is that man is an obscure text to himself. He knows that something is meant by what he is, by what he does, but he remains perplexed when called upon to interpret his own being. It is not enough to read the syllables of a text written in a language which one does not understand, to observe and to recount man’s external behavior, important and necessary as such an enterprise is. Man must interpret them in terms larger than his inner life.²²⁶

We may now turn to a prime exemplar of a fully engaged Jewish thinker, immersed in postmodernism. No other Jewish thinker in the last century has grappled with the epistemological, traditional, and theological issues facing modernity as significantly as has Neil Gillman. And no other thinker has labored within the tradition to convey its significance as deeply as Gillman has. Most important-

 See God in Search, pp.  – , where objectivity is rendered within the bounds of indicative and responsive meanings.  Who Is Man?, p. .

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ly for this study, no other Jewish thinker since Heschel’s death has adopted his dictum, “As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash.” As significant as this is, Gillman has not joined his understanding of Heschel’s dictum to a meaningful understanding of what it means to be a concrete, singular, individuality within the Jewish tradition. In fact, Gillman denies this aspect of Heschel’s thought, which has consumed much of the analysis here.²²⁷ What follows is an examination of this missing link in Gillman’s thought, so essential to this investigation and to the principles of postmodernism, which have made their way into Gillman’s thinking. As the title of Gillman’s major work suggests,²²⁸ we are all sacred fragments. In Gillman’s case, these fragments are held together in a cultural/scientific paradigm influenced by Clifford Geertz,²²⁹ not through the image of God, which has been subjected to irreparable postmodern criticism via Kuhnian mythic meanings.²³⁰ Dreyfus points out that there are direct similarities between Geertz’s and Kuhn’s attempts at interpreting alien discourse and practices with Heidegger’s notion of everydayness.²³¹ And Gillman’s thought on myth could be introduced by Heidegger’s observation in On the Way to Language, that hermeneutics is “the attempt first of all to define the nature of interpretation.”²³²  Gillman Sacred Fragments, p. , “But what we do not find in Heschel’s writings is a systematic discussion of the more strictly philosophical problems that inevitably accompany this approach―particularly the issue of subjectivity. He is palpably aware of the problems, and he is certainly capable of dealing with them, but he seems to view them as intrusive. They come from a perspective that is external to the experience itself and they are thus simply illegitimate.” Heschel’s non-systematic approach notwithstanding, he has clearly presented the issues in a manner that has escaped Gillman because of the assumptions built into Gillman’s own thought as will be demonstrated in the following analysis.  Gillman, Sacred Fragments.  See Neil Gillman, The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought, pp.  and , where he clearly lays out Geertz’s anthropological understanding of the “general order of existence,” and Doing Jewish Theology: God, Torah and Israel in Modern Judaism (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, ), p. . For a further elaboration of some of Gillman’s use of myth, see Lawrence Troster, “‘Not Just A Symbol’: Neil Gillman’s Theological Method and Critical Realism,” Conservative Judaism, Vol. , nos.  –  (Fall/Winter  – ), pp.  – .  See, “Toward a Theology for Conservative Judaism,” Vol. , , Fall , note , Doing Jewish Theology, Chapter , “The Problematics of Myths,” Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, Jan., . See Sacred Fragments, pp.  –  with its reliance on Freud and some generalizations as to why myth and midrash are similar, and The Death of Death, pp.  – , where Gilman invokes Rollo May, Ian Barbour, and John Hick to buttress his account.  Dreyfus, p. .  Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: HarperCollins, ), p. .

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The fragments of humanity that Gillman subjects to myth are born of the hermeneutic of everydayness in that same vein. Moreover, the incommensurateness of myth and midrash that Heschel fully avows and Gillman disavows in passing, is akin to Rorty’s attempt to see hermeneutics “as the attempt to make incommensurate discourses commensurable.”²³³ In Gillman’s case, as in Rorty’s and Heidegger’s, hermeneutics is “an interpretation of human beings as essentially self interpreting.”²³⁴ To philosophize in Gillman’s sense, then means studying interpretation itself―or the act of myth-making. Gillman’s critical philosophical apparatus is put into effect to create epistemological distance between himself and Heschel. In an essay, “Epistemological Tensions in Heschel’s Thought,”²³⁵ Gillman takes Heschel to task for not providing the means of falsifiability or verifiability of religious claims,²³⁶ and generally for being imprecise in his use of philosophical ideas. In this vein, it is instructive to use a comparison that Gillman employs. Gillman gives as an example the precise thought of Gabriel Marcel, with which Gillman is very familiar.²³⁷ In so doing, Gillman invokes Marcel’s distinction between presence and object. It is of note because it contains the idea of “thrownness,” which Heschel has criticized throughout Who Is Man?. It is also of note because it sees philosophical problems as solvable when Heschel argues in the very first paragraph of Who Is Man? that they are not: To ask a question is an act of the intellect; to face a problem is a situation involving the whole person. A question is the result of a thirst for knowledge; a problem reflects a state of perplexity, or even distress. A question calls for an answer, a problem calls for a solution (from the Latin solvere, to loosen to dissolve.).²³⁸

With this in mind, we must consider what Gillman says: Marcel defines his terms with precision: An “object,” as its name implies, is some reality that lies outside of me, etymologically “thrown before me.” Objects present us with “problems” that are before me in their entirety. Problems are in principle solvable, precisely by “primary reflection,” by dispassionate, critical inquiry.²³⁹

 Ibid., p. .  Ibid.  Gillman, “Epistemological Tensions in Heschel’s Thought,” pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  Neil Gillman, Gabriel Marcel on Religious Knowledge (Washington, DC: University Press of America, .  Who Is Man?, p. .  Gillman, “Epistemological Tensions,” p. .

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Gillman has missed some of the subtlety of Heschel’s thinking and criticism of “thrownness” and phenomenology. Consequently, two things have occurred. First, he has misconstrued Heschel’s analysis of critical philosophical thought. Second, he has allowed himself a measure of freedom of criticism in relation to his own thinking. This is glaringly evident when we understand the difference between Heschel’s and Gillman’s use of hermeneutics, and when we see Gillman put his own version to use. And third, Gillman misconstrues Heschel’s theological talk as poetry, but in a much more sophisticated sense than Edward Kaplan propounds.²⁴⁰ Heschel’s disavowal of hermeneutics as an end in itself means that philosophizing is the means through which man becomes aware of the ineffable in the historical dimension of his concrete life. Midrash needs to be applied as it lacks self-evidence. The words of the Bible are an indication that man will only discover himself in the meaning of the ineffable and never as an act of self-interpretation. The words of the Bible are a requirement for the challenge of being human.²⁴¹ The irremediable nature of Gillman’s interpretation is evident when he confronts the most difficult idea of all in the Jewish tradition: resurrection. When Gillman gives his own existential interpretation, the limits of myths are exposed, and we see just what has been lurking in the background all along. If everything is myth, then nothing can be literal, least of all the messianic finality of history. Yet, when Gillman concludes his thinking on the resurrection of the dead, he sounds exactly like any religious fundamentalist using a notion of necessity that begs the question: The thrust of these reflections is to suggest, first, that my body is indispensable to my sense of self. Without my body, there is no “me.” Whatever my ultimate destiny, then, whatever God has in store for me at the end, must include my body. That is why any doctrine of the afterlife must deal with my body as well. Belief in bodily resurrection, is, then, indispensable to any doctrine of the afterlife. It is indispensable for another reason. If my body inserts me into history and society, then the affirmation of the bodily resurrection is also an affirmation of history and society. If my bodily existence is insignificant, then so are history and society. To affirm that God has the power to reconstitute me in my bodily existence is to affirm that God also cares deeply about history and society.²⁴²

 Gillman, Sacred Fragments p. , “Heschel’s evocative prose mirrors his purpose, which is not to expound a theological system but rather to awaken us to look at the world in a fresh unanticipated way. In the first instance, theology becomes drama; in the second it turns to poetry.”  Who Is Man?, p. .  The Death of Death, p. .

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This thinking, while based on anthropological underpinnings,²⁴³ is then transferred to the Talmud: Gillman says, When the Gevurot benediction affirms that God is meyaye hametim, that God “revives the dead,” I believe it means the entire scenario. God gives new life to the dead, to the totality of me, to my body together with my soul. This is the ultimate meaning of the Talmudic doctrine that at the end of days, God will bring my body and soul together again and that I will be reconstituted as I was during my life on earth. ²⁴⁴

These are strong statements that blur the line between myth and literalism. While previously arguing for the centrality of mythic, non-literal language when dealing with the “beyond,” Gillman says, These are mythic statements precisely because they speak of the “beyond.” To understand them as literal truths is to trivialize them. To believe for example that God came down on Sinai and literally spoke to our ancestors is to commit the sin of idolatry, which in its purest form, reduces God to a natural/human phenomenon. People descend and speak, God does not―except in a mythic way.²⁴⁵

Gillman now clearly asserts that, when it comes to resurrecting the dead, God speaks and acts literally. Gillman’s epistemology should be “critically” offended. It seems clear that Gillman takes all statements about God mythically except for one―that God literally brings the dead back to life. This thinking about the body is not a slipshod conception. Rather, it is derived from the very first association with presence and object that Gillman used for his epistemology, and is at the basis of his criticism of Heschel. It is overtly borrowed from Gillman’s appreciation of Marcel.²⁴⁶ While this is inventive thinking, it is anti-rational and Gillman senses this by the end of the book: But at those moments, I cling by my very fingernails to the realization that my rational self is not the whole of me, that there are dimensions of my experience that elude the critical temper, that the world remains for me a realm of enchantment… My second naiveté takes me “in and through criticism.” It does not ignore, deny, or side-step my critical faculties. It acknowledges their legitimacy, even their power. And it takes me beyond [emphasis added] their reach. It is what makes it possible for me to hope that my life here on earth is not my entire destiny. That kind of hope takes me beyond

 Ibid., pp.  – .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  The Death of Death, p. , n. . “In what follows on my relationship with ‘my body,’ I borrow liberally from the thought of the twentieth-century French philosopher Gabriel Marcel.”

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[emphasis added] the conclusions of my rational self. It comes from some other dimension of my being, from that intuitive sense that I form a part of a broader order of existence that lends my life coherence.²⁴⁷

If belief in bodily resurrection is indispensable, is this indispensability a myth or a literal statement? Any critical reader of Gillman must remain confused. To say that it is indicative of God’s power, concern, and the like, does not signify how we tell the difference between a mythic and a literal statement. On the contrary, it blurs the distinction. And while Gillman would like to uphold a meaningful sense of concrete individuality,²⁴⁸ a close reading of his theology indicates that he has integrated some of the lapses of postmodern thinking that preclude that possibility. Like Rorty,²⁴⁹ Gillman has accepted the Kuhnian revolutionary science wholeheartedly. With assumptions he has not qualified, Gillman has used Heschel’s dictum about revelation and stripped it of any meaning. Revelation becomes a soliloquy and not a response.²⁵⁰ Gillman has invented a sense of concrete individuality, which is neither mythic nor literal in the end, as the difference cannot be critically delineated by any means other than his own hope. Like the postmodern usages of individuality, which assume neutrality for subjectivity and objectivity, upon which he based many of his arguments, Gillman is left with an empty notion of man, a fragment of a fragment ad infinitum. Much of the difference between Gillman and Heschel turns on a particular idea. Significantly, “criticism” doesn’t mean the same thing to Gillman and Heschel. In Gillman’s case “criticism,” while it is dispassionate and of primary significance, can be transcended because hope is of greater existential value. And while Gillman does not account for the implication of his action, it is a willing suspension and neither self-evident nor necessary in any way. Heschel is much more open and critical about criticism. He refuses to invoke an existential maneuver when something offends his sense of hope. Rather, he invokes a reasonable argument when faced with the limits of rationality. His remark, even though it appeared in 1962 in the introduction to The Prophets, still resonates throughout his writings: The bias which so many scholars share and which may be defined as a principle―namely, that nothing is to be recognized as a datum unless it can be qualified a priori as capable of

   

Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp.  – . God in Search, p. .

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explanation―besides being pretentious and questionable, obstructs the view of much of reality and seriously affects our power to gain a pristine insight into what we face.²⁵¹

This is the exact point at which their difference lies, and the significance of Heshel’s thought must be explicated. The singular individuality of the Bible, of Adam, who is not a historic personality but a midrashic revelation of each and every instantiation of human being, is not devoid of philosophical premises. Adam is neither a literal nor a mythic being, and his self-consciousness is an instantiation of the creative tension and polarity grounded in a phenomenology that has neither utilitarian nor explanatory a priori conditions. Like Rorty, Gillman ultimately sees philosophy as a kind of therapy―an adjustment by the individual to cultural norms and changes with the use of symbolism.²⁵² Heschel eschews such a path. The act of religious consciousness, within the parameters of Heschel’s phenomenological understanding, evokes pathos and responses of being human/human being, which shed light on our situation. This may be discomforting and ultimately not satisfying a priori, yet it is meaningful, nonetheless. Gillman’s sense of verification demands a foregone conclusion, a pattern of ideas or structure of reality in and through which we organize reality, or a surrender to being. In the face of the last, ultimate reality that remains unknown by our experience―death―Gillman simply projects a “beyond” based on this coherence.²⁵³ Heschel has subtly and critically purged his thinking of any kind of verification. Explanation is, by its nature, deprived of insight, and prophetic consciousness cannot be discovered by providing the conditions of its possibility or the means of its verification.²⁵⁴ Insight is not based on a second look or second naiveté, as Ricoeur posits and Gillman seconds.²⁵⁵ For Heschel, insight is bound up in the raw truth that awe and the reality of the sublime are irreducibly objective and subjectively responsive and available when man has parted ways with his interests and desires, when he has given up on exploitation, self-fulfillment, and self-enjoyment.²⁵⁶

 The Prophets, Vol. , p. x.  See Sacred Fragment, p.  where he claims that Tillich’s use of symbolism is the seminal aspect of all God talk and Chapter  of Sacred Fragments most specifically p. , where Gillman bases himself on Mordecai Kaplan’s use of symbolism for Judaism.  Ibid., p. .  The Prophets, Vol , p. xi.  Ibid., pp.  –  and .  Man Is Not Alone, p. .

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“Paradoxically, insight is knowledge at first sight.”²⁵⁷ The ineffable is not available as an inquiry into the nature of reality. Its presence is found in the tension of being human and human being. It is located in an awareness that does not surrender to being nor to symbolism. Heschel has made this abundantly clear in Man’s Quest for God, the most profound critique of symbolism in the study of modern religion. Insight is present in an image of man whose ineffability is a reflection of God’s: A symbol is by definition not the ultimate; it is the representation of something else. What is ultimate is not translated into symbols; the ultimate is an antonym of the symbolic. We must distinguish between symbolic knowledge which we obtain through logical operations, such as analysis and syllogism; and immediate understanding which enables us to acquire insights which are not derived from symbols but from an intimate engagement with what is real… The whole history of religion is filled with the struggle between the pursuit of idols and the worship of Him whose name is ineffable; between symbolic knowledge and metasymbolic understanding; between employing symbols as means and accepting them as ends. In the past symbols have often served as substitutes for insights, for immediate perception; as an alibi for faith.²⁵⁸

Conclusion Heschel’s challenge of Heidegger and by extension of these few but significant postmodernist thinkers I have considered, is seminal and meaningful because it has identified the single-most significant issue for Jewish thought and postmodernism. Whether within the tradition, as Gillman, Fackenheim, and Cohen are situated, or beyond the tradition, as the others are found and try to leave their imprint within and without, the question remains: once deconstructed, can man be recognizable to himself not merely as a human being but also as being human? Heschel’s answer is encased in the work known as Who Is Man? Layered in the history of being, engaged in the course of human events, the brutality of the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the face of Heidegger’s reformulation of the question of being and the construction of Dasein, the answer is: an eclipse appears blocking man’s view, denying him his own image and his cherished humanity. Secondarily, the “man” who is under consideration in these post Heidegger deconstructionists, even in Gillman’s case of idealized resurrection, is an ideal-

 The Prophets, Vol., p. xii.  Man’s Quest for God, pp.  – .

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ized Jew-Greek. The assumptions that furthered the deconstruction of Heideggerian issues cannot cross a divide and point to a living being, or in Gillman’s case, a resurrected living being, who was thoroughly mythified in this world. Derrida is the most direct and removed, but the others share equally in the desire to obliterate tradition and to remake it in their own image, to lesser or greater degrees and depths. The appeal of postmodernism to a kind of selflessness, a non-ego, based on the absence of the subject is ultimately dangerous. The obliteration of the self is misleading because it undermines in every case the basis of being human. This in no way makes Heschel’s view of the self naïve. The evils of selfishness cannot be a kind of privation or oblivion. They must be the basis for any recognition that human being can be uplifted by being human and that humanity, however at odds it is with being human, can face evil and be redeemed. Heschel’s experience and thought are entirely different with respect to different traditions and their experience. When he asks “who is man?” he in no way discounts anyone else’s experience of tradition. He engages the ideas and language of others and subjects them to his own phenomenological analysis in their own tradition. And in so doing, Heschel clearly believes that the depth of Jewish experience is more profound but all religious traditions are significant. Moreover, Heschel can do this because his phenomenological analysis never presumes to discount the value of man in any tradition. It reads everyone into the discussion even though their weightiness and depth are not the same. Is Heschel a Jew-Greek? Arguably he is if we look to a pre-deconstructed image of man. At home in any tradition, Heschel is engaged in a discussion of significance when the ineffable is man’s foremost characteristic. If Heschel’s engagement with Heidegger tells us anything, it is that Heschel can use interrogatory phenomenology to penetrate the supposed Greek thought of the twentieth century. In doing so, Heschel’s language and thought are no less Greek or Hebraic than others’. And when subjected to analysis, it turns out it is more Greek and Hebraic than most others, conclusions notwithstanding. Phenomenology should be capable of employing an epoché upon itself and it should make no cultural difference, whether one avails oneself of an “ontological difference” or an “ontological connective.” Similarly, when we look at man, it should make no difference for placement in a tradition vis-à-vis inquiry whether man is being-in-the-world in Heidegger’s case, or man is being-challenged-in-the-world as Heschel asserts. Interrogatory and phenomenological descriptions must be appreciated before conclusions are drawn. And even once they are drawn, the engagement never ceases. A new take on philosophy after Auschwitz must mean that philosophy cannot provide final answers and that no one, neither Greek nor Jew, has any privileged position. Phenomenology, according to Heschel, means that the

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argument, if we may call it such, must be from the inside out and must be on the level of ontological presuppositions that present the most important philosophical problem of the twentieth century to Heschel,²⁵⁹ not allegiances or loyalties. I say inside out because it is easy to forget that what starts on the inside must be placed in an epoché with what is not inside. It is in this juxtaposition that Heschel has the most to tell us about being a Jew-Greek. Is Heidegger an exception to my conclusion of Heschel’s labor? Is Heidegger worth reading? Should we try to understand Heidegger as a relativist in relation to the Holocaust, and humanize him in relation to other atrocities, as Nolte has suggested?²⁶⁰ Should we just let the past pass away? Yes and no. Yes, Heidegger is worth reading. It is an attempt to express the depth of truth about human existence. Coincidentally and inseparately he must be read because the history of Nazism and of Heidegger’s participation ought not be repeated and justified in the manner in which Heidegger did. Yes, because the question of being as asked was not separated from its own historical time consciousness with the arrival of Nazi Germany, and without it we cannot understand the depth of the absence of humanity. Yes, because Dasein is an interrogatory being and must be engaged if phenomenology can claim its proper role. Moreover, Heidegger’s thought cannot be excluded because it is valued in the historical current of its time and our time, and must be seen in the continuity of historical consciousness that it engenders. We clearly need to know where we stand in the historical consciousness of traditions when they come face to face with hatred and mass destruction. From Heschel’s perspective, Heidegger cannot be completely read out of the tradition but he can be overturned, eclipsed as he had attempted to eclipse others in the deconstruction of being because of the depth of its brutality and its abandonment of an image of man that is based on pathos. We need to be reminded that being and meaning, as Heschel has worked out here, are bound up in the ineffable and mirrored in the image of man. No, we should not relativize or humanize Heidegger’s silence, not merely on account of his sins of commission or omission, but because wisdom and humanity should be the hallmark of any accountable philosopher. And the absence of these attributes means that human life has been denigrated and not upheld. Adam, biblical man, opened up to phenomenological analysis in the midst of philosophy and religion, without deconstruction, living in the polarity of human being/being human, and facing the reality of evil and death, contains the possibility of transcendence that surpasses that eclipse. Adam’s singular, liv-

 The Prophets, Vol. , p. xvii.  See Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi,” for an in-depth analysis of Nolte’s argument.

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6 Heschel and the Postmodernists: (Are the Demonic and Death Real?)

ing being can participate in the course of events propelled by a midrashic tailwind, capable of transcending those events in the unity of his personality, drawn from past meanings and challenges only to face new challenges―all with unforeseen consequences, but in the presence of the ineffable. This is Heschel’s vision. When all is said and done, and Heidegger is confronted with the lost labor of philosophy in a post-Holocaust world, he cannot face the impotence of thinking being, much less the irony of his own relation to the Holocaust, as we saw in the Der Spiegel interview. When the unending anxiety of an unredeemed world is unavoidable, Heidegger gives into his lesser instincts and calls for a god who may redeem us: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god.²⁶¹

This is part of Heidegger’s original thesis, as Heschel argued, and part of the “turn,” as Sheehan noted.²⁶² When, as Heidegger says, “Being just happens to happen” (es ereignet, es gibt Sein), human effort can only be a failure in the face of technology and nihilism. In this way mysticism becomes a last resort, a gift for special individuals, rather than a first insight of the ineffable available for anyone, as it was for Heschel. Heschel, in a paragraph immediately following his understanding of kiddush hashem―readiness to die for the sake of God―shows us how being can be the fulcrum of human redemption, and how we must not fall prey to false polarities when being is conceived as the ultimate. Without mentioning Heidegger, Nazism, or evil, Heschel, whose experience of the ineffable ties being to meaning, speaks of redemption. He does so without irony, and without a sense of weariness like Heidegger. He says the following, having asked from the beginning if philosophy and religion are possible after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and having argued that it is possible for the ineffable to enter the world through the portal of deeds, whose foundation is pathos: And yet, even though God’s creation retains precedence over man’s corruption, man has the power to convert blessing into curse, to use being for undoing, to turn the elixir of God’s word to deadly poison. His power of corruption may again and again, temporarily, for

 Der Spiegel, May .  Sheehan, “A Normal Nazi,” p. .

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long stretches of history, destroy what God designs. However, man’s willfulness is not the ultimate force in history. We are involved in a drama dependent upon the polarity of creation and corruption. Just as creation goes on all the time, redemption goes on all the time. At the end, we believe, God’s care defeats man’s defiance. God and the world are not polar opposites. There is darkness in the world, but there is also this call, “Let there be light!” Nor are body and soul at loggerheads. We are not told to decide between “Either–Or,” either God or the world, either this world or the world to come. We are told to accept Either and Or, God and the world, as well as to let God have a share in this world.²⁶³

 Who Is Man?, pp.  – .

Bibliography Heschel Between God and Man, ed. Fritz Rothschild (New York: The Free Press, 1959). God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1976). Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1951). Man’s Quest for God (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954). No Religion Is an Island (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991). A Passion for Truth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974). The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), Volumes I & II. The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1951). Who Is Man? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965).

Heidegger The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). The Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 54, Parmenides (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981). History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1985). Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1977). “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel 30 (May 1976): 193 – 219. Trans. by W. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1981), ed. T. Sheehan, pp. 45 – 67. On Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1982). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Die Technik und die Kehre, 6th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1985). “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics” ed. W. Kauffman, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 206 – 221. What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), “What Is Metaphysics?,” ed. D. F. Krell, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 110.

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Others Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947), M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Theodor Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” Gesammelte Schriften 10, (1970 – 1986) no. 2, 558. —, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashston (New York: Seabury Press, 1966). Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,1999). Alfred Baumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931). — Nietzsches Philosophie in Selbstzegunissen. Ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Alfred Baeumler (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931). Nikolai Berdyaev, “The Problem of Man: Toward a Construct of Christian Anthropology,” 1936 (#408), @berdyaev.com. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Richard J. Bernstein, “Metaphysics, Critique and Utopia,” Review of Metaphysics 42 (December 1988), pp. 255 – 73. William Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Edgar C. Boedeker, “Phenomenology,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 156 – 172. Joseph Harp Britton, Abraham Heschel and the Phenomenon of Piety (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt: A Christian Anthropology, trans. Olive Wyon (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2002). Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith (London: Collins, 1973). —, The Eclipse of God, trans. M. Friedman, N. Guterman, and E. Kamenka (New York: Harper and Row, 1952). —, I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Schocken Books, 1972). —, “The Philosophical Anthropology of Max Scheler,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 6, no. 2 (December 1945), pp. 307 – 321. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. J. O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955). John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Arthur Cohen, The Natural and Supernatural Jew (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962). —, The Tremendum (New York: Crossroad, 1981). Benedetto Croce, “La Critica: Revista di letteratura, storia e filosofia” (Naples) 31 (1933). Steven Galt Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy,” A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 49 – 64. Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007). Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York: Verso, 1987).

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Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Boston: MIT Press: 1991). Emil Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1973). —, God’s Presence in History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970). —, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1982). Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrrel, Dominic Di Bernardi, and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). David Forman-Barzilai, “Agonism in Faith: Martin Bubers’s Eternal Thou after the Holocaust,” Modern Judaism 23, no. 2 (May 2003), pp. 156 – 179. Maurice Friedman, “Buber, Heschel and Heidegger: Two Jewish Existentialists Confront a Great German Existentialist,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 51, no. 1 (2011), pp. 129 – 134. Paolo Gamberini, Pathos e Logos in Abraham Jo Heschel (Rome: Citta Nuova, 2009). Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989). Neil Gillman, The Death of Death; Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought (Woodstock. VT, Jewish Lights Publishing, 2000). —, “Epistemological Tensions in Heschel’s Thought,” Conservative Judaism L, nos. 2 – 3 (Winter/Spring 1998), pp. 77 – 83. —, Gabriel Marcel on Religious Knowledge (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980). —, Sacred Fragments (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1990). —, “Toward a Theology for Conservative Judaism” 37, no. 1 (Fall 1983), pp. 4 – 22. Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). Michael Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, trans. Michael McNeill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). Susan Handelman, The Slayers of Moses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). Shai Held, Abraham Heschel: The Call of Transcendence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983). —, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phenomenologische Forschung (Halle: Max Neimeyer, XI 1930). —, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). Brian D. Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Kant on History, ed. L. W. Beck (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963). Edward Kaplan’s two-volume biography on Heschel, Abraham Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) and Abraham Heschel: Spiritual Radical (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Edward Kaplan, “Abraham Heschel’s Poetics of Religious Thinking,” in John C. Merkle, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring His Life and Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 103 – 119.

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—, “Heschel as Philosopher: Phenomenology and the Rhetoric of Revelation,” Modern Judaism 21, no. 1 (February 2001), pp. 1 – 14. —, “Heschel’s Poetics of Religious Thinking,” Modern Judaism 21, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1 – 14. —, “Metaphor and Miracle: A. J. Heschel and the Holy Spirit,” Conservative Judaism 26, no. 2 (Winter), pp. 3 – 18. Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1934). Steven T. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues (New York: New York University Press, 1983). Pierre Keller, Husserl and Heidegger on Human Experience (Riverside: University of California Press, 2007). Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Philosophical Geopolitics in The Third Reich,” in A Commentary to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 248 – 249. George Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger’s Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990). Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1987). Christina Lafont, “Hermeneutucs,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Miriam Leonard, ed., Derrida and Antiquity: Classical Presences (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 135 – 158. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1948). Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). Karl Lowith, Heidegger, Denker in durftiger Zeit, 2nd edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960). —, “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome,” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 140 – 143 —, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 167 – 185. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Joseph Margolis, “Pragmatism, Transcendental Arguments and the Technological,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Paul T. Durbin and Friedrich Rapp (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1983), pp. 291 – 309. J. L. Mehta, The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). Freidrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale and Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969). —, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1987). —, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954). David Novak, “Heschel’s Phenomenology of Revelation,” in Abraham Joshua Heschel: Philosophy, Theology and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Stanislaw Krajewski and Adam Lipszyc (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009).

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Brian O’Connor, “Adorno on the Destruction of Memory,” in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. 136 – 149. —, “Adorno’s Reconception of the Dialectic,” in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), pp. 537 – 555. Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), p. 178. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. A. Blunden (London: Fontana Press, 1994). Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). Lawrence Perlman, Abraham Heschel’s Idea of Revelation (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). —, “As a Report about Revelation, the Bible Itself Is a Midrash,” Conservative Judaism 55, no. 1 (Fall 2002), pp. 30 – 37. —, “Buber’s Anti-Kantianism,” AJS Review 15, no. 1 (March 1990), pp. 95 – 108. —, “Heschel’s Critique of Kant,” in From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner, Vol. 3 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), pp. 213 – 226. —, “Revelation and Prayer: Heschel’s Meeting With God,” Conservative Judaism 60, no. 3 (Spring 2008), pp. 76 – 89. —, “Text, Myth and Midrash: Unearthing Theological Foundations,” CCAR (Winter 2008), pp. 3 – 35. Otto Poggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. D. Margurshak and S. Barber (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987). Richard Polt and Gregory Fried, eds., A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). The Concept of Man, ed. S. Radhakrishnan and P.T. Raju (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960). William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003). Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Richard Rorty, “A Master from Germany,” New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1998. —, “Heidegger, Contingency and Pragmatism,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 511 – 523. —, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Gillian Rose, “Of Derrida’s Spirit,” New Literary History 24, no. 2, Reconsiderations (Spring 1993), pp. 447 – 465. Fritz Rothschild, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (New York: The Free Press, 1959). Rudolph Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Rudiger Safranski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966). Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, trans. M. Frings (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009). Allen Michael Scult, Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” The New York Review of Books 35, no. 10 (June 16, 1988), pp. 38 – 47.

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Index of Names Adorno, Theodore 145, 147 f., 174 – 178 Agamben, Giorgio 132 Akaviah Ben Mahalalel 45 Aquinas 14 Arendt, Hannah 27, 123, 144 f. Aristotle 29, 39, 43, 46, 54, 73, 99, 157 Augustine 14, 47, 99

Fackenheim, Emil 145, 174 f., 187 Farias, Victor 7, 13, 22, 119 f., 131 Fichte, Johann 146 Forman-Barzilai, David 35 Foucault, Michel 58, 147 Franklin, Benjamin 39, 54 Freud, Sigmund 14, 48 – 50, 59, 181

Baumler, Alfred 50 Berdyaev, Nikolai 52 Bergson, Henri 89 Blattner, William 23, 71 f., 79, 88, 91, 104 f., 111, 113 f. Boedeker, Edgar 72 Borowitz, Eugene 174 Brentano, Franz 18, 28, 71 Britton, Joseph Harp 17 – 19 Brunner, Emil 52 Buber, Martin 32 – 38, 47, 51 f., 55, 57, 60, 81, 174 f.

Gamberini, Paolo 1 Geertz, Clifford 30, 181 Gillman, Neil 30, 38, 53 f., 71, 145, 179 – 188 Gordon, Peter 7, 26

Calvin, John 100 Camus, Albert 14 f., 49 f., 144 Caputo, John 11, 23, 58, 145, 148 f., 157 – 166, 168 Cohen, Arthur 60, 156 f., 187 Cohen, Hermann 179 Cohen, Steven M. 174, Crowell, Stephen Galt 29 f., 120 Darwin, Charles 39 De Beaufret, Jean 120 Derrida, Jacques 12, 21, 145 – 155, 157 – 159, 162 – 164, 166, 188 Descartes, Rene 15, 40 f., 47, 151 Dewey, John 170 – 172 Dews, Peter 146 – 148 Dilthey, Wilhelm 89, 99, 111, 128 Diogenes 42 Dreyfus, Hubert 22, 30, 70, 74 f., 79, 81, 98 f., 103 – 105, 110 f., 113, 115, 128 f., 181 Eisen, Arnold

174

Haar, Michel 28, 89, 94, 99, 104 – 106, 109, 111 – 113, 129 f., 135 – 137, 142 Hegel, G.W. F. 87, 141, 145, 147, 155 Held, Shai 16 – 19 Heraclitus 60 Horkheimer, Max 145, 176 Husserl, Edmund 18, 26 – 30, 34, 56 f., 68, 70 – 73, 111, 144, 153 Ingraffia, Brian Jaspers, Karl Junger, Ernst

99 22 25, 58, 99

Kant, Immanuel 14, 25, 34, 47 f., 62, 73, 141 f., 155, 179 Kaplan, Edward 9, 12, 14 – 19, 31, 33 f., 36, 39, 51, 55, 60, 67, 102, 145, 167, 183 Kaplan, Mordecai 32 – 35, 186 Keith, Arthur 40 Keller, Pierre 30, 79 Kierkegaard, Soren 16, 99, 111, 128, 157 Kisiel, Theodore 24, 74 Kotzker Rebbe, the 16 Kuhn, Thomas 30, 181 Lacan, Jacques 147 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe Lafont, Cristina 83, 87 f. Lang, Berel 11, 50 Lauer, Quentin 56 f.

25, 44, 155, 159

200

Index of Names

Leonard, Mariam 155 Levinas, Emmanuel 12, 154, 157 – 159, 161, 163 Locke, John 75 Lowith, Karl 11, 22, 24, 27, 119 Luther 99, 157 Lyotard, Jean-François 147, 155 f. Maimonides 2, 14, 61, 179 Marcel, Gabriel 182, 184 Marcuse, Herbert 22, 27 Margolis, Joseph 7, 148 Marx, Karl 141, 145, 147 Meander, Protagoras 43 Morgan, Michael 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich 17, 23, 46, 49 – 51, 58 f., 141, 144 Nolte, Ernst 24, 189 Novak, David 20 Ott, Hugo 13, 35, 59, 131 Otto, Rudolph 38, 51 Parmenides 2, 14, 28 f., 32, 39, 42, 44, 46, 53, 58, 60, 62, 68, 77, 86 f., 96, 165 Paul 13, 99, 148, 153 Perlman, Lawrence 2, 18 f., 34, 109 Phaedrus 43 Plato 3, 14, 43, 58, 73, 99, 130, 148, 166, 170 Prometheus 63 Pythagoras 14 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 9, 14 Raju, P.T. 9, 14 Richardson, William 29, 78 f., 83, 90, 99, 106, 137, 168 Rockmore, Tom 7, 22 f., 57, 99, 119, 155

Rorty, Richard 21 f., 138, 145, 166 – 172, 182, 185 f. Rose, Gillian 152 f. Rosenzweig, Franz 26 f. Rothschild, Fritz 34, 36 Ryle, Gilbert 128 Safranski, Rudiger 13 Sartre, Jean-Paul 14 f., 30, 49, 59, 81, 105, 111, 120, 144 Scheler, Max 34, 51 f. Schelling, Friedrich 146, 152 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 48, 51 Schneeburger, Guido 32 Scult, Allen Michael 29 Sheehan, Thomas 6 – 8, 22, 24 f., 58, 70, 99, 109, 131 f., 137, 160, 164, 189 f. Sluga, Hans 50, 83 Socrates 3, 43 Spiegelberg, Herbert 68, 71 Spinoza, Benedict 39 – 41 Stangneth, Bettina 145 Thompson, Ian 24 Tillich, Paul 27, 186 Tucker, Gordon 167 Vattimo, Gianni

17

White, Carol 58 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 128 Wolin, Richard 7, 11, 13, 22 – 24, 58, 103, 119 f., 145, 148, 153, 155, 164 Yerushalmi, Yosef

174

Zimmerman, Michael 13, 75, 78, 99, 136, 148, 155 Zwingli, Huldrych 100

Subject Index Absurdity 49, 64 f., 91, 93, 134, 178 Adam 1, 4 f., 31, 60, 63 f., 69, 92, 95, 97 – 99, 109, 111, 118, 134, 142, 157, 165, 168, 174 f., 186, 189 Agriculture 7, 103, 131 Analysis 1 f., 4 – 8, 10, 13 – 19, 21 f., 28 – 32, 38, 40 f., 50 f., 55 – 57, 60, 65, 68, 71, 73 – 75, 77, 80, 82 – 84, 87 – 94, 98, 101 – 103, 105 – 108, 110 – 113, 118, 121 f., 131, 134, 136 – 138, 142 f., 148, 155 – 157, 161 f., 170 f., 177, 181, 183, 187 – 189 Anonymity 10, 33, 66, 91, 134 Anthropology 17, 37, 47, 52 – 55, 68, 71, 99 f., 131 Antisemitic, Antisemitism 7, 159 Anxiety 45, 66, 81 f., 89, 105, 113, 129, 131, 134, 137, 190 Apology, the 3 Appreciation 49, 66, 77, 101, 178, 184 A Priori 71, 85, 115, 171, 185 f. Atomic Age 135 Atomic Bombs 10, 103, 137 Attunement 114, 136 Auschwitz 9 f., 22, 31, 37, 46 f., 84, 103, 127, 137, 155 f., 161, 171, 174 – 176, 188, 190 Authentic 21, 45, 49, 55, 59, 89, 91, 94, 106, 112 f., 118, 128, 130, 135, 169 f. Authentic Being-toward-death 89 Average 74, 85, 112, 121, 129 Avoiding 149 Awe 20, 48, 52, 65 f., 76, 80 – 82, 108 f., 143, 160, 172, 177, 186 Being 1 – 7, 9 – 12, 18, 20 – 23, 25 – 33, 38 – 42, 44 – 49, 52 f., 55 f., 58 – 66, 68, 70 – 75, 77 – 139, 141 – 145, 147 – 152, 154 – 173, 177 – 180, 182, 185 – 190 Being-Challenged-in-the-World 92, 94, 107, 124, 188 Being Human 26, 28, 31, 39, 41 f., 46, 48 f., 61, 64, 70, 78 – 80, 83 – 86, 92 – 95, 103, 109, 116 – 118, 122, 124, 127, 131, 133 f.,

137 – 139, 142 f., 148, 154 – 157, 160 – 162, 165, 172, 174 f., 178, 183, 186 – 189 Being-in-the-world 10, 78 f., 90, 92, 105, 107, 111, 114 f., 122, 124, 129 – 131, 188 Being-one’s-Self 112 Bible 9, 13, 19, 29, 38, 40, 53, 60 f., 63 f., 66, 96, 102, 109, 165, 179 – 181, 183, 186 Brutality 7, 103, 121 f., 124, 187, 189 Caesura 155 f. Care 20, 29, 41, 105 f., 110, 115 – 117, 121 f., 142, 183, 191 Cartesian Subjectivism 120 Categories 4, 6, 39, 55, 85, 93, 95, 108, 111, 138, 147, 176 Celebration 66, 79, 92, 118 Christian 9, 35, 52, 58, 99 – 102, 124, 130, 135, 143, 155, 161, 175 Clearing 111, 114 f., 124 f., 130, 152, 170 Cobblers Workshop, the 70, 74 f., 78, Commandment 41, 46, 64, 90, 92, 107 Comportment 6, 90, 95, 124, 128 f., 134 Concern 5, 15 – 17, 22, 24 f., 28 – 30, 39, 48 f., 55 f., 63, 73 – 75, 78, 110, 114 f., 120, 146, 149, 162, 171, 173, 178, 185 Conscience 65, 94, 102 f., 110, 130, 173 Consciousness 18, 20 f., 29 f., 33 f., 40 f., 47 f., 52, 55, 64, 71, 76, 78 – 81, 90, 95 f., 100 f., 105, 109, 116, 127, 133, 148 f., 162, 176, 178, 180, 186, 189 Coping Skills 75, 96 Culture 66, 125, 129, 134, 156, 167, 170, 172, 176 Dasein 1, 3 – 5, 7 f., 10, 28, 30 f., 45 f., 59, 63 f., 68 – 71, 73 – 75, 79 – 92, 94 – 115, 117 – 119, 121 – 125, 128 – 131, 134, 136 f., 143, 149 – 151, 158 – 161, 167 – 171, 187, 189 Das Gestell 131 f. Das Man 5, 79, 110 f., 113 f., 116, 119, 122, 127 – 129, 131 Das Nichtdentische 177

202

Subject Index

Death 3, 6, 24, 27, 30, 45, 53 f., 89, 91, 101, 103, 105, 113, 132 – 134, 136 – 139, 143 f., 149, 152 f., 155, 158, 162, 174, 179, 181, 183 f., 189 Deconstruction 1, 6, 21 f., 31, 130 f., 144, 148, 152 – 154, 158 f., 163, 175, 180, 188 f. Deed 55, 87, 91, 93 f., 116, 162, 164, 172, 190 Demonic 137, 144, 151, 165 f. Demythologizing 11, 23, 58, 163, 165 Denazification 22, 120, 123 Denial 53, 55, 76, 156 Destruction 11, 13, 21 f., 26 f., 36, 94, 103, 120, 137, 139, 143, 151 f., 176, 189 Destruktion 149 Dialectic 87, 145, 147, 166, 175 – 177 Dialogical Thinking 175 Die Gefahr 132 Ding an sich 73 Disavowal of Transcendence 107 Disclosedness 105, 110, 114 f. Discontent 18 f. Disintegration of Being Human 79 Distillation of the Self 91, 93 Duty (Sollen) 94

113, 121 f., 124 – 127, 130 – 133, 136 f., 141 f., 151 f., 155, 159 Ethics 40, 45 f., 48, 124, 160 f., 174 f. Everydayness 74, 78 f., 113 – 115, 119, 122, 127 – 129, 181 f. Evil 3, 6, 13, 23 f., 26, 36, 49, 66, 73, 87, 94, 96 f., 121, 126 f., 131, 137, 143 – 145, 151 f., 160 – 163, 165 f., 171 – 174, 188 – 190 Existence 10, 15, 17, 23, 40 f., 45 f., 48 f., 54 f., 64 f., 70 f., 73, 75, 78 – 80, 84, 89 f., 93 f., 104 f., 107, 109 f., 113, 116 – 118, 122, 124 – 126, 128, 135, 138 f., 142, 148, 151, 162, 173, 181, 183, 185, 189 Existence of God 121 Existential 15 f., 28, 45, 49 f., 60, 64, 80, 89, 91, 94, 103, 105 – 107, 110, 112 – 115, 121 f., 129, 133 f., 173, 175, 183, 185 Existential Analytic 10, 15 f., 73, 88, 92, 94, 102, 105 f., 124, 150 Existentiale 112, 129 Existentiell 112 Extermination 11, 23, 142, 155 Extermination Camps 7, 26, 103, 131 f. External world 70 f. Fact

Eclipse 5, 11 f., 34 – 36, 89, 120, 126 – 128, 131, 133 f., 136, 142 f., 156, 175 – 178, 187, 189 Eclipse of Humanity 3, 5 – 7, 10 f., 13, 21 f., 28, 31, 35, 66, 103, 119 f., 127, 135, 137, 142, 175 Ek-static 142 Embarrassment 57, 65 f., 92 f., 102, 118, 164,173 Enlightenment 2, 25, 135, 176 f. Entities 71 f., 74 f., 78, 80, 83, 88, 90 f., 104 – 106, 112, 115 Environment 71, 73 f., 116, 159 Epoch 51, 135 f., 158 f., 169 Epochality 2, 5, 135, 149, 155, 174 Epoché 6, 188 f. Equipment 74, 129 Ereignis 109, 136, 168 Essence 7, 11, 24 f., 28, 34, 37, 48 f., 58 – 61, 64, 78, 80, 94, 103 – 105, 109, 111,

14, 20, 26, 28, 43, 45 f., 54, 56 – 58, 60, 70, 73, 76, 80 – 86, 88, 98, 100, 102, 105, 114 – 116, 120, 123, 125, 127, 131, 138 – 141, 143 – 148, 163, 169, 176, 179 – 181 Facticity 28, 38, 80 f., 85, 105 f., 114, 130 Faith 13, 35, 41, 48, 52, 82, 87, 93, 96, 118, 160, 162, 187 Fallenness 106 Falsifiability 182 Fear 87, 91, 121, 134, 172, 177 Finitude 106, 108, 113 Forgetting of Being 169 Fragen 149 Fragments 30, 38, 53 f., 118, 176, 181 – 183, 186 Fundamental Ontology 3, 73, 83, 103 f. Geist 149, 151 f. Geistig 149 Gelassenheit 90, 131

Subject Index

Geleichtet 114 Grandeur 40, 76 – 78, 90, 93, 109, 162, 168, 179 Guilt (Schuld) 94, 176 f. Hermeneutic 32, 80, 83, 88, 92, 95, 113, 165 f., 181 – 183 Hermeneutical 29, 133 Hiroshima 9 f., 30 f., 37, 47, 84, 127, 137, 161, 187, 190 History 1 – 4, 7, 10, 12, 18, 20 f., 24 f., 29, 33, 36, 43, 48, 53, 56, 58, 74 f., 97, 99, 123, 127, 131, 135 f., 140 f., 143 f., 146, 148, 151 f., 157 – 159, 161, 169, 173 – 175, 183, 187, 189, 191 Holocaust 1 – 3, 5 – 7, 9 – 13, 18, 21 f., 26, 28, 30 f., 35, 42, 96, 102 f., 120, 127, 131 f., 135, 137 f., 141, 144 f., 149 f., 153 f., 156, 161, 173 f., 176 – 178, 187, 189 f. Horizon 85, 88, 115 Human Being 3, 11 – 13, 17 f., 21, 26, 36, 38 – 44, 46 – 48, 50, 53, 55 – 57, 59, 61 – 66, 70, 79 f., 83 – 86, 90 – 93, 95, 101, 103, 107, 109, 111, 115 – 118, 122, 125 – 128, 131, 134, 136 f., 139, 145, 153, 156 f., 159 – 161, 165, 174 f., 177 f., 182, 186 – 189 Humanism 5, 23 – 26, 42, 55, 59, 96 f., 107, 119 – 124, 126, 130 – 132, 137, 143 f., 148, 164, 171 Humanity 6, 9, 11 f., 23, 25 f., 30, 36 f., 40, 47 f., 53, 71, 77 f., 81, 95, 103, 116, 119 – 124, 126 f., 130 f., 135, 139, 143, 145, 148, 155, 157, 165, 168, 170 f., 175, 177 – 179, 182, 187 – 189 Human Nature 30, 64, 79, 98, 165 Immediacy 77, 87 Immediacy after Reflection 175 Inauthentic 128 – 130, 148, 168, 170 Indebtedness 40, 48, 65, 94 f., 110, 118 Ineffable 12, 60 f., 93, 95, 108, 157, 160, 163 f., 167 f., 172, 179, 183, 187 – 190 Inhumanity 27, 137 f., 169 Insight 1, 3 f., 19 – 21, 26, 28, 32, 40 – 42, 47, 52, 55, 57, 61, 68, 82, 84, 87, 92 f., 95, 105 f., 110, 112, 119, 127, 131, 133,

203

139, 141 – 144, 157, 160, 164, 166, 186 f., 190 Insult 134, 162 Intelligibility 74, 93, 96, 108, 113, 129 Intentionality 18, 34, 52, 56, 67, 78, 127, 131, 134, 138, 180 Interrogatory 5, 29, 39 – 41, 53, 59, 108, 188 f. Intuition 82, 125 Irony 11, 22 f., 31, 98, 139, 153, 190 Jew-Greek

154, 157 f., 161, 165, 188 f.

Language 7, 14, 20, 26, 51, 57, 68, 71, 76, 83, 93, 112 f., 116 f., 119, 125 – 127, 138, 151, 165, 168, 170, 180 f., 184, 188 Law 87, 94, 125, 153, 177 Lebensphilosophie 89 Level 4 f., 11, 18 f., 24, 29, 38, 40, 42, 70 f., 94 f., 100, 112, 122, 160, 166, 172, 189 Liquidation 85, 132 f., 136, 138 Literal 19, 30 f., 68, 153, 183 – 186 Living-in-the-World 92 Living Transcendence 93 Logic of Disintegration 146 f., 177 Logos 1, 49, 117, 148, 156 f. Malice of Rage 126 Man 2 – 4, 9 – 12, 14, 17, 19 f., 26 – 40, 42 – 45, 47 – 57, 59 – 63, 65 f., 68, 70 – 73, 75 – 87, 89 – 105, 107, 109 – 113, 115, 117 f., 121 – 127, 129 – 142, 144 f., 148 – 150, 153 – 158, 162, 164 – 168, 172 f., 177 f., 180, 183, 185 – 191 Manipulation 77 – 79, 90, 96, 101, 133 Meaning 1 – 3, 5 f., 8, 17, 20 f., 23, 25, 27 – 30, 36 – 38, 41, 43 f., 47, 53, 55 f., 58, 61 – 65, 67, 70 f., 75 – 79, 81 – 85, 88, 91 – 93, 95, 98 f., 104 f., 108 – 112, 115 f., 118, 122 f., 128 – 130, 132 f., 135 f., 139 f., 142 – 144, 146 f., 151, 156, 158 f., 166 – 168, 172, 174 – 176, 178 – 181, 183 – 185, 189 f. Memory 61, 135, 153 f., 176, 178 Metaphor 4 f., 19, 24, 138, 152, 167 – 169, 171 f., 175

204

Subject Index

Metaphysics 5, 24, 26, 30, 35, 59, 83, 87, 99, 105 f., 109, 117, 119, 130, 132, 144, 148, 150, 168, 175 Midrash 19, 29, 53 f., 63, 109, 175, 180 – 183 Mimetic 12, 159 Mindless 75, 96, 177 Mood 45, 55, 85, 90, 113 f. Myth 12, 30, 43, 49, 53 f., 63, 92, 109, 138, 145, 149, 158 f., 161 – 164, 176, 181 – 185 National Socialism 7, 11, 23 – 25, 119, 148 Nazism 3, 7, 13, 22 f., 25, 57, 119 f., 138, 151, 153, 155, 158, 189 f. Neutral 5, 72, 84, 113, 116, 121, 127, 145 Neutrality 1, 5, 31, 72, 144, 185 Nihilation 126, 133 Nihilism 23, 129, 140, 155, 190 Non-Being 78, 91, 109, 117, 121, 134 Non-Identity 175, Nostalgia 168, 170 f. Nothing, the 4, 9, 11, 13 f., 18, 24, 33, 45 – 47, 65, 70, 72, 87, 89, 105, 113, 117, 121, 126, 131 f., 141, 154, 163, 171, 176, 178, 183, 185 Obedience 41, 46, 87, 90, 107, 109 Oblivion 96, 124, 129, 188 Obliviousness of Consciousness 124 One, the 1, 3, 6 f., 10 – 12, 16 – 20, 22 – 24, 26, 28 – 35, 37, 42 f., 45 – 50, 54 – 57, 59 f., 62, 65 – 73, 75 – 77, 79 – 83, 86 f., 89, 93, 99 f., 102 f., 105, 107, 109, 111 – 114, 117 f., 121 – 125, 127 – 129, 132 f., 137 – 139, 144, 147, 150 – 152, 154 – 159, 162, 164, 166, 169 – 172, 174 f., 177, 179 f., 188 Ontic 28, 79, 106, 112, 129, 156, 169 Ontically 104 – 106 Ontocentric Predicament 12, 44, 62, 86 f., 102, 107, 124, 127 Ontological Connective 84 f., 92, 101 f., 188 Ontological Difference 28, 50, 62, 82 – 86, 88, 92, 101, 155, 188 Ontological Presupposition 3 f., 20, 118, 189

Ontology 3 – 5, 17, 40, 62, 70, 80, 84 – 87, 100, 103 Open, the 4, 6, 40 f., 49, 56, 84, 104, 109, 122, 124, 134, 155, 161, 167, 170, 178, 185 Pathos 1, 5, 20, 23, 27, 49, 67, 94 f., 110, 115, 117 f., 124, 127, 131, 137, 142 f., 153, 168, 175, 178, 186, 189 f. Phenomenological reduction 70 – 72 Phenomenology 3 – 5, 7, 11, 17 – 20, 23, 27 – 29, 56, 60, 68, 70 – 83, 95 f., 98 f., 109 – 111, 113, 117, 124, 127, 131, 139, 143, 156, 160, 168, 179, 183, 186, 188 f. Philosophy 1 – 4, 6, 9 – 11, 17 – 20, 22 – 27, 29, 31, 33, 35 – 37, 41 f., 52, 56 f., 59, 67, 71, 73, 75 – 77, 83, 88, 96, 99, 107, 109, 119, 127 f., 130 – 132, 137, 140 f., 143 f., 146 – 148, 155, 158 – 161, 166 f., 169, 172, 175, 178 f., 185 f., 188 – 190 Piety 17, 162 Planetary 135 Poetry 1, 4 – 6, 19 f., 83, 92, 166 – 168, 171, 183 Polarity 55, 63 f., 84, 87 f., 92, 104, 109, 117 f., 152 – 154, 164, 186, 189, 191 Polar Tension 87 Politics 13, 24 f., 67, 119, 141 Postmodernism 1 f., 6, 13, 26, 43, 47, 54, 137, 144, 146, 149, 164, 171 f., 179 – 181, 187 f. Pragmatism 22, 79, 148, 166, 168 – 171 Pre-conceptual 95 Pre-ontological 3, 74, 78, 80, 108 Presence 10, 37, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 58, 61, 63, 65 f., 68, 80, 83, 100 f., 108, 110, 117, 125, 133, 138, 155, 162, 167, 174 f., 180, 182, 184, 187, 190 Presence-to-hand 106 Present-at-hand 74, 81, 100 f. Proof texts 5, 10, 38, 53, 60 – 65 Readiness-to-hand 74 Ready-to-hand 101, 108 Reason 25, 29, 32, 55, 59, 71, 100 – 102, 104 – 106, 119, 125, 130, 143 f., 148 f., 155, 163, 172, 176 – 178, 183

Subject Index

Reciprocity 41, 110, 121 Reflection 7, 23, 29, 38, 57, 73 f., 77, 79 f., 86, 116, 128, 131, 139 f., 145, 158, 162, 172, 176, 182 f., 187, 190 Requiredness 65, 84, 118, 139 Response 3, 18, 27, 29, 40 f., 61, 64 f., 77, 85, 87, 94, 102, 108, 120 f., 134, 139, 160, 179 f., 185 f. Resurrection 30, 54, 181, 183, 185, 187 Revelation 2, 17 – 21, 27 – 31, 33 f., 40 f., 52 – 54, 61, 71, 78, 87, 109, 117, 133, 141, 144 f., 152 f., 155, 157, 162, 164, 167, 174, 180 f., 185 f. Rhetoric 4, 18 f., 60, 66, 156, 178 Schema 105, 115, 124, 129, 135 Self 5, 11, 18, 20, 23, 26, 43, 46 – 48, 53, 57 f., 61 f., 64 – 66, 72 – 74, 76 f., 79 f., 83 f., 87, 92, 94 f., 98, 100, 102 – 106, 108 – 113, 116, 127 – 129, 133 – 136, 142, 144, 147 f., 154, 162, 164 f., 173 – 178, 180, 182 – 186, 188 Sheer Being 10, 18 f., 45, 48, 80, 89 – 91, 117, 122, 133 Shoah 22, 24 – 27, 42, 50, 57, 61 Silence 3, 7, 11, 21 – 23, 26, 50, 123, 127, 131, 151, 170, 189 Singular 109, 114, 117, 127, 139, 143, 150, 160, 164, 166, 175, 181, 186, 189 Situational Thinking 72, 122 Spirit 12, 19, 33, 56 f., 63, 113, 119, 130, 149 – 153 Standpoint 51, 70, 72, 96, 118 Subjectivity 70, 96, 112, 125, 129, 147, 150, 177, 181, 185 Sublime, the 20, 60, 76 – 78, 108 f., 112, 117, 159 f., 165, 186 Submission 5, 90, 92, 106, 109, 115, 131 Submissive 90, 101, 108 Surrender 10, 27, 49, 90 – 92, 117, 154, 169, 186 f. Symbolism 75, 103, 155 f., 175, 186 f. Technology 13, 29, 58, 131 f., 135 – 137, 148, 170, 190 Temporal Idealism 23

205

Temporality 88, 106, 113, 115, 137, 156, 159 Terror 136 Text 5 f., 10 f., 13 – 15, 19, 25, 28, 31 – 33, 37 – 40, 42 f., 46, 51, 53 f., 56, 60 – 66, 68, 89, 100, 109, 122 f., 152, 154, 179 f. Theology 12, 15 – 20, 23, 27, 39, 41, 62, 72, 83, 99, 109, 120, 174, 181, 183, 185 Thrownness 5 f., 28, 45, 83, 88 f., 106, 114, 116, 126, 156, 182 f. Tool 18, 75, 78, 124 Tradition 3, 5, 9, 12, 14 f., 17 f., 23, 25 f., 28, 31 f., 38 – 44, 46, 50 – 55, 58, 60 – 63, 66, 68, 87, 96, 98 f., 101, 107, 117, 119, 123, 132, 140 f., 143 – 147, 153 f., 157 f., 166 f., 179 – 181, 183, 187 – 189 Transcendence 5, 9, 16 f., 28, 45 – 47, 61 – 63, 71, 82, 86 – 88, 90, 93, 95, 101 f., 104, 106 – 110, 113, 117 f., 123 f., 130, 133, 142, 165, 178, 189 Transcendental Subjectivity 71 Transcendent Meaning 11, 95, 108 – 110 Turning (Kehre), the 40, 63, 83, 96, 113, 120, 143, 156 f. Uniqueness 24, 116 f., 127 Utilitarian 60, 78, 124, 131, 180, 186 Utility 75 – 77, 160 Value 19, 45, 78, 89, 93, 108, 110, 125, 127, 159, 163, 185, 188 Veleugnung 156 Verifiability 182 Verification 71, 169, 186 Vermeiden 150 What is man 16, 33 – 35, 37 f., 47, 55, 57, 59, 81, 150 Who is man 1 f., 5 f., 9 – 16, 18 – 21, 23, 26 – 29, 31 – 45, 47 f., 50 – 62, 68, 70 – 72, 77 – 82, 84, 86 – 92, 94 – 103, 106 – 110, 116 – 118, 121, 123, 126 f., 133, 137 f., 142 – 144, 154, 156, 161 f., 168, 171 – 173, 175, 178, 180, 182 f., 187 f., 191