Rabbi Joseph
B. Soloveitchik’s Early Epistemology
In 1941, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik succeeded his late father as professor of Talmud at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. In 1944, he published the now famous essay Ish Ha-Halakhah,1Published in Talpiot 1:3–4, New York, 1944. an epic phenomenological study of the halakhic personality. From then on, for twenty years, almost nothing appeared until “Confrontation”2Published in Tradition 6:2, (Summer 1964), 5–28. – which argued the impossibility of theological interfaith dialogue – laid the ground for “The Lonely Man of Faith”3Published in Tradition 7:2, (Summer 1965), 5–67. a year later. This article, at one level an analysis of the perennial conflicts of the homo religiosus, at another a prescient critique of what has subsequently come to be known as “civil religion,”4See Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State, University of California Press, 1983; Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews, Indiana University Press, 1986. The description given by Woocher of American Civil Judaism exactly mirrors the religion of majestic man described in the last twelve pages of “The Lonely Man of Faith.” firmly established Rabbi Soloveitchik as the outstanding Orthodox philosopher of the age.
To the initiated, however, he had held that position long before. Already by 1963 he was included as one of the three Americans in Simon Noveck’s collection of Great Jewish Thinkers of the Twentieth Century5Simon Noveck (ed.), Great Jewish Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, B’nai B’rith, 1963, 281–297. and Aharon Lichtenstein’s essay in that volume did much to project his thought to a wider audience. Those who were familiar with his philosophical positions at that stage knew them as Torah shebe’al peh, through the spoken medium of lectures, derashot and shiurim. Lichtenstein explained that this was not to be taken as a distaste for the act of writing, but rather as a perfectionist’s reluctance to publish. “The fact is, that although R. Soloveitchik has published very little, he has written a great deal.”6Ibid., 287. Eugene Borowitz wrote that “I have been present when he has lectured by utilizing a portion of a sizable manuscript, but no book by him has appeared.”7Eugene Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, New York: Behrman House, 1983, 222. There was an air of mystery about this submerged iceberg of the unpublished corpus, added to by such tantalising hints, thrown out by Soloveitchik himself, as “The role of the multi-valued logic in Halakhah will be discussed by me, God willing, in a forthcoming paper.”8“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 51. This has now been at least somewhat dispelled by the publication of The Halakhic Mind.9Published by Seth Press, distributed by The Free Press, 1986.
This, the author notes, “was written in 1944 and is being published for the first time, without any revisions or additions.” It is a remarkable work, different in kind from his other writings: a sustained exposition of epistemology and the philosophy of science, quite devoid of the dialectical tension, rhapsodic prose,10“[Halakhic man’s] affective life is characterized by a fine equilibrium, a stoic tranquility” (Halakhic Man, translated by Lawrence Kaplan, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983, 77). One of the more interesting things about Halakhic Man, with its passionate rhetoric, is that it could not have been written by halakhic man. anecdotal digression and exegetical innovation that so animate the rest of his oeuvre. The most technical of his writings to appear thus far, it displays a yet more awesome command of the philosophical literature than that which astounded readers of Ish Ha-Halakhah. Most interesting, perhaps, is the reference in the footnote11Note 98, 130. to the essay U-vikashetem Mi-Sham, first published in 1978,12First published in Ha-Darom 47 (Tishri 5739), 1–83; subsequently in Ish ha-Halakhah – Galui ve-Nistar, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1979, 115–235. The section on shinui and chiddush to which Soloveitchik alludes in The Halakhic Mind is to be found in the latter, pages 204–207. which contains some of Soloveitchik’s most profound theological reflections. It is now clear that a draft of this essay existed in the early forties,13Aviezer Ravitsky notes that an early version of U-vikashtem Misham, under the title of Ish ha-Elokim, was “already written in the years following the appearance of [Ish ha-Halakhah].” Aviezer Ravitzky, “Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge: Between Maimonidean and neo-Kantian Philosophy,” Modern Judaism 6:2 (May 1986), 157–188, note 17. The present version was clearly written later, and is perhaps a reworking of several papers. and thus a much more complete picture of those years is beginning to emerge.
Epistemological Foundations
The long period between 1944 and 1964 during which no major writings of Soloveitchik were published led to a conception of his thought, based solely on Ish Ha-Halakhah, which had to be radically revised on the appearance of “The Lonely Man of Faith.” Here, and even more so in the essays published thirteen years later in Tradition,14“The Community,” Majesty and Humility,” “Catharsis,” “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah,” “A Tribute to the Rebbitzen of Talne,” Tradition 17:2 (Spring 1978), 1–83. was an existentialism of divided selfhood and ceaseless conflict. The man of faith, wrote Soloveitchik, was condemned to move between the “majestic” and “covenantal” communities, “commanded to move on before he manages to strike roots in either,” an eternally wandering Aramean.15“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 55. Or as he was subsequently to write, yet more dramatically, “Man is a dialectical being; an inner schism runs through his personality at every level.… Judaic dialectic, unlike the Hegelian, is irreconcilable and hence interminable. Judaism accepted a dialectic, consisting only of thesis and antithesis. The third Hegelian stage, that of reconciliation, is missing.”16“Majesty and Humility,” 25.
This was not what readers of Ish Ha-Halakhah had expected. As Eugene Borowitz notes in reference to the earlier essay, “Most readers thought that Rabbi Soloveitchik had restated the mitnagdic, anti-Chassidic, tradition of Eastern Europe and wanted intellect, as utilized in halakhic reasoning and living, to be the central feature of modern Jewish life. When his later papers…it became clear that the early impression was wrong. While an overarching intellectuality is manifest in these later publications, they are concerned with facing the conflicted human situation depicted by modern existentialism, not arguing for a latter-day rationalism.”17Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, 223.
The discrepancies perplexed a number of commentators.18In addition to the articles cited below, see David Hartman, A Living Covenant, The Free Press, 1985, 60–88. In his early writings, Hartman argues, Soloveitchik was “struggling to present halakhic man as an attractive model for Orthodox Judaism in the modern era.” In his later writings he “senses that if there were a total translation of the halakhic experience into Western rational categories, commitment to halakhah would be weakened” (84–85). For much of the rest of the book, Hartman takes issue with the turn in Soloveitchik’s thought. Was the life of faith consummated in a serene equilibrium, or destined to remain torn and divided? Was the man of faith essentially creative (Halakhic Man) or submissive (the Lonely Man of Faith)? Was there, or was there not, a higher synthesis between the messages of creation and revelation? Some suggested that in Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik was drawing an ideal type while in the “Lonely Man” he was projecting his personal spiritual dilemmas.19David Singer and Moshe Sokol, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” Modern Judaism 2:3 (October 1982), 227–272. Others argued that Halakhic Man was only the first typological stage in the religious life, and that his full development was closer to the Lonely Man of Faith.20Lawrence Kaplan, “The Religious Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik,” Tradition 14:2 (Fall 1973), 43–64, on the basis of the essay “Al Ahavat ha-Torah u-Geulat Nefesh ha-Dor.” A third possibility was that the differences could be traced to the languages in which the various essays were published and the audiences to which they were addressed. In his English essays, Soloveitchik warned of the dangers implicit in secular culture and argued that it must be counterbalanced by a different set of values. In his Hebrew essays, speaking to members of the halakhic community, he could afford to be less critical and more harmonising.21Lawrence Kaplan, “Degamin shel ha-Adam ha-Dati ha-Idiah be-Hagut ha-Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik,” Mechkerei Yerushalayim be-Machshevet Yisrael, 4:3–4 (1985), 327–339.
Nor did these exhaust the possibilities. A recent study suggests that the difference lies between the religious personality as a general phenomenon – man as such, facing God, the world and his fellow man – and the halakhic personality as a specifically Jewish mode of resolving the tensions of the former.22Aviezer Ravitsky, loc. cit. Borowitz himself supplied the simplest solution. Soloveitchik had simply changed his mind: “We cannot now know if there have been major shifts in his thought over these four decades or whether the progress of his thought has come about by slow evolution.”23Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, 223.
The hermeneutic problem may remain. On this, I will say more below. But the publication of The Halakhic Mind allows us to see a full outline of the early philosophical structure. Aviezer Ravitsky has pointed out that Halakhic Man and U-vikashtem Mi-sham are complementary studies.24Aviezer Ravitsky, loc. cit., pp. 159–160. The former is an analytical treatment of the halakhic personality, splitting it into its component parts (cognitive man and homo religiosus). The latter is a synthetic treatment of the same personality, moving in Hegelian dialectic through freedom (active speculation and the search for religious experience) and submission (to the revealed Divine command) to the ultimate union of the Divine and human will. Halakhic Man describes human types; U-vikashtem Mi-sham describes cognitive stages.
The programme of The Halakhic Mind is essentially prior to both these enterprises. In it, Soloveitchik sets out his claim for the cognitive status of religion, for the methodological autonomy of the philosophy of religion, and for the primacy of halakhah as the basic datum on which a philosophy of Judaism should be based. This looks very much like the epistemological prologue to the two other works. And if U-vikashtem Mi-sham was indeed extant at least in outline at the time, it would seem that by 1944 Soloveitchik had already formulated an impressively complete philosophical system along three disciplinary axes: methodology, analysis and synthesis.
Cognitive Pluralism
The central argument of The Halakhic Mind is that religion constitutes an autonomous cognitive domain. Soloveitchik has no taste for apologetics, for the justification of religion in terms drawn from outside itself. He notes “the passionate desire of every philosopher of religion to legitimate the cognitive validity and truthfulness of religious propositions. Yet the problem of evidence in religion will never be solved. The believer does not miss philosophic legitimation; the skeptic will never be satisfied with any cognitive demonstration.”25The Halakhic Mind, 118, note 58.
In the past, rationalisation had distorted the presentation of Judaism. Soloveitchik singles out for criticism – in terms highly reminiscent of Samson Raphael Hirsch26Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters, translated by J. Breuer and B. Drachman, New York: Feldheim, 1960, 117–132. and Abraham Isaac Kook27R. Abraham Isaac Ha-Cohen Kook, Talelei Orot, translated in Ben Zion Bokser, Abraham Isaac Kook, London: SPCK, 1979, 303–305. – Maimonides’ treatment, in Guide for the Perplexed, of the reasons of the commandments. “In rationalising the commandments genetically, Maimonides developed a religious ‘instrumentalism.’
Causality reverted to teleology…and Jewish religion was converted into technical wisdom.”28The Halakhic Mind, 91–99. He had subjected them to interpretation in terms foreign to themselves. He had sought the “why” instead of the “what,” a failing he avoided in the Mishneh Torah.29Soloveitchik offers here a fascinating analysis of Maimonides’ use of the term remez (M.T. Teshuvah 3:4; Mikvaot 11:12) as signifying “descriptive hermeneutics.”
The avoidance of rationalisation does not mean the suspension of the rational. Soloveitchik is equally critical of religious irrationalism of the credo quia absurdum est kind, and of mysticism and subjectivity, of which he accuses much of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy. What, then, is the alternative? Normally there would be none. But the starting point of the book is that the twentieth century has opened up a gap between science and philosophy, and in the void thus created there is room – perhaps for the first time – for a fully autonomous religious epistemology.
The first and last sentences of The Halakhic Mind define the challenge: “It would be difficult to distinguish any epoch in the history of philosophy more amenable to the mediating homo religiosus than that of today.… Out of the sources of Halakhah, a new world view awaits formulation.”30The Halakhic Mind, 3, 102. The argument between is devoted to two questions: How has this happened? And what would be the shape of a religious philosophy that took advantage of it?
The answer to the first is that traditionally, philosophy and science have been allies. The result was that “the only realm of reality to which the philosopher had access was…the scientifically charted universe.”31Ibid., 6. This placed religion on the defensive, having either to conform to scientific criteria of knowledge (rationalisation) or be driven into escapist postures (agnosticism, mysticism). However, the Galilean-Newtonian physics on which philosophy from Descartes to the neo-Kantians is premissed, has been supplanted by the counter-intuitive phenomena of modern science: relativity, quantum mechanics and non-Euclidian geometry. This posed a crisis for philosophy which Bergsen was the first to diagnose. The result has been the emergence of epistemological pluralism.
It arose from the fact that concepts in the new sciences neither mirrored ordinary experience nor remained constant between disciplines. Thus “space” might mean one thing to the mathematician, another to the physicist, and a third in ordinary experience. Philosophy could not postulate a unified conceptual world and at the same time embrace modern science. But therein lies the great liberation, for “as long as general philosophy explored a quantitatively constructed universe, the philosophy of religion could not progress.”32Ibid., 32. Now there opens up an alternative to the scientific description of reality, namely one which focuses on the qualitative aspects of experience. This is where religious experience belongs, in the “concrete world full of color and sound.”33Ibid., 40
Soloveitchik insists that the “non-scientific” character of religion does not signify that it is non-cognitive. To the contrary: “The homo religiosus must regain his position in the cognitive realm.”34Ibid. Against several modern philosophies of religion, Soloveitchik argues that the believer is concerned not with the transcendental domain, but with the here-and-now viewed from a religious perspective; not with interpreting God in terms of the world but the world under the aspect of God. The task of a new philosophy of religion would be to uncover its distinctive conceptuality, probing what “time,” “space,” “causality” and so on mean within its world. Hence the conclusion of the first half of the argument, that for the first time in the history of thought religion can be presented autonomously, as a cognitive system independent of but parallel to science.
From Objective to Subjective
The question now arises: how should such a philosophy proceed? Soloveitchik proposes two criteria. The first is practical, or more strictly, ethical. “Epistemology would do well to cast aside such canonized concepts as objectivity and ethical neutrality and survey philosophical doctrines from a subjective, normative standpoint.”35Ibid., 52. Such considerations militate against irrationalism, subjectivism and mysticism for these lead in the end to moral corruption. “It is no mere coincidence that the most celebrated philosophers of the third Reich were outstanding disciples of Husserl.”36Ibid., 53.
The second is theoretical. The philosophy of religion should imitate the method of modern science, namely “reconstruction” or sensing the whole within the parts. “The structural designs of religion cannot be intuited through any sympathetic fusion with an eternal essence, but must be reconstructed out of objective religious data and central realities.”37Ibid., 62. Religion may proceed, like art, from subjective experience to objectified forms, but it must be explored in the reverse direction. One may try to gain an insight into the inner world of the artist by examining his works, but the reverse is impossible: from a precise description of his inner state one could not infer the art he will produce. So too in religion. The subjective can only be reconstructed from the objective, the actual forms in which it is concretised in specific traditions. Of these forms, the “cult” is to be preferred to the “ethos” as being more indicative of the unique character of a particular religion.
Soloveitchik thus has a series of objections against religious subjectivism which he summarises as follows. First, it fails to satisfy homo religiosus, who seeks more than inward experience. He wants ethical guidance and a religious community. Second, subjective religion has no defences against barbarism, to which it frequently descends. Third, it renders religion esoteric and non- democratic. “Aristocracy in the religious realm is identical with the decadence of religion.”38Ibid., 80. Religious liberalism errs by proceeding in the wrong direction, from subjectivity to objectivity. But in reality there is no pristine religious subjectivity: “If one seeks primordial subjectivity he would find an evanescent flux, neither religious nor mundane, but, similar to Aristotelian matter, unregulated and chaotic.”39Ibid., 90.
The only valid procedure is to travel inwards from the objectified forms of religion, beginning with the received text of revelation. “The canonized Scripture serves as the most reliable standard of reference for objectivity.”40Ibid., 81. The halakhic tradition is perfectly suited to this role. “Objectification reaches its highest expression in the Halakhah. Halakhah is the act of seizing the subjective flow and converting it into enduring and tangible magnitudes.… In short, Halakhah is the objectifying instrument of our religious consciousness, the form-principle of the transcendental act, the matrix in which the amorphous religious hylo is cast.”41Ibid., 85.
The Halakhic Mind ends by dissociating itself from medieval Jewish philosophy. Firstly, it had never succeeded in shaping the experience of the majority of the Jewish community. Secondly, it is rooted in non-indigenous sources, ancient Greek and medieval Arabic. Thirdly, it cannot meet the requirement of living continuity, since its concepts are by now outmoded. An autonomous Jewish philosophy is now possible and necessary, and it can only be constructed on the basis of halakhah.
Halakhic Mind and Halakhic Man
Such, then, is the argument of the book. What impressions does it leave? First, it is obviously close in spirit to the work undertaken in Ish Ha-Halakhah. The two books share an admiration for modern mathematics and theoretical physics as cognitive paradigms, and seek to establish their kinship with a philosophy based on halakhah. There are differences. The homo religiosus of The Halakhic Mind is not that of Ish Ha-Halakhah, but this is a matter of terminology rather than substance. The project of the two books is altogether different. Ish Ha-Halakhah describes halakhic man from the inside, The Halakhic Mind establishes the philosophical significance of such a description. It belongs, in other words, to the world of the footnotes of the early part of Ish Ha-Halakhah and constitutes a kind of systematic introduction to it. The two books differ in style and tone too. The Halakhic Mind is a sober philosophical work, and the persuasive, evocative style of Ish Ha-Halakhah would have been irrelevant to its purpose. But the setting is the same in both cases: a sense that romantic religion and philosophical subjectivism have failed, and that the need is for a presentation of religion as a form of cognitive, disciplined perception.
Second, The Halakhic Mind is not a prologue to Ish Ha-Halakhah alone but to an entire programme, a new kind of Jewish philosophy. This would undertake to gather the entire corpus of objectified Jewish spirituality – biblical text, halakhic literature, liturgy, mysticism and so on – and seek its subjective correlative. “Out of this enormous mass of objectified constructs, the underlying subjective aspects could gradually be reconstructed.”42Ibid., 91. In the light of this, both early works, together with U-vikashtem Mi-sham, are merely introductory. A good example of the detailed work one would expect, having read The Halakhic Mind, would be the lectures gathered in Al Ha-Teshuvah, where a particular body of halakhah is treated to “subjective reconstruction.” There is thus every reason to suppose that Soloveitchik has been faithful to the call he issued in those early years, and that his “philosophy” is to be found as much in his analysis of texts as in his more overtly philosophical statements.
Third, there is a surprising but unmistakable echo of Samson Raphael Hirsch in the book’s closing pages. There is the same attack on Maimonides and others (Mendelssohn for Hirsch, Hermann Cohen for Soloveitchik) for interpreting Judaism through non-Jewish concepts. There is the same call “to know Judaism out of itself.”43Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters, 127. Hirsch writes that “the Bible…should be studied as the foundation of a new science. Nature should be contemplated with the spirit of David.”44Ibid. For “Bible” read “halakhah” and we have the programme of The Halakhic Mind. Soloveitchik’s critique of religious liberalism is mounted on the same foundation as Hirsch’s critique of the Science of Judaism,45Samson Raphael Hirsch, Judaism Eternal, translated by I. Grunfeld, London: Soncino, 1959, vol. 2, 285–286. namely that any philosophical study of Judaism must live in the details of the text and command and be built bit by bit through an extended effort of exegesis.
Indeed, even the weaknesses of The Halakhic Mind mirror those of Hirsch. There is the same equivocation between a penetrating methodological critique of reform and a quite disparate ethical denunciation. Both see humanism as prone to corruption, religious liberalism as arbitrary; both attack the elitism of rarified theologies. Though the temperaments of the two men could not be more different, they share the same movement from emancipation to self-emancipation. The epistemological pluralism with which The Halakhic Mind begins is a kind of metaphysical equivalent to the social processes experienced by Hirsch in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. Both create space for Judaism to be itself.
Fourth, inevitably, the book has a somewhat dated feel about it. For those raised in the atmosphere of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, philosophical pluralism is not the Copernican revolution it may have seemed forty years ago. Nor is science, after T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the pristine paradigm of knowledge it once was. Indeed, the “scientific” outlook – cognition, control, creation – came to seem, to Soloveitchik of “The Lonely Man of Faith,” a more threatening force than the subjective religiosity he attacked in The Halakhic Mind and Ish Ha-Halakhah. Had Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) been available two decades earlier, one of the central arguments of The Halakhic Mind (the opposition between physics and modern humanistic sciences46The Halakhic Mind, 30–36.) might not have been necessary. None of this is to say that Soloveitchik’s case has been rendered obsolete. To the contrary, it has been reinforced to the point where it may have been rendered redundant. But the book will remain invaluable as his most explicit methodological statement, his point of departure, the external justification he gave for his long journey inward to a disciplined Jewish subjectivity.
Liberation and Privation
The Halakhic Mind is a deeply impressive work, furnishing new evidence of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s unrivalled mastery of secular sources and disclosing a tone of voice we had not heard before, the Dr. Soloveitchik of Berlin rather than the Rav of Yeshiva University. It will raise two questions: Does it succeed in its own terms,47For some other questions, see Steven S Schwarzschild’s review of The Halakhic Mind, 1986, 127–128. in providing a philosophical justification for the cognitive autonomy of religion? And, what light does it shed on Soloveitchik’s other works and his intellectual development? Both are beyond the scope of this review and the competence of this reviewer. Some tentative speculations, though, seem inescapable.
First, Soloveitchik insists at critical stages of the argument that the pluralism he is endorsing is nonetheless a form of realism. It corresponds to something real in the world. It is not pragmatism. It does not deny the absolute character of Being. “Teleological heterogeneity…does not invalidate the cognitive act, for, in the final analysis pluralism is founded on reality itself.… Pluralism asserts only that the object reveals itself in manifold ways to the subject, and that a certain telos corresponds to each of these ontological manifestations.”48The Halakhic Mind, 16.
Yet the very force of the argument suggests that reality can be sliced up and interpreted in infinitely many ways. And if reality corresponds to each of them, is it significant to say that it corresponds to any? This is the conclusion reached by Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), a work which in many ways parallels The Halakhic Mind. Rorty’s remarks on the implications of twentieth-century philosophy are directly relevant and challenging. “It would make for philosophical clarity if we just gave the notion of ‘cognition’ to predictive science, and stopped worrying about ‘alternative cognitive methods.’ The word knowledge would not seem worth fighting over were it not for the Kantian tradition that to be a philosopher is to have a ‘theory of knowledge.’”49Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, 356.
Closely related to this is Soloveitchik’s demonstration that religion is indeed cognitive, namely that its mental acts are intentional or “coordinated with an object.” He alludes, in footnotes, to the problematic nature of the demonstration. Brentano denied that intentional acts were cognitive; Scheler disagreed; Soloveitchik declares his indebtedness to Scheler.50The Halakhic Mind, 41–44, 116 (note 50), 120 (note 62). But this spreads the net of cognition very wide indeed – to all mental acts – and would not justify the conclusion he wants to reach, namely, that some forms of religion are more cognitive than others, halakhic Judaism most of all.
This relates to another ambivalence, here as elsewhere in Soloveitchik’s work, between the universal and the particular. Is The Halakhic Mind about religion or about Judaism? Is the homo religiosus portrayed in its pages, religious man tout court, or the Jew? He is “an enthusiastic practitioner of the cognitive act,” he is a “social being,” he seeks ethical guidance and wants to change the world rather than accept it. In short, he has a predisposition to welcome halakhic Judaism. Soloveitchik seeks to demonstrate the autonomy of religion as cognition, and then to establish Judaism as the supreme example. But he has provided an argument for the autonomy and incommensurability of religions in the plural, so that the success of the first part of the argument must ipso facto weaken the second. He testifies to this at one stage by saying that sometimes one must choose one’s philosophy “from a subjective, normative viewpoint.”51Ibid., 52. There is a straight road from The Halakhic Mind to the argument in “Confrontation” that there is no ultimate dialogue between religions since “the numinous character and the strangeness of the act of faith of a particular community…is totally incomprehensible to the man of a different faith community.”52“Confrontation,” 23–24.
These are all symptoms of the dual direction of Soloveitchik’s thought, projecting the autonomy and cognitive integrity of the halakhic system on the one hand, arguing its supremacy over other systems on the other. The former embraces pluralism, the latter rejects it. Which brings us back to our starting point: the relation between Soloveitchik’s early work and his later, more pessimistic and conflicted essays.
The transition from nineteenth-century liberalism to twentieth-century pluralism – both terms construed in their widest sense – seemed to promise much to religious orthodoxy. Instead of having to justify itself at the bar of an enlightenment universal religion or ethic, it could declare independence without forfeiting rationality. Did not the multiplicity of models of knowledge, of which mathematics and science provided ample examples, show that even within the “hard” disciplines there was methodological pluralism? The life of faith too had to be understood on its own terms, in its own concepts, rather than be subjected to the disciplines of science, history, anthropology and psychology. This was liberation indeed, and The Halakhic Mind bespeaks the mood.
But the pluralism of knowledge was mirrored in society. It had correlatives in the real world. The single universe of pre-modernity – the universe inhabited by Maimonides, in which the God of Abraham and of Aristotle were indeed one; the universe in which science, philosophy and religion competed in a single arena; the universe whose last Jewish inhabitant was Rav Abraham Isaac Kook – was shattered. In its place were not merely pluralities of thought-worlds, but of identities, roles and lifestyles as well. Consider the markers of modernity invoked by one major sociological study: “plurality of life-worlds,” “dichotomy of public and private spheres” and “multi-relational synchronization.” Personal identity is “peculiarly open, differentiated, reflective, individuated.” Modern man is afflicted with a “permanent identity crisis,” and suffers “from a deepening condition of ‘homelessness.’”53P.L. Berger, B. Berger and H. Kellner, The Homeless Mind, London: Penguin Books, 1973, 62–77. This world is instantly recognisable. It is the world of “The Lonely Man of Faith.”
Soloveitchik makes an important point at the beginning and end of The Halakhic Mind. Judaism is timeless and autonomous. But how much of it can be expressed in the language of the world depends on where the world is at a given point of time. The pluralism of contemporary culture, which he was the first to recognise, was both a liberation and a privation. It liberated tradition from having to vindicate itself in alien terms. But it prised tradition from its moorings in the collective order and made it seem as just one system among many, either consciously chosen (the ba’al teshuvah phenomenon) or validated by an act of faith which is “aboriginal, exploding with elemental force”54“The Lonely Man of Faith,” 60. and eluding cognitive analysis. Soloveitchik’s genius and the poignancy of his intellectual development are both evidenced in this: that he was the first to explore the positive possibilities of the liberation, and the first to chart the tragic dimension of the privation.