PUTNAM ON METAPHYSICS, RELIGION, AND ETHICS:CRITICAL NOTICE OF JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AS A GUIDETO LIFE: ROSENZWEIG, BUBER, LEVINAS, WITTGENSTEINphil_337 425..434

MARK ZELCER

For what can be more characteristic of a Jewish thinker than to use the Jewish experience as aconduit to universality?—Rebecca Goldstein1

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1991, perhaps somewhat prophetically, before Hilary Putnam publishedanything about Jewish topics, Kenneth Seeskin recommended looking to Put-nam’s writing for insight into how Jews (yes, qua Jews) practice Jewish philoso-phy.2 Putnam tells us though that up until the past few years he saw nothingparticularly Jewish about his philosophy and it is only recently that he has startedto see the philosophical side of his life in relation to the Jewish side (4);3 but hedoes not see himself as a “Jewish philosopher”. In his most recent book, JewishPhilosophy as a Guide to Life (henceforth JPGL), Putnam now claims to joinhis philosophical side with his life as a practicing Jew.4 Ostensibly the book isa brief discussion of a theme addressed by three modern Jewish philosophers:Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. What follows is an

1 Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity (New York:Schocken Books, 2006) 178.

2 Kenneth Seeskin, “Jewish Philosophy in the 1980’s,” Modern Judaism 11 (1991): 168.3 References in the text are all to Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig,

Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington, IN, Indiana UP, 2008) [henceforth JPGL]. Note also thatthe first chapter on Rosenzweig is essentially the same as his “Introduction” to Rosenzweig’sUnderstanding the Sick and the Healthy: A view of World, Man, and God (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUP, 1999). The chapter on Levinas is essentially the same as the entry on “Levinas and Judaism” inthe Cambridge Companion to Levinas (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002).

4 Putnam repeatedly characterizes himself as a practicing Jew. See his introduction to JPGL,“Thoughts Addressed to an Analytical Thomist” The Monist 80:4 (1997a): 487, and “God and thePhilosophers” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXI (1997b): 175.

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explication of that theme woven together with other aspects of Putnam’s thinking,specifically his ethics. We also pick up some questions that Putnam leaves out-standing and ultimately elaborate on what he must mean in taking Jewish phi-losophy as a guide to life.

II. WITTGENSTEIN

Putnam understands the three Jewish philosophers he discusses as havingone view in common with Wittgenstein’s5 philosophy of religion (6). ThoughWittgenstein’s ideas on the philosophy of religion are known to us only via afew second-handnotes of lectures and conversations6 they have had a dispropor-tionate influence on the philosophy of religion,7 and Putnam is arguably the mostprominent thinker to explore them.8

To understand Wittgenstein’s approach consider first a rather traditional philo-sophical stance toward religious discourse that goes something like the following:Religious statements often appear to take stands on historical or ontologicalmatters. We would ordinarily suppose that a historical or ontological fact-of-the-matter under dispute is true if and only if it corresponds to the way things are, andfalse otherwise. If one were nonetheless to believe the false or dubious statements,she does so non-rationally or irrationally; perhaps she believes on faith. There isconsiderable reason to believe that many ethical, historical, and ontological claimsmade by religions are false and can be easily shown to be highly implausible(consider, say, that the Bible endorses genocide as sometimes justified, claims thatthose on the ark with Noah were the only living creatures at one time or that the

5 Putnam treats Wittgenstein as “1/4” of a Jewish philosopher, mostly because Wittgenstein neverwrote about Judaism philosophically and was only partially Jewish by descent.

6 We have fewer than 30 printed pages of notes that have been collected as “Remarks on Frazers’Golden Bough” (Reprinted in Michael Lambek, A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion [NewYork: Blackwell, 2008]) and “Lectures on Religious Belief ” (in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures andConversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett [Berkeley, CA: U ofCalifornia P] 53–72).

7 Wittgenstein’s impact on the philosophy of religion was initially discussed in terms of what waslabeled “Wittgensteinian Fideism.” More recently it can be seen in discussions in introductory andadvanced works in the philosophy of religion. See, for example, Richard Messer’s Does God’sExistence Need Proof? (New York: Oxford UP, 1993); Michael Peterson, William Hasker, BruceReichenbach, and David Basinger’s Reason and Religious belief: An introduction to the philosophyof religion (New York: Oxford, 2003); and Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Religion, ed. RobertL. Arrington and Mark Addis (New York: Routledge, 2001). Some of these works deal with theLectures and Conversations, while others explore the concept of religious discourse as a type ofWittgenstinian language game. Norman Malcolm’s Wittgenstein: A religious Point of View? (Ithaca,NY: Cornell UP, 1993) is a general discussion of Wittgenstein’s view of religion.

8 See his Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), ch. 7 and (2008) ch 1.

MARK ZELCER

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