I grew up in a modern Orthodox household but when I was in high school I discovered (ironically through my Talmud teacher) Greek Philosophy, Descartes and the Enlightenment. I truly felt as if a light had shined in my mind, although I never could embrace the German philosophers & all that followed them. And while I soon lost faith in Rationalism as the Truth, I always defended the Enlightenment against its critics and the Haskalah as well. I also felt the Athenic way is superior, and I never could quite figure out where G-d fits into the life of an agnostic—of what use is G-d to us?
I won’t put all the blame on your writings—many years of experience since first reading Descartes, but especially the events of the past year and a half played a critical role in the evolution of my view of the world. But reading your essays helped give me new tools to understand & critique what I was seeing, particularly since I am so steeped in the Athenic. Meta-critique was exactly what I needed.
Now I fully agree with everything you wrote in this essay and I too am far more inclined to view the world through the eyes of our rich and sacred texts and traditions, and see the ultimate superiority of Jerusalem over Athens, while still appreciating the latter. And having freed myself of the domination Athens had over how I see the world, Hashem as we Jews call the divine, is easier to experience.
So please continue with your “unrefined” musings. You have nothing to apologize for. You are an important modern midrashic voice.
Armed with what I've learned here, I am better prepared to read again the earlier essays, like "The Villainy You Teach Me" and "Rise and Fall of the Whore of Babylon", with a better background than I had the first time.
"my skills limp beside those shaped by venerable institutions" Hardly, those institutions are no longer venerable and, looking at their recent outputs, not shaping many skills. It's work like these essays that should be in these institutions (although as a humble mathematics, science and engineering student, I would still not have encountered them. My loss).
I enjoy your writing.. !!! Its very rich i have seen you in interviews and enjoy hearing you speak as well. Few days ago I watched you on a Tikvah interview and listened intently to your insights into the Iranian regime particularly at end. It was frightening and disturbing as you spoke of the psychology of these people and how such destruction of their facilities could spur them on. Yet it had to be done.. you grapple with human thinking foibles contradictions evil hypocrisy yet look to a better more holistic way forward by embracing and living from the 3 traditions .. thank you.. keep writing.
I've been looking to start with Hamann for a while. When I was at university my tutor spoke very highly of him. Would you recommend beginning with the Isaiah Berlin book or just going straight for it? I consider myself to have a decent grasp of the philosophical background required.
Wow! Just wow! So much to ponder. I stayed glued to every word, every line, every paragraph and found myself constantly nodding in agreement. I look forward to this journey with you and your followers. There is much that rings true here and soars out over the cacophony like a tenor in a choir. Thank you.
A wonderful revival of the medieval intellectual commons of Muslims, Christians, and Jews drawing on the common language and in tension with the dominant humanism.
No worries! I think the issue was that you had to accounts registered using two different Gmail emails and one of thing is paid. I unlocked access to the other email anyways so no matter how you log in, you can read all content.
I stumbled into your parlour after you appeared in Café Americain this morning. I have the dubious honour of being the first person invited to write for Elena and Daniel... If I do not write there often, it's because I'm conflicted about writing for a space where reading is bountiful but discourse is impossible. As someone who fears the absence of discourse is precisely the problem tearing apart what passes for civilisation, this leaves me in a corner.
There is a great deal to love in this essay, and love it I do. As a fellow self-taught philosopher (I went to university to study astrophysics, was horrified at the intellectual stagnation I encountered there, and left for computer science, which at least had a pulse), I have great admiration for your skill in weaving together these different influences with panache and insight. I admire unfettered rambling, yet have recently chained myself recently to an odd form - 750 word reflections - because I write too fast and realised I was writing philosophy books faster than anyone could read them, which was worthless even if I had a readership, which I only barely do. I am still trying to find a better form, but I am enjoying my current philosophical experiment at Stranger Worlds.
From praise, to criticism. I must push back on two points. You accuse Kant of building the Enlightenment's Tower of Babel. I do not dispute that tower was built, but I would exonerate Kant from responsibility. Here, I am informed by Jacques Rancière's critique (you would likely hate his work, but still...), which unpicks two strands in the Enlightenment, one of which (the one which won out) was the Tower of Babel you reference. The other is Kant's project, which stands in ruins. I shall not condemn Kant's attempt, though, I admire it.
Some nitpicks to emphasise my point.
"we have forgotten how humanism, from Kant to Marx, forged its identity by conjuring a phantom Judaism as its adversary"
Kant was not a humanist but a Christian, and a devout one at that, for all that he saw Christianity rather differently from the people of his time (and of our own). It is true that the humanist traditions - including Marx - descend from Kant's work. But to accuse him of responsibility for that would be akin to blaming Abraham for Auschwitz.
"Kant scorned Jewish law as servitude to a master beyond man"
The first half is correct, the second misreads Kant. I am saddened by Kant's dismissive attitude to Jewish law in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, but it's clear at least why he takes this view and it's preposterous to suggest that Kant was trying to put man on a pedestal. Kant believed that the divine established the order that bankrolled reason's success, and therefore 'autonomy' to Kant was in itself submission to God. I know, I know, that sounds mad, but centuries of misreading Kant have created a false impression of his purposes and his faith.
I don't claim to have special insight here, just the banal claim that Kant remains one of the most misrepresented philosophers around (there are so many candidates for this accolade!) and nobody but Alasdair MacIntyre seems to have spotted how much of a good Lutheran he was. MacIntyre was presumably sensitive to this aspect of Kant's work since Kant was far more hostile to the Catholicism of his day than to Judaism, which he simply misunderstood (had he never spoken to Jews...? I wish I knew!). MacIntyre, as the arch defender of tradition, naturally puts Kant in his place. I am far more sympathetic to Kant. He would be devastated to see what became of his philosophy, but more than anything he would have wept if he had known it was going to draw people away from God.
Kantian autonomy is not 'self-rule' because for Kant (and for Kierkegaard, for that matter!) God is that from which the boundaries of the self take their meaning. Kantian autonomy is duty. I challenge you to find an existentialist after Kierkegaard who can muster any sense of duty, with the possible exception of novelist Michael Moorcock, who has been successfully erased from the literary canon coincidentally just as he himself realised he was Jewish.
"Marx, Nietzsche—turned it into an axe against tradition, 'philosophizing with a hammer,' including the Abrahamic itself"
Ah, Nietzsche, poor Friedrich's fate was the same as Kant's - to thrive and prosper in an inheritance that was a complete misunderstanding of his work! One difference, though, Nietzsche knew full well this was what was coming. But you misread him if you think that 'philosophizing with a hammer' meant mere iconoclasm for Nietzsche. He is talking about a tuning hammer, about sounding notes from the idols.
Honestly, his 'Death of God' anecdote and his declaration of himself as the antichrist(!) has convinced everyone that Nietzsche is the archenemy of religion. Why then, do the atheists refuse to read him...? Because Nietzsche disembowels every one of their idols, who are far more appalling to him than the religions, which to be fair, he also disdains.
My dear friend, and last living supporter of my philosophy within academic philosophy, Babette Babich, a Catholic and a Nietzsche scholar, has taught me so much about Nietzsche, Feyerabend, and many others who are neither read nor understood. I know writing this will not bring you closer to reading anything she has written, and so be it, but an Abrahamic metacritique that treats Nietzsche as anything like a villain might have missed out on a diamond in the rough, rendered suspect by yet more misunderstandings.
And maybe here is the nub of the matter. The misunderstandings. We're all guilty of it. I misunderstood that the Arab-Muslim worlds had missed out on their version of the Enlightenment. I understand now, for the first time, reading you that this is not the case. They got their own Tower of Babel down the dark path, and they got the well-lit but untrodden path too, with you, and others like you, who presumably must also be out there somewhere.
You have already cleared 9,000 subscribers on Substack, so you've passed well beyond the range of conversation, and thus this missive cannot be the start of a discourse between us, even assuming such a thing were possible. A great shame. I shall have to settle for reading you, blessing your mission, and forgiving your prideful accusations of pride against Kant, who warned that pride was the illusion of moral superiority long before you.
Your work is wonderous. I hope the seeds that you are planting will bloom in the coming Spring that lies far beyond our hopes and dreams.
The most important thing to do is to continue educating any unaware people about these major unprosecuted crimes like the 9/11/01 scam and anthrax "vaccine" scam on people including on myself and many others in the U.S. military, and how and why electronic voting machines have never been valid, as HBO pointed out in Hacking Democracy (2006) (1:21:58) https://old.bitchute.com/video/jsHTV8JdIlAt/
Additionally, people are either intelligent, respectful, and responsible enough to acknowledge reality, history, that fake man-made religion labels, books, symbols, and buildings were made by mankind, that Americans have a Republic not a Democracy scam, that there is no "left" or "right", or they're not. "Jimmie" Carter even pointed out that Americans were taken back over by an illegal oligarchy, aka a fake government and mainstream media that's comprised of unelected, "gaslighting" scam artist posers.
I only belatedly came to read this essay. Impressive, and challenging. I am self-taught, rambling and unsystematic, too old and mentally creaky to master complex and difficult ideas, but always ready to be “nudged beyond the worn ramparts of orthodoxy and convention.” Thank you for this
I was born into an atheist household, with a Jewish maternal grandmother, educated at a Christian school, became a medical researcher, married a Jew and brought up my children as Jews. I have long been sympathetic to Palestinians and critical of Israeli policies. Over the last few years I have become increasingly disturbed by the rise in anti-semitism in the west. Since October 7th 2023, it has pervaded all our major institutions and is now thoroughly normalised amongst our University educated elites. In the past year my son has married into a Muslim Arab family (refugees from Iraq), and I have spent time learning more about Islam and Muslims.
The alliance between the secular left in the west and many Muslims has alarmed and puzzled me. What can possibly unite such disparate groups?
Reading your article about the Enchantment of the Arab Mind has helped me understand this puzzle.
Reading this article has also helped me understand the limits of humanism and human reason.
Your work seems to be forming into a book. I sure hope that is your intention. There are enduringly important ideas behind these contemporary metacritiques.
I grew up in a modern Orthodox household but when I was in high school I discovered (ironically through my Talmud teacher) Greek Philosophy, Descartes and the Enlightenment. I truly felt as if a light had shined in my mind, although I never could embrace the German philosophers & all that followed them. And while I soon lost faith in Rationalism as the Truth, I always defended the Enlightenment against its critics and the Haskalah as well. I also felt the Athenic way is superior, and I never could quite figure out where G-d fits into the life of an agnostic—of what use is G-d to us?
I won’t put all the blame on your writings—many years of experience since first reading Descartes, but especially the events of the past year and a half played a critical role in the evolution of my view of the world. But reading your essays helped give me new tools to understand & critique what I was seeing, particularly since I am so steeped in the Athenic. Meta-critique was exactly what I needed.
Now I fully agree with everything you wrote in this essay and I too am far more inclined to view the world through the eyes of our rich and sacred texts and traditions, and see the ultimate superiority of Jerusalem over Athens, while still appreciating the latter. And having freed myself of the domination Athens had over how I see the world, Hashem as we Jews call the divine, is easier to experience.
So please continue with your “unrefined” musings. You have nothing to apologize for. You are an important modern midrashic voice.
Thank you for another outstanding essay!
Armed with what I've learned here, I am better prepared to read again the earlier essays, like "The Villainy You Teach Me" and "Rise and Fall of the Whore of Babylon", with a better background than I had the first time.
"my skills limp beside those shaped by venerable institutions" Hardly, those institutions are no longer venerable and, looking at their recent outputs, not shaping many skills. It's work like these essays that should be in these institutions (although as a humble mathematics, science and engineering student, I would still not have encountered them. My loss).
All the Best, Sir!
Just to say that I really appreciate what you are doing -- some of the most insightful writing around on so many important topics.
The zig zag medium is the message. Making crooked lines on the earth not stairways to heaven.
Unfortunately you’re much too brilliant to appeal to those whom needs to be appeal to .
I enjoy your writing.. !!! Its very rich i have seen you in interviews and enjoy hearing you speak as well. Few days ago I watched you on a Tikvah interview and listened intently to your insights into the Iranian regime particularly at end. It was frightening and disturbing as you spoke of the psychology of these people and how such destruction of their facilities could spur them on. Yet it had to be done.. you grapple with human thinking foibles contradictions evil hypocrisy yet look to a better more holistic way forward by embracing and living from the 3 traditions .. thank you.. keep writing.
I've been looking to start with Hamann for a while. When I was at university my tutor spoke very highly of him. Would you recommend beginning with the Isaiah Berlin book or just going straight for it? I consider myself to have a decent grasp of the philosophical background required.
I would very much recommend starting with,
James C. O’Flaherty's Johann Georg Hamann
Oswald Bayer's A Contemporary in Dissent
W.M. Alexander's Hamann Philosophy and Faith
Berlin can be added with them for a measure of liberal reading of Hamann.
A dense text that provides an in-depth study, delving deep into Hamann's cryptic and forbidding texts, is John R. Betz's After Enlightenment.
Thank you!
I was just thinking of Berlin. His essay on Hamann was my first exposure, as well to Hamann's forerunner, Vico.
Wow! Just wow! So much to ponder. I stayed glued to every word, every line, every paragraph and found myself constantly nodding in agreement. I look forward to this journey with you and your followers. There is much that rings true here and soars out over the cacophony like a tenor in a choir. Thank you.
A wonderful revival of the medieval intellectual commons of Muslims, Christians, and Jews drawing on the common language and in tension with the dominant humanism.
Sorry to be messaging you in a chat but I am not sure how else to reach you. I believe my subscription is paid but I can’t access as a subscriber
Hi Yvette,
No worries! I think the issue was that you had to accounts registered using two different Gmail emails and one of thing is paid. I unlocked access to the other email anyways so no matter how you log in, you can read all content.
Dear Hussein,
I stumbled into your parlour after you appeared in Café Americain this morning. I have the dubious honour of being the first person invited to write for Elena and Daniel... If I do not write there often, it's because I'm conflicted about writing for a space where reading is bountiful but discourse is impossible. As someone who fears the absence of discourse is precisely the problem tearing apart what passes for civilisation, this leaves me in a corner.
There is a great deal to love in this essay, and love it I do. As a fellow self-taught philosopher (I went to university to study astrophysics, was horrified at the intellectual stagnation I encountered there, and left for computer science, which at least had a pulse), I have great admiration for your skill in weaving together these different influences with panache and insight. I admire unfettered rambling, yet have recently chained myself recently to an odd form - 750 word reflections - because I write too fast and realised I was writing philosophy books faster than anyone could read them, which was worthless even if I had a readership, which I only barely do. I am still trying to find a better form, but I am enjoying my current philosophical experiment at Stranger Worlds.
From praise, to criticism. I must push back on two points. You accuse Kant of building the Enlightenment's Tower of Babel. I do not dispute that tower was built, but I would exonerate Kant from responsibility. Here, I am informed by Jacques Rancière's critique (you would likely hate his work, but still...), which unpicks two strands in the Enlightenment, one of which (the one which won out) was the Tower of Babel you reference. The other is Kant's project, which stands in ruins. I shall not condemn Kant's attempt, though, I admire it.
Some nitpicks to emphasise my point.
"we have forgotten how humanism, from Kant to Marx, forged its identity by conjuring a phantom Judaism as its adversary"
Kant was not a humanist but a Christian, and a devout one at that, for all that he saw Christianity rather differently from the people of his time (and of our own). It is true that the humanist traditions - including Marx - descend from Kant's work. But to accuse him of responsibility for that would be akin to blaming Abraham for Auschwitz.
"Kant scorned Jewish law as servitude to a master beyond man"
The first half is correct, the second misreads Kant. I am saddened by Kant's dismissive attitude to Jewish law in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, but it's clear at least why he takes this view and it's preposterous to suggest that Kant was trying to put man on a pedestal. Kant believed that the divine established the order that bankrolled reason's success, and therefore 'autonomy' to Kant was in itself submission to God. I know, I know, that sounds mad, but centuries of misreading Kant have created a false impression of his purposes and his faith.
I don't claim to have special insight here, just the banal claim that Kant remains one of the most misrepresented philosophers around (there are so many candidates for this accolade!) and nobody but Alasdair MacIntyre seems to have spotted how much of a good Lutheran he was. MacIntyre was presumably sensitive to this aspect of Kant's work since Kant was far more hostile to the Catholicism of his day than to Judaism, which he simply misunderstood (had he never spoken to Jews...? I wish I knew!). MacIntyre, as the arch defender of tradition, naturally puts Kant in his place. I am far more sympathetic to Kant. He would be devastated to see what became of his philosophy, but more than anything he would have wept if he had known it was going to draw people away from God.
Kantian autonomy is not 'self-rule' because for Kant (and for Kierkegaard, for that matter!) God is that from which the boundaries of the self take their meaning. Kantian autonomy is duty. I challenge you to find an existentialist after Kierkegaard who can muster any sense of duty, with the possible exception of novelist Michael Moorcock, who has been successfully erased from the literary canon coincidentally just as he himself realised he was Jewish.
"Marx, Nietzsche—turned it into an axe against tradition, 'philosophizing with a hammer,' including the Abrahamic itself"
Ah, Nietzsche, poor Friedrich's fate was the same as Kant's - to thrive and prosper in an inheritance that was a complete misunderstanding of his work! One difference, though, Nietzsche knew full well this was what was coming. But you misread him if you think that 'philosophizing with a hammer' meant mere iconoclasm for Nietzsche. He is talking about a tuning hammer, about sounding notes from the idols.
Honestly, his 'Death of God' anecdote and his declaration of himself as the antichrist(!) has convinced everyone that Nietzsche is the archenemy of religion. Why then, do the atheists refuse to read him...? Because Nietzsche disembowels every one of their idols, who are far more appalling to him than the religions, which to be fair, he also disdains.
My dear friend, and last living supporter of my philosophy within academic philosophy, Babette Babich, a Catholic and a Nietzsche scholar, has taught me so much about Nietzsche, Feyerabend, and many others who are neither read nor understood. I know writing this will not bring you closer to reading anything she has written, and so be it, but an Abrahamic metacritique that treats Nietzsche as anything like a villain might have missed out on a diamond in the rough, rendered suspect by yet more misunderstandings.
And maybe here is the nub of the matter. The misunderstandings. We're all guilty of it. I misunderstood that the Arab-Muslim worlds had missed out on their version of the Enlightenment. I understand now, for the first time, reading you that this is not the case. They got their own Tower of Babel down the dark path, and they got the well-lit but untrodden path too, with you, and others like you, who presumably must also be out there somewhere.
You have already cleared 9,000 subscribers on Substack, so you've passed well beyond the range of conversation, and thus this missive cannot be the start of a discourse between us, even assuming such a thing were possible. A great shame. I shall have to settle for reading you, blessing your mission, and forgiving your prideful accusations of pride against Kant, who warned that pride was the illusion of moral superiority long before you.
Your work is wonderous. I hope the seeds that you are planting will bloom in the coming Spring that lies far beyond our hopes and dreams.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Hussein and all,
The most important thing to do is to continue educating any unaware people about these major unprosecuted crimes like the 9/11/01 scam and anthrax "vaccine" scam on people including on myself and many others in the U.S. military, and how and why electronic voting machines have never been valid, as HBO pointed out in Hacking Democracy (2006) (1:21:58) https://old.bitchute.com/video/jsHTV8JdIlAt/
Additionally, people are either intelligent, respectful, and responsible enough to acknowledge reality, history, that fake man-made religion labels, books, symbols, and buildings were made by mankind, that Americans have a Republic not a Democracy scam, that there is no "left" or "right", or they're not. "Jimmie" Carter even pointed out that Americans were taken back over by an illegal oligarchy, aka a fake government and mainstream media that's comprised of unelected, "gaslighting" scam artist posers.
https://michaelatkinson.substack.com/
Thank you,
Michael
🦖
I only belatedly came to read this essay. Impressive, and challenging. I am self-taught, rambling and unsystematic, too old and mentally creaky to master complex and difficult ideas, but always ready to be “nudged beyond the worn ramparts of orthodoxy and convention.” Thank you for this
I was born into an atheist household, with a Jewish maternal grandmother, educated at a Christian school, became a medical researcher, married a Jew and brought up my children as Jews. I have long been sympathetic to Palestinians and critical of Israeli policies. Over the last few years I have become increasingly disturbed by the rise in anti-semitism in the west. Since October 7th 2023, it has pervaded all our major institutions and is now thoroughly normalised amongst our University educated elites. In the past year my son has married into a Muslim Arab family (refugees from Iraq), and I have spent time learning more about Islam and Muslims.
The alliance between the secular left in the west and many Muslims has alarmed and puzzled me. What can possibly unite such disparate groups?
Reading your article about the Enchantment of the Arab Mind has helped me understand this puzzle.
Reading this article has also helped me understand the limits of humanism and human reason.
Thank you.
Your work seems to be forming into a book. I sure hope that is your intention. There are enduringly important ideas behind these contemporary metacritiques.
Have you tried poetry? I'm thinking in the style of Donne and come of the other 17th century English metaphysicals.
My own favorite era of English poetry, one foot in the medieval, the other in the modern.