The rationality of history and the history of rationality: Menachem Fisch on the analytic idealist predicament

1 Introduction

What I find so inspiring about the work of Menachem Fisch is the way in which he lives his own philosophy. He does this, first, by holding himself open to revision and, second, by allowing his interests in three apparently disparate areas to interact with mutually productive effects. These areas are analytic philosophy of science since Kuhn; the history of science, in particular the history of Cambridge mathematics in the nineteenth century and the philosophy of rabbinic Judaism.^[1]

Since I want to bring Fisch’s work to bear on what I call the analytic idealist predicament, a few words about analytic idealism are in order. Analytic idealism involves a correction of the impoverished self-understanding, dominant during the middle third of the twentieth century, according to which analytic philosophy began in rebellion against idealism, specifically in Frege’s rebellion against neo-Kantianism and in the rebellion of Russell and Moore – one might also add the American New Realists^[2] – against neo-Hegelianism. Bertrand Russell did much to further this version of analytic philosophy’s origins: “I regard the whole romantic movement, beginning with Rousseau and Kant, and culminating in pragmatism and futurism, as a regrettable aberration. I should take ‘back to the 18th century’ as a battle-cry, if I could entertain any hope that others would rally to it.”^[3] In general, as analytic philosophy became dominant, post-Kantian Idealism fell from favour, both as a family of views and as a textual tradition. Although Kant himself never entirely lost his canonical status, emphasis was placed strongly on his empirical realism, while the transcendental idealism that undergirded this realism was neglected or derided.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, analytic philosophers showed a renewed interest, not only in the idealist side of Kant’s philosophy but also in post-Kantian idealism, notably in Fichte and, above all, Hegel.^[4] This revival, still underway a few decades later, has understood itself not as a reversal of the analytic turn but rather as a development and deepening of analytic philosophy through the retrieval of idealist insights into the spontaneity, sociality and historicity of reason – insights developed by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, among others, and now placed into conversation with philosophy since Frege. Though not exactly mainstream, analytic idealism or post-Kantianism is nevertheless a thriving family of approaches within multiple fields of contemporary philosophy.

In what follows, first, I will characterize what I take to be two crucial Kantian insights. In so doing, I will stick to Kantian terms so far as possible. This has the advantage of helping us to get clear about how far we are from returning to what was once known, and how far post-Kantian problems lead to what is in effect a new idea rooted in but diverging from Kant’s own views. Second, I will describe how, given these insights, we find ourselves today in what I call the analytic idealist predicament. Third, I will then characterize what I consider novel in Fisch’s response to this predicament. In particular, I will argue that, in his notion of critical address, Fisch has in effect thematized a new variety of what Kant calls reflecting judgement, a variety best understood in light of Fichte’s modification of Kantianism and as exemplified by what Fisch calls the anti-traditionalist or confrontationalist strand of rabbinic Judaism.

2 Two Kantian insights

The first Kantian insight concerns the importance of criticism for understanding rationality. Here it is essential to distinguish the Kantian approach from a Popperian approach that played a significant role in Fisch’s thinking earlier in his career. From Popper’s standpoint, the crucial question is, “In what does the rationality of a theory or discourse consist?,” and the answer offered is: not in justification, as others have thought, let alone in verification, but rather in vulnerability to criticism.^[5] From Kant’s standpoint, however, the important question is, “In what does the rationality of an agent – specifically, a finite human agent such as ourselves – consist?” The rationality of a theory or discourse would, on this view, be derivative from the rationality of the agent developing or maintaining it. While Kant does not eschew justification in the way that Popper does, it is criticism – specifically, the capacity for unlimited criticism – in which Kant takes finite rationality to consist. Finitude, as Kant reconceives it, consists not in getting only part of the way towards the attainments of an infinitely rational agent but rather in the capacity for self-criticism in accordance with norms that are themselves subject to criticism.

This insight into finitude is, on the Kantian view, of a piece with the proper understanding of Descartes’ insight into subjecthood. As Descartes noted, it is always possible to make explicit the first-person singular character of one’s reflections first by adding, “I think that […]” to one’s thoughts and then by affirming “I think;” and from this it follows, not only that I exist, but also my existence as a thinker is indubitable, since doubt is also a thought.^[6] Although I qua thinker am the impredicable subject of all my mental acts, it does not follow – so Kant argues – that, metaphysically speaking, I am an impredicable substance underlying all my mental properties.^[7] To be sure, “The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me.”^[8] But this tells us nothing about metaphysics. What it tells us is that the capacity to attach the “I think” to my thoughts is necessary insofar as my thoughts are something to me – insofar, that is, as I am a responsible cognitive agent who is responsible for these thoughts. If I could not attach the “I think” to my thoughts, then I would not be able to criticize those thoughts in light of normative standards of logic and cognition, and to say that I am one and the same subject with respect to all my thoughts is to say that my unitariness is part and parcel of my ability to bring each of those thoughts to bear in criticism upon each and all of the others.

The Kantian approach offers a response to the objection raised against Descartes by Georg Lichtenberg who wrote:

We become conscious of certain representations that are not dependent upon us; others, at least we believe, are dependent upon us; where is the boundary? We know only the existence of our sensations, representations, and thoughts. It thinks, we should say, just as one says, it lightnings. To say cogito is already too much if we translate it as I think. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical necessity.^[9]

On this view, Descartes cheats by using the first-person singular form of the verb: “cogito.” Of course, the existence of the I who thinks follows necessarily once the legitimacy of this use is granted. But should it be granted and, if so, why? There are processes that are not ascribed to a subject, such as rain, thunder and lightning. Why should thinking not be counted among them? Lichtenberg suggests that, insofar as we concede the legitimacy of the first-person singular, it is merely for practical purposes. Nietzsche adds that the practical purpose in question is to sweeten the poison by promulgating the illusion that no matter how dismal a human life may be, it is in fact the achievement of a freely willing subject.^[10]

Here is a Kantian response. Ascribability to a subject is not merely practically convenient or necessary but theoretically necessary and indeed necessary for subjecthood tout court. That is to say, there would be neither practice nor theory – indeed, there would be no thought at all – without ascribability and specifically first-person singular self-ascription.^[11] For it is constitutive of thought that it is subject to norms of consistency, truth, validity, etc., and nothing could be subject to such norms without first-person singular self-ascription. To see this, imagine representations that are not first-person singular self-ascribable. It would be impossible to judge whether these representations are so much as consistent in a way that is normatively troubling without implicitly or explicitly ascribing them to a subject. For there is nothing normatively troubling as such about representations that are inconsistent with one another. Only if inconsistent representations are assigned to a single subject does the inconsistency become a reason for correction and revision. And only if the subject in question can self-ascribe the representations does the inconsistency become troubling for the subject. Were the representations to be ascribed to the subject only by an external subject, the inconsistency would be troubling for the subject, if at all, only as a derivative of being troubling for the external subject, for whom in turn they would be troubling only if they could self-ascribe their own representations. In short, representations are not thoughts unless they are self-ascribable to and by a subject.

Relativization to the first-person singular standpoint emerges, then, as the necessary condition for the possibility of self-criticism, hence as the mark of finite rational agency. This generic first-person singular standpoint is the condition not only of subjectivity but of objectivity as well. For objectivity consists in relativization to the standpoint that would be shared by any finite human agent under relevantly similar circumstances.^[12]

Not for nothing, then, is Kant’s philosophy called the critical philosophy. Critique consists in relativizing thoughts to a standpoint, and then in subjecting those relativized thoughts to criticism in light of relevant norms. The critical philosophy applies this hallmark of finite rationality to philosophy itself, outlining our shared human perspective by delineating the synthetic a priori principles that comprise its framework.

Some care is needed here, however. What is distinctive about finite rationality is that it is the faculty of criticism. Yet the faculty of reason as such is not finite. It is the faculty of absolute cognition or cognition simpliciter. For a faculty is defined by its form and end, and reason, conceived as having the form of truth and the end of immediate relation to actuality, would be the infinite cognition characteristic of divinity. There is nothing necessarily or intrinsically standpoint-relative and finite about reason. It is a contingent and extrinsic yet crucially important fact about us humans that our reason is standpoint-relative and finite.

Criticism is at once the hallmark of finite rational agency, the general strategy of Kant’s philosophy and the characteristic of the age in which Kant finds himself:

Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.^[13]

Kant’s age is the age both of political revolution in America and France and of the intellectual revolution in which the study of nature has finally been put on the secure path of science. There could be no better time for Kant’s proposed philosophical revolution, in which the critical character of reason is itself subjected to criticism, with a view to establishing what finite rational agents can cognize and with the hope of placing metaphysics at last on a scientific basis. One justly:

demands that reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself.^[14]

There may be a limit to our cognitive abilities, but there is no limit to our capacity for criticism, which can and should be turned even on itself.

At the same time, criticism turned upon itself discovers, according to Kant, its own internal limits: there are necessary conditions for the possibility of human cognition, which ground the principles in terms of which we criticize ourselves. This is the second Kantian insight: that human self-criticism discovers relativity not only to abstract standpoint but also to concrete perspective – to what I will call perspectival standpoint.^[15] While an abstract, first-person singular standpoint has the formal features required for the capacity for first-person singular self-ascription, a perspectival standpoint has the additional feature that objects and events can appear to someone occupying such a standpoint as possessing some properties that, from another standpoint, may be seen to pertain to the perspectival standpoint itself.

The general idea of a perspectival standpoint taken to be at rest relative to a moving vehicle in which it is situated, so that objects external to the vehicle appear to be moving relative to the standpoint, is familiar to anybody who has ever ridden in a boat, carriage or car. Copernicus’ innovation consists in extrapolating this notion to the idea of a perspectival standpoint at rest relative to a large moving body whose motion is imperceptible to the one at relative rest. Given this extrapolation, the question arises how to determine the true motions construed either as relative to some privileged perspectival standpoint taken to be at rest or as relative to some perspectival standpoint that is absolutely at rest and not merely assumed to be so.

Kant’s innovation consists in extrapolating the notion still further: to what he calls “the human standpoint,” comprising necessary conditions for the possibility of cognition taken to be at rest with respect to criticism.^[16] The claim is that if we subject our faculties of criticism to self-criticism, examining not only our beliefs but also the standards whereby we criticize our beliefs, we will find that some of those standards are immutable. Moreover, among the immutable standards, some – the logical forms of judgement and, relatedly, the unschematized categories – are immutable because they must be the standards of any finite rational agent’s capacity to cognize. But some of those immutable standards are peculiarly human, and they are not necessarily shared by all other finite rational agents. In particular, space, time and the spatio-temporally inflected or schematized categories are at one and the same time grounds for normative standards of criticism and grounded in apparently arbitrary features of humanity.

What makes Kant’s view idealist in his special sense of the term is that these peculiarly human standards, discovered through criticism of criticism, are determined to be privileged yet not to be absolute. Idealism of this kind may be expressed by means of two theses. First, the Constitution Thesis states that these elements – space and time, the categories, and the ideas – are privileged in the sense that some of them constitute the objects of sense perception and perceptually grounded cognition, thereby enabling genuine cognition of spatio-temporal objects and events.^[17] They could not be falsified, because nothing that purports to falsify them could be an object or event.

Second, the Restriction Thesis states that the constitutive features in question are not absolute but relative to humanity.^[18] They play this constitutive role only insofar as they comprise not the form of things as they are in themselves but the form of objects as they appear from “the human standpoint.” So this standpoint is perspectival: objects and events appear to someone occupying the standpoint as having features that may be seen as pertaining to the standpoint itself. For reasons that we will not explore here, Kant believes that he has proven the strong claim that the form of objects as they appear could not be the form of things as they are in themselves. He takes himself to have ruled out the so-called “neglected alternative” that the form of phenomena is both the form of our human cognitive faculty and the form of things in themselves. Even if one challenges his arguments, however, it is conceivable, at least in the minimal sense that it is non-contradictory, that there are perspectival standpoints of finite rational agency different from our own, and accordingly that objects may appear to those who occupy such standpoints as having forms that are very different from the forms in which they appear to us humans. Of course, none of this means that these objects are mental or that we somehow create them. The form of the objects of human cognition may be grounded in us, but the matter is not. So the objects of human cognition are grounded in mind-independent reality in two senses: first, insofar as these objects are as they are independent of individual human perspectives and relative only to the specifically human perspectival standpoint; and, second, insofar as these objects would not be there to be cognized if they were not grounded in some reality in itself – whatever it is – independent even of the human standpoint.

Enough is now in place for the statement of the analytic idealist predicament. This predicament arises from the post-Kantian challenge to the Kantian view that there is only one immutable framework for human rationality. In ethics, there would seem to be multiple frameworks at any given moment of human culture, without any hope of reducing them all to one, or proving the superiority of one. Even in modern science, where there is arguably a dominant framework at a given moment – what Kuhn calls a paradigm in terms of which “normal science” is done – there have, by now, been several dominant frameworks.^[19] After two more centuries of scientific development, Kant’s contention, in the preface to the B edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, that after a pre-history of groping around, a fortunate individual has an insight that enables a discipline to achieve scientific status by means of a revolution, after which there can be no further revolutions, no longer carries plausibility.^[20] No scientific paradigm, no matter how secure, can be considered secure against future revolutionary overthrow. Moreover, historical thinking itself, both in the human sciences and in evolutionary biology has developed into a family of rigorous disciplines, tracing the development of diachronically diverse frameworks in culture and in science, and itself depending on a framework that is synchronically distinct from the paradigms operative within the mathematical natural sciences.

This raises two troubling questions. The first is the question of the rationality of history: if rationality is framework dependent, then how revolutionary transitions between frameworks be seen as rational? And if each framework came to be in a non-rational manner, does this not undermine its claim to rationality? The second is the question of the historicity of reason. One way to answer the first question is to situate diachronic framework transitions within an overarching meta-framework that resembles Kant’s putative “human standpoint” in its immutability. But this seems to short-change the revolutionary character of the transitions. Another way to answer the question is to reconceive reason as intrinsically historical. But this threatens to lose touch with the traditional understanding of reason as eternal and beyond the flux of sense perception. Can this dilemma be avoided? Is there any way to take both historicity and rationality seriously at the same time?

3 Fisch’s contribution

Fisch takes the development of historical thinking utterly seriously. His work on the history of Cambridge mathematics is scrupulous, and his philosophical commitment to historicity is shown by his objection to Michael Friedman’s account of framework transitions. Fisch objects that Friedman gives only a retrospective account of the product of framework transition, not a prospective account of the process of production.^[21] This is a point to which I will return at the end of this article.

Fisch emphasizes that criticism culminates not only in self-criticism but also in criticism addressed to one by another. It is this notion of address – notably absent from Kant’s version of critical philosophy – that enables him to move beyond both Friedman’s idea of the fruitfulness of mathematics and philosophy for physics, and Galison’s idea of trading zones.^[22] Both of these ideas are valuable, but Fisch gives them renewed power insofar as he incorporates them within a conception of criticism as external address to which an important response is creative ambivalence. If Fisch had focused only on self-criticism, it would have been difficult to see ambivalence as distinguishable from and more productive than mere confusion.

This is also where Fisch’s philosophy of rationality in general intersects with his philosophy of rabbinic Judaism, one of the great developments in recent Jewish thought. The intersection is already clear in View from Within, when Fisch and Benbaji cite the apothegm of Joshua ben Perahyah: “Acquire for yourself a colleague!”^[23] Here too Fisch and Benbaji quote Michael Walzer’s discussion of the distinction between the prophetic rebukes of Amos, who shares his covenantal framework with his audience, and Jonah, who does not.^[24] But the intersection is even clearer in Fisch’s recent book, Covenant of Confrontation (2019).

I want to suggest that, situated within a post-Kantian context, Fisch may be said to have discovered in effect a new species of what Kant calls reflecting judgement. In so doing, Fisch develops an idea of Fichte’s – an idea that, surprisingly, has Jewish resonances notwithstanding Fichte’s notorious antisemitism.

Among the elements comprising the human perspectival standpoint or framework, Kant distinguishes between three kinds: the constitutive, the regulative, which together are determining, and the reflecting. A formal element of cognition is constitutive only if it cannot help but be realized by any matter given in sense perception. Thus, for example, any object or event whatsoever given in sense perception must exhibit spatio-temporal form as well as some quantitative and qualitative features identified in Kant’s table of categories. Nothing could be called a sensible object that did not exhibit these formal features, for example, by having no spatio-temporal location, no unity in its multiplicity and so on.

It is with respect to constitutive elements that the framework transition problem most obviously arises. If we are asked to imagine that someone purports or proposes to deploy a framework differing from the dominant one in some constitutive respect, then it is hard to say what we are being asked to imagine. Either there can be no such thing as an alternative, or the element in question is not in fact constitutive, or it can somehow lose its constitutive status.

Starting with Reichenbach’s classic account of shifting constitutive status in light of relativity theory, diachronic framework transitions have captured the attention of many post-Kantian philosophers of science.^[25] In Fisch’s account, however, it is synchronic framework diversity that provides the key to the solution of diachronic framework transitions. Without multiple frameworks coexisting at a given time, there would be no possibility of trusted critics inhabiting neighbouring but distinct disciplines.

Some have sought to deal with diachronic framework transitions by focusing on regulative elements of the framework. A formal element is regulative only if it expresses a value that need not or cannot be realized by means of any matter given in sense perception. For this reason, while spatio-temporal form and what Kant calls the mathematical categories of quantity and quality are constitutive, the dynamic categories of substance-accident, cause-effect and community are regulative.^[26] Although Kant argues that these grounding relations must be presupposed in order to represent sense perceptions as in and of temporal events, it nevertheless remains the case that neither substantial grounding, nor causing, nor community can themselves be given in sense perception. Regulative values cannot be fully realized in the way that they would be if they could be given in sense perception, but they may be partly realized within a theoretical embedding of the framework, and they should be realized to the greatest extent possible.^[27] Thus, scientific theories can realize the goals of explanation – in terms of substantiality, causality and community – to a greater or lesser extent, and they should be judged in part by the degree to which they realize these goals.

One might deal with the analytic idealist dilemma by reconstruing putatively constitutive elements as regulative. Alternatively, one might keep constitutive elements but emphasize an immutable regulative aspect shared by alternative frameworks, a regulative aspect that allows for assessments of the rationality of transitions. Michael Friedman has made a well-argued proposal of the latter kind, attending carefully both to the philosophical and to the history of science issues.^[28] However, in The View from Within, Fisch and Benbaji criticize Friedman’s strategy as an attempt to ameliorate the radical character of transitions that really merit being called revolutionary.^[29] For a strategy of the first kind, which denies “the myth of the framework” altogether, one may look to Popper’s work, and – notwithstanding his own earlier Popperianism – Fisch criticizes Popper’s appeal to nothing more than general logic plus regulative values.^[30] Thus, Fisch insists on some version of the second Kantian insight, the framework dependence or relativity to perspectival standpoint of knowledge.

The third Kantian status – the reflecting – has not been explicitly invoked in this debate so far as I know, but it deserves attention and, I will argue, Fisch has implicitly invoked it. Both judgements applying constitutive elements and judgements seeking to realize regulative elements are determining judgements in Kant’s terminology, because they involve the application of determinate concepts whose contents are settled. In contrast, reflecting judgements involve concepts whose contents are not settled.^[31] Some judgements may be reflecting because the concepts they deploy are new concepts, still in formation, that will at some point become settled concepts figuring in determining judgements. Until that time, each judgement must involve the process of comparing and contrasting particular cases, a process that Locke called reflection. However, some judgements are reflecting because the concepts they deploy cannot become settled. In such cases, the process of contrast and comparison can never be replaced by the application of a concept to a particular on the basis of its characteristics. Kant himself gives two different sorts of examples: aesthetic judgements and teleological judgements. Aesthetic judgements are reflecting because, he argues, beauty and other aesthetic concepts cannot be defined independently of specific human responses to particulars. Here criticism consists in discursive appeal to particular cases and cannot invoke established universals. Teleological judgements of natural processes and systems are reflecting because, Kant argues, they invoke a concept of purposiveness that has no clear ground in non-intentional nature and that depends on an intentional model; accordingly, if and when it becomes possible to replace a teleological account of some natural pattern of phenomena with a non-teleological account appealing only to fundamental physical forces and modes of causality, it should be replaced. Consequently, no teleological account can count as settled.

It is an implication of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgement as reflecting – although apparently not an implication noticed by Kant – that there is a possibility of aesthetic revolution.^[32] A revolutionary work of art divides its audience in such a way that its enemies will deny that it counts as art at all. Those who are convinced, however, are called upon to reflect upon and to judge anew old instances whose status was previously beyond question. Borges wrote, “The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”^[33] Each revolutionary artist not only creates their precursors but may also disenfranchise works of the past that are not precursors.^[34]

There is no reason to think that aesthetic and teleological judgements exhaust the reflecting, and Kant does not claim that they do. Post-Kantians have sometimes argued that the reflecting plays a role in historiography or in politics or in some other area of judgement. Fisch’s illuminating account of criticism seems to me to amount to the characterization of critical judgements as reflecting.

Although Fisch engages significantly with Robert Brandom and thereby with Brandom’s version of Hegelianism – indeed Fisch sometimes calls his own approach “neo-Hegelian” – it nevertheless seems to me that the German Idealist most pertinent here is Fichte.^[35] Hegel’s dialectic of reciprocal recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit may be better known, and it has the advantage of historical development, but Fichte’s earlier account, in which he seems to have coined the concept, is worth considering for the light it sheds on the practice of criticism.

Fichte may seem an unlikely interlocutor for Fisch, because of his notorious remark that Jews should be granted civil rights within the modern state only if all their heads are chopped off in one night and replaced with heads in which there is not a single Jewish idea.^[36] However, as I have argued elsewhere, insofar as there are such things as “Jewish ideas,” then Fichte’s conception of the reciprocal recognition embodied by what he calls the summons to self-consciousness has as strong a claim to this title as any other.^[37]

In the background lies the reported conversation with which post-Kantian idealism may be said to start: the conversation between Jacobi and Lessing at Wolfenbüttel in 1780 reported by Jacobi after Lessing’s death in his Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785).^[38] Occasioned by the reading of Goethe’s as yet unpublished poem, “Prometheus,” the conversation passes seamlessly to the Egyptian roots of Orphism, then to Spinoza, then to kabbalah and then back to Spinoza again, turning around Lessing’s scandalous self-exposure as a Spinozist, which Jacobi aims as a weapon against the Berlin Enlightenment of Mendelssohn and his friends.

Of all the contexts assumed and alluded to in the Jacobi–Lessing conversation, it is perhaps to kabbalah that the least attention has been paid. In addition to the obscurity and linguistic difficulty of kabbalah – familiar to Lessing and his contemporaries in Latin translation and German commentary – Jacobi’s statement that “the philosophy of the kabbalah […] is, as philosophy, nothing but undeveloped or newly confused Spinozism” may have suggested that one could focus on Spinozism instead.^[39] Yet, if one wants to understand Jacobi’s own positive proposal, which would eventually lead to Fichte’s conception of reciprocal recognition as well as Buber’s dialogicism, one would do well to attend to Jacobi’s own use of the concept of kabbalah.

Jacobi’s position – suggestively sketched but hardly developed, to the frustration of his readers – is supposed to contrast with both the positions between which Lessing vacillates: kabbalism, which is said to regard the cosmos as animated by the world soul, and Spinozism, which denies any soul whatsoever. Although they are metaphysically distinguishable, these two views are nevertheless equivalent in the sense that they both deny divine transcendence as well as human individuality and freedom of the will. Moreover, it cannot have escaped anyone’s attention at the time that the two views in question are both “Jewish.” The implication is that Lessing has been corrupted by “Jewish” ideas, but – unlike Mendelssohn and his Berlin colleagues – Lessing is either too intelligent or too honest to pretend that these ideas are compatible with traditional ethics and religion. Yet, despite all this, Jacobi repurposes the term “kabbalah” in his articulation of the alternative:

I took the occasion to speak in favour of the Kibbel, or the kabbalah in the strict sense-that is, taking as starting point the view that it is impossible, in and for itself, to derive the infinite from a given finite, or to define the transition from the one to the other, or their proportion, through any formula whatever. Hence, if anyone wants to say anything on the subject, one must speak on the basis of revelation.^[40]

It had long been known among Christian kabbalists and their readers that the term “kabbalah” means “reception,” and here Jacobi insists that reception requires distance: the transcendence by the infinite of the finite.

To avoid misunderstanding, Jacobi clarifies later in the conversation that he is not speaking in the first instance, about scriptural or mystical revelation from God:

A veritable and wondrous revelation! For in fact we only sense our body, as constituted in this way or that; but in thus feeling it, we become aware not only of its alterations, but of something else as well, totally different from it, which is neither mere sensation nor thought; we become aware of other actual things, and, of that with the very same certainty with which we become aware of ourselves, for without the You, the I is impossible.^[41]

Suggestively, Jacobi declares that revelation occurs in the everyday event of sense perception, and – perhaps – whenever a You confronts an I. Indeed, he hints that this confrontation enables self-consciousness. Revelation in this sense – the transcendence within the everyday – requires faith, but it is not the faith required by “the religion of the Christians.” In fact, it is the everyday faith discussed by Hume as that which skepticism cannot overcome.^[42] And this everyday revelation that calls for faith, not the kabbalah of the world soul or of Spinoza’s substance, is “the kabbalah in the strict sense.” According to Jacobi, no monistic system, whether Spinozist realism or post-Kantian idealism, can meet the challenge of accommodating the reality of another person, world or divinity that can address you in the second person. I call this kabbalistic realism: a constraint on any adequate philosophical system requiring it to account, not only for the externality of sensible objects but also for the externality of other minds, with their own interiority, and for the openness of these minds to each other.

Wittingly or unwittingly, Jacobi’s formulation suggests a remarkable construal of the epistemology of kabbalah (received tradition) as opposed to mesorah (transmitted tradition). A mesorah or transmitted tradition is made available, so that anyone who exerts themselves may inherit it. But a kabbalah or received tradition must be received from someone who addresses it to you, in a manner designed to provoke your spontaneity, so that you are the one who “understands spontaneously.”^[43] On the suggested view, the esoteric character of kabbalah consists not in the withholding of information that could have been imparted but rather in the role of the first-person singular and of the second-person singular within a dialectic whose point is not to convey already formed knowledge but to provoke its formation.

Developing Jacobi’s emphasis on second-person address in a systematic manner foreign to Jacobi, Fichte attempts to solve several problems at once: not only the problem of the origin of self-conscious agency but also the foundation of human rights. Moreover, Fichte seeks to respond to Jacobi’s challenge by showing that a post-Kantian idealist monism can accommodate the revelatory character of sense perception and even the I-You character of personal interaction. Fichte’s argument, which I have reconstructed in detail elsewhere, is that the first moment and enabling condition of self-consciousness must be at once both receptive and spontaneous, neither exclusively one nor exclusively the other; and that this can happen in only one way, namely, when the action of another is perceived and at the same time comprehended as a “summons” to act for a reason. In such a situation, the incipient agent is “determined to be self-determining:”^[44] once the summons is perceived as a summons, whatever the summonee does will count willy-nilly as a response to the summons, whether the summonee does what the summoner wants, does what the summonee does not want or indeed does nothing at all. In mode of response, the summonee is self-determining; in whether to respond at all, the summonee is determined.^[45]

Not only does Fichte develop Jacobi’s I-You interpretation of kabbalah as reception, but he also does so – as I have argued elsewhere – by deploying a central kabbalistic concept mentioned by Jacobi: tsimtsum, or the contraction of the infinite that enables coexistence with the finite.^[46] Setting aside nuances and variations, the fundamental idea is that the uncontracted infinite is incompatible with plurality, but contraction or self-limitation is compatible both with infinity and with plurality. Contraction is at once both concentration in an action, and withdrawal from that action, leaving it for the other’s uptake. The summons is both concentration in an act of recognizing the summonee as a rational agent, and withdrawal or standing back from that act of recognition, which awaits the recognition by the summonee that would render the event one of reciprocal recognition. Moreover, the summons is not only the originary act in which self-consciousness is born. It is also the origination of the form of normative rights claims. The self-limitation that lets You be You also establishes limits whose transgression would amount to violation.^[47] These limits are therefore normative limits, and a rights claim has the form of a summons to respect the self-imposed limits implicit in the originary summons. Ironically, Fichte himself turns out to have a “Jewish” idea in his German head.

Now, Fichte notes that the judgement that a summons is appropriate or that someone has recognized a summons as a summons is a reflecting judgement:

Which effects can be explained only by reference to a rational cause? […] a sure criterion for determining that something is the effect of a rational being would be this: the effect can be thought as possible only under the condition that there is some cognition of the object of the effect. But there is only one thing whose possibility can be thought only through cognition – rather than through some merely natural force – and that is cognition itself. Thus if the only possible object of an effect – and here that also means its end – were the production of cognition, then one would necessarily have to assume that the effect had a rational cause […]. Now the situation that has just been described is present here [i.e., in the case of the summons].^[48]

Fichte’s point here is that the judgement that an event is the act of a rational agent is similar to the reflecting judgement, discussed by Kant, that a structure or process is teleological: in both cases, one judges that something exists or occurs for the sake of an end. However, the judgement that an event is a rational agent’s action adds to end directedness that the event occurs on the basis of the agent’s cognition. This is precisely the case with a summons: insofar as the summonee cognizes the summons as a summons, they also act insofar as they are determined to self-determine. So the recognition of a summons is at once both cognition and action, and the judgement that such a recognition has occurred is therefore a reflecting judgement that whatever now ensues from the summonee is a free, end-directed action.

This judgement is also equivalent to the judgement that the one to whom the summon is addressed is human. And Fichte’s view is that, like the aesthetic concept of beauty, the concept of humanity is permanently in a state of reflective formation and can never be settled:

Every animal is what it is; only the human being is originally nothing at all. He must become what he is to be: and, since he is to be a being for himself, he must become this through himself. Nature completed all her works; only from the human being did she withdraw her hand, and precisely by doing so, she gave him over to himself. Formability as such is the character of humanity. Because it is impossible to superimpose upon a human shape any concept other than that of oneself, every human being is inwardly compelled to regard every other human being as his equal.^[49]

This implies first that, like aesthetic judgements, judgements of humanity are inextricably linked to concrete exemplars, and second that we cannot rule out the possibility of surprise and revolution: a new case may change our understanding of humanity and shed a novel, retrospective light on our previous judgements.

It is clear that Fichte did not see these implications of the reflecting character of judgements of humanity. For him, the normative constraints called human rights follow directly from the originary summons, and anyone who violates the rights of another is committing a logical contradiction by both recognizing their humanity and failing to act in accordance with this recognition. However, one readily understands from Hegel’s discussion of reciprocal recognition that enslavement is not a straightforward logical contradiction. It is precisely human and not non-human beings that we enslave. Throughout human history, we have found subtle ways to justify slavery, and it has taken millennia for the implicit tensions to become evident.^[50]

What would it take for Fichte’s own constitutive framework of rights to one’s own body and private property to be challenged as in tension with concrete instances of violated humanity? In an anonymous, early work on political philosophy, written during the French Revolution, Fichte argues that Jews should not have civil rights within the modern state that is coming into being.^[51] The reason is that the Jews already constitute an international state, based on “the hatred of all humanity,” and dispersed throughout the world, constituting a “state within the state” in “almost every country of Europe.” Since they “are citizens of a state which is more secure and powerful than yours,” and since they have a power to pillage gentile property that exceeds the power of an absolute monarch, it would be folly to grant them further rights, augmenting the advantage that they already have. Yet Fichte takes what he thinks is the high road and rejects intolerance: “They must have human rights, even if they will not grant them to us.”^[52]

What would it take for Fichte to recognize the concrete humanity of the Jews living in Germanic lands in the 1790s, excluded from most lines of work and residing in assigned and overpopulated areas at the pleasure of the local authorities? What would have to happen in order for Fichte to consider the possibility that the formal protection of Jewish bodies and possessions by the law could mask a dehumanization deeply rooted in European religion and culture? Could Fichte be brought to see that it was impossible to genuinely acknowledge Jewish humanity without recognizing them as citizens of the lands in which they had resided for centuries? Could he even, through criticism, come to a revolutionary revision of the constitutive framework of rights itself, as failing to fully capture his originary insight that self-consciousness begins with a second-person summons that also acknowledges the summonee as someone who is vulnerable to dehumanization?^[53]

Recall now that a special kind of criticism exposes the relativity of framework to the human perspectival standpoint. Insofar as it involves the judgement of humanity, criticism of this kind has an essentially reflecting moment, and the possibility of surprise and revolution cannot be ruled out.

As I understand Fisch’s conception of criticism, it exhibits a Fichtean form. It involves a second-person address, operating according to the kabbalistic logic of tsimtsum, that gives rise to a reason for action.^[54] It also identifies a problem, the concept of which is a teleological concept.^[55] In the Fichtean case, discussed above, the criticism alleges a conflict between the target’s action and the constitutive rights framework of another. In the cases that most interest Fisch, the criticism alleges a tension between the target’s action or account and their constitutive framework for understanding the world or some portion of it, their inflection of humanity.

In addition to developing the idea of the second-person critical address by finding for it a new application, Fisch grasps, as Fichte does not, the inherently historical and potentially revolutionary character of criticism. He also develops the idea further by pointing out, first, that criticism may give a reason, not for decisive action, but for ambivalence, and, second, that nobody is so exemplary that they are beyond criticism – not even God. When God wants to destroy the cities of the plain, Abraham asks, “Should the judge of the whole earth not do justice?”^[56] I understand this, neither as an application of a determinate concept of justice nor as an appeal to some shared and maximizable value, but rather as an invocation of the concrete, particular conversation of justice between God and this human individual, “dust and ashes,” who has left his homeland at God’s command. Should God not do what is seen to be just by the human beings who seek to emulate God? Should divine justice be conducted, not from the transcendent heights, but in the thick of human weakness and neediness? There is no determinate concept or maximizable value of justice prior to this particular conversation. Nor does any finally settled concept emerge from it. What emerges, rather, is the conversation of justice itself – a work to be continued, case by challenging case. As Fisch argues, the rabbis of the classic Midrash and Talmud emphasized this moment and found similar moments in the life of other exemplary figures such as Moses, while themselves undertaking to emulate a non-submissive model of religiosity in their own relationships with God and with each other.^[57]

4 Conclusion

I end with two questions, one about each of the topics in my title.

The first question concerns the rationality of history. As discussed above, Fisch understands this to require, not merely a retrospective interpretation of framework transitions that renders them rational, but a prospective account of the rationality of the agents involved. But how exactly should this requirement be construed. Of course, all historiography is in fact retrospective, so the requirement presumably is not that a prospective account be actually available to a cognitive agent undergoing radical criticism. But this leaves several possibilities open. Is the requirement that such an account be potentially available to the agent? In that case, it should use only concepts to which the agent could have had access at the time. Or is it that the agent’s actions be describable as rational from the standpoint of a contemporaneous third-person observer? In that case, it would appear legitimate to use concepts available at the time but not available – for any of numerous reasons that one can imagine – to the agents themselves.

The second question is about the historicity of rationality. Fisch and Benbaji emphasize the role of the “trusted critic.” Here they draw explicitly on Avot de-Rabi Natan 1.6. Expanding on the injunction to “acquire for oneself a friend,” Version B notes:

But a student who sits and studies alone, if he errs on a matter of law—wrongly pronouncing the pure impure, or the impure pure—if he has no friend to mend his mistake, of him it is said: “Woe to him who is alone when he falls; for he has not another to help him up.” (Eccl. 4:10)^[58]

Radical self-criticism is difficult for an obvious reason. One always has a good reason to conserve one’s own perspectival standpoint through ad hoc manoeuvres. But another – the right other – can issue the challenge that brings out the irreparable failure of one’s normative framework. “The rabbinic text […] draws attention to the most personal level of critical discourse, at which individual agents are confronted and urged to take responsibility for their mistakes and oversights. At this level, the rabbinic text implies, one needs to be close, sympathetic, and trusted in order to be heard.”^[59] I am reminded of Rabbi Yohanan’s grief over the death of his friend, Resh Lakish, and his irritation at Resh Lakish’s replacement, Rabbi Eleazar ben Pedat:

[Rabbi Yohanan] said, “Are you like Bar Lakisha? When I believed something, he would challenge me with twenty four difficulties, and I would respond to him with twenty four answers, and, inevitably, understanding was enlarged. And you say, “There is a beraita [i.e., an early rabbinic tradition] that supports you! Do I not know already that my belief is valid?” He went and tore his clothes and cried and said, “Where are you Bar Lakisha? Where are you Bar Lakisha?” And he shouted until he lost his mind.^[60]

To be sure, even a trusted critic like Resh Lakish cannot impose change from without but can nevertheless “still be highly effective in provoking their addressees to reconsider and subsequently replace heartfelt normative commitments.”^[61] In light of this effectiveness, I want to ask how the concept of trust in play here is to be theorized? Can more be said about whom to trust? Is it an entirely psychological concept? Or, as I allow myself to hope, is it an essentially unsettled concept, tied to particular cases but not therefore wholly opaque to discussion and reason. In other words, a concept like the concepts of beauty, end-directedness, humanity and criticism: permanently unsettled, and therefore permanently open for discussion, the sort of concept that figures in Kant’s reflecting judgements? For further illumination of the issues, I look to the future work of Menachem Fisch.