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ABSTRACT
Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God illustrates a distinctive way of understanding the relationship between ideas and history, while posing several connected questions. Among these are how the human condition of alienation may be overcome in a way that is ethically and intellectually defensible; how the search for reconciliation may generate, paradoxically, further alienation, and inspire terrible inhumanity; and whether a meaningful and good human life can be lived without the assurance of future justice—or, indeed, future existence. Rosen evokes the emotional pull of the quest for reconciliation, and reveals the argumentative richness it has generated; yet reflection on human evil and suffering should chasten our aspirations to attain historical reconciliation or rational understanding. We may have good reason to turn away from both the project of theodicy, and the tendency to identify human value in something detached from living individuals, in favor of a reaffirmation of the value of the personal. Rosen’s own work illustrates how a reaffirmation of the personal, and respect for the freedom of others, may be practiced in and through the history of ideas.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For an illustration—and acute observation—on this point see Addams Citation1965.
2 While Kant is as far removed as one could imagine from B. F. Skinner, reading Rosen’s reconstruction of Kant, I was reminded of Sidney Morgenbesser’s incredulous reaction to Skinner: “So, you’re telling me it’s wrong to anthropomorphise humans?”
3 See Berlin Citation2002, Berlin Citation2014b. For a more detailed reconstruction see Cherniss Citation2013, chs. 6 and 8.
4 Several of Rosen’s students have worked on these dimensions of political thinking. See, e. g., Keum Citation2020; Alfaro Altamirano Citation2021; Cherniss Citation2021 (the last of which also examines the ethos of the revolutionary ascetic).
5 The Soviet dissident Lev Kopelev (Citation1980, 235) recalled that his youthful Communist “fanaticism” was “nourished not only by speculative newspaper and literary sources. More convincing than these were people who in my eyes embodied, personified our truth and our justice, people who confirmed with their lives that it was necessary to clench your teeth, clench your heart and carry out everything the party and the Soviet power ordered.”
6 For a much fuller, and somewhat different, development of the idea of political hope, see Goldman Citation2022.
7 Rosen evidently agrees with Diderot: “Even if I didn’t believe in progress I would still feel very distressed by the thought of human extinction … knowledge of the extinction of humanity in a thousand years’ time would be an utter catastrophe and would destroy my sense of the world and my place in it” (in Rosen and Marshall Citation2022).
8 The inmates of the Kovno Ghetto, knowing that they would be exterminated, resolved to preserve as extensive a record of their lives—photographs, writing, artworks—buried in the ground. After liberation the few remaining inmates recovered the buried records. We now know more about life in Kovno than the other ghettos which suffered the same fate.
9 “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. but even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this. All our dignity consists then in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality” (Pascal Citation2003, 66; all but the last two sentences of this passage are quoted in Rosen Citation2012, 18).
10 One oddity of the influence of “Cambridge School” contextualism within political theory is the frequency with which scholars feel compelled to assert the need to do our own thinking for ourselves … by quoting Skinner’s authoritative words. For a more substantive critique of Skinner’s methodological views see Rosen Citation2011.
11 E.g. Rosen Citation2022, 30, 51, 57, 62, 73, 74, 75, 79, 95, 152, 193, 206, 216.
12 See Cherniss Citation2013, 8-9, 38, 101, 109, 120-21, 190-94, 208-9; on Berlin as “Kantian” see also Kocis Citation2022; Lyons Citation2020.
13 “I object to being treated like a child. I think I object to not being reasoned with. I object to paternalism … being treated like a schoolboy, being told for my own good that there are certain things to do, or being driven in a perfectly beneficent direction by a perfectly disinterested, pure-hearted body of—anyone you like, governments or manufacturers—it doesn’t matter which—even if you assume that they are pure-hearted men not seeking profit at all” (Berlin Citation1964).
14 For exploration of Berlin’s obscure characterization of values as “absolute,” see Cherniss and Hardy Citation2022, note 16.
15 There is also an important difference here. Adorno continued to insist on the validity of the standpoint of redemption (Adorno Citation1978, aphorism 153). Berlin (according to his friend the pianist Alfred Brendel) once commented, during the interval of a performance of Parsifal, “the concept of redemption I do not understand.”
16 See, e.g., Berlin Citation2008, 99-103, 107, 220-21, 224-5, 236.
17 See Berlin Citation1953; see also Lifschitz Citation2016.