On Humanism and the Bible

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank Grant Havers for reading my review-essay and for sharing with me his response to it.

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 160; emphasis in the original. Regarding Heidegger’s failure to see that “Western humanism… originated with the Christian doctrine of the incarnation,” Zimmermann states that “Heidegger takes up and sharpens Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity is indeed a form of Platonism and that therefore essentially contributed to the decline of Western Culture” (172). Zimmermann is simply wrong about Nietzsche, as we have seen. Nietzsche does not claim in the Genealogy that Christianity is a form of Platonism that essentially contributed to the decline of western culture. What he shows in that work, rather, is that Christianity, as originally and primordially Jewish, both historically and ontologically, is the source of what he calls the “ascetic ideal” of modernity of willing the truth at any price. I shall be examining Zimmerman’s characteristic assertion that western humanism is originally Christian later in my review.

2. Montaigne writes that the ancient skeptics (and, I would add, all Greek philosophers) cannot speak without contradicting themselves. In contrast, he observes, our language “is wholly formed of affirmative propositions, which to them are utterly repugnant; so that when they say ‘I doubt,’ immediately you have them by the throat to make them admit that at least they know and are sure of this fact, that they doubt. ... This idea is more firmly grasped in the form of interrogation: ‘What do I know?’” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 392-93. While Montaigne launches in the “Apology” a full-scale attack on all claims, as based on Greek philosophy, that we can know “the sovereign good” (i.e., Kant’s thing in itself), at the same time he holds, in anticipating Descartes, that our logos (i.e., our speech as communication) incontestably affirms our knowledge of existence. Indeed, he later asks in the “Apology”: How can the ancient skeptics “let themselves be inclined towards the likeness of truth, if they know not the truth? How do they [as the heirs of Plato] know the semblance of that whose essence they do not know?” His answer: “Either we can judge absolutely, or we absolutely cannot” (422). It is evident that by judging absolutely Montaigne understands logos (the word) as being. The word as encounter in, with, and through the other represents the truth of existence (the existence of truth). So Buber writes: “Being I and saying I are the same.” Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 54.

3. An Introduction to Metaphysics, published in 1953, is based on a lecture of the same title that Heidegger gave in 1935. Part 1, “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics,” opens with that question: Why is there something and not simply nothing?

4. When I cite, within the same paragraph, consecutive passages from the same page of a text, the page number is given at the end of the last passage cited.

5. Levinas writes in Outside the Subject: “Any reflection on the alterity of the other in his or her irreducibility to the objectivity of objects and [to] the being of beings must recognize the new perspective that Buber opened--and find encouragement in it.” He also observes that the “justice and charity whose message the Bible bears were difficult, until Buber’s time [I and Thou was published in 1923], to integrate with philosophical reason, [which had been] constructed for a cosmology situating God in relation to the world and positing God, in a way, as a superlative of being.” Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Continuum, 2008), 31, 9.

6. Buber, I and Thou, 69.

7. Zimmermann also states: “The true revelation of the imago Dei in Christ now requires from the Christian to view all of humanity in light of Christ, thus personalizing and intensifying the ethical imperative contained in the Old Testament notion of imago Dei” (310). But again the question emerges: What does this “revelation” now require from or mean to those of us who are not believing but secular Christians or are not Christians at all?