The Apocalyptic Life of a Mephistophelian Zelig

Some twenty years ago, Jacob Taubes’s lectures on Saint Paul, delivered in 1987, the year of his death, and first published in German in 1993, were published in English as The Political Theology of Paul. This was not long after Alain Badiou’s and shortly before Giorgio Agamben’s books on Paul appeared. Taken together the three works were part of a wider academic interest in the messianic reading of radical politics that Walter Benjamin had been engaged in, and which Jacques Derrida, also inspired by Benjamin, was undertaking in the 1990s. The English translation of Taubes’s Paul lectures indicated that Taubes had finally become essential reading in what had been hailed as the field of theo-politics, and what had been his life-long intellectual impetus.

As unpublished letters by Taubes to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, written shortly after Taubes arrived in the United States in 1953, show, Taubes had been deeply influenced by Benjamin, but he was also deeply influenced by the more conservative wing (at least in comparison to Taubes himself) of those writing on the interconnection of theology and politics, such as Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, and Hans Jonas. In the same letters of 1953, he vigorously defended Löwith’s intellectual importance and character against Rosenstock-Huessy, who despised Löwith. The importance of Löwith for Taubes would be repeated in his introduction to Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fügung where he wrote that Löwith (in his book Von Hegel bis Nietzsche [1941]) had opened his eyes to the eschatological political line that moved from Hegel, via Marx and Kierkegaard to Nietzsche.¹ As with Löwith’s argument about the eschatological nature of modern philosophy, Taubes’s doctoral work had been heavily influenced by writings upon Gnosticism by Hans Urs von Balthasar as well as by Hans Jonas’s account of its sociopolitical historical impact. Unlike Taubes, Jonas was seeking to inform people about the apocalyptic and nihilistic tendencies within the Gnostic legacy so that it might be countered by a more ethical and measured response to life. Another émigré from Nazism, albeit from Austria, Eric Voegelin had an even stronger case than Jonas to make against the destructive powers and continuous line of Gnosticism within the Enlightenment’s revolutionary assault upon the classical and traditional symbolic order. Taubes would seek him out and he even corrected the proofs of the first volume of Voegelin’s Order and History, and years later, after returning to Germany would attempt to set up a discussion (that did not eventuate) between Hans Blumenberg (whose position was critical of the likes of Voegelin arguing that modernity was rooted in religious movements), Alexander Kojève and Voegelin. Taubes had initially astonished Voegelin, who reported immediately after meeting him, that he had met “a real live Gnostic” (195), only to belatedly astonish him by “demonstrating” why Voegelin himself was a Gnostic.²

Taubes also studied with Leo Strauss from 1948 to 1949. But although he was intrigued and open to dialogue with more conservative leaning thinkers such as Voegelin and Strauss, and most notoriously the former Nazi Carl Schmitt, he was far more at home intellectually with the kind of radical thinkers who would become core players in the new left such as Herbert Marcuse, whom he met in 1953 (in the letters to Rosenstock-Huessy he also sings the praises of Marcuse).

As chameleon as Taubes was, there were two pairs of constants that led his intellectual adventures: his Jewishness (he had been born into an illustrious line of Rabbis) and the importance of the Holocaust; and his apocalypticism and radical, or eschatological politics. To Margaret Susman he would say that American Jews who supported anti-communism “failed to realize they were cutting off the branch on which they sat, ‘For after the defeat of communism they will come after the Jews’” (107). It is impossible to overestimate just how much the American intellectual landscape of the post-Second World War period was shaped by German-Jewish émigrés. It was also within that landscape and largely thanks to those émigrés that the key political appeals and narratives coming out of America and circulating globally, thanks to the cultural hegemony (incorporating the cultural networks it championed from Western Europe) it exercised over the Western world. Those narratives and the political positions they supported bifurcated into the new left and the cultural and identity politics that gained shape in the 1960s and 1970s, and the anti-communist political culture (exemplified by Irving Kristol, his wife Gertrud Himmelfarb, and Daniel Bell, who were part of the same circle Strauss was moving in), that eventually gave birth to the Neo-conservative positions of the 2000s. In this respect, and in large part due to his prodigious energy and beguiling charm (which all too often soured) in meeting everyone and anyone who was someone not only in the American academy, but in Israel, Germany, and France, Taubes was a cipher for the spirit of the post-Second World War age, and the ideas that came to define it.

In the United States, he served briefly as editor of a series on Studies in the Humanities for Beacon Press—whilst it fell far short of his ambitions, the list commencing with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and the subsequent books—Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Jacob Burckhardt’s Judgment on History and Historians, Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia, Lewis Feuer’s Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, and Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion, which, with the exception of Burckhardt’s important work being a nineteenth-century classic, were all books vying for the status of modern classics.

When Taubes left the United States to return to Western Europe to take up a position at the Free University of Berlin, in the role of running the Institute of Judaica and Hermeneutics, which had been set up especially for him, he was also soon recruited to do acquisition work for Suhrkamp. On a personal note, I recall when I first went to Germany in 1981, as I was working on my Master’s thesis, being amazed and enchanted by the inexpensive editions of Surhkamp which laid out—much as Penguin Classics was doing in the English-speaking world for the classics—the books that it seemed one had to read if one wanted to understand the world one was living in. It was through Taubes’s tireless efforts in networking, that his intellectual tastes played such a seminal role in creating the modern canon. His contacts who would either grace the Suhrkamp list or be invited to his colloquiums included Hans Blumenberg, Odo Marquand, Robert Jauss, Reinhart Kosselleck, Joachim Ritter, Dieter Heinrich, Hermann Lübbe, Jürgen Habermas—whom he befriended only to fall out with by wanting Suhrkamp to publish Ernst Nolte, who had enraged Habermas by arguing that Nazism was primarily a reaction to the rise of Bolshevism. Many of these as well as numerous others whom Taubes sought out were frequent contributors to the Feuilleton pages of German newspapers, and generally known to the German educated public. His talent in scouting and publicizing would also extend to many French authors when their work was still largely unknow in the United States and Germany. He had already befriended Lucien Goldman in Zurich whilst a doctoral student and would meet Michel Foucault in 1964. Goldman and Foucault, along with Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser (Taubes even attended the funeral of the wife Althusser had strangled), the Romanian French writer E. M. Cioran—would all end up being part of the Suhrkamp list. He also reached out to Hungarian dissidents from the Lukács circle such as Agnes Heller and György Márkus (Taubes had visited and conversed with Lukács in Zurich whilst writing his doctoral thesis).

Then there was his involvement in the German student movement of the 1960s. Unlike Adorno and Habermas who were critical of the irrationality (which for Germans, unlike their French counterparts, was often synonymous with fascism) being unleashed by the student radicalism in Germany, Taubes hailed the movement as just the kind of apocalyptic opportunity he had craved since having seen the revolutionary potential to redeem the world by the Gnostics and eschatologists. By now he was avowing himself to be a Maoist, appearing on stage with Marcuse and Rudi Dutschke and asking the university to invite the American Black Panthers Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver to Berlin.

In sum, Taubes was a veritable Zelig of the life of the mind between the publication of Occidental Eschatology and the time of his death. (For those who do not recall, Zelig is the name of a character in a Woody Allen 1983 movie of the same name about a human chameleon who seems to be present at almost every major historical event during his lifetime as he appears alongside great historical figures.) And any intellectual biography that would do justice to Taubes would have to also tell the story of the ideas and main characters of that age. And that is precisely what Jerry Muller has done in his Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes—brilliantly. Indeed, I cannot think of a better overview of the intellectuals and ideas which have shaped the modern age, especially when it comes to the network of German émigrés in the United States.

What is also essential to Muller’s story is the man and his written work. Again, Muller’s account is excellent. Of the work, though, there is not that much to say, for what is remarkable about this achievement is that Taubes had almost no reputation in his own right until the two “non-books,” his lectures on Paul and the very slim correspondence with and reflection upon Carl Schmitt, made it into print. And while, as Horst Bredekamp observed, Ad Carl Schmitt would eventually become “one of the most influential publications on Schmitt ever written” (cited in Muller, 503)—for around much the same time as the journal Telos was doing in the English-speaking world, it was giving a new lease of life to Schmitt, who inadvertently had sabotaged his postwar career by having served as the President of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists and throwing out antisemitic jibes. Taubes’s fascination with Schmitt had been formed in the 1940s and was fuelled by his friendship with Armin Mohler—who was working on Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and other intellectual Nazis, for his doctoral thesis that would become the book, The Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918–1932: An Outline of Its Worldviews (1949)—and given his sympathetic treatment of Schmitt and Jünger it is not surprising that Mohler was not well thought of by other intellectuals of the time. Nevertheless, it was thanks to the “right-wing” Mohler that the Jewish Taubes, in 1952, first became known to Schmitt—Mohler would pass on a letter by Taubes about Schmitt’s work, which Schmitt found intriguing and insightful.

More than twenty years later, Taubes would meet with Schmitt and enter into a dialogue that would serve in its way to rehabilitate Schmitt for the left. This is Muller’s summation, and I think he is not wrong when he says of the Schmitt and Taubes “books” that Taubes “had made Carl Schmitt kosher for post-Communist leftist intellectuals, just as Taubes’s posthumously published lectures on Die Politische Theologie des Paulus would make Paul kosher for them” (503). Two other volumes of Taubes’s correspondence, the one with Gershom Scholem, the other with Hans Blumenberg, would also be released as books. Apart from these works and a couple of collections of essays, also published after the Paul lectures, Taubes only published one book in his lifetime, his doctoral thesis, Occidental Eschatology. The book is both brilliant in its sweep and scope and a pastiche of the work of other scholars. Rudolf Zipkes, Margarete Susman, and René König complained that Taubes had not acknowledged how dependent his work was upon their scholarship (80). Also peeved by not being adequately acknowledged in the book were Jonas and Löwith—and to be fair to Taubes if he stole anything from them, he certainly made up for it by doing everything he could to publicize their work.

One story (though not mentioned by Muller) recounts that when Taubes invited Hans Jonas to discuss Occidental Eschatology, Jonas, who had no idea who Taubes was, asked Karl Löwith if he knew Taubes or his book, to which Löwith responded: “Oh, yes,” he said, “I know the book.” “Well, is it any good?” At that he said, laughing, “Oh, it’s a very good book. And that’s no accident—half of it’s by you and the other half’s by me.”³ Though as Wilem Styfhals rightly points out whilst the book did rely heavily upon Jonas and Löwith, Taubes’s originality lay in “in bringing together the two perspectives of modern Gnosticism [Jonas] and secularized eschatology [Löwith].”⁴ As Styfhals also rightly says, Taubes would invariably reshape the material he borrowed to develop his own take. More pertinently, as I have indicated, it is hard to think of anyone at the time working in the area of philosophical-theology and politics who Taubes did not personally seek out and attempt to bring into dialogue—which justifies Styfhals’s assessment that “Taubes can be considered the originator and mediator of the postwar debates on modern Gnosticism.”⁵

Then there is the man, Jacob Taubes himself. And much of Muller’s book attempts to do justice to the man, who, though not universally, was deeply hated by the many people who had the misfortune to be caught up in the havoc (which included the suicide of his ex-wife Susan) he left around him by playing various mind-games, spreading gossip, innuendo, and philandering; indeed, according to Janet Aviad he “took a certain pleasure in destroying marriages,” and generally being a master manipulator. A former colleague of his at Columbia, whom I knew, appears in the book—along with the story of how Taubes stabbed him in the back—turned crimson at the mere mention of his name. Muller recounts that “the word most frequently used to describe him was “demonic,” though another “adjective applied” to him was “Mephistophelean.” Adorno wrote of him, “I tend to think that Taubes is a person of good intellectual but bad empirical character” (289); Leo Strauss said “he had never experienced such shameless ambition,” and Hanna Arendt called him “mendacious and impudent” (225). And those are some of the more measured character assessments.

Perhaps the most famous of Taubes’s fallouts was with Gershom Scholem, who never forgave him for breaching a confidential remark about the work of one of his doctoral students with psychological difficulties, and, in doing so, sending him, as well as the student’s wife, into a state of clinical depression. Muller recounts that Susan Sontag, married then to Philip Rieff (whom Taubes had been undermining behind his back), and somewhat enamoured of Taubes, mentioned him whilst visiting Scholem, “Scholem paled and told them that it was through knowing Jacob Taubes that he had come to know the reality of moral evil in the world” (323). Another, Jean Bollack, who had known Taubes for decades, felt compelled to tell Taubes’s daughter that “You need to know that your father is the incarnation of evil” (404).

It must be very galling for those who knew and loathed Taubes to see that this man who beguiled and charmed his way into prestigious academic positions, who published almost nothing after his PhD thesis, who ruined marriages, friendships and reputations has become something of a star in the intellectual firmament. Even worse, whilst there is ample evidence of Taubes’s incredible ability to scan and summarize and capably pronounce on works he had merely skimmed, as well as provide a vast number of references whilst summarizing the various sides of a dispute—as Walter Sokel, a colleague at Columbia, put it, “Before there was Google, there was Taubes”—he was also a master “bullshitter.” Muller recounts the following story (a story that Taubes’s son, Ethan, also told me personally when I was in touch with him almost ten years ago): some colleagues invented a fictional Medieval philosopher Bertram of Hildesheim, who was an intermediary between the Thomistic and Scotist schools. Knowing that Taubes was within hearing distance they began discussing his theory of the soul. “After listening intently for a while, Jacob “spoke brilliantly about [the non-existent] Bertram of Hildesheim’s psychology and astonished those present with his profound and comprehensive knowledge” (224).

For all Taubes’s sins—he himself would say, when once asked how he could reconcile eating pork sausages while presenting himself as an orthodox Jew “I am an Orthodox Jew … but I’m also a great sinner” (449)—and for all his intellectual guile, Taubes was a brilliant man. And Jerry Muller is to be congratulated on doing such a great job not only in conveying the complexities, the paradoxes, and demonic genius of Taubes, but, in some ways, and even more importantly, writing a marvellous intellectual biography of the post-World War Two period in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Germany.

By way of a postscript, I should disclose that some years back after finding the letters by Taubes mentioned above in the archives of Rosenstock-Huessy, I forwarded them to Jerry Muller—so we are acquainted—and a friend of mine and I have a draft translation of the letters by Taubes. They are as brash as they are brilliant, and they provide an invaluable contribution to understanding how the post-Holocaust sensibility exemplified by Taubes differs from that of Rosenstock-Huessy, an intellectual colossus whose deepest traumas came from the First World War.

Finally, as great as this biography is and as smart as so many of the characters who grace its pages are, what I am also left with is a sense of the intellectual conceit not only of Taubes, but of all those thinkers whom Taubes befriended and often disappointed or betrayed. Whilst he sided with the antinomian radicalism that would find its zenith in the 1960s, perhaps neatly summed up by Taubes himself in his assessment of where he differed from Carl Schmitt, when he said that he “had no spiritual investment in the world as it is,” what is so striking is how certain the respective diagnosticians of the modern age were about their diagnoses. And this holds just as true for the more conservative thinkers who had no sympathy for the antinomian political radicalism that Taubes embraced, as for the radical thinkers who were intent on overhauling society to fit their picture of what it might be if their ideas were but followed. That is something that I particularly find disquieting. It speaks to a generation of thinkers who, whilst being pretty clever and well read, were enchanted by their abilities, and who in the long run have contributed to an intellectual culture where ability to navigate one’s way in the world of ideas and come to solutions about social and political problems comes relatively easy, whilst the world we live in is just as riven politically and mired in geopolitical conflicts as it ever was.

Notes

^1. The letters of Taubes to Rosentstock-Huessy are to be found in the Rosenstock-Huessy archives at the Rauner Library at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA; Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt Gegenstrebige Fügung, 2.

^2. Cooper and Bruhn, Voegelin Recollected, 80.

^3. Jonas, Memoirs, 168.

^4. Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World, 78.

^5. Ibid.