Ethics between Cognition and Volition

Author(s): Arnold I. Davidson

Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 93, No. 4 (October 2013), pp. 452-460
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Ethics between Cognition and Volition*

Arnold I. Davidson /

University of Chicago and

Universita` CaFoscari Venezia

Michael Fishbanes Ethics and Sacred Attunement embodies all of the

virtues of the classic genre of the essay. Building on his Sacred Attunement,
but standing fully on its own, this essay succeeds in combining extraordinary scholarship with profound philosophical insight. Ethics and Sacred
Attunement calls for a reading in at least three separate, but contiguous
and interrelated dimensions: 1 the general relationship between theology
and ethics; 2 the specifically Jewish tradition of relating theology and ethics; and 3 the nature and foundations of ethics as such. Despite its brevity,
the richness and subtlety of Ethics and Sacred Attunement can hardly be
exhausted in the space of this response. I have chosen to focus on a limited,
and I believe essential, set of issues in the hope of raising further questions, questions implicit in this text that have to be confronted by all theologians and philosophers who are gripped by these problems.
Central to Ethics and Sacred Attunement is the idea that patterns and
their meanings are neither self-evident nor imposed, but are the product
of human interpretation 422 and, therefore, that we take hermeneutic
responsibility for our relations with things and persons, an idea that, as Fishbane putsit, is a fundamental precondition for ethics 423. Our fundamental
orientation in the world is as hermeneutic beings who bear inalienable
responsibility for our assessments and explanations 422. As ethical moments break forth explicitly, we must consciously assess a particular person
in a particular situation here and now, and any such assessment requires
a hermeneutic moment that Fishbane calls a reflective pause, a space for reflection and deliberation: Ethical attunement requires a series of pauses
amid the entwined loops of intersubjectivity, each one effecting deliberate
acts of coregulation between the selves 43132. As our hermeneutic aware-

* All references within the text are to Michael Fishbanes Ethics and Sacred Attunement,
in this issue. All translations from French and Italian are my own.
2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0022-4189/2013/9304-0004$10.00

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Ethics between Cognition and Volition

ness and attention increases, so does our sense of responsibility, a responsibility that has no limit fixed in advance. This interactive spiral between
attention and responsibility grounds an attitude and practice of unending
responsiveness.
Lack of deliberative, of reflexive and focused interpretation, assessment
and evaluation in a world shared with others is the hermeneutic commencement of evil. In a brilliant paragraph toward the end of his essay, Fishbane
writes:
Breaches of this entwined attunement, disregulations and interpersonal infringements of every sort, mark the insidious path of evil in its various degrees and forms.
For evil occurs along a hermeneutic spectrum. It may begin somewhat innocuously,
with a forgetting or obscuring of ones primary hermeneutic responsibilityperhaps through the inurement of habit or self-centeredness. One expression of this is
indifference. Such an attitude may lead to disregardperhaps for similar reasons.
The result is a more deliberate turning away from the other person. All such moments may result in interpersonal or social disease and may corrode into malign
acts of disruption or deliberate destruction. Each act along this spectrum thus effects a different reading of worldly cohabitation, a different effacement of the
human presence that has solicited me and my being. Thus, ethics may be thought of
as involving attunements of intentional coregulation, for the sake of transforming
the world into communities of value through reflective acts of intersubjective interpretation 42333.

The most powerful confirmation of this philosophical insight can be

found in Primo Levis discussion of the outermost edge of this hermeneutic
spectrum of evil, in the chapter of I sommersi e i salvati titled Comunicare.
Dismantling the frivolous and irritating, but very fashionable, idea that
we are all condemned to incommunicability, that we are monads, incapable
of reciprocal messages, or capable only of mutilated messages, false in departure and misunderstood at arrival, Levi perspicuously attributes this
lamentation to mental laziness, and he challenges this laziness with the
following claim: Except in cases of pathological incapacity, one can and
one should communicate: it is a useful and easy way to contribute to others
and to ones own peace, because silence, the absence of signals, is in its turn
a signal, but ambiguous, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To
deny that one can communicate is false: one always can. To refuse to communicate is a fault.1
Commenting on the range of various forms of absent communication,
and arriving at that devastating, radical incommunicability encountered in
the concentration camps, that collision against a total linguistic barrier,
Levi observes, with his characteristic anthropological sobriety, that the use
of speech to communicate thought, this necessary and sufficient mechanism in order for a human being to be a human being, had fallen into dis1

Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati Torino: Einaudi, 1986, 6869.

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The Journal of Religion

use.2 After describing in terrifying detail this genuine absence of communication, Levi recalls that in the Lager of Mauthausen, even more multilingual than Auschwitz, the rubber whip was called der Dolmetscher, the interpreter: that which made itself understood by everyone.3 Levi draws his
discussion to a close with the following apparently descriptive observation,
a description whose ethical force is undeniable: Not everyone suffered in
equal measure from missing or meager communication. Not to suffer from
it, to accept the eclipse of speech, was a fatal symptom: it signaled the approach of definitive indifference.4
The interpretive indifference noted by Fishbane, the eclipse of communication signaled by Levi, each mark out a form of evil that can only be
countered by that attention and vigilance that are inherently ethical.5 If the
notion of communication in Levi directly invokes a social dimension, Fishbane makes clear, using the full resources of the Jewish tradition, that his
idea of interpretation inevitably implies a social ethic. Both Fishbanes interpretation and Levis communication are in effect forms of dialogue. As Pierre
Hadot has argued, dialogue was the fundamental form of ancient philosophical discourse, a mode of discourse that aims to form rather than to inform.6 The dialectic of the dialogue requires, at each moment the explicit
agreement of the interlocutor, an accord or attunement that demands a
path traveled together, so that the dialectical effort is in fact an ascent in
common toward the truth and toward the Good.7 As Hadot emphasizes,
Only he who is capable of a true encounter with others is capable of an
authentic encounter with himself and the reverse is equally true. The dialogue is truly a dialogue only in the presence to others and to oneself.8 Or
as Hadot memorably puts it in our book of conversations, in Antiquity,
philosophy is therefore essentially dialogue, a living relation between persons rather than an abstract relation to ideas.9 I am reminded here of the
philosophically astute use of the Hassidic tradition by Gilles Bernheim, the
former chief rabbi of France. Speaking of the significance of dialogue, he
writes, The words of the Hassidic masters . . . seem to banish all abstract
objectivity, all supposedly indifferent neutrality toward people. All that
counts is he or she to whom the words are addressed. The truth is that
which reaches each one in the appropriate way. The address to the other
2

Ibid., 68, 70.

Ibid., 71.
4
Ibid., 79.
5
I have discussed further aspects of Levis own ethics of communication in Gli esercizi
spirituali di Primo Levi, in La vacanza morale del fascismo: Intorno a Primo Levi, ed. Arnold I.
Davidson Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2009, 519.
6
Pierre Hadot, La philosophie comme manie`re de vivre: Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I.
Davidson Paris: Albin Michel, 2001, 97, and see also Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique
Paris: Albin Michel, 2002, 3847.
7
Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 4547.
8
Ibid., 44.
9
Hadot, La philosophie comme manie`re de vivre, 97.
3

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Ethics between Cognition and Volition

governs and models the aim. It is advisable to say that which concerns the
other, what he can understand, what can be useful to him, and not only to
dispense some indivisible truth.10 I read Michael Fishbanes social ethics of
hermeneutic responsibility as a call to dialogue, not in the trivial sense that
one usually employs this term, but in Hadots sense of dialogue as spiritual exercise, a combat, friendly, but real in which each participant wrestles with the other and struggles with himself, submitting himself to the requirements of the Logos and turning himself toward the Good.11 This
transformative work of dialogue is an overcoming of evil. As Hadot says, in
ancient philosophical thought this exercise was often conceived of as an
itinerary of the spirit toward the divine.12
***
I would like to move now to discuss a major series of questions, one that
lies, so to speak, in the space between Fishbane and Levi. In contrast to
Fishbane, Levis ethics of communication has no theological foundation,
and Levi puts forward his conception as rationally defensible without any
need for such a foundation. The most unambiguously foundational theological moment of Fishbanes ethics is to be found in his articulation of the
notion of Torah Kelulah, which marks off the transcendental world of Divine effectivity for our consciousness 42324. The most recurrent characterization of the Torah Kelulah in Fishbanes account is as an immeasurable
vastness that gathers our sense of the infinite surge of things 423. He
also emphasizes its silence, unsayability, ineffability, which only speaks insofar as we strive to hear its address, or attempt to give voice to its inscrutable
inscription upon the tablets of existence 424. This basic ontological truth
of an ineffable, immeasurable vastness gives rise to our task, our duty, of finding hermeneutic measures, measures that give sense to the immeasurable
expressions of the Torah Kelulah 424. Fishbane compellingly weaves together the various dimensions of this hermeneutical ethics founded on the
Torah Kelulah: Alert to the omnipresent Torah Kelulah and its many challenges, they teachers within the tradition$ mediate its potential through hermeneutic devices that inject the received forms of culture with new possibility. . . . At every point, the Torah Kelulah was parsed anew, and its immeasurable
effects adjusted to the old inheritance through hermeneutic revisions of
every sort. . . . The Torah Kelulah of God thus holds immeasurable potential
for human life. How one evaluates these possibilities, and articulates measures for beneficent living, is the ongoing moral challenge 424.
There is no doubt that the notion of the Torah Kelulah gives metaphysical
and theological depth to our experience of cosmic vastness. And it is exactly at this juncture that the question arises as to the relation between a
phenomenology of ethics, indeed of the social ethics of hermeneutic re10
11
12

Gilles Bernheim, Quarante meditations juives Paris: Stock, 2011, 14.

Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 45, 47.
Ibid., 47.

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The Journal of Religion

sponsibility described by Fishbane, and the need for a theological foundation such as that of the Torah Kelulah. Are we not able to bring into focus
and preserve the phenomenon of cosmic vastness or infinities from a thoroughly phenomenological point of view, without grounding it theologically?
Is the experience so acutely enunciated by FishbaneSomething whelms
me and I parse it; something has exigency, even as I exegete it. I somehow
take its measure and interact with it 431not phenomenologically selfsufficient? Does the being with of the ethics of attunement, which issues from
the need for interpretation and evaluation, hermeneutic and ethical measure, require an independent theological or metaphysical justification? As
Fishbane emphasizes, For we are creatures that continuously shape the surrounding vastness into cultural forms and formulations, through our evaluations of its nature and being 422. And isnt that description enough? The
centrality of these questions is internal to Fishbanes account itself. The final section of his essay, his phenomenology of the ethics of attunement,
beings with a consideration of the ways in which we are overwhelmed by a
swirl of elements, an immeasurableswirl thatisthepurephenomenological
equivalent of the all-enfolding Divine effectivity, an immeasurable Vastness,
Source of all measures named Torah Kelulah 430, 423. Fishbanes refined
phenomenological sensibility in this last section is not framed in theological terms. He writes: That primal swirl is the most fundamental ground of
consciousness, from which and through which we see and hear and make all
decisions. Ever requiring new acts of interpretation, that swirl is the archetypical site of an ontological ethics 430. On my reading, this description
is the precise phenomenological correlative of an earlier theological description: Thus, the Name Shall Be which marks the divine Tetragram$ gathers
our sense of the infinite surge of things, this being the experiential ground
of all human measures 423. Thus Fishbanes own account pushes us to
ask: Is the Torah Kelulah an optional foundational discourse that arises, as it
were, after the fact of our primary existential experience? Or is some such discourse necessary to preserve and give force to this experience? I am reminded
here of Hadots argument that spiritual exercises can be practiced independently of the discourses that justify them or recommend them, that these
exercises have a value in itself, independently of theories.13 Hadots conclusion thus gives rise to the corresponding question I want to raise with respect to this aspect of Fishbanes account. Hadots decisive claim is as follows:
One can in effect justify the same spiritual exercise with extremely different
philosophical discourses, which are only awkward attempts, that come after
the event, to describe and justify inner experiences whose existential density in the end escapes every effort of theorization and systematization.14
13
14

Hadot, La philosophie comme manie`re de vivre, 252.

Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 331.

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Ethics between Cognition and Volition

***
Now that I have moved into the domain of phenomenology and theology, I want to conclude by taking up a final issue of fundamental philosophical significance, a series of questions that revolve around Fishbanes
other central concept, that of humility. The notion of humility plays as
essential a role in Fishbanes ethics as that of responsibility. Indeed, humility is the basis for that moral awareness expressed in his hermeneutic of
responsibility. At the beginning of his essay, speaking of two fundamental
dispositions, Fishbane writes: The more primary disposition of humility is
a response to the vastness itself, and issues in tremors of awe; its secondary
consequence, moral awareness, is an awakening to the realization that our
world of meanings is constructed through ongoing evaluations and interpretations. Thus, if the attitude of humility is an attunement to our fundamental finitude, the sense of moral awareness relates to our primary responsibility for all our judgments and determinations 422. From this
description, dense but direct, I believe that we can extract two distinctive
phenomenologies of humility. I will label them the humility of limitation
and the humility of awe. The humility expressed in the realization of ones
limitations is precisely a response to the vastness itself 422. In a hermeneutic context, this encounter with cosmic vastness and the constant need
to shape the surrounding vastness into cultural forms and formulations,
through our evaluation of its nature and being, leads to an acute awareness
of our limitationsboth the limitations in all of our hermeneutic gestures,
which are never definitive or finished, as well as the limitations manifest in
the need for a social hermeneutics, a co-regulation with others that must
serve a shared world 422, 432. This humility of limitation, to use Fishbanes incisive words, ramifies into responsibility for personal judgments
and ethical attunement toward all creatures 424 25. However, this recognition of our limitations, as expressed in humility, confronted by vastness,
does not need to issue in tremors of awe. The experience of awe gives rise
to another phenomenology of humility, one that is distinctively theological.
The most phenomenologically precise definition of awe that I have discovered is given by the French Robert respect mixed with fear respect mele de
crainteand it is evident that the primary object of awe is God. Presence
before God makes me aware of my finitude in the face of the Infinity of
transcendence, and this awareness takes me beyond that of my hermeneutic
and social limitations. I am humbled and submitted, in an experience more
passive than active, to that Being who provokes and inspires respect and fear.
This phenomenology of humility appears explicitly in Fishbanes account
when he discusses the hermeneutic mode of Sod, where one is inducted into
the transcendental mysteries themselves 429. As he puts it, The hermeneutic mode of Sod may thus cultivate a most awesome humility and reverential attunement to the All-Immeasurable of Gods Shall Be 429. This hu-

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mility, intimately linked to awe and reverence, is part of a specific phenomenological structure, one that is explicitly theological.
In order to draw out further the philosophical importance of this multiform problem of humility, and confining myself to the resources of the
Jewish tradition, I want briefly to consider Joseph Soloveitchiks classic essay, Majesty and Humility.15 After describing what we can think of as the
phenomenological core of that irreconcilable and interminable dialectic that characterizes our being, Soloveitchik turns to the dialectical morality expressed in the two moralities of a morality of majesty and a morality of
humility. The morality of majesty, that of cosmic man, aims at sovereignty
and victory, and underlying this ethic of victory is the mystical doctrine
that creation is incomplete. God purposefully left one aspect of creation unfinished in order to involve man in a creative gesture and to give him the opportunity to become co-creator and king. . . . Under victory we understand,
not only the subjection of nature to the needs of man, but also the establishment of a true and just society, and an equitable economic order.16
This creative gesture is consonant with a hermeneutic of responsibility that
emphasizes the fundamentally constructive nature of thought and judgment 429.
Soloveitchik then turns to the ethic of retreat or withdrawal, which he
roots in the Lurianic doctrine of tzimtzum, the self-contraction or withdrawal
of God to make room for a finite world. However, for Soloveitchik the doctrine of tzimtzum is not just a Kabbalistic mystery, but has foundational
moral consequences: If God withdrew, and creation is a result of his withdrawal, then, guided by the principle of imitatio Dei, we are called upon to
do the same. Jewish ethics, then, requires man, in certain situations, to withdraw.17 As Soloveitchik proceeds, this ethic of retreat and withdrawal becomes an ethic of self-defeat : Self-defeat is demanded in those areas in
which man is most interested . . . God tells man to withdraw from whatever
man desires the most.18 This ethic of self-defeat, in Soloveitchiks account,
then takes a particularly significant form, with its own specific phenomenological texture that will take me back to the issue of the phenomenology
of humility. Soloveitchik writes: What does man cherish more than intellect, around which his sense of dignity is centered? Precisely because of the
supremacy of the intellect in human life, the Torah requires, at times, the
suspension of the authority logos. Man defeats himself by accepting norms
that the intellect cannot assimilate into its normative system. The Judaic
15
Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Majesty and Humility, Tradition 17, no. 2 1978: 2537. The
best overall introduction to Soloveitchiks thought is Reuven Ziegler, Majesty and Humility:
The Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik Jerusalem: Urim, 2012. Zeigler discusses all of
Soloveitchiks major works, both Hebrew and English.
16
Soloveitchik, Majesty and Humility, 34.
17
Ibid., 3536.
18
Ibid., 36.

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Ethics between Cognition and Volition

concept of represents human surrender and human defeat. Man, an
intellectual being, ignores the logos and burdens himself with laws whose
rational motif he cannot grasp. He withdraws from the rationalistic position.19 The acceptance of hukim, as commanded by God, requires a suspension of judgment and evaluation: it is the self-defeat of reason and the submission of the will to God. According to Soloveitchik, a hok can be defined as
an absolute norm and an ultimate command, demanding total submission
without reservations . . . it demands the surrender of ones mind and the
suspension of ones thinking. It is a total commitment precisely because it
requires an abdication of ones reason.20
As we can see here, to complete the phenomenological structure of the
humility of awe, we must take account of the phenomenon of submission
and explicitly attend to the phenomenology of volition. The experience represented by a hok takes shape in that form of humility, which, in experiencing
awe in the presence of God, demands absolute submission to His will. If awe
is respect mixed with fear, we can say that while fear provokes psychological
submission, respect occasions ethical submission. Of course, in the phenomenology of religious submission these two dimensions combine to form an
organic whole: the result is humility as a theological phenomenon. We become aware not only of our specific cognitive limitations but of the limitations of the intellect as such, and this is brought about through the experience of volitional submission in which our cognitive aspirations are totally
surrendered to the will of God. We are volitionally and cognitively humbled
by Gods commands.
I am now in a position to formulate my question: Is there an equivalent to
this phenomenology of hukim in Fishbanes ethics of sacred attunement?
In an elegant and remarkable phrase, Fishbane characterizes us as cognizing modalities of the Torah Kelulah 424. And, no doubt, the hermeneutic
activities of interpretation and assessment are primarily cognitive activities.
On the other hand, it is evident that attunement is a volitional phenomenon, but it does not imply complete surrender, total submission: indeed, it
requires, coresponsiveness, coresponsibility, coregulation 432. So what
then is our volitional orientation toward the Torah Kelulah? More generally,
what is the relation between cognition and volition with respect to the foundations of ethics? Or to raise the question in another way, Is our experience
of the humility of limitation or of the humility of awe the basis of our moral
awareness? These questions strike me as crucial to understanding the phenomenology of command, which will then allow us to discern more clearly
19

Ibid., 37.
Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Abraham R. Besdin, Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish
Thought, vol. 1 Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1979, 100, 102. For other discussions of Soloveitchik on
hukim, see Avishei C. David, Darosh Darash Yosef: Discourses of Rav Yosef Dov Halevi Soloveitchik on
the Weekly Parashah Jerusalem: Urim, 2011, 24348, 33956.
20

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the strong theological moments, or absence thereof, in our ethical consciousness. Such issues concerning the place of the humility of submission in our
moral life can be condensed in the contrasting provocative avowals of Joseph
Soloveitchik and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and so I shall end this essay with their
words:
Soloveitchik: Eleven years ago my wife lay on her deathbed and I watched her dying,
day by day, hour by hour; medically, I could do very little for her, all I could do was to
pray. However, I could not pray in the hospital; somehow I could not find God in the
whitewashed, long corridors among the interns and the nurses. However, the need for
prayer was great; I could not live without gratifying this need. The moment I returned
home I would rush to my room, fall on my knees and pray fervently.21
Wittgenstein: I cannot kneel to pray, because its as though my knees were stiff. I am
afraid of dissolution my own dissolution should I become soft.22
21
22

Soloveitchik, Majesty and Humility, 33.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, rev. ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, 63e.

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