Heidegger and Kabbalah

Heidegger and Kabbalah
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0253042585

While many scholars have noted Martin Heidegger's indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, as well as his affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, Elliot R. Wolfson expands connections between Heidegger's thought and kabbalistic material. By arguing that the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger, Wolfson presents an alternative way of understanding the history of Western philosophy. Wolfson's comparison between Heidegger and kabbalah sheds light on key concepts such as hermeneutics, temporality, language, and being and nothingness, while yielding surprising reflections on their common philosophical ground. Given Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language, these innovative readings are all the more remarkable for their juxtaposition of incongruent fields of discourse. Wolfson's entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions.

Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality

Suffering Time: Philosophical, Kabbalistic, and Ḥasidic Reflections on Temporality
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 799
Release: 2021-05-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004449345

No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.

The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow

The Duplicity of Philosophy's Shadow
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231546246

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is considered one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century in spite of his well-known transgressions—his complicity with National Socialism and his inability to show remorse or compassion for its victims. In The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow, Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in a debate that has seen much attention in scholarly and popular media from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger’s work. Wolfson sets out to probe Heidegger’s writings to expose what remains unthought. In spite of Heidegger’s explicit anti-Semitic statements, Wolfson reveals some crucial aspects of his thinking—including criticism of the biological racism and militant apocalypticism of Nazism—that betray an affinity with dimensions of Jewish thought: the triangulation of the concepts of homeland, language, and peoplehood; Jewish messianism and the notion of historical time as the return of the same that is always different; inclusion, exclusion, and the status of the other; the problem of evil in kabbalistic symbolism. Using Heidegger’s own methods, Wolfson reflects on the inextricable link of truth and untruth and investigates the matter of silence and the limits of speech. He challenges the tendency to bifurcate the relationship of the political and the philosophical in Heidegger’s thought, but parts company with those who write off Heidegger as a Nazi ideologue. Ultimately, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow argues, the greatness and relevance of Heidegger’s work is that he presents us with the opportunity to think the unthinkable as part of our communal destiny as historical beings.

Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice

Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice
Author: Charles Bambach
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2013-05-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438445814

A new reading of justice engaging the work of two philosophical poets who stand in conversation with the work of Martin Heidegger. What is the measure of ethics? What is the measure of justice? And how do we come to measure the immeasurability of these questions? Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice situates the problem of justice in the interdisciplinary space between philosophy and poetry in an effort to explore the sources of ethical life in a new way. Charles Bambach engages the works of two philosophical poets who stand as the bookends of modernity—Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Paul Celan (1920–1970)—offering close textual readings of poems from each that define and express some of the crucial problems of German philosophical thought in the twentieth century: tensions between the native and the foreign, the proper and the strange, the self and the other. At the center of this philosophical conversation between Hölderlin and Celan, Bambach places the work of Martin Heidegger to rethink the question of justice in a nonlegal, nonmoral register by understanding it in terms of poetic measure. Focusing on Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s readings of pre-Socratic philosophy and Greek tragedy, as well as on Celan’s reading of Kabbalah, he frames the problem of poetic justice against the trauma of German destruction in the twentieth century.

Alef, Mem, Tau

Alef, Mem, Tau
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2006-04-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0520246195

Alef, Mem, Tau also discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time."

The Unthought Debt

The Unthought Debt
Author: Marlène Zarader
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2006
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780804736862

Drawing on Heidegger's corpus, the work of historians and biblical specialists, and contemporary philosophers like Levinas and Derrida, Zarader brings to light the evolution of an impensé—or unthought thought—that bespeaks a complex debt at the core of Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology. Zarader argues forcefully that in his interpretation of Western thought and culture, Heidegger manages to recognize only two main lines of inheritance: the "Greek" line of philosophical thinking, and the Christian tradition of "faith." From this perspective, Heidegger systematically avoids any explicit or meaningful recognition of the contribution made by the Hebraic biblical and exegetical traditions to Western thought and culture. Zarader argues that this avoidance is significant, not simply because it involves an inexcusable historical oversight, but more importantly because Heidegger's own philosophical project draws on and develops themes that appear first, and fundamentally, within the very Hebraic traditions that he avoids, betraying an "unthought debt" to Hebraic tradition.

Language, Eros, Being

Language, Eros, Being
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 1256
Release: 2009-08-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823224201

This long-awaited, magisterial study-an unparalleled blend of philosophy, poetry, and philology-draws on theories of sexuality, phenomenology, comparative religion, philological writings on Kabbalah, Russian formalism, Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, William Blake, and the very physics of the time-space continuum to establish what will surely be a highwater mark in work on Kabbalah. Not only a study of texts, Language, Eros, Being is perhaps the fullest confrontation of the body in Jewish studies, if not in religious studies as a whole. Elliot R. Wolfson explores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, he seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists. He demonstrates that the traditional Kabbalistic view of gender was a monolithic and androcentric one, in which the feminine was conceived as being derived from the masculine. He does not shrink from the negative implications of this doctrine, but seeks to make an honest acknowledgment of it as the first step toward the redemption of an ancient wisdom. Comparisons with other mystical traditions-including those in Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam-are a remarkable feature throughout the book. They will make it important well beyond Jewish studies, indeed, a must for historians of comparative religion, in particular of comparative mysticism. Praise for Elliot R. Wolfson: "Through a Speculum That Shines is an important and provocative contribution to the study of Jewish mysticism by one of the major scholars now working in this field."-Speculum

New Paths in Jewish and Religious Studies

New Paths in Jewish and Religious Studies
Author: Glenn Dynner
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2024-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1612499244

The work of Elliot R. Wolfson has profoundly influenced the fields of Jewish studies as well as philosophy and religion more broadly. His radically new approaches have created pioneering ways of analyzing texts and thinking about religion through the lens of gender, sexuality, and feminist theory. The contributors to New Paths in Jewish and Religious Studies: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, many of whom are internationally renowned scholars, hearken from diverse fields. Each has learned from and collaborated with Wolfson as student or colleague, and each has expanded the new scholarly directions initiated by Wolfson’s groundbreaking work. Wolfson’s scholarship gives us innovative ways to think about Judaism and a fresh understanding of religion. Not only a scholar, Wolfson is one of the most important Jewish thinkers of our day. Chapters are grouped according to the categories of religion, Jewish thought and philosophy, and a focused section on Kabbalah, Wolfson’s primary specialization. The volume concludes with a bibliography of Wolfson’s published work and a selection of his poetry.

Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah

Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah
Author: Karen Silvia DeLe¢n-Jones
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0803266464

Giordano Bruno (1548?1600), a defrocked Dominican monk, was convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Inquisition and burned at the stake in Rome. He had spent fifteen years wandering throughout Europe on the run from Counter-Reformation intelligence and eight years in prison under interrogation. The author of more than sixty works on mathematics, science, ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, the art of memory and esoteric mysticism, Bruno had a profound impact on Western thought. Until now his involvement with Jewish mysticism has never been fully explored. Karen Silvia de Le¢n-Jones presents an engaging and illuminating discussion of his mystical understanding and use of Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, theology, and philosophy, including the famous Hermetica, and especially his exploration and use of magic to reveal the mysteries of the universe and the divine.

Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust

Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust
Author: Alan Michman
Publisher: Humanity Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1996
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781573923743

Focuses on a neglected aspect of the Heidegger controversy: the question of Martin Heidegger's relationship to the industrialization of death as symbolized by Auschwitz. Contributors seek to comprehend the meaning of Heidegger's post-war silence about the Holocaust, as well as the meaning of his several explicit references to the Extermination, in the light of his preoccupation with the nihilism that he believed to be the hallmark of our technological world. Essays reflect the editors' concern to avoid both censorship and partisanship in their selections--resulting in a wide diversity of viewpoints, and the full spectrum of views, that have arisen in the course of the ongoing Heidegger debate.