The Romance of Reason

For Gillian Rose

In case you missed it, here is my latest podcast interview with Sheila Heti.

And here is my 100 tweet essay in tribute to Gillian Rose:

The time has come for a threadapalooza on Gillian Rose (1947-1995), a giant thinker and deep soul. Massively under-read and under-appreciated. A philosopher, theologian, and memoirist, she
sought both to defend and mourn the Enlightenment after the Holocaust.

Rose is a liminal figure in the history of thought, because she is born at a time when it's difficult to be an original thinker. And yet her works read like primary texts and even as they are works of commentary. 2

Academia generally does not smile upon works of primary thought, but requires one to be "a scholar of X." Rose wrote a dissertation on Adorno, but she is not an Adorno scholar. She is a a thinker who writes with a refreshing clarity, often lacking in her influences. 3

Rose's project is something like Adorno's in that she wants to save a place for reason and enlightenment even after its disappointments, the atrocities committed in its name. Adorno called his work "the melancholy science." 4

It's melancholy because it no longer believes in itself. But it's also stubborn. It's not gonna move on. Postmodernism, in some tellings, is the cynical move of saying let's not bother anymore with reason. Rose would rather say let's sit with the failures of reason. 5

In my favorite work of Rose's- "Mourning Becomes the Law"- Rose positions herself as Phocion's wife. Phocion was excommunicated from the polis. But his wife eats his ashes and in so doing brings them back into the city after his death. She smuggles him back in. 6

The philosopher's job, she says, is to eat the ashes of reason and bring them back into the city. 7

According to Rose, Auschwitz wasn't intended to be a place off the map, but a kind of epic city that would play a major role in the future of Germany. The architectural plans of Auschwitz implicate the city as a philosophical and humanitarian problem. 8

We have to contend not just with atrocity, but how atrocity could co-exist with rationality, urban planning, "utopian" aspirations to create a new world. 9

But Rose refuses to do what a lot of other thinkers do. She refuses to idealize the opposition to German thought, as if, if we just changed a couple premises, Auschwitz might be avoided. She considers Auschwitz to be a serious blow, a major risk, of western thought generally. 10

Rose doesn't think the answers can be found in Buber, Levinas, Rosenzweig, or "Judaism," conceived as dialogue or a fore-fronting of "the other." 11

She believes we need to find new paths in thinking, but not by rejecting the old ones. We have to write from ruin. Rose writes in "Judaism & Modernity" that she isn't writing from the perspective of one who found an answer. She's writing in search of herself. 12

Rose writes as someone born Jewish, and she writes as someone who grapples with Jewish thought. But she also writes as someone who is of the West, and who is grapplling with a hybrid identity, including an aversion to being pigeon-holed into an identity label. 13

Rose rejects the notion that one's cultural origins are determinative of one's destiny or agency. She died of ovarian cancer, and converted, shortly before her death, to Christianity.

Her conversion is both shocking and not shocking. 14

It is shocking because she seems so deeply Jewish and close to Jewish thought throughout her work. It is also shocking because she rejects the caricature of Judaism as loveless law; she writes sympathetically of halacha. 15

In fact, Rose takes halacha (Jewish law) to be a rejoinder to those who would bifurcate reason from life, creating a cleft between the abstract and the personal. 16

For Rose, following the lead of Adorno, her life has philosophical meaning, and offers insights and guideposts for thinking. 17

But it's not shocking, because Rose is not a triumphalist. She doesn't think that any particular system or lineage has cracked the code. Nor is she settled on the issue of particularism vs. universalism. 18

One way that Judaism is defended, and this was especially true in the 80s, was to associate it with postmodernism. We find this in the work of Daniel Boyarin, in Susan Handler, in Derrida, Eric Santner...the Jew is carnal, messy, embodied...unlike the Greek, who is pristine...19

But Rose is suspicious of these neat oppositions; Athens and Jerusalem have more in common than they have in opposition to each other. 20

Alternatively, life is meaningfully lived in the tensions caused by being hybrid. We need not settle the conflicts; rather, they are are evidence of dialectic on a personal level. 21

Death put an end to Rose's life and work, but her conversion is not the end of her story; it is one piece in a dynamic that was always messy and experimental, sincere and searching. 22

What we should take from her conversion, I think, is not a verdict on what she believed, but evidence that project is both rational AND devotional, and that regarded saw the pursuit of truth in religious and ethical tones. 23

Lots of people criticize postmodernism, especially from the so-called "analytic" camp. They regard it as "nonsense" and as "relativistic." Rose is different from these drive-by critics. 24

She's writing as someone who reads and grapples with the postmodern challenge to the enlightenment...her argument is from the inside and so her writing has more pathos than those who simply scoff. There is a world of difference between, say, a Pinker and a Rose. 25

In her book on Adorno, Rose defends Adorno's difficulty of style as core to his work. 26

The defense is this: if the world is distorted, then one must counter the distortion by being distorted oneself. To be clear is to be an apologist for the world's distortion. 27

It's a kind of gnostic move. To see through a glass darkly takes stylistic fortitude. 28

Rose claims this idea as beginning with Nietzsche. Nietzsche wasn't against morality, he was a moralist, who thought conventional morality was wrong. His work only makes sense as an argument for morality, but his amoral style is needed to counter it. 29

This is also sort of an antinomian move, some might even say a Frankist one. You have to turn things on their head to see right. Normative halachic Judaism accepts a dose of this in the carnival holiday of Purim (upcoming). 30

But Adorno says we have to write drunk all the time, as it were. And in this Rose sort of follows, even as, I believe, her work is much more readable and, indeed, beautiful. 31

Rose distinguishes between Adorno's Minima Moralia and his Negative Dialectic. The one book is more beautiful and more readable than the other, because it is written from a personal standpoint; the latter is more difficult because it is written from an impersonal standpoint. 32

Rose's best work is written from a personal standpoint. Her signature is the admixture of the personal and the philosophical, the claim that my life is a microcosm of Spirit, and is an entree-point into speculating about what really is. 33

We find this kind of writing in the genre-bending work of Kierkegaard, Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, Lars Iyer, but it's still rare. And doing it well is also very hard. 34

What Rose takes from Adorno is the idea that philosophy isn't systematic, but also that we can never abandon the desire for a system. The life of philosophy is fragmentary, mirroring the fragmentation of the world. 35

But just because it's personally fragmentary doesn't mean we can't hope for some sense of genuine order, even if it's beyond us. To give up on order is reasonable, but also like replacing one mistake with another. 36

Rose is a singular voice in that she defends the project of aspiring to rationality, while also giving a phenomenological account of why many feel betrayed by it. She's almost like a therapist, or grief counselor to those who say "Why be reasonable"? 37

In one essay she compares the loss of Reason to the loss of a friend. Should losing a particular friendship cause one to abandon one's belief in friendship altogether? And why cast blame on the other? Maybe I am to blame, or both of us are to blame? 38

The critic of reason needs to self-examine more. 39

Rose says that replacing Reason with its "Abused Other" is not just unfair to Reason, but also a misconstrual of the relationship between Reason and its Other. Why make the Other out to be just a victim? And why claim that victimhood, alone, makes one right or righteous? 40

To characterize Reason as imperialistic is to overlook that Reason is most of all responsive. The demonization of Reason as dualistic is itself dualistic. The replacement of one hierarchy by another changes little. 41

Against this, Rose wants us to consider Reason as full of surprises. Reason contains elements that hurt, but also elements that heal; Reason is needed to critique Reason, or to critique its manifestations. 42

But to claim Reason as simply bad is to deny the possibility of evolution and transformation. You have to take the good with the bad as a starting point. Otherwise, you are left with nothing. 43

In commenting on the feminist Jewish theologian, Judith Plaskow, Rose notes that Plaskow affirms Judaism as offering a prophetic tradition even as she critiques it for perpetrating various prejudices and harms. 44

For Rose, Reason contains a prophetic tradition, as it were. Philosophy isn't simply oppression, it's also the ability to argue against oppression. It's both, but more the latter. 45

Considering certain post-colonial critiques of Western thought, Rose is making the claim that if you want to be post-colonial, you first have to accept the prophetic offering of philosophy. You can't start with the premise "Western thought is bad." 46

The affirmation of complexity, of both/and, is something Rose gets not just from Adorno, but from their shared influence, Hegel. 47

The critique of Hegel is that he's wishy washy, since he says everything and its opposite is true. 48

Another critique of Hegel is that he's too moderate, seeing social progress as a series of backlashes, rather than as a victory achieved by a single revolt. 49

But Rose likes Hegel, I think, because of his faith, which she shares, that the individual is a part of a whole, and is both responsible to that whole, but also incapable of revising it all by herself. 50

What are we supposed to do if our aspirations are to make the whole more habitable, more good, and yet we can only effect the local? An expansive view of the earth can be de-stablilizing, but a narrow one can be dispiriting. Rose is an idealist. And I love her for it. 51

I'm not totally persuaded by her idealism, but I find it noble. 52

For Rose, the model for Reason is not the wounded angel of history, that Benjamin found in Paul Klee, but the "Dubious Angel." 53

The Dubious Angel is an angel that learns by trial and error. You try to do your best, and then you realize that you were wrong, over and over. 54

But there's a learning process in it that's positive. So the skepticism is animated, maybe even, light, by the sense that one is testing oneself against others, as opposed to remaining in the armchair. 55

It's sort of like Zuck's charge to "Move fast and break things" except with less zealotry and more empathy. Ethical striving requires self-forgiveness. 56

The Dubious angel is dubious that Athens is bad, Jerusalem is good. The Dubious angel is dubious that Plato is bad, while Adorno is good. The Dubious angel sees one difficult fate for all. No subject position is totally good or bad. 57

We are all going to hit up against contradictions, hypocrisy, inconsistency, dilemma, and that's OK. That's life. But maybe this is where faith comes in and is needed, to embolden us to accept this fact and to know that we are loved even as we can't but fail. 58

Rose positions herself as an alternative to both Strauss and Levinas (both of whom opposed modern thought to Judaism), and blame modern thought, especially its political forms, for the Holocaust. 59

There is a hip story that goes something like: Aristotle's God is unmoved, but the Jewish God feels and moves; Reason predicts, God Promises. The beginning of Athenian wisdom is wonder; the beginning of Biblical wisdom is Fear of the Lord. 60

But Rose says, look, both Socrates and Prophets, are interested in creating a good society, one founded in good laws and aspiring to the perfection of human nature and character. Both are critical traditions but not only critical traditions. They are about founding. 61

In both traditions, there's a floor and a ceiling. The floor is, as it were, the reality of our flawed nature. The ceiling is the plasticity of our conduct. Law needs to contain the worst of us, but we can't only hope to be less evil. 62

The prophets remind us to direct our hopes for a messianic age. 63

Too much messianism breads terrible mistakes. But too much realism breads acceptance of "less evil" as the moral standard. 64

It's just as wrong to say that Athens is realist, though, as it is to say that Judaism is messianic. For Rose, Strauss understates the role that the gods play in Athenian society. Piety and revelation matter there, too. 65

Meanwhile, Strauss and Levinas make a straw-man of the Talmud, as if it were some unchanging static mouthpiece for God, and not a living attempt to grapple with reason and its discontents. 66

In short, Strauss and Levinas romanticize Judaism, and embrace a kind of Haredi view of it (but only to weaponize it). Meanwhile, the actual Talmud and Jewish legal process shares more in common with the West than is claimed. 67

So Athens is more religious than we thought, and Jerusalem is more rational than we thought. And neither is purely one thing. 68

Here is where Rose's conversion to Christianity becomes, for me, both disconcerting and also comprehensible. If traditions have more in common with one another and are not absolute, than less is at stake in jumping from one hybrid to another. What matters is the dialectic. 69

But for this Jewish reader, Rose's credibility is possibly undermined by her conversion, because if her presentation of Judaism is not enough to lead her to remain a Jew, I worry that it is deficient. 70

Or rather, I find that her view of Judaism becomes swallowed up by her Hegelianism. Hegel was a philosophical antisemite because he thought Judaism was just a stage on the way to some higher understanding. 71

To deny Judaism a certain distinction, as we find in Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Strauss, is to deny it a kind of justification; to say that one need not be Jewish, that Jewishness is one step in a dialectic to something better. I'm skeptical of this supercessionism. 72

But whatever you think, Rose's move is helpful for posing a question that I come back to in my threads.

Are we Hegelians or something else? Levinas, Strauss, Kierkegaard, Schlegel, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Schmitt, are all anti-Hegelian, for better and for worse.
73

But on Rose's view they are wrong. They are wrong to abandon the desire for holism and universalism. And their embrace of particularism leads to bad places politically and temper-mentally...74

Arendt and Berlin and post war liberals see universalism as leading to bad politics.

Rose sees the abandonment of universalism as leading to bad politics. The problem with totalitarianism wasn't that it was universalistic, but that it was falsely so. She wants option c. 75

Option c) is the affirmation of universal problems, rather than universal solutions. Comraderie based in empathy for our inability to solve universal problems, right here, right now, but not an abandonment of the aspiration. 76

The shared terrain of all traditions, but especially Judaism and Western thought, is that both have fallen into crisis, both are at impasses, both have contested identities. They need each other because, as the Talmud teaches, "the prisoner cannot free himself from jail." 77

As a Jewish reader, I am especially touched by Rose's work, but I find it compelling for reasons beyond her and my Jewishness. I think she writes cogently about what it means to belong to a multiplicity of traditions and ways of thinking. 78

We should all be thinking more about the lineages that inform our attitudes. 79

From Strauss and Levinas we have a model of opposition. This is a common one. Empire bad; indigenous tradition good. 80

Rose is sober and more honest in her acceptance that often we contain "two nations in our womb." 81

I find in Rebecca's cry, her existential complaint, "Why is this happening to me" (lama ze anochi), an echo of an answer in Rose. We can't but contain contradictions and they are there because our task is to work through them. That is our service and our charge on earth. 82

Where a standard reading of Esau and Jacob has it that we must choose between the one and the other, Rose offers us the insight that both are broken in some way, and that their healing might only occur if they can join forces. There is some Midrashic support for this reading. 83

For example, in the Talmud Antoninus, the Roman Emperor, and Rebbe, the leading Jewish sage, are chevrutas. Rebbe tells Antoninus a parable about a lame man who rides on the back of a blind man, and together they pick fruit that neither could get by himself. 84

Perhaps Jacob, who limps, is the lame man; Esau, who is deceived, is the blind man. They should be judged, concludes, Rebbe, "as one." Just as we cannot separate soul and body, we cannot separate Judaism and Greece, Religion and Reason. 85

We also can't totally separate ethics from the non-ethical, for example, the legal; but nor can we conflate them. Halacha and ethics overlap, but are not the same.
86

The inability to achieve synthesis in our lives is not the result of incommensurate goods, as we find in Strauss, though, but has to do with the fact that the dialectic has not ended. In contrast to Strauss, Rose thinks there is forward movement, that we learn from history. 87

We should be reading Rose as a major thinker alongside Levinas and Strauss, whether we agree with her or not. And, in particular, observant Jews will find her quite sympathetic to and insightful on Jewish legal thought. 88

To return to Rose on Adorno, Rose shows us that style isn't incidental to thinking, but part of it. Her own style is generally not obfuscatory, but clear. This needs to be appreciated as a kind of aesthetic intervention in a field dominated by free association and academese. 89

Rose believes that style matters because the personality of the thinker is part of the thought, it's the horizon of the thought, a limit in the negative and positive sense. I find sympathy with this point and wish for more stylistic diversity amongst thinkers. 90

In an age that is either individualistic or collectivist, Rose is really remarkable, perhaps even mystical, for making the individual a stand-in for the whole, a fractal of a universal problem. 91

In her memoir, she calls writing a combination of "discipline and miracle." But notes that life is better than writing, the joy of life is love, not writing. 92

This may seem a small point, but it's not the kind of point we're accustomed to read or to hear from "thought leaders." 93

We also are unaccustomed to hearing tributes to love from those who are committed to reason. Adorno, for example, was hardly a paragon of love. 94

Romantic love, especially, is a kind of embarrassment for those who hide behind "theory." 95

Few thinkers who defend reason also sing about love's work (except Socrates/Plato). And I see Rose's claim that love offers a taste of redemption to be sober rather than escapist, because she is such a critical thinker.96

We need sober thinkers to defend and advocate for love. We need romantic people to be committed to reason. 97

Though Rose follows Adorno's sense that philosophy continues because the chance to realize it has been missed, her refusal to move on is more loving, more faithful. Rose shows what it looks like to be disappointed but not discouraged. 98

To read Rose is not to be converted to Spirit, but to be open to the possibility that our speculative capacities are not only delusional, that our strangest thoughts have something to do with rationality, are part of its journey. 99

Rose diagnoses postmodernism as a kind of heartbreak. & offers us philosophy not as naive love, but as "love after love," a love of and hope for wisdom after getting burned. Her work and life are form of testimony. We will return to you, Reason, and you will return to us.
100.