Abstract
The notion of a particular is what makes the Bible (the reference is to the Hebrew Scriptures) an original position in philosophy. (Particulars are self-contained spatio-temporal entities, and hence, though present in the system that is nature, are not essentially parts of it.) The early chapters of Genesis develop a comprehensive (anti-pagan) conceptualization of reality that gives particularity its due. Whether particularity can be secured without a fully extra-natural anchorage (i.e., without God) is a live issue. As the case may be, the philosophy of the Bible is not a footnote, not even a substantial footnote, to Plato. Plato’s metaphysical discourse cannot handle the particular. An irreducibly different, ontological, discourse is needed for that. Having conceived the new notion (the act of conception is dramatized in the theophany of Genesis 12), Abraham, the philosopher of the paper’s title, ‘called…on the name of the Lord’ (Genesis 21:33) to the men and women of the world. The particularity of God, I explain, not God’s numerical uniqueness, is the essence of monotheism.
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Notes
‘Bible’ refers throughout to the Hebrew Scriptures. I quote from the New Revised Standard Version [NRSV]. Along with publication data about other works cited, the relevant edition is listed in the Bibliography.
A similar claim about calling on the name of the Lord appears at 13:4. 21:33 is however the first instance in which the official patriarchal name ‘Abraham’ is used, the first post-covenant instance. (Abram of Mesopotamia has now had a PhD conferred on him by God.) The occasion therefore has a special authority. I have another reason (whose truth I would not insist upon) for deferring Abraham’s inaugural lecture from Genesis 13, where he is called ‘Abram,’ to Genesis 21. See footnote 9.
The question, the title of a lecture given to the London Jewish Students Association, serves as the name of a collection of Roth’s writings on Jewish thought and Judaism (Roth 1999). The central paper, ‘Jewish Thought as a Factor in Civilization,’ backs up the ‘No.’ Roth, whose dates are 1896-1963, was at the Hebrew University (which was founded in 1925) from 1928 to 1951.
There could of course be non-Jewish thinkers who think philosophically about Jewish matters.
Did Roth ever look into chapter-and-verse with the express aim of determining whether any philosophy is contained therein? On the evidence of the essays that compose the collection, I would infer the negative. In all likelihood, Roth, an observant Jew, absorbed early on the usual classification of the Bible as a religious text. This view, interacting with what he later found in Maimonides & Co., solidified his mistaken view.
This isn’t to say that philosophers are committed to science. It is to say that a burden of justification falls on those philosophers who dissociate themselves from science as a cognitive paradigm.
As the Bible sees it, Alexander Pope’s ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan’ is inconsistent counsel.
Plato objects to Homer’s portrayal of the gods. There is a deeper point here than that the free-for-all on Olympus is a very bad model. The deeper criticism is that the welter on high that the epics present to us encourages the view that the world is at the basic level a multiplicity of irreducibly conflicting forces.
The Bible’s distinctive philosophical contribution has to do with Genesis 2, then. Abram of Mesopotamia could have declaimed Genesis 1. As I have argued, the Genesis 1 story is in content like the story advanced in, say, Hesiod.
The physical origin of our species is as much a blank to the Bible’s writers as that of the universe. It is not with the intention of filling in the first blank or even of indicating that there is a blank that they paint the picture of the man being fashioned on a kind of potter’s table and of the woman emerging in a sort of operating theatre by a fleshly version of plant propagation through cutting. The pictures have nothing to do with the subject matter that Darwin sketched two and a half millennia later. Rather, they respond to the contents of this independent analysis by telling a genetic story.
It has not (to the best of my knowledge) been adequately remarked, of Philo and Maimonides for instance, how odd it is that a defender of the Bible, whose basic thrust is anti-pagan, should call upon the intellectual products of pagan thinkers in elaboration/interpretation/defense of Scripture. It would seem that Augustine, who makes extensive use of Plato in his treatment of the Bible, finds the fact embarrassing. In The City of God (VIII.11), he floats the balloon that Plato (whose philosophy he enlisted to the interpretation/elaboration/defense of Scripture) was a chiton-wearing yeshiva boy, having studied at the feet of Jeremiah. Platonism, in effect, has a biblical precedent! (The full title of Augustine’s work is ‘De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos,’ i.e., ‘The City of God Against the Pagans.’) Though this will come out only en passant, Augustine is mistaken about a real similarity between Plato’s ideas and the ideas of the thinkers behind the Bible. So he is right to be embarrassed. He is looking for philosophy in the Garden of Academus, when it is found in the Garden of Eden.
Consider the tickbird that rides the rhinoceros and pecks ticks, which it eats, from the creases of the animal’s skin. The pachyderm gets cleaned of ticks. The bird has a meal. The two live symbiotically. What about the insects? They perish. If the unit is taken to be rhinoceros + tickbird + tick, one could avoid saying of the elements taken pairwise that the good of the one is the bad of the other. But this just shows how different the human case is, since in the human case very few would take anything other than the particular as the true unit.
If the transcendent appeal were needed to make sense of ‘dominion,’ how could (secular) ecologists criticize the Bible for representing men and women as having dominion? The critics understand what their criticism means. (I add that I do not think that the ecologists and other critics of the Bible are reading ‘dominion’ correctly. Invariably, they link ‘X has dominion’ to ‘X has the right to trample, crush, subdue.’ Thus their hostility. But the core meaning of ‘X has dominion’ is ‘X does not have a proprietary domain.’ In this men and women are like God, who, qua outside of nature, does not have a niche within it. No creature with a niche has dominion in regard to the whole. Having dominion, then, can easily put a creature at quite a disadvantage. ‘A fish out of water,’ the saying goes. Where then is the basis for hostility?)
The NRSV (which follows the Authorized Version) puts ‘man,’ not ‘the man.’ This is a serious error. It elides the important difference between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.
In Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel rendering, God is about to touch the man’s digit. Clearly, the man is alive before contact is made.
Recall the contractive tendency of the pantheon of a pagan religion like the Olympian religion. I used the figure of blobs of mercury coalescing. So Zeus, say, is not one. He is an aspect of a wider whole.
‘Unless a man had been created, there would have been no beginning in the world.’ Or: ‘God created a man in order that the world should contain beginnings.’ I spoke a moment ago of the passing of a pet. Such talk is, then, anthropomorphic.
The Bible rejects Aristotle’s philosophical anthropology. For Aristotle, a man is just a specific kind of animal. To capture what men and women among creatures are, we need what Aristotle lacks: an ontological, as opposed merely to a metaphysical, discourse. Men and women are biological entities. But they are not animals. Animals are individuals, i.e., parts of a system that can be differentiated in a well-defined way, not particulars, i.e., autonomous entities. I discuss this language in the next section.
The Christian view (based in a reading of Genesis 3) is that death was brought into the world by man’s disobedience. This isn’t the Bible’s position. God, the principle of particularity, is in a sense the angel of death. The option, then, is not immortality or disobedience. It is particularity (which comes with mortality) or immersion in a wider system in which no real termination occurs, only recycling.
The noun ‘particular’ does however mean ‘a single or separate case.’ Thus the oddities of etymology.
The claim that people are distinguished from (other) physical things by virtue of the fact that a specific range of predicates, P-predicates, apply (only) to them, distinguishes people from among other non-general particulars in exactly the same that the members of any two classes of non-general things are distinguished from each other. Now Strawson may be content with this on philosophical grounds, though I think he should not be. The present point is only that he has no way of making a stronger distinction.
The formulation quotes G. E. Moore’s thumbnail (1953: 1) of what philosophy is all about.
The points show that by not appreciating that there is a biblical philosophy, Roth is not in a position to understand much of the Jewish way of thinking and living. The ‘Jewish’ ways are, then, ways that have philosophical backing. Even if the philosophy is valid, this does not mean that truth-lovers must adhere to those ways. For Judaism gives the truths a specific, optional, cultural inflection. Just so, in some countries, drivers keep to the right; in others, to the left.
See Gospel of John 5:17.
God himself can be seen as breaking with the pagan pantheon. Historically, God probably did emerge through a radical internal upheaval in paganism. This, if so, had, as I have explained, to be more than merely a reduction in the number of deities. Thus, Abraham’s epiphany is not a Thales-type insight. It is sometimes maintained that the reform of the religion that Akhenaten attempted in Egypt is historically linked to the Bible’s rejection of polytheism. (Akhenaten’s dates correspond to the [completely conjectural] dates of the period of the Israelites in Egypt just prior to the exodus. Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, makes imaginative use of the connection.) That Akhenaten falls more on the monistic side than on the monotheistic one is asserted by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann (quoted in Allen et al. 1989: 89): ‘We stand here at the origin less of the monotheistic world religions than of natural philosophy. If [Akhenaten’s] religion had succeeded, we should have expected it to produce a Thales [sc. a material monist] rather than a Moses [sc. a monotheist].’
References
Allen, J. P., et al. (1989). The natural Philosophy of Akhenaten. In Religion and philosophy in ancient Egypt, Yale egyptological studies 3. New Haven: Yale.
Hesiod. (2004). In A. N. Athanassakis (Ed.), Theogony, works and days, shield (2nd ed.). Baltimore and London: The Johns-Hopkins University Press.
Moore, G. E. (1953). Some main problems of philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin.
Roth, L. (1999). Is there a Jewish philosophy? London: Littman.
Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals: An essay in descriptive metaphysics. London: Methuen.
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Glouberman, M. The First Professor of Biblical Philosophy. SOPHIA 52, 503–519 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-012-0349-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-012-0349-6