An idea's genealogy is not the idea itself, and still less does an idea's historical context exhaust its potentialities for meaning. The excavation of sources and influences is then for the historian of ideas not an end in itself; it is more properly the inauguration, not the consummation, of efforts in intellectual history. But genealogical investigation does matter, because its vertical depth can illuminate the contours requisite for horizontal discernment, and because exploring its temporal register can free an idea from artificially inert stasis back into the stream of living reflective activity.Footnote 1
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's The Emergence of Ethical Man, edited and published posthumously in 2005 from unfinished, handwritten manuscripts, has been duly recognized as a resource of surpassing importance for Soloveitchik scholarship and for the enterprise of Jewish philosophy more generally. While declaring it a “bombshell”Footnote 2 is somewhat excessive, the work is significantly unique in the context of Orthodox Jewish philosophy. A strong emphasis on this-worldly realism and humanism as against any fixation on spiritual transcendence is a trademark of Soloveitchik's writings, but nowhere is that orientation articulated as fully, ambitiously, and cogently as in Emergence; where a perceptive scholar could write that Soloveitchik in Halakhic Man essentially maintains the “dualism which privileges the soul over the body,”Footnote 3 no such statement would be possible about Emergence. In a mindful, perceived break with centuries of virtually canonical Jewish thought,Footnote 4 Soloveitchik in this work draws from modern science, philosophy, the Bible, and the Talmud in constructing an argument for a conception of the human person as at once thoroughly natural and yet robustly capable of ethical and religious transcendence. One early reviewer has commented that among the many posthumously published Soloveitchik manuscripts, Emergence is “probably the greatest treasure trove for Soloveitchik scholars,” noting in particular the questions it raises about Soloveitchik's intellectual influences.Footnote 5 Appearing by name in the text as we have it are such wide-rangingly diverse figures as Martin Buber, Gardner Murphy, Henri Bergson, C. D. Broad, and George Santayana—hardly regulars in the pages of Orthodox Jewish thought—and some have discerned in between the lines the unmistakable (and entirely predictable) impact of Immanuel Kant and Hermann Cohen.Footnote 6 But the real treasure here may lie precisely in what is not explicit in the text, in a cogent presence that has nevertheless largely eluded detection hitherto: that is, the pervasive, crucial, thoroughgoing influence of Max Scheler.Footnote 7
Not once anywhere in the text, or in the editor's introduction highlighting the text's intellectual sources,Footnote 8 does Scheler's name appear. This is, I judge, a major oversight. It is clear that in crafting Emergence, Soloveitchik borrowed rather heavily from Scheler, in particular from his Man's Place in Nature, a late, fragmentary treatise on philosophical anthropology. That this is so can be well established without advancing past the first paragraph of either book. Here is the opening of Scheler's work (from the 1961 English translation):
If we ask an educated person in the Western world what he means by the word “man,” three irreconcilable ways of thinking are apt to come into conflict in his mind. The first is the Jewish-Christian tradition of Adam and Eve, including creation, paradise, and fall. The second is the Greek tradition in which, for the first time, man's self-consciousness raised him to a unique place on the grounds that he is endowed with “reason.”. . . The third idea is that of modern science and genetic psychology, which also has a tradition of its own. According to this view, man is a very recent product of evolution on our planet, a creature distinguished from its antecedents in the animal world only by the degree of complexity of energies and capacities already present on a subhuman level. These three ideas are not compatible with each other. Thus we have a scientific, a philosophical, and a theological anthropology in complete separation from each other.Footnote 9
Now compare the beginning of Emergence:
Should we inquire of a modern historian of philosophy or of any educated person well acquainted with the history of ideas what he understands by the word “man,” he would immediately advise us about a basic controversy concerning the destiny or essence of this being. By the sheer force of associative thinking, he would at once refer to three disparate anthropological-philosophical viewpoints: the Biblical (referred to by many as the Judeo-Christian view), the classical Greek, and the modern empirico-scientific. . . . The Biblical and the Greek views, of course, disagree as to the distinctive element in man. For the Bible, the mystical image of the transcendental God (tzelem E-lokim), as well as the metaphysics of the nous and the logos for Greek antiquity, serve as the ground of man's essential autonomy and his “incommensurability” with other living beings. . . . In contradistinction, the modern scientific viewpoint spurns the idea of human autonomy as mythical and unfounded and denies the ontic discrepancy between man and animal-plant. . . . The differences between the vegetative-animal and human life concern just the degree of diversity, complexity and organization of life-processes.Footnote 10
This is not an exact quotation, but it is a rather faithful paraphrase; at the least, the convergence between the two is simply too thorough, extensive, and exact to be the work of mere happenstance. In both we have the rhetorical frame of “what the educated person would say” introducing the same “disparate” or “irreconcilable” triad of anthropological conceptions: the classical Greek, on which human persons are ontically unique on account of their reason; the modern scientific, on which they differ from animals only in degree of complexity; and the Judeo-Christian. Scheler's book first appeared in 1928, and while we have no way of knowing for certain, the best evidence points to Emergence’s being written sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s;Footnote 11 it is in any case extremely implausible that Soloveitchik was composing English philosophical manuscripts before 1928 (he immigrated to America in 1932), and still more implausible that Scheler would have read them if he had. With or without a citation in the published text, therefore, there is no doubt that in writing Emergence, Soloveitchik was in some manner drawing material substantially and directly from Scheler's Man's Place in Nature.Footnote 12
The affinities between the two works extend well beyond literary form and well beyond the introductory paragraphs—as I hope to show, the better portion of the philosophical ingredients for Emergence have their origins in Scheler. And so beyond the appeal of clarifying the bibliographical and biographical records, appreciating Emergence’s Schelerian genealogy opens up a vital arena for understanding and properly evaluating the work: we can thereby both clarify many of its otherwise obscure or idiosyncratic concepts, and we can cultivate a fuller, better-textured picture of the intellectual context out of which those ideas grew. And where Soloveitchik's thinking does diverge from Scheler's—as indeed it often does in crucial ways—due awareness of the contrast serves both to highlight the broader philosophical motives animating Soloveitchik's work as well as to accentuate the particular forms of ingenuity he exhibited in adapting the Schelerian material in accordance thereof. Soloveitchik is significantly reliant on but not in the least submissive toward Scheler, and appreciating both sides of that polarity is vital to understanding exactly what Soloveitchik is, and is not, up to in Emergence. Finally, understanding Scheler's influence on Soloveitchik's work will help to provide a common intellectual framework for situating his thought in conversation with figures such as Karol Wojtyla, Eliezer Berkovits, Paul Tillich, Edith Stein, A. J. Heschel, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, all of whose thought is well recognized as indebted to Scheler's. The effort promises a window into a tradition with a rich past and, rightly attended to, a potentially rich future.
In what follows, I have organized the material under three headings: 1) the common nature of plant, animal, and man;Footnote 13 2) the uniqueness and autonomy of man; and 3) the metaphysics of history and the Ground of Being. Under each, I proceed with a selective retelling of the relevant material in Man's Place in Nature, followed by a selective retelling of the relevant material in The Emergence of Ethical Man with an accounting and evaluation of the convergences and divergences obtaining between the two works. It is my contention that in each case Soloveitchik appropriates the substance of Scheler's ideas, but that in so doing he subjects the formulations of those ideas to critical philosophical, theological, and rhetorical refinement and advancement. The resulting picture is not one of a reduction of derivative to origin, but an open-ended trajectory of active, dynamic, purposive development.
The Common Nature of Plant, Animal, and Man
At no other time in history, writes Max Scheler in the preface to his 1928 Man's Place in Nature, has man been more of a mystery to himself. And at no other time has man been better positioned to address that mystery adequately: the propitious convergence of the human person's acquiring a “new kind of self-consciousness and insight” grounded in modern scientific knowledge and achieving a “new courage of truthfulness” born of freedom from prior commitment to any tradition makes for an exhilarating opportunity finally to get our philosophical anthropology right.Footnote 14 Scheler's book is thus a sort of first attempt at consolidating his lifelong reflections on the topic—an effort cut short by his death in 1928.
With the broader project of developing a new philosophical anthropology secured in the background, Scheler clarifies the more modest goal of this essay as simply to “suggest a few conclusions that deal with the nature of man in relation to animal and plant and with man's unique metaphysical place in the universe.”Footnote 15 On the one hand, there is a significant sense in which a human being is just another biological organism like all the others; even if we accept the questionable assertion that “man is the ‘pinnacle’ of the vertebrate-mammal kingdom,” it would still remain the case that “this pinnacle, like any other, still belongs to the line of development of which it is the highest point.”Footnote 16 As a matter of morphology, physiology, or psychology, the human possesses no categorical uniqueness from the other animals. The word “man” in common language, however, has an entirely different meaning, what Scheler calls “the essential nature of man,” according to which human persons, with all their biological affinities to the rest of the animal kingdom, are nonetheless metaphysically unique creatures unto themselves—they possess some “unique characteristics not comparable to those of any other species.”Footnote 17 It is just this question—whether we are indeed justified in ascribing to humanity “a special place in the universe”Footnote 18—that constitutes the book's central focus. Scheler argues that in fact there is an essential, qualitative difference between the human person and all other organisms—but that this difference lies elsewhere from what is commonly believed.
Addressing this question embroils Scheler in a two-front offensive. His first opponent is the classical (Greek) theory of humanity, epitomized in modern times in the philosophy of Descartes, according to which the uniqueness of the human consists in being the one and only form of life that possesses rationality, consciousness, and sensation.Footnote 19 Descartes divides all substance into two broadly disjunctive categories, mind and matter, and claims that humanity alone consists in the mutual interaction of the two substances. The result, says Scheler, was a “fantastic exaggeration of the unique position of man now completely torn loose from the maternal arms of nature” and a conception of the world as consisting “only of thinking ‘points’ and of a gigantic mechanism to be explored mathematically.”Footnote 20 As the universe's lone thinking being, the human person stands categorically apart from all other things, inorganic and organic alike. Between the human and the most sophisticated chimpanzee is the same infinite, qualitative gulf as between human and rock.
Scheler attacks this view from several angles. First, he appeals to then-recent biological research to establish that full-fledged psychic life is present not only in humans but in all animals, and even plants as well: “The limits of psychic life coincide with the limits of life itself.”Footnote 21 It is a mistake, he says, to identify psychic life with consciousness and sensation,Footnote 22 and acknowledging that mistake opens the door to appreciating the forms of psyche basic to all living organisms. Each and every living being, on account of its living, is not only “an object for external observation, but also has a being in and for itself, or an inner life of its own.”Footnote 23 In other words, all living organisms possess a “soul.”Footnote 24 In its most basic form, psychic life is a “vital feeling, drive, or impulse”Footnote 25—that in every organism which propels it toward survival, growth, and flourishing. It is the “power behind every activity.”Footnote 26 Plants, to be sure, lack any form of consciousness, sensation, or reflection, and therefore lack any capacity for spontaneous choice, learning, or any form of “action” in the full sense of the word, but they nonetheless exhibit a true drive toward growth and reproduction, as well as the “original phenomenon of expressiveness, or a certain physiognomy of [their] inner states, such as feeble, vigorous, luxuriant, or poor,”Footnote 27 and even a sort of aesthetically attuned “fanciful play” expressed in the rich and colorful variety of floral life.Footnote 28
Animals move beyond plants in psychic sophistication with the achievement of “instinct,” by which Scheler means behavior that is innate or hereditary to members of a given species, that is a response to environmental patterns typical to the life of the species, and that is purposively oriented toward some end belonging to the species as a whole: instinct always serves the species, never the individual organism.Footnote 29 With the faculty of associative memory, animals may in the course of their instinctual behavior come to learn specialized methods—a process we call “training” or “habituation”—for focused gratification of particular drives. In this way the individual animal begins the process of liberation from its hitherto total subservience to the species; only with the exercise of associative memory can the individual “adapt himself to new situations, situations not typical of the species,” such that “the individual ceases to be no more than a point of transition in the reproduction of the species.”Footnote 30
As the individual animal's psychic life progresses further, it may begin to exhibit “practical intelligence”—the faculty by which the individual organism meaningfully responds, without need for blunt trial and error, to a new situation in pursuit of some drive-determined goal.Footnote 31 Scheler appeals here to the work of Wolfgang Kohler demonstrating the capacity of chimpanzees to intelligently fashion instruments and devise creative methods for grasping otherwise unreachable fruit.Footnote 32 This is not yet “conscious, reflective activity,” but it is nevertheless “an act of genuine intelligence and discovery” rather than mere instinct or habit.Footnote 33 Still further, Scheler insists that animals possess at least some measure of capacity for genuine choice, in that they can freely decide which of their drives to pursue at any given time. With its diverse and differentiated system of drives and impulses integrated within a single center, an animal is “capable of intervening spontaneously in its constellation of drives from this central organization, [and,] to a certain extent at least, can avoid immediate gratifications in order to obtain greater gratifications that are more distant in time and may involve a circuitous route.”Footnote 34 Finally, animals exhibit human-like, affective personality in their apparent “capacity for generosity, help, reconciliation, friendship and similar phenomena.”Footnote 35
Scheler advances the other side of coin as well: just as the higher forms of psychic life associated with humanity are present in animals, so too the lower forms of psychic life associated with animals and plants are present in the human person. With the animal's and the human person's considerable superiority over plants in forms and degrees of psyche, it nonetheless always remains the case that at the root of it all lies the “vital urge.” Its reach is inescapable: even in humanity, “there is no sensation, no perception, no representation behind which is not the dark impulse burning continuously.”Footnote 36 The vital urge, as that which suffers the “resistance” of the external world, is what provides the human person with the basic perception of “reality” grounding worldly perceptions.Footnote 37 It is also the source of all effective energy and power available to the higher faculties and generally represents the “unity of all the highly differentiated drives and affects in man.”Footnote 38 All told, with the vital drive we have both “man's affinity with the plant,”Footnote 39 and more generally the essential “unity of life behind all morphological changes.”Footnote 40 The most basic, essential aspects of organic life, then, are fully, fundamentally, and equally present in plant, animal, and human alike. The conclusion: “There is not the slightest reason to think there is more than a difference in degree between the psychic life in man and in the animal.”Footnote 41 If we are to secure for humanity a place in the cosmos special unto itself, we will have to look elsewhere than psyche.
To summarize, it is Scheler's contention here that 1) plants, animals, and humans all share a single, common nature; 2) as organic beings, plants, animals, and humans all have genuine psychic life, or “inwardness”; and 3) as organic beings, plants, animals, and humans too, are all pervasively animated by the vital urge.
As with Scheler, Soloveitchik's central question in Emergence is whether the human person is simply one more organism like all the rest, or whether the human person is in some way a unique being unto itself; in Soloveitchik's words, “The ontic autonomy or heteronomy of man is the problem.”Footnote 42 And as with Scheler, Soloveitchik appeals to modern biology in demonstrating that, in fact, humanity is ontologically continuous with the whole of the natural world. The first issue addressed is the continuity between human and plant life. No different from humans, Soloveitchik explains, plants exhibit the “propensities of growth, reclamation, regeneration, and so on,” and, as against inorganic entities that have no existence independent of their environments, the plant is as an organism a “bounded entity, rooted in inner existence.”Footnote 43 Tracking Scheler's conclusion that “the vegetative nervous system in man which. . . regulates the distribution of nourishment, shows man's affinity with the plant,”Footnote 44 Soloveitchik writes that, all told,
concerning his entire physiologico-biological functioning system—breathing, assimilation of organic matter, circulation of blood, glandular secretion, and so on—man does not differ from the plant. The same automatic non-teleokeneic (non-self-conscious) functionalism, which operates within man and regulates his response to the outside, prevails in plant. In this regard, man is not to be found one degree above the physiological operation of the plant.Footnote 45
It is worth noting here as well Soloveitchik's use of the word “teleokeneic,” a term otherwise unknown in English-language writingFootnote 46 but which is rather similar to “teleoclitic”—a neologism of Scheler's coinage.Footnote 47
Moving on to animal life, Soloveitchik highlights the capacity for instinctive action as distinguishing both humanity and animalia from lower forms of organic life. Where the behavior of plants is performed entirely in “deep slumber,” the animal can, in addition to its vegetative functions, consciously and purposefully act toward the satisfaction of its drives.Footnote 48 Further, both human and animal are capable, through the employment of associative memory, of developing technical intelligence—the ability creatively and insightfully to manipulate their environments in pursuit of their drive-determined ends. It is true, to be sure, that the technological capacity of the human is considerably greater than that of the animal, but “it is again only a gradual difference,” such that the technological capacity cannot be said to constitute “a unique endowment of man.”Footnote 49 Soloveitchik thus concludes, with Scheler, that, while human life may well represent the “apex of the bio-pyramid,” still the “difference consists only in degree, not in kind.”Footnote 50
Beyond the realm of science qua science and philosophy qua philosophy, the place of the human person in the natural cosmos is for Soloveitchik a deeply religious, or better, Jewish, question. Recall that in Scheler's introduction, emulated by Soloveitchik, we are presented with three “irreconcilable views” on the nature of man: the classical Greek, on which man is singular among all other organic life; the modern scientific, on which man is in no way unique from all other organic life; and the Jewish-Christian. While Scheler does not at first elaborate on the last (one gets the impression he felt its meaning was simply too obvious to require explicit clarification), it becomes clear in the course of the text that he understands the Jewish-Christian view as basically in accord with the classical Greek, in that both insist on the essential singularity of the human person. In response, much of Soloveitchik's book is aimed at correcting precisely this conflation: where the average educated person is liable to believe, as did Scheler, that the Bible and Jewish tradition “proclaimed the separateness of man from nature and his otherness,”Footnote 51 Soloveitchik sets out to demonstrate that, in fact, the biblical view is far closer to the modern scientific position in characterizing the human as an organism in essential ontological continuity with the natural biological world; man for the Bible is simply a “drop of the cosmos that fits into the schemata of naturalness and concreteness.”Footnote 52 Reconciling the facts of evolution with the biblical history holds little interest for Soloveitchik; “we could find a solution of some kind to this controversy,”Footnote 53 he says. But clarifying the anthropological import of each is of genuine and urgent concern, and here, Soloveitchik insists, harmony rather than conflict rules the day.
Soloveitchik argues the point by appeal to an array of biblical and rabbinic sources. Christian theologians, Soloveitchik says, have in reading Genesis tended to fixate on the statement “Let us make mankind in our image”Footnote 54 in order to exaggerate the unique place of humanity in creation, but if we read the account as a whole, and so dare to tell “the story of man in the aboriginal terms of Genesis,” a rather different picture emerges.Footnote 55 The Genesis creation story, he argues, is through and through natural and this-worldly; it is essentially a “biography of nature” with no reference whatsoever to “any transcendental world or any supernatural phenomena.”Footnote 56 God himself appears in Genesis not as a transcendent deity but as a creator immanently and intimately involved with his creation. The biblical creation account is constructed as a single, unified whole, its various component stages presented “according to a certain principle of order”: the creation of heaven and earth provides the universe its basic frame, and the progressive introductions of light, stars, plants, animals, and finally humanity follow in a “meaningful pattern of succession,” with each component of creation, humanity included, presented in “almost identical” terms.Footnote 57 The creation of humanity, therefore, is, like the creation of the birds or the stars, simply one more part of the larger whole that is the natural world's creation. The well-ordered literary unity of the narrative deliberately precludes any claims to heterogeneity therein, and so while humanity may well represent the crowning apex of creation, it is nonetheless fully a part of it. Far from occupying any unique, transcendent position, the human person is here seen as decidedly “enmeshed within the entire physical environment. . . a drop of cosmos that fits into the schemata of naturalness and concreteness.”Footnote 58
Turning to the Jewish legal tradition, Soloveitchik shows that the halakhah recognizes the unique status and independent integrity of the individual biological organism in general as well as the deformities and distortions possible therewith and observes that these categories apply to plant, animal, and human alike; all organic life is set off as one unified class from all inanimate material. As regards the human person, the halakhah's granting of juridical rights as persons to both the unborn fetus and the mentally disabled adult clearly shows that it does not regard the human, as would the classical Greek or modern Cartesian, essentially in terms of rational intellect or consciousness.Footnote 59 It is the whole of the human biological organism from conception to death, and nothing else, that the halakhah identifies as the person.
Soloveitchik is concerned with the question for a cluster of ethical, theological, and polemical reasons. At the most basic level, he observes that “one's theoretical worldview as well as one's practical creed are deeply affected by one's anthropological philosophy.”Footnote 60 In particular, “if man is a natural being, the axiological emphasis is placed upon his biological integrity and welfare. If, however, man is a spiritual personality, a bearer of a transcendental charisma, be it a universal logos, a free will or a heroic modus existentae, our value judgments revolve about this mysterious ultimate self-reality.”Footnote 61 To Soloveitchik's eyes, the excessive spiritualization of the human characteristic of Christianity, classical Stoicism, and various forms of mysticism tends to undermine adequate concern for the worldly welfare of persons—a vice for which emphasizing humanity's essential naturalness and animality serves as a vital corrective.Footnote 62 What we belong to is what we care about, and what we should care about, Soloveitchik implores, is the living world. Further, setting the record straight on this issue, with the accompanying ethical-axiological arguments, effectively turns the tables on long-standing Christian (Pauline) condemnations of Jewish religion. Judaism, precisely on account of its persistent focus on flesh, law, and bodily deed, emerges as the torchbearer of living spirit.
What we have so far in Emergence, then, is Soloveitchik's essentially wholesale conscription of the literary and philosophical framework of Scheler's Man's Place in Nature, partnered with his own theological mission of clarifying certain misconceptions and advancing a certain broadly ethical program with respect to the biblical-Jewish conception of human nature. There is, though, one thing more. In his discussion of plant life, Soloveitchik emphasizes the exemplary extent to which the plant, though possessing an inward existence of its own, is ontologically embedded in its environment; for the plant, “the world and the inner structure form one self-nonself.”Footnote 63 While acknowledging that this is significantly less true of animals—the animal, gifted with the power of locomotion, can adjust its environment as it pleases—he nonetheless insists that even human persons, just because they do in fact share a common nature with plants, can be rightly thought of as exhibiting “affinity and integration within a specific milieu”Footnote 64 and “confinement to a fixed environment.”Footnote 65 The motif of life's constitutive confinement to a specific, fixed environment—a motif absent in Scheler's presentation—becomes a persistent, recurrently accentuated feature throughout the text.Footnote 66 To what end? Because human persons are organic beings, Soloveitchik reasons, they are by nature attached to particular terrestrial confines. And since Jews are human persons, they too, it follows, have a place on earth to which they most truly, perhaps uniquely, belong. Here the pro-Zionist argument aims less at external antagonism than at strands of internal resistance: countering, in his words, the cosmopolitanism of certain “European intellectuals” who claimed that “one becomes more man in proportion as one dissociates from his fatherland,”Footnote 67 Soloveitchik argues that, like the plant, the Jewish people can only truly flourish when it is securely rooted, and its life robustly established, upon its native soil.Footnote 68 Diaspora is no virtue; exile is the paradigmatic injury visited as punishment on humanity.Footnote 69 The argument is reminiscent of the classical Zionist polemics of figures such as Ahad Ha'am, Moses Hess, and A. D. Gordon in justifying the insistence that the Jewish people ought to have, and indeed do have, a particular plot of soil on which to make its home. Soloveitchik takes the opportunity afforded by the Schelerian anthropological discourse to score an important philosophical, religious, and political point.Footnote 70
The Uniqueness and Autonomy of Man
With the essential commonality of all organic life duly established, Scheler moves to counter his next foe: reductive scientific materialism. Where the classical/Cartesian theory asserts the absolute, categorical distinctiveness of humanity from all other worldly things, modern Darwinian science, he says, takes the opposite extreme in denying any uniqueness to humanity whatsoever; complex and sophisticated as she or he may be, the human person is, and is nothing more than, just one more animal. Scheler cites Freud as a leading champion of this view: “The development of man, it seems to me, does not require a different explanation from the development of animals. What may be observed in the minority of individuals as restless striving toward perfection can be understood quite naturally as the consequence of the displacement of drives on which the most valuable achievements of human culture rest.”Footnote 71 The loftiest achievements of humanity are merely the result of the essentially mechanistic execution and interplay of blind biological impulses. At most, the human is a highly complex and sophisticated animal.
Scheler disagrees, insisting that the essential nature of the human person consists in an element that is qualitatively, categorically distinct from all lower forms of life. It is not merely a matter of more intelligence; “the nature of man. . . goes far beyond the capacity for choice and intelligence and would not be reached even if we were to enlarge these powers, in a quantitative sense, to infinity.”Footnote 72 Here Scheler introduces his distinctively inflected concept of Geist, or “spirit,” and the process through which it emerges in man. First Scheler clarifies his use of the term: spirit, he stipulates, “includes the concept of reason,” but “in addition to conceptual thought, also includes the intuition of essences and a class of voluntary and emotional acts such as kindness, love, remorse, reverence, wonder, bliss, despair and free decision,”Footnote 73 and it is these various capacities of the spirit that constitute that singular form of being we refer to as the “person.”Footnote 74 Humans are thus unique from all other animals in that they alone are persons, bearers of spirit. And, importantly, spirit must not be conceived of as simply a further development of life, in the way the instinctual represents a higher stage of life than the vegetative. As a “genuinely new phenomenon which cannot be derived from the natural evolution of life,” the spirit “transcends what we call ‘life.’”Footnote 75 It is, in fact, a “principle opposed to life as such.”Footnote 76 The result is that, while we have rejected the dualism of mind and body, we affirm in its place a “dualism of a higher order”—that is, “the antithesis between spirit and life.”Footnote 77
What exactly for Scheler does the spirit involve? At the most fundamental level, the essential quality of spirit is its “existential liberation from the organic world—its freedom and detachability from the bondage and pressure of life, from its dependence upon all that belongs to life, including its drive-motivated intelligence.”Footnote 78 The animal has no motivations apart from its innate biological drives and so has no capacity to see the world external to it in any terms other than the interests of those drives; entirely subject to the whims of impulse, the animal lives “ecstatically immersed in its environment,”Footnote 79 lacking any awareness of its own self, the world as apart from its own self, or any relationship between the two. It is only the human person who is somehow capable of performing the “peculiar act of detachment and distance”Footnote 80 that enables genuinely autonomous spiritual activity. Most basically, humans as spirit are self-reflective, individual beings and effective volitional agents unto themselves. In asserting the ontological autonomy of the spirit, Scheler's work proactively counters understandings that confine humanity and human behavior to purely genetic, or otherwise material, mechanical determination—reductive patterns of thought that have come to be known by names such as sociobiology, behaviorism, and evolutionary psychology—as well as fatalistic construals of the human existential condition.Footnote 81
Vital to the spirit's development for Scheler are the psychic processes, brought to notoriety by Freud, of repression and sublimation. Humans, Scheler says, are uniquely capable of assuming an “ascetic” posture toward life in willfully denying fulfillment to their biological drives; the human is “the being who can ‘say no.’”Footnote 82 Because humans can say no, they become capable of perceiving the world independently of the world's significance for fulfilling those biological drives—they become capable of “objectivity.” Suddenly the human “has a world,”Footnote 83 a world the human can explore and evaluate on its own terms.Footnote 84 Further, humans can “say no” not only to particular drives but also to their whole experience of reality itself—they can, as it were, temporarily suspend their recognition of existence—and so they become capable of abstract “ideation,”Footnote 85 or “the capacity to distinguish between essence and existence.”Footnote 86 Experiencing a pain in my arm, my practical intelligence will ask questions such as “what caused it?” or “how can it be removed?” But approaching the matter as a detached, contemplative spirit, I can penetrate to its abstract essence: “What is ‘pain itself,’ apart from the fact that I experience it here and now?”Footnote 87 Being a spirit means transcending the boundaries of immediate, concrete, particular reality in engaging the abstract, universal, and absolute—and emerging therefore as capable of genuine spiritual life in autonomy from biological impulse.
But how are these so-called “spiritual” capacities first achieved? Per his usual practice, Scheler presents two commonly held answers and then rejects them both. The first theory, which he attributes to both the classical Greeks and to Jewish-Christian theism, conceives of spirit as not only unique and autonomous, but also as ultimately powerful; the purer the spirit, the greater the effective causal power. This culminates, of course, in the idea of an omnipotent God, “a God who is omnipotent because he is spirit.”Footnote 88 On this view, the human spirit is both ontologically independent and possesses independent power of its own. The second position, which Scheler refers to as the “negative theory,”Footnote 89 holds that the spirit, to the extent the term should be admissible at all, has in fact no autonomous standing and no power of its own. Schopenhauer, Alsberg, Freud, and Buddha are all invoked as emblematic advocates of this conception, for which all in the human person that is apparently higher or spiritual is in fact nothing but the product, by way of various methods of inhibition and repression, of instinctual energies. The human person, whatever the reasons, denies drives their direct fulfillment, and the resultant excess energy is judiciously conserved and “sublimated” toward the non-natural ends of civilization and culture, an impressive feat, to be sure. In its essence, though, there is nothing to the spirit but the crudely biological.
Scheler rejects both views. On the one hand, he insists against the negative theory that spirit must indeed have a unique nature and autonomy unto itself. For if spirit is the product of instinctual repression, what is it that first initiates the process of repression? Why should it happen at all, and why should it work? In making spirit dependent on repression for its very existence, the negative theory “invariably presupposes what it is supposed to explain.”Footnote 90 The spirit, then, must have something of an autonomous existence. But Scheler breaks with the full-fledged classical/theistic view in denying that the spirit has any effective creative power of its own. Just the opposite is true: spirit is by its very nature entirely impotent; it is “originally devoid of power and efficacy, and the more this is so, the purer it is.”Footnote 91 Bourgeois thought, he laments, is enamored with the originally Greek doctrine of the “autonomous power of the idea, or the view that the (rational) idea has an original power, activity, and energy”Footnote 92 unto itself, but, in fact, our experience of life and history bears out the inverse conclusion: it is always the lower, primal forces that dominate the higher and spiritual; individuals, groups, and nations are driven far more by the dark powers of vital passion than by abstract intellectual or spiritual ideas. “How rare an accident of good fortune or grace,” he asks, “when we see that the autonomous movements of masses tolerate a genius in their midst. . . when the ethically good person succeeds in the world or achieves what we call ‘historical greatness’ and power in history?”Footnote 93 Clearly, the presumed dour response entails, spirit is not that which is inherently powerful.
How, then, does spirit ever achieve efficacy in the world? Here is where repression and sublimation get to work, for Scheler. The human spirit, with its autonomous character, can indeed, independently of all biological impulse, freely elect its own ends. It cannot, however, directly deny the demands of the corresponding biological drives, because all effective power belongs to the biological, not the spiritual. But this is the cunning of spirit: by presenting the drives with ideas and images of its own choosing, the spirit can guide the drives toward particular forms of fulfillment and away from others, thereby effectively “sublimating” the energy latent in those drives toward the ends of the spirit.Footnote 94 In this way the unique and autonomous spirit acquires for itself the raw power of life and thereby becomes capable of real, effective action in the world of things. It is through, and only through, the progressive partnering of life and spirit that humans achieve their true metaphysical uniqueness—their special place in nature.
In step with Scheler, Soloveitchik moves from securing the essential commonality of humanity with all organic life to articulating those qualities that do indeed make the human a unique creature and the process through which those qualities come to be. In his description of the contemporary scientific view, Soloveitchik echoes Scheler's characterization of the reductive, or negative, interpretation of human spirit: “Even his [man's] so called spiritual activities cannot lay claim to autonomy and singularity. . . . The alleged spirit is nothing but a mere illusion, an appearance, the sum total of transformed natural drives and sense experiences. Spirit, or soul, is reduced to psyche, and the latter—to a function of the biological occurrence.”Footnote 95 The worry here is that asserting the human person's essential worldliness and animality, as Soloveitchik aims to do, may lead (and historically often has led) to a complete reduction of humanity to the worldly and animal and so to a denial of any capacity for meaningfully personal or ethical life. It is Soloveitchik's aim, then, to demonstrate that “man-animal,” no less and perhaps even more than “man-as-a-divine-person,” is robustly capable of authentic “relatedness to eternity and infinity.”Footnote 96 With Scheler, Soloveitchik insists that he can have his cake and eat it too: human persons assuredly are animals, but they are no less spiritual for the wear.
Soloveitchik weaves his account of the emergence of humanity's uniqueness into a close reading of the Genesis narrative. Immediately following his creation, Adam is “still an animal crawling in the jungle,”Footnote 97 in that his behavior, though intelligent, is entirely determined by the inborn, natural drives native to his species. He is governed exclusively by “automatic push and blind, forced movement.”Footnote 98 In the course of Gen 2, however, Adam undergoes three transformative experiences that together serve to awaken in him the human personality in its full singularity. First is the primordial command of God to abstain from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So far as his animal nature is concerned, Adam categorically has no reason either to prefer or avoid the fruit of that particular tree, and so he experiences the command as “completely alien to the biological impulse,”Footnote 99 speaking to some reality with which he has had no prior acquaintance. This represents, on Soloveitchik's reading, the introduction to the world of what we call the ethical. As a result of that first divine command, “man suddenly experienced the ethical imperative, which was prompted by autonomous, unique interests, unknown to natural man.”Footnote 100 No longer would the natural impulse be sufficient to determine human intention. Now human persons must deny their drives their immediate gratification so as to step back, reflect, and evaluate what they should and should not do, and what they should and should not do is in principle independent of what they by their animal natures might feel driven to do. It is with the divine command that we have the “dawning of ethical experience,” and it is through that ethical experience that “man begins to experience his selfhood, his personalistic existence.”Footnote 101 The Genesis story, on Soloveitchik's reading, identifies the experience of moral obligation as central to the development of authentic human personality.Footnote 102
Moving on in Gen 2, God grows concerned that Adam is alone and so in verse 18 parades all the animals before Adam for him to name them and to determine whether any of them might make for a suitable mate. Paralleling Scheler's description of the spirit's developing the capacity for objectification, Soloveitchik writes that the task of actively classifying and then consciously selecting or rejecting the animals means for Adam that he is “no longer a non-reflective being that forges ahead in unison with a mechanistic natural process, but begins to single himself out, to confront nature in a mood of cognitive criticism and observation.”Footnote 103 Thus emerges the “split implied in the cognitive gesture, the discrepancy involved in the subject-object division.”Footnote 104 The human person achieves separateness and uniqueness from fellow organisms through acquiring the capacity for critical, objective observation and evaluation. The person is now an “I” for which nature is an “it.” So far it would seem that what makes the human unique for Soloveitchik—ethical personality—is very much like the spirit that serves the same human-individuating role for Scheler. Central to both concepts is the ability to deny one's instinctual drives their immediate gratification and the consequently inaugurated capacity for detached, objective cognition.
But Soloveitchik goes a step further, supplementing the model with a critical new valence. The consummation of the human's development into an ethical personality comes in verse 23 with the first meeting of Adam and Eve—man's first encounter with a genuine “thou.” By faithfully acknowledging a person other than himself, a person with her own independent will and whim, the human person is drawn out of himself, beyond the bounds of autonomous solitude and into the realm of authentic interpersonal I-thou community. Adam realizes his solitude and “cries out. . . to the thou, begging him or her for deliverance from the misery of solitary existence.”Footnote 105 The lover is then compelled to transcend his selfhood in order to “turn to the other human being, to the beloved, and to accept her in all her otherness and independence, in her total self-reality.”Footnote 106
Martin Buber, in a series of lectures on philosophical anthropology delivered in 1938 and published in an English collection referenced by Soloveitchik elsewhere in Emergence,Footnote 107 criticized Scheler's Man's Place in Nature for giving inadequate regard to the role of interpersonal relationship in the basic makeup of humanity: “Man's essential life is not to be grasped from what unrolls in the individual's inner life nor from the consciousness of one's own self, which Scheler takes to be the decisive difference between man and beast, but from the distinctiveness of his relation to things and to living beings.”Footnote 108 It is at least unsurprising, then, to find Soloveitchik likewise insisting on augmenting Scheler's largely cognitive account of “spirit” with the capacity for and experience of relationship between the I and thou. Where Scheler's conception of human uniqueness is basically indifferent to the moral, Soloveitchik places ethical concern at the very heart of what it means to be a genuine human person. For Soloveitchik, in addition to, but not apparently conflicting with, the capacities included in Scheler's “spirit,” the achievement of ethical personality means becoming open, as one's individual self, to genuine sympathetic coexistence and community with another individual self—as an I to a thou. Scheler himself does explicitly acknowledge and commend the potential import his account of spirit could bear on real-world ethical life; he simply maintains that it is conceptually possible for the spiritual personality to elect either to “return from the sphere of essences to the reality of the world in order to improve it” or to live a life in full detachment from reality and so without real-world ethical concerns.Footnote 109 Soloveitchik's innovation here, then, is simply to press the issue and take a clear stance on a possibility already present in Scheler.
A similar dynamic between Soloveitchik and Scheler obtains with respect to the question of dualism in their respective anthropologies. Scheler, while enthusiastically arguing for humanity's continuity with nature and organic life, is no less dead-set on accentuating humanity's essential uniqueness from all natural life, and the result of these conflicting motives is an anthropology grounded in a dualism of fundamentally antithetical principles—life, and spirit that is in its essence opposed to life.Footnote 110 At times in his presentation, however, Scheler seems to drift significantly toward a more integrated conception. Consider the following: “Does this hierarchy of forms not appear as if there were different levels in the structure of being in which the ultimate Ground of Being bends back more and more upon itself to become more and more conscious of itself on higher levels and new dimensions—until it comes to possess and grasp itself completely in man?”Footnote 111 Here it sounds as if what ultimately becomes the spirit in the human person—that which possesses itself in self-consciousness—is simply the culmination of a process in which the lower forms themselves achieve a unique standing; it is not that spirit is an essentially distinct, extraneous form of being conjoined to life, but that life in itself becomes spiritual.Footnote 112 Similarly, while Scheler insists that only an autonomous spirit can explain the initial act of ascetic repression necessary for the realization of spirit at all, he also writes that “only life is capable of initiating and realizing the spiritual activity, from its simplest act to the achievement of a great spiritual content.”Footnote 113 Again, spirit here appears precisely as an achievement of life itself, not, as much of his writing implies, a principle ontologically opposed to life. Scheler, it would seem, was significantly ambivalent—or simply unsure—about his stated anthropological dualism.
There is in Soloveitchik's presentation no trace of this equivocation. While Soloveitchik is, with Scheler, intent on establishing both human persons’ continuity with nature and their uniqueness from it, he assiduously takes pains to preclude any potential confusion of his position as dualistic. Ethical personality, he insists repeatedly, is not a second component of human nature in addition to the biological; rather, it just is the biological, only under a new aspect. Through his achievement of ethical personality, the human animal is “enriched. . . by a new modality, which adds a new quality to his existence,”Footnote 114 but ontologically or metaphysically speaking, the human remains the very same being as before. “Man,” Soloveitchik writes, “is a simple creature ontically, but a very complicated one ethically.”Footnote 115 It is true that the freedom of ethical personality requires that humans experience their otherness from, or incommensurability with, nature, but it remains that “there is nothing mystical about this,” as it is “merely the cognitive drive, the cognitive gesture which requires man to face nature as something extraneous, distinct and separate.”Footnote 116 And while it is true that we do “come across a dual concept of man in the Bible”—man in the Bible is both natural and transcendent—that “transcendence was always seen against the background of naturalness.”Footnote 117 For the Bible, “the canvas was man's immanence; transcendence was just projected on it as a display of colors. It was more a modifying than a basic attribute of man.”Footnote 118 Finally, reminiscent of the alternative formulations we saw in Scheler's work, Soloveitchik asserts that personality is something that “emerges from the cosmic process.”Footnote 119 Ultimately it is a “human function” that “brings forth the duality in personalism.”Footnote 120 With Soloveitchik we find no ambivalence: the human personality does admit of duality—to describe the human as merely animal would be radically inadequate—but that duality in no way entails a dualism in substance. “Exercises of spontaneity belong to our way of actualizing ourselves as animals.”Footnote 121 And so, to invert a (Heideggerian) formulation Soloveitchik employs elsewhere, the ontological dualism is not a reflection of an ontic dualism.Footnote 122
And so again what we have in Emergence is Soloveitchik's selective appropriation, mediated by substantial rhetorical and conceptual development, of material from Scheler's Man's Place in Nature. Confronting the ambiguities and potential deficiencies in Scheler's work, Soloveitchik pursues refinement through immanent critique: he shapes possibilities latent in the text toward his own more satisfying construction. The human person is indeed unique among all nature's creatures, but that uniqueness is natural through and through.Footnote 123
The Metaphysics of History and the Ground of Being
Scheler's anthropological conception of the human person as comprising two antithetical forces, spirit and vital impulse, is rooted in a broader vision of the fundamental metaphysics of the cosmos and history—the human person's condition is unique precisely on account of humanity's taking center stage in the grand drama of the very Ground of Being and its progressive development through time. Readers in search of anthropological insight will then, for better or for worse, find in Scheler a good deal more than that. As Buber laments, “Scheler lets his consideration of the real man be permeated by a metaphysic,” and a metaphysic with the particularly unseemly flaws of being “deeply influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche” at that.Footnote 124 But this metaphysic, while it is idiosyncratic, generally extravagant, and without doubt “quirky,” is central to Scheler's anthropological project, and, as I will show, becomes central to Soloveitchik's as well.
In the beginning, Scheler recounts, there was spirit and there was life. Spirit, yearning to realize itself but unable to on account of its essential powerlessness, was forced to let loose the “world-creative drive.”Footnote 125 In order to realize its own “inherent plenitude of ideas and values”—what Scheler calls its “deitas”—the spirit was “compelled, as it were, to pay the price of the world process in order to realize its own essence in and through this temporal process.”Footnote 126 For Scheler, this account is theism, only in reverse: rather than a pure, omnipotent spirit creating a world of his own power and in accord with his own vision, God for Scheler “becomes” in the first place only through the world-historical process. Spirit is, as we have seen, by its nature unique and autonomous—it has its own “inherent plenitude of ideas and values”—but it is also by its nature entirely without effective power, and so it must rely on the world, on life, and on the human in order to realize those ideas and values and so to become God. The higher can only come to be through partnering with the lower, and that partnership is possible “only in the raging tempest of the world.” Ultimately, “spirit, originally impotent, and the demonic drive originally blind to all spiritual ideas and values, may fuse in the growing process of ideation, or spiritualization, in the sublimation of the drives and in the simultaneous actualization, or vitalization, of the spirit.”Footnote 127 The story of the world is the story of the divine coming to be in and through the progressive interpenetration of the primal, primordially antithetical forces of spirit and life.
Taking center stage in that process is the human person. At the most elementary level, of course, humans are biological beings, animals driven by the “dark impulse burning continually”Footnote 128 through the whole breadth and depth of their existence. At the human's core are primal, vitalistic forces that “are ‘blind’ as it were, to any idea, form, or meaning.”Footnote 129 But humanity is capable, through “some kind of identification” (brought about by the technique of ascetic repression), to “participate” in the “acts of the superindividual spirit”Footnote 130 and thereby to channel the power of the vital impulse toward higher ends. In achieving self-conscious freedom and personality, humanity becomes capable of “sublimating” the vital impulse, giving form and direction—and therewith spirit—to the raging tempest. The vital impulse thus acquires purpose and meaning, and the spirit is thus realized in finding effective purchase in the real world. To the extent, and only to the extent, that the human person succeeds in channeling life's natural energy toward the autonomous ends of the spirit does the spirit achieve true reality. God thus “becomes,” not before history and not after, but precisely with the historical process.Footnote 131 In sum, “The birth of man and the birth of God are, from the outset, reciprocally dependent upon each other.”Footnote 132
Spirit can guide the vital impulse, but it holds no power of its own and so can neither act on its own nor challenge the vital impulse head-on—“a direct struggle of the pure will against the instinct is impossible.”Footnote 133 There can be, then, no realization of the spirit without first having the forces of life on board. But involving those forces, in themselves entirely blind but ultimately powerful, necessarily makes for a protracted, challenging, and uncertain process. And beyond the indifferent, chaotic power inherent to life in general, the human presents a further complication: the demonic temptations of hedonism. The animal already is capable, with the aid of associative memory, of fixating its drives on particular objects merely on account of the pleasure afforded thereby, regardless of that fixation's implications for the drive's natural purpose. The instinct becomes “more and more an autonomous source of pleasure” essentially indifferent to the organism's genuine needs and, as a result, “opens up a horizon of excess.”Footnote 134 But while this capacity belongs to all animals, no animal exhibits the same remarkable facility as does the human: “Only in man does the capacity to isolate the drive from instinctive behavior and to separate the state of pleasure from functional enjoyment assume such monstrous forms that it is quite correct to say, man can be either more or less than an animal, but never an animal.”Footnote 135 Just those abilities that make humanity uniquely suited to serve as the focal point for the realization of the divine also make it uniquely prone to monstrosity. The fate of the spirit, then, rests in the hands of the potentially demonic soul of the human person. It is this that explains, Scheler says, why history has so often been so dark. The battle for spirit is always uphill.
In the end, though, Scheler remains fundamentally optimistic.Footnote 136 Notwithstanding all of the inevitable darkness and chaos, “history does show, on the whole and in general, an increasing scope in the power of reason”Footnote 137—the gradual ascendancy of spirit. Somehow the ideas and values of the spirit do ultimately achieve purchase in the world, gradually succeeding in making spirit manifest in the gritty and grisly material of human life. Somehow, as humanity progresses through history, God becomes more and more real, real “to the degree to which what we call ‘world’ becomes a perfect body of the eternal substance.”Footnote 138 It has always been and will always remain the case that “what is truly creative and powerful in man is not the spirit, nor the higher forms of consciousness, but the dark, unconscious drives in the human soul.”Footnote 139 Spirit cannot create without the power native only to life. But with the cooperative interfusion of the spiritual and the demonic—with the “growing process of ideation, or spiritualization, in the sublimation of the drives and in the simultaneous actualization, or vitalization, of the spirit”—the divine comes into being.
What we have, then, is a worldview that, in aspiration at least, “cuts through the dualism that has prevailed between a teleological and a mechanistic explanation of reality.”Footnote 140 World history begins as mechanical—powerful but blind and indifferent to all higher values—but in time becomes more and more personal, progressing meaningfully and purposefully toward the ends of the spirit. The key to the evolution is the human person. Humanity's “true life and destiny,” Scheler surmises, consists in “an eternal rhythmic movement between idea and reality, spirit and instinct—and in the reconciliation of this constant tension.”Footnote 141
Soloveitchik continues his retelling of the Genesis story with an extensive discussion of original sin. What is it about Adam and Eve's choice to eat the fruit of that one forbidden tree that makes it the archetype for human transgression? Christians, Soloveitchik says, often characterize sin as the rebellion of a spiritual being—humanity, in its prideful insolence, pretends to the divine and so willfully challenges God's rightful dominion by violating his command. But Soloveitchik prefers a more mundane account, one that speaks to the everyday reality of embodied human persons: humans sin not to vie with God for cosmic ascendancy but because they succumb to the animal pursuit of the aesthetic. The allure of anticipated pleasure hypnotizes humanity, crippling its capacity for free decision; “driven by the pleasure instinct, man does not actively choose between evil and good.”Footnote 142 The paradigmatic sinner then is not a monster intent on evil for evil's sake—not Lucifer—but simply the person who has forgotten that she ought to be more than a beast.
This is not to say, to be sure, that Soloveitchik sees animality as inherently evil; just the opposite is true: much of Emergence is devoted precisely to highlighting Judaism's affirmation of the goodness of humanity precisely as a natural, organic being. The ideal for humanity is not freedom from biological instinct, but rather biological instinct ordered in accord with higher ethical motives—the redemption, rather than the transcending, of the natural. But what, then, is sin? Here Soloveitchik incorporates Scheler's characterization of the instinct's subversion through fixation on pleasure: with the capacity for “associative memory,” the animal may come to associate a particular object of its natural drives as providing pleasure and so learn to repeat the pleasure-providing performance without regard to the drive's original purpose.Footnote 143 With this “mechanization of primordial biological drives,” the individual organism thus becomes a “traitor to the group, to the species”Footnote 144 in subverting its natural instincts to the autonomous pursuit of pleasure. And as in Scheler's account, while this phenomenon features in all animal life, nowhere is it more advanced than with the human:
For millennia, man has been experimenting with his biological energies and tensions for the sole purpose of converting them into something for which they were not meant in the original scheme of creation: into a source of pleasure and enjoyment. . . . Instead of man driven to activity by biological motivation, we find man trying to make the organism respond to external stimuli in order that he could repeat the same performance, which has become for him an inexhaustible well of hedone.Footnote 145
This for Soloveitchik marks the emergence of the demonic, the personality who in its blind pursuit of pleasure violates the bounds of nature and stretches forth its hand to that which is not rightly its own.Footnote 146 Humanity in Eden had—through a self-conscious break with nature, relation to the thou, and accepting the divine command—achieved genuine ethical personality. But with the primordial sin humanity introduced to world history the ethical personality's chief opponent—not satanic evil, but the blind, mechanical, demonic pursuit of pleasure. Thus “the battle lines were drawn,” and the result is the “eternal conflict between the demonic and ethical personalities.”Footnote 147 The question now is whether human persons will, with their sophisticated technical intelligence, be compulsively driven to pursue pleasure without regard for right or wrong—and so to be, as Scheler would say, “less than an animal”—or whether they can, in and through their animality, live in purposive harmony with the autonomous demands of divine morality.
As with Scheler's cosmic dualism, for Soloveitchik the drama between these opposing forces extends not only to individual persons but to the whole of the world and the historical process. Central to the Bible is God's covenantal promise to the people of Israel to redeem them from slavery and bring them to flourish in the land of milk and honey. This is the “great promise and vision”Footnote 148 of historical reality coming into line with the divine will. But the fulfillment of that promise, Soloveitchik stresses, lies not at the beginning but at the end of history. In present time, “there is a perennial conflict between the historical-covenantal motivation and historical immediacy,” because the “covenant appears to oppose historical regularity and continuity.”Footnote 149 History, prior to the realization of the covenantal vision, is governed not by dynamic spiritual visions but by essentially indifferent mechanical forces. Humanity working in pursuit of the covenantal promise is “subject to the unalterable laws of a natural existence, to all the indifferent, purposeless forces of a self-sufficient, blind being, which does not recognize covenant motifs and charismatic patterns in history.”Footnote 150 Natural history is powerful and inevitable—and so “the level of natural, concrete existence cannot be ignored”Footnote 151—but it is also blind and so must be actively brought into harmony with the ethical. Redemption, then, consists in “the assertion of the charismatic-meaningful over the indifferent-meaningless”Footnote 152—or, we might say, the assertion of spirit over vital impulse. History is the teleological becoming of teleological history.
God, of course, is intimately involved in the redemption process, but only with the fullest reciprocal contribution of humanity. There is in covenantal fulfillment “no division of duties” between God and humanity, as God requires that humanity do an at least equal part: “Let man himself attempt to realize the covenant. Let this realization occur within the bounds of human activity.”Footnote 153 In and through the purposive participation of the human, world history is transformed from an indifferent, blind mechanism into a meaningful, dynamic, and deliberate reality expressive of personal moral agency; “the historico-coincidental forces are superseded by transcendental-purposive motives.”Footnote 154 So world history is not simply mechanistic, because it can, through human action, become purposive; but it is not quite teleological either, because its purposive character is not present at the outset but only realized through the human historical process. The result, a student of Scheler might contend, is a worldview that “cuts through the dualism that has prevailed between a teleological and a mechanistic explanation of reality.”Footnote 155 And again, it is the human person who takes center stage in the process.
Intriguingly, Soloveitchik's conception of covenantal realization is not without hints of Scheler's reciprocal “becoming,” or perhaps emergence, of God himself. At history's beginning, God appears only as “E-lokim,” which for Soloveitchik indicates a mode of impersonal, mechanical governance and regulation. It is only in the course of the covenant's fulfillment that God becomes manifest as “Havayah,” as the God who is personally and dynamically invested in human goings-on. And so, “while the universal historical process is completely dominated by the E-lokim aspect—uniformity and regularity, similar to the monotony in the cosmic drama, are characteristics of the historical occurrence—the charismatic historical emergence is guided by the Havayah idea.”Footnote 156 The becoming of God-as-Havayah, and the transformation of mechanistic forces into purposive history through the charismatic, ethical life of humanity, are two sides of the same coin.
Eliezer Berkovits, a contemporary of Soloveitchik's with a similar intellectual pedigree, likewise gives Scheler's conception of the essential powerlessness of spirit a prominent place in his religious philosophy. Preempting a question that would be obvious in this context to any reader of Scheler, Berkovits remarks simply that “Scheler, however, assumes that his position is not compatible with a theistic philosophy”Footnote 157—the implication being that, in fact, against Scheler's assumption, his characterization of spirit is compatible with a theistic philosophy. One can, according to Berkovits, follow Scheler in denying spirit any effective power, thereby requiring for spirit's real-world realization that it channel the energy inherent in natural life, while breaking with Scheler in his assertion that this negates theism. I would argue that Soloveitchik in Emergence employs just this strategy: the aspect of God relevant for biblical theism, Soloveitchik avers, is not pure spirit in Scheler's sense, because God, as Havayah, is a living being—indeed, “life in general is divine.”Footnote 158 Soloveitchik notes that “locomotion is one of the traits of life,” and so “in speaking of God, the Bible never neglects to emphasize the dynamic aspect. . . . God is eternal urgency and activity; He is compelling and alive.”Footnote 159 That is not to say that God is not also a transcendent, mysterious being whose existence is entirely apart from and beyond the natural world. The biblical God, in Soloveitchik's conception, is both transcendent and immanent, spiritual and alive. And so, where Scheler had rejected his earlier theism for the effectively pantheistic view of Man's Place in Nature, Soloveitchik ambitiously announces that this dual conception of God has “resolved the pantheism-theism antimony.”Footnote 160
Soloveitchik, then, while avoiding certain of Scheler's verdicts, conscripts the core ideas of Scheler's cosmic and religious metaphysics: the God to whom humans relate is a God who through the process of history gradually becomes more and more closely allied with the forces of vitality, with the result that the natural cosmos itself is gradually transformed from indifferent mechanism to a form of purposive, personal, and spiritual being. The forces of blind impulse, in and through the process of human history, give way to the guiding direction of mindful spirit. For Soloveitchik, as for Scheler, God is becoming.
Conclusion
The vocabulary and rhetorical trappings of Scheler's and Soloveitchik's works are somewhat out of style nowadays, but their underlying philosophical concerns remain surprisingly current, and the terms of the debate remain surprisingly unchanged. Alasdair MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals, first published in 1999, is illustrative here: while he had in After Virtue attempted to construct a theory of human virtue without appeal to biology, he came to see that he “was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible,” as “no account of the goods, rules and virtues that are definitive of our moral life can be adequate that does not explain. . . how that form of life is possible for beings who are biologically constituted as we are, by providing us with an account of our development towards and into that form of life.”Footnote 161 Modern ethical theory has often fallen short, MacIntyre argues, on account of “either a failure or a refusal to acknowledge adequately the bodily dimensions of our existence,” and the tendency to “conceive of ourselves and imagine ourselves as other than animal, as exempt from the hazardous condition of ‘mere’ animality.”Footnote 162 MacIntyre subsequently devotes the bulk of his book to demonstrating, through philosophical engagement with the latest scientific research, that animals and humans are essentially alike: animals think, choose, and act just the way humans do, and human thinking, while exceptionally sophisticated, is in the end “the thinking of one species of animal.”Footnote 163 Appreciating these continuities between human and animal life is for MacIntyre, as against what he takes to be the regnant majority opinion, vital to a wholesome and holistic understanding of virtue. Dependent Rational Animals is effectively an up-to-date, polished, and morally attuned version of Scheler's Man's Place in Nature—or, of course, a sequel to Soloveitchik's Emergence of Ethical Man.
It scarcely requires mention that this position is less than universally held. Opposition remains energetic and powerful on several fronts: from those who embrace human animality but take that animality to entail the comprehensive unavailability to human persons of any transcendent horizon; from those who deny that human nature is a species of animal nature, and so regard reference to animality as necessarily distorting of sound moral thinking; and from those who simply deny that there is such a thing as human nature at all. It is a curious fact: like MacIntyre, thinkers advocating for a moral vision grounded in human animality tend to write as if they stand alone, the last soldiers standing in a noble battle. Writing in 2013, David Clough diagnoses what he takes to be the widespread, philosophically and religiously problematic “‘not-animal’ mode of theological anthropology.”Footnote 164 Both science and theology rightly done, Clough says, dictate that, against the pervasive trends, we construct an anthropology rooted in a recognition of the commonality of human and animal creatures, and while Clough can in this article only gesture at what that positive construction will look like, he can at least, he says, perform the prerequisite negative task of shaking the hold of the not-animal mode's illicit monopoly. Franz de Waal has achieved considerable notoriety, and been met with considerable resistance, for his work on primates aimed at demonstrating that human morality, rather than being an artificial human fabrication, is in organic, evolutionary confluence with broader animal nature. “Morality is neither unique to us nor a conscious decision,”Footnote 165 because ultimately, “while it is true that animals are not humans, it is equally true that humans are animals.”Footnote 166 Louise Westling observes that “a queasy reluctance among philosophers prevents full acknowledgement of our kinship with the rest of animalia.”Footnote 167 Leon Kass has devoted his career to countering what he sees as the profoundly inadequate and morally insidious philosophy underlying the modern technological project, counseling that “what is urgently needed is a richer, more natural biology and anthropology, one that does full justice to the meaning of our peculiarly human union of soul and body.”Footnote 168
All of these thinkers believe that emphasizing the continuities between human and animal life is vital to healthy moral thinking, and all of these thinkers see themselves as speaking for an isolated and ever more endangered minority. We are dealing, then, with what is very much a living and lively conversation, but one apparently in urgent need of some order and clarification. But this conversation has a long and wide-ranging history, and the better we understand that history the better we know where we are now and where we are going. Achieving that understanding would be greatly helped by substantive critical attention to the various common currents running through what ought to be recognized as a tradition of anthropological thinking emphasizing commonality of human and animal—a tradition that includes the work of Max Scheler as well as Joseph Soloveitchik's appropriations and refinements thereof. This paper, then, in both content and form, aspires toward a modest contribution to the enterprise of reflectively excavating, and thereby galvanizing, that tradition.
While philosophical anthropology and its moral resonances are common fare in Christian scholarship, as things stand they receive minimal attention in contemporary writing on Jewish thought.Footnote 169 This is an unfortunate oversight and should be righted, if not for the sake of the topic's inherent significance then on account of the fact that it simply is a central concern to canonical figures in modern Jewish philosophy. Soloveitchik's Emergence is, as we noted, unusual for the extent and directedness of its focus on the technicalities of philosophical anthropology, but the underlying concerns are no less vital to the writings of Eliezer Berkovits, Martin Buber, Michael Wyschogrod, A. J. Heschel, and Franz Rosenzweig, all of whom regularly appeal to the character of the human condition as natural, embodied personhood as definitive for authentic Judaism and regulative for its religiously, politically, and ethically wholesome continuance. Further attention to the commonalities and divergences among these thinkers would be a major contribution to the project of telling the story of Jewish thought, which should in turn have considerable import for the ongoing projects of religious and moral thought more generally. It is in the progressive evolution from passive, inert mechanism to free, dynamic, and personal activity that history truly comes to be.
