Willi Goetschel's new book, The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought, puts forth the argument that Jewish philosophy, rather than being confined to a particular content or a set of established concerns designated as “Jewish,” is a corrective to the misguided universalist aspirations of traditional Western philosophy. Long dismissed by the guardians of that tradition as parochial, as covetous of cultic distinctiveness as opposed to universal belonging, Jewish philosophy, Goetschel contends, is rather the suppressed voice of philosophy in general, an unwanted reminder that a totalizing universalism can only be attained by disregarding, or even eliminating, the local features of thought, action, and culture. The practitioners of Jewish thought, represented here by Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, among others, bring to light the logic of “exclusion,” the way in which identity presupposes and depends upon unacknowledged difference, and thus compels philosophy to recognize that its dream of closure, of finally attaining a perspective that includes all other perspectives, is not just impossible, but a nightmare. In its pursuit of absolute self-identity, Western philosophy disfigures its own ideal.

Goetschel's argument proceeds along two intersecting lines. The first is his contention that the “project of philosophy” (6) has, ever since its putative inception in Greek lands, marginalized minority intellectual trajectories, the Jewish being perhaps the most prominent. It has done this by claiming, in one form or another, that Jewish thought is extraneous to the principles and motives of the Western intellectual tradition and that the short-sightedness of Jewish thought, its inability to look beyond the confines of its private obsessions, disqualifies it from being included in the expansive, universalist agenda of philosophy proper. In the history of German thought, this dismissiveness undergoes a variety of conceptual permutations. For example, the distinction between the spiritual Greek and the sensuous Hebrew mind, a staple of pre-Enlightenment thought that still exerts a residual influence today, facilitated cultural discrimination by depicting Jews as anthropologically, i.e. fundamentally, different; predisposed towards material considerations, Jews were incapable of appreciating the Enlightenment's commitment to highly abstract notions of universality. According to Goetschel, the view that Jewish thought was inferior to Greek/German thought became institutionalized, or “disciplined,” throughout the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The disciplining of Jewish philosophy—Goetschel means by this both the transformation of Jewish philosophy into an academically acceptable field of study and the deliberate domestication of its transgressive potential—provided it with institutional legitimacy; as with other subjects worthy of understanding, procedural norms developed around it and helped to guide inquiry. But in exchange for this acceptance Goetschel believes that Jewish philosophy had to abandon its self-conception; it had to operate according to the assumption that what is worthwhile about Jewish thought is only that portion of it which conforms to philosophy's overarching project. Thus, Jewish philosophy, even today, must apologize for its supposed narrowness and its unwillingness to integrate itself into philosophy's prevailing self-conception as the only arbiter of an appropriate universalism. Consequently, a self-conscious Jewish philosophy is forced to reflect on its marginalized status and to define itself according to criteria which will only perpetuate its position as a “subaltern” (116). The perennial outsider, Jewish thought is philosophy's “dybbuk” (7), an aggrieved specter haunting the margins of the real and the true.

However, the second major line of Goetschel's argument is that the marginalization of Jewish philosophy is in fact its enduring strength. This is because the particularity of Jewish philosophy, its resistance to wholesale appropriation, “challenges philosophy as a discipline to understand that its universalism is necessarily founded in the particular it seeks to exclude” (232). What unifies all twelve chapters of Goetschel's study is that each offers a variation of the claim that Jewish thought cannot be reduced to a specific content; rather, the value of “Jewish philosophy” (Goetschel sometimes puts this phrase in quotes to indicate its resistance to definition) can be found in its insistence that the universal remains unthinkable without the particular. Exclusion, marginalization, and repression: this is the lamentable historical fate of Jewish thought, but one which enables it to rattle Western philosophy's self-certainty. This does not mean, however, that Jewish thought must accept a subsidiary role, as if its only purpose is to vex and annoy mainstream intellectual traditions. What renders Jewish philosophy indispensable is that it pushes Western thought to be more self-reflexive: by confronting its blind spots, by coming face-to-face with the inconvenient facts of an alternate spiritual legacy, philosophy learns to see itself better; it learns, in other words, how its self-understanding relies upon the very differences it attempts to exclude. “The distinction between what is Jewish or non-Jewish,” Goetschel explains, “is therefore from the very onset a dynamic one in process and transformation. Yet Jewish thought has been criticized for precisely this reflexive fluidity that has allowed it to develop through constant and creative forms of exchange. But the compliment must be returned. Jewish philosophy's stubborn resistance to assimilation is not merely a negative feature…but a creative contradiction from a counterposition that reflects the hegemonic stand on philosophy critically” (156).

Goetschel's overall approach owes something to postcolonial theory, to Derrida's notion of a supplement, and to Niklas Luhmann's speculations on the paradoxes of observing systems. However, Goetschel's greatest debt is perhaps to Rosenzweig's famous claim, made in The Star of Redemption, that Judaism cannot be assimilated into the Christian worldview and thus thwarts the latter's universalist ambitions. Rosenzweig's argument depends upon two dubious presuppositions: the first that Judaism is ahistorical; and the second that Hegel's philosophy is totalizing (both intellectually and historically). Goetschel, of course, wholeheartedly rejects the first assumption; the second he also rejects, but not completely. In chapter 7, “Goldschmidt's Philosophy out of the Sources of Judaism,” Goetschel maintains that while there are affinities between Hegel's speculative logic and Goldschmidt's dialogic philosophy, it is only the latter that allows for true difference and distinctiveness; Hegel's thought ends up cancelling difference by dialectically sublimating it (128). I mention this not necessarily because I disagree with Goetschel's interpretation of Hegel (although, respectfully, I do), but rather because it raises a challenge to his entire approach. If Jewish philosophy's endurance requires the willful blindness of “philosophy,” then what happens to it when “philosophy” can provide its own reflexivity (as Hegel's thought arguably does), that is, when it learns to see on its own? Does “Jewish philosophy” need to misread and misunderstand “philosophy” the same way “philosophy” misunderstands and misreads “Jewish philosophy”? In the case of Rosenzweig, it is clear that his thought carves out a space for itself by turning a blind eye to the fact that dialectic is endless, not static. Does “Jewish philosophy” have to make the same mistake about “philosophy” in order to establish its relevance? It is one of the great benefits of Goetschel's study that it brings these difficult and taxing questions before our eyes.