3 - Phenomenology

Summary

THE PROMISES AND PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY

One might suspect that to discuss Jewish thinkers' appropriation of the ideas, method, and vocabulary of phenomenology is to catalogue yet another dimension of Jews' intellectual acculturation into the broader European world of letters. In other words, if Edmund Husserl revolutionized European philosophy in 1899 by introducing phenomenology in his Logical Investigations, then it would only be expected that there would be a group of authors who would take phenomenology out of the surrounding air and give it a Jewish inflection. However, phenomenology was more than just an instrumental good for Jewish intellectuals. It was an intrinsic good; it allowed Jewish thinkers to defend the validity of taking traditional texts as divine revelation. For example, Abraham Joshua Heschel's revised doctoral dissertation, Die Prophetie (published in 1936, a briefer and more technical version of the material that would be published in 1962 in English as The Prophets), opens with a critique of the dominant view in Old Testament scholarship at Heschel's time, typified by Gustav Hölscher, which saw the prophets as mantic figures who come to supernatural knowledge through an ecstatic union with God. Prophecy for such scholars was thus about an altered state of consciousness.