Max Kadushin struggled to reconcile the continuity of tradition with the coherent
transmission of meaning during a unique time in the history of Western philosophy: a time when prominent secular thinkers began to ask themselves the same kinds of questions. These questions had, until that point, largely been asked by theologians.
When Kadushin’s Organic Thinking was published in 1938, the tradition of
continental hermeneutics was in its infancy and held little sway outside of Germany. There is no evidence that Kadushin was in any sense familiar with it at any point in his career; Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) was not published in English until 1962, and
222 These are appended to the Sifra, a halakhic midrash on Leviticus (Vayikra), and described therein (and by
Kadushin) as “the thirteen middot”—and generally described as such in rabbinic literature, despite the fact that there are in fact sixteen distinct middot in the text. “That the ‘thirteen’ middot seem to number sixteen,” Azzan Yadin writes in Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p. 101), “...does not undermine the centrality of this tradition. Quite the contrary; the discrepancy suggests that the number thirteen is not an empirical characterization arrived at by counting the middot, but rather an ideological statement imposed upon the list.” Yadin argues that a Talmudic
mandate to “Go and learn [a verse from Torah] by one of the thirteen middot according to which the Torah is interpreted—a matter is learned by its context” (Sanhedrin 86a, quoted by Yadin on p. 102) led to a tradition in which the sixteen middot were referred to as the thirteen middot, perhaps in much the same way as a baker’s dozen, despite being clearly described as a dozen, actually numbers 13.
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method was not published in English until 1975. But the priorities of continental hermeneutics, particularly those described by Gadamer, were similar to those of Kadushin and would have probably been of considerable interest to him given the suspicion he felt regarding second-order philosophical reinterpretations of the rabbinic tradition. This passage from Gadamer’s Truth and Method, for example, indirectly defends Kadushin’s position on the communal and organismic character of rabbinic texts:
A person who reflects himself out of a living relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition ... I must allow tradition’s claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me ... Someone who is open to tradition in this way sees that historical consciousness is not really open at all but rather, when it reads its texts “historically,” it has always thoroughly smothered them out beforehand, so that the criteria of the historian’s own knowledge can never be called into question by tradition.224
Where Gadamer’s predecessors tended to assess textual traditions from a rationalistic point of view, focusing on assessing a text as an outsider with as much conceptual accuracy as possible, Gadamer—in keeping with his roots as a German phenomenologist—saw the hermeneutic enterprise as an experiential one in which a partial ontological fusion of horizons, a human resonance with the text and the community that produced it, would become necessary. The more complete the understanding of the text, the more immersive the process, the riskier it becomes. “In understanding,” Gadamer writes, “we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe.”225 In Gadamer’s
system, objectivity comes with a price—the more we use our own worldviews to assess a text, the less we are likely to recognize a text’s internal merits and coherence:
[T]he historian usually chooses concepts to describe the historical particularity of his objects without expressly reflecting on their origin and justification. He simply follows his interest in the material and takes no account of the fact that the
descriptive concepts he chooses can be highly detrimental to his proper purpose if
224 Truth and Method, pp. 354-355. 225 Truth and Method, p. 484.
they assimilate what is historically different to what is familiar and thus, despite all impartiality, subordinate the alien being of the object to his own preconceptions. Thus, despite his scientific method, he behaves just like everyone else—a child of his time who is unquestioningly dominated by the concepts and prejudices of his own age.226
Kadushin’s argument that value-concepts are intrinsic to rabbinic Jewish thought, and not merely to the physical texts themselves, would also carry weight with Gadamer. “It is not by accident,” Gadamer writes, “that one could talk about the ‘book of nature,’ which contained just as much truth as the ‘book of books.’ That which can be understood is language.”227
But if Gadamer’s work reinforces Kadushin’s assessment of the problem, it also criticizes Kadushin’s proposed solution. Where Kadushin would likely run afoul of the Gadamerian hermeneutic standard is in his attempt to classify value-concepts into exactly the sorts of explicit taxonomies that held no interest for the rabbinical authors themselves, and Gadamer saw this as an intrinsically flawed approach. This passage could have been written specifically about Kadushin’s taxonomy of value-concepts:
We have seen that conceptual interpretation is the realization of the hermeneutical experience itself. That is why our problem is so difficult. The interpreter does not know that he is bringing himself and his own concepts into the interpretation. The verbal formulation is so much part of the interpreter’s mind that he never becomes aware of it as an object ... It is obvious that an instrumentalist theory of signs which sees words and concepts as handy tools has missed the point of the hermeneutical phenomenon. If we stick to what takes place in speech and, above all, in every dialogue with tradition carried on by the human sciences, we cannot fail to see that here concepts are constantly in the process of being formed. This does not mean that the interpreter is using new or unusual words. But the capacity to use familiar words is not based on an act of logical subsumption, through which a particular is placed under a universal concept. Let us remember, rather, that understanding always includes an element of application and thus produces an ongoing process of concept formation.228
226 Truth and Method, p. 397. 227 Truth and Method, p. 484. 228 Truth and Method, p. 404.
Still, this criticism becomes less potent if we remember that Gadamer and Kadushin had fundamentally different goals. It is reasonable to assume that it is primarily their
differing goals, and not their differing methodologies, that render their systems so incompatible. Kadushin is not explicitly attempting to achieve the sort of ontological fusion of horizons proposed by Gadamer, or any approximation of it; he is merely expressing the normal valuational life of a 20th-century Jew who has inherited the language of his ancestors, and is trying to describe it in such a way that it appears coherent to those who do not immediately find it to be so. That Max Kadushin failed to explain rabbinic philosophy by the standards of continental hermeneutics, a branch of a discipline that he had already denounced as irrelevant to his inquiry, would have most likely seemed to him both obvious and unimpressive.