Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li : Ziporyn, Brook: Amazon.com.au: Books

Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li : Ziporyn, Brook: Amazon.com.au: Books


Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li  2013
by Brook Ziporyn (Author)
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars (9)
Part of: SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (193 books)

Explores the development of Chinese thought, highlighting its concern with questions of coherence.

Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge-the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions-as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.
===
Review


"Ziporyn takes on the deepest issues and most difficult texts from a millennium and a half of Chinese thinking, and offers exciting new ways to make sense of both individual texts and the tradition's broader concerns ... Whether read separately or together, these two volumes are among the most provocative and tightly argued works on Chinese philosophy to appear in many years, and richly repay the effort it takes to learn to see through the lens of coherence." -- Dao

"...Ziporyn's two volumes on 'oneness and difference' represent a well-argued and highly sophisticated attempt at understanding Chinese metaphysics on its own terms ... I recommend these two volumes unconditionally to the reader." -- Kai Marchal, Philosophy East & West

"...constitute[s] the first comprehensive attempt in any Western language to explore the meaning and history of the difficult term li prior to the Song period ... Ziporyn displays a tremendous knowledge of difficult philosophical texts such as the commentaries to Daoist classics by Wang Bi and Guo Xiang as well as primary texts and commentaries of the Buddhist Tiantai and Huayan traditions." -- Monumenta Serica
About the Author
Brook Ziporyn is Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of several books, including The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang and Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li, both also published by SUNY Press.

Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ State University of New York Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 2 July 2013

Customer Reviews:
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars (9)


Chinese Phil Scholar

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this bookReviewed in the United States on 26 March 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I love this book. Ziporyn's work is fantastic. In particular, the section on "Ironic Coherence" in the DDJ and Zhuangzi is one of my favorite accounts of classical Daoist Philosophy. I wont give a thorough/scholarly account of the book here but it is a five star book for sure!

Report

==

BOOK REVIEWS 

BROOK ZIPORYN, Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese 

Thought. Prolegomena to the Study of li 理. Albany: State University of 

New York, 2012. ix, 323 pp. Bibliography, Index. US$ 85.00 (HB). ISBN 978-1- 

4384-4289-1 

BROOK ZIPORYN, Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li 理 and Coherence in Chinese 

Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents. Albany: State University of New York, 

2013. xviii, 413 pp. Bibliography, Index. US$ 95.00 (HB). ISBN 978-1-4384- 

4817-6 

These two books have been lying on my desk for more than a year. They constitute 

the first comprehensive attempt in any Western language to explore the meaning and 

history of the difficult term li 理 prior to the Song period. Especially in the second 

volume, which is full of interesting insights as far as such terms as li or ti 體 and 

yong 用 are concerned, Ziporyn displays a tremendous knowledge of difficult phi- 

losophical texts such as the commentaries to Daoist classics by Wang Bi and Guo 

Xiang as well as primary texts and commentaries of the Buddhist Tiantai and 

Huayan traditions. There is as yet no other work in the West that has attempted 

to study passages concerning li in similar depth. Brook Ziporyn has to be given 

credit for providing new ground to stand on for a better understanding of this 

term that was to become crucial for the Neo-Confucian tradition. 

The above being said, I have to point out that, all my admiration for Ziporyn’ s 

tremendous erudition notwithstanding, there is a reason for my delay in reviewing 

these two books: they are not an easy read. It has taken me quite a while to 

realise what makes reading them such a demanding task. In the end, I did find 

out that basically there are two reasons for this. Both of them are to be found in 

the titles of the books. They concern the words “irony” and “coherence,” the 

meaning of which in Ziporyn’ s language is not easy to grasp. On page 9 of the 

first of the two books, Ziporyn announces that he will adopt the word “coherence” 

as “a strong approximate marker of the character’ s semantic territory in many of its 

most puzzling and distinctive contexts.” He immediately cautions his reader that this 

does not mean that li always has the same meaning, nor that the term is “best trans- 

latable as coherence in all or even most contexts.” But later in the two books he 

forces the notion of “coherence” on li quite often. 

On page 10, Ziporyn announces that his book will deal with what may be called 

“the ironies of the notion of coherence as it develops in the classical philosophers. ” 

He understands such Confucian texts as Lunyu and Mengzi as “non-ironic” while he 

thinks that the Laozi tradition and the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi are “ironic.” 

“Ironic here means that this coherence is in a certain sense also, and necessarily, a 

noncoherence: the togetherness of things, pushed to its ultimate conclusion in the 

notion of the omnipresent, undermines the intelligibility of things, rather than estab- 

lishing them. ” I had not read these introductory remarks carefully enough in the 

==

beginning, and hence it took me a long time to understand what Ziporyn meant by 

the term “irony, ” since this certainly is not what common wisdom understands by it. 

In many places the reader gets the impression that for Ziporyn “irony” means what 

others would call “paradoxical, ” and sometimes I thought that it would be a good 

recommendation to any reader to simply read “paradoxical” whenever Ziporyn 

uses the word “irony. ” Conventionally, irony means to say something but to mean 

its opposite, often with the intent to criticize someone else or oneself. This is not 

what neither Laozi nor Zhuangzi do; both of whom are quite explicit about the dif- 

ficulties of the use of terms such as dao. Indeed, one may argue that the hidden 

element that is characteristic of irony in many definitions is completely lacking in 

these two texts. I do believe that there is irony in ancient China. Examples of this 

may be found in Sima Qian’ s criticisms of Emperor Wu of Han whom he praises 

for things that are obviously not good. But I have to confess that I have never 

read Laozi or Zhuangzi as great ironists. On p. 141, Ziporyn again shows what 

he means by irony, when he says that the Daoist use of dao is an ironic use of the 

older term. According to him, this usage is closely equivalent to someone who is 

looking out of the window at a rainstorm and saying, “Oh, great weather for a 

picnic. ” Of course, in the Western tradition there is also Socratic irony. Yet, it is 

my impression that the Daoist use of dao is not ironic even in that sense. I have 

the feeling that Daoist thinking does not really fit Ziporyn’ s example. Yes, dao 

first may have meant a proper “method” to do something, and, as we all know, 

Laozi does say that the best method has no definable method. But is this irony? 

In the introduction to his second book, Ziporyn again explains what he means by 

“irony.” Speaking of the fact that the most all-inclusive totality is necessarily incoher- 

ent he says that the ultimate intellibility of any definite identity must be questioned. 

“I call this ‘ironic’ because it means that any attribution of identity can only be 

meant ironically, since all of them depend on relation to a context that is itself necess- 

arily incoherent, such that every coherence is itself necessarily incoherent …” (p. 18). 

Again I would say that this is not really how I would understand the word “ironic.” 

This was the first problem that made reading the book so difficult to me. As 

suggested before, this obstacle can be overcome by simply speaking of a tradition 

of the “paradoxical” instead of the “ironic.” 

More difficult to discuss is my second problem, namely the translation of li as 

“coherence” which has been suggested years ago by Willard Peterson in “Another 

Look at li 理” (Bulletin of Sung-Yüan Studies 18 [1986], pp. 13-31). His suggestion 

has not been taken up for a long time. Instead specialists of Neo-Confucianism dis- 

cussed at great length whether the traditional translation of li as “principle” should 

be replaced by the word “pattern,” which often seems to be more fitting. What I 

would have really liked to know from Ziporyn is whether Peterson’ s suggestion 

was simply neglected or whether it was silently rejected because it did not make 

enough sense to many specialists. I would have truly loved to see a convincing argu- 

ment of why “coherence” should be a better translation for li than other words. 

Instead of this, Ziporyn in the introduction to both of his books briefly begins 

with a discussion of secondary literature that has influenced him (Chad Hansen, 

A.C. Graham, Tang Junyi, Hall and Ames). He says that Fung Yu-lan’ s idea of li 

as the Chinese equivalent to the Platonic forms was refuted by others (Beyond 

Oneness and Difference, p. 22). I have to confess here that I belong to those who 

still prefer Fung Yu-lan’ s Platonic “ideas” for li to “coherence” in many contexts. 

442 BOOK REVIEWS 

On the other hand, what I did like very much in Ziporyn’ s second book was the 

summary of Tang Junyi’ s argument put forward in yuanli 原理 that stressed the 

notion of “to divide or make a border” (p. 27). But at the same time, I am quite 

sure that it was not Tang’ s intention to say, as Ziporyn does, that li always means 

“coherence between a set of disparate items, which necessarily includes both nonhu- 

man reality and human responses to that reality (desires and cognitions)” (p. 28). 

Ziporyn criticizes Duan Yucai for stressing the aspect of “separation” in the charac- 

ter, but he again does not really argue for “coherence” instead. He simply apodicti- 

cally states that this is the correct meaning: “Li would then mean ‘second-order 

coherence between found coherences in the world and coherent clusters of human 

evolution’” (p. 30). One may or may not believe this. 

Brook Ziporyn, quoting Peterson (and later Hall and Ames) who was (were) con- 

cerned with Neo-Confucianism, is convinced that Chinese thought basically is about 

coherence or interconnectedness of everything with everything (pp. 38ff). I do not 

disagree. Actually this is the old idea of J.J.M. de Groot for which he had coined 

the term “Chinese Universism” (one could have credited him for the idea somewhere 

in this book), and I do think that Ziporyn is right to stress the paramount impor- 

tance of this concept. Yet, the question for me is whether li is actually the right 

term to argue for it. I wonder whether a sentence such as 仁愛之理也, taken by 

myself at random from Zhu Xi’ s famous “Ren shuo” 仁說, does actually mean: 

“Being humane is the coherent form of caring for something” (or in Ziporyns 

sense: “the form that makes other things cohere”), “being humane is the principle 

of caring for something” or “being humane is the ideal/normative form of caring 

for something. ” These are three quite different things. Maybe li means all of this, 

but in my opinion what Sinology should do is to start a discussion of this 

problem and make an attempt to explain plausibly why one translation is better 

than another. 

Yet, Ziporyn does not really like to argue for his own choice: He rather tries to 

convince his reader by repeating the word “coherence” as often as possible. On 

p. 145, of Ironies of Oneness and Difference we find the following sentence: “The 

emergence of the coherence and the incoherence, these opposites, are aspects of a 

single event. Every coherence (name, value) has a double meaning: it names both 

the coherence and the ultimate incoherence with which it is coherent, and it is this 

coherence (togetherness) of the coherence and the incoherence that alone makes 

any coherence coherent (intelligible).” 

Let me give some more examples for this, all of them taken from Beyond Oneness 

and Difference. In the second chapter of this book Ziporyn summarizes findings 

made in Ironies of Oneness and Difference. On p. 55, he translates from Xunzi: 

That which knows things is human nature [ren zhi xing]. That which can be known is 

the coherences of things [wu zhi li]. If we seek to know the coherences of things with 

this human nature which is able to know, without any point of consolidation or resting 

point …, then even if one continues to study all one’ s life one will never get all of it. 

Even though one may string together coherences numbered in the millions, it will 

never be sufficient to go through all the changes of the ten thousand things … 

I am not convinced at all that this text speaks about the coherence of things when it 

uses the word li, as it mentions the difficulty to know millions of li. Fung Yu-lan’ s 

BOOK REVIEWS 443 

Platonic forms or “ideas” actually seem to fit much better what Xunzi wants to say. 

To me, li seems to be the particular form of individual things. On the next page, 

Ziporyn again quotes Xunzi, this time with the dichotomy of li and luan 亂. 

He translates buli 不理 as “incoherent” and luan as “disorder. ” This is possible 

since coherence may be an aspect of a state of order and incoherence one of disorder, 

but may we not ask whether Ziporyn does not turn something that is just one aspect 

of li into its main component? Moving on I would like to further explore the follow- 

ing statement: “The center is the unobstructed Coherence of the beauties of Heaven 

and Earth” (p. 68) as a translation for Dong Zhongshu’ s: 中者天地之美達理也. 

Possible, but not really convincing. Dong probably rather wanted to say: “The 

mean is the most beautiful and most accomplished norm/ideal of/between Heaven 

and Earth.” If we use the preposition “of ” to translate the sentence then its 

meaning could be, for example: Heaven gives some rain but not too much, Earth 

provides us with enough water to moisten our fields, but it does not give rise to inun- 

dations, and so forth – with remaining in the mean Heaven and Earth set the stan- 

dard, an ideal norm (li), not a coherence. In Han thought, only human interference 

leads to disasters of Heaven and Earth. This is de Groot’ s (Chinese) universism. 

Human behavior has an influence on Heaven and Earth, it is coherent with them, 

but li in this sentence most probably does not mean “coherence” at all. One 

would have needed a solid argument for reading li as “coherent” in order to 

accept it. 

In chapter three of Beyond Oneness and Difference, Ziporyn writes about the 

“development of li in ironic texts.” On p. 73, he quotes Zhuangzi 16: “The 

ancient practitioners of the Course used placidity to nourish their knowledge … 

When knowledge and placidity thus nourish one another, harmony and coherence 

grow out of the inborn nature” (知與恬交相養，而和理出其性). I think that 

harmony and placidity, he and tian, belong to each other in this passage just as 

zhi and li, and that li here has something to do with reason, not with coherence. 

This may be open to discussion – but the discussion is open. It is more obvious 

that Zhuangzi did not mean “coherence” when he spoke of li in the passage on 

p. 78: “From the stopping and the moving creatures were born, and when these crea- 

tures form in such a way as to generate a coherence 物生成理 it is called physical 

form 形.” Why should this li here mean “coherence”? This is totally unconvincing 

to me. I rather think that Zhuangzi wanted to say that as soon as a thing is born 

it has its own characteristics, it becomes an ideal form in itself – a translation that 

has nothing at all to do with “coherence.” Li here has something to do with the par- 

ticularity of things or categories of things (just as Duan Yucai thought). The same 

meaning we find in chapter 22 (p. 79) of the Zhuangzi where Ziporyn translates: 

“The sage traces the beauty of heaven and earth back and arrives at the coherences 

of the ten thousand things” (緣天地之美而達萬物之理). This probably means: “By 

tracing the beauty of Heaven and Earth, he is able to understand the characteristics 

of all things” (something that, without understanding the main features of Heaven 

and Earth, would be very difficult because there are simply too many characteristics 

and peculiarities of things to be understood). Here, li is not “beyond oneness and 

difference,” but it seems to be about difference alone: The sage is able to do what 

nobody else can do, namely to react to all different forms and beings in the 

proper way because he has understood the basic principle of the working of 

Heaven and Earth. 

444 BOOK REVIEWS 

I could continue with examples for the fact that li may not mean “coherences” but 

“characteristics” in many texts of what Ziporyn calls the “ironic tradition, ” but this 

is probably not necessary. I hope the reader gets my point: I am not at all arguing in 

favor of a translation of li as “characteristic” or “peculiar, ” but I would have loved to 

see in this book that is so abundantly rich with examples – a fact that shows how 

extremely erudite its author is – a proper refutation of this understanding of li 

and an argument in favor of “coherence” instead of a simple repetition of trans- 

lations that without this necessary step will not really convince many readers of 

his understanding of the term. 

Chapter 4 is about “the advent of li as a technical philosophical term. ” Here, 

Ziporyn makes use of such texts as the important “Neiye” 內業 chapter of the 

Guanzi. Again, I would like to give an example for his translations: “The noble 

man controls things and is not controlled by them: This is the ordered coherence 

of things that comes from his attaining unity. With an orderly mind within, 

orderly words issue from his mouth, and orderly deeds are applied to others, 

and it is thus that the world becomes orderly” 君子協定使物，不為物使。得一之 

理，治心在於中，治言出於口，治事加於人，然則天下治矣 (p. 113). “This is the 

ordered coherence of things that comes from his attaining unity” for 得一之理 

really stretches things very far. The sentence seems to be the conclusion of what is 

said before, but, as is suggested by the interpunctuation of the Chinese version of 

the text that Ziporyn has made use of, the author of the “Neiye” wanted to say: 

“If he attains the unifying principle/the ideal form of unity, he has an ordered 

mind within, orderly words issue from his mouth etc. ” If there is “coherence” in 

this sentence, then in the word yi 一, not in li. What is even more important, the 

text stresses the connection between li and “order, ” not with coherence. This is actu- 

ally what many ancient texts do. 

Or consider the following translation from “Xinshu shang” 心術上 on p. 117: “It 

[the ruling string of dao] diversifies their shapes and tendencies, but does not join in/ 

differ from the different coherences of the ten thousand things” (殊形異勢，不與萬 

物異理). Does this not mean: “It is different in form and not the same in its efficacy, 

but it is not of a different nature/underlying structure than the ten thousand things”? 

Ziporyn quite interestingly points to the opposition of dao and li in Huainanzi 

(p. 131). Yet, again the translation of 修道理之數 as “But if you work with the 

measure of the specific coherences as rooted in their incoherence” baffled me 

although I think I finally had understood that dao for Ziporyn is “ironic” and 

thus means “incoherence. ” 

In Chapters 5 to 7 on Wang Bi and Guo Xiang, Tiantai, and Huayan, Brook 

Ziporyn displays all his knowledge of Six Dynasties’ and Tang thought. I truly 

like much of what he has to say there, for example his apt discussion of the term 

ti on page 151 as “to fully integrate and present in its completeness” instead of 

the usual “to embody.” It is interesting that in this part of the book his attempts 

to translate li as “coherence” are much fewer. In Buddhism, Ziporyn does not 

seem to find this translation as convincing as in early texts and comes up with sug- 

gestions such as “potential” (p. 187), “emptiness” or even “truth. ” On p. 217, he even 

refrains from translating li. One is thus somewhat surprised when he comes back to 

the idea of coherence in his conclusions to chapter 6 (p. 258). 

In addition to these remarks on the nature of this book, I would like to make two 

technical points: Unfortunately, SUNY as so many other publishing houses, has 

BOOK REVIEWS 445 

decided to ban footnotes which makes reading a book full of profound scholarly 

erudition extremely tedious. The interested reader always has to struggle his way 

back and forth in the book in order to find out whom the author refers to. As the 

reader often forgets which chapter he is actually reading and as there are no 

headers that tell him which endnote belongs to which page he has too many different 

options. This is a time-consuming process that finally disencourages one from con- 

sulting the endnotes at all. Secondly, in my discussion above I have quoted only those 

translations for which at least some Chinese characters were provided in the main 

text. Unfortunately, this has been done in a very unsystematic way. Only very 

rarely do we actually find the Chinese text that Ziporyn translates. Yet, as some 

readers may struggle with the terminology as I did, these Chinese texts would be 

sorely needed in order to understand what the sources actually have to say. 

Again, this is a problem which publishing houses have created intentionally 

because they do not like Chinese characters. The seriously interested reader is 

thus left alone with difficult translations, a fact that makes reading such books dif- 

ficult even for the specialist. Is there really a non-specialist readership that wants to 

read a book like this in the English language without being interested in the Chinese 

original as well? 

To summarize, I would once again like to stress what I said right in the beginning, 

namely that I was very impressed by the amount of material that Ziporyn has pre- 

sented to us in a very erudite way. I do think that this is an important book that will 

serve as a basis for our understanding of the historical development of the term li in 

the Chinese philosophical tradition although I remain unconvinced by the use of the 

terms “irony” and “coherence. ” Yet, I do believe that there are indeed passages in 

classical Chinese literature, and especially in the later philosophical Daoist tradition 

in which it is very tempting to understand li as “coherence, ” just as suggested by 

Peterson and Ziporyn. 

HANS VAN ESS 

Institut für Sinologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

==

==

==

Losing Faith in Atheism | The New Yorker

Losing Faith in Atheism | The New Yorker

Losing Faith in Atheism
I spent years searching for a livable secular world view, but none of them quite offered the value of belief.
By Christopher BehaFebruary 14, 2026




Illustration by David Ope
Save this story


Early in my freshman year of college, a speeding car struck my twin brother, Jim, on a street near our campus. These were pre-cellphone days, but I happened to be in my dorm room when the call came in, so I got to ride with my brother in the ambulance. Our sister, Alice, who was in the year ahead of us, soon arrived at the hospital.

Shortly after the orderlies wheeled Jim away to be intubated, an intensive-care doctor explained to me and Alice that our brother was suffering from acute respiratory failure. This man, whom we’d never seen before, casually added that Jim was unlikely to make it to morning. Then he continued on his rounds. The first thing we did, once he’d left, was pray.




We’d been raised in a devout Catholic home, attending Mass every Sunday and on holy days of obligation, saying grace before meals, prayers before bed, and rosaries on long car rides, constantly adding sick or troubled loved ones to our intentions list. At the hospital, praying together was a distraction, but it was also an act that we believed to have some power to help our brother live through the night.




Looking for new books, TV, and music? Get the Goings On newsletter for picks from our writers and critics.

SIGN UP
By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.


As it happens, he did live through it. His recovery was long—months stretching into years—but ultimately complete. I thanked God for that. But the memory of that first night, when I thought I was losing him forever, stayed with me. The recognition of radical human vulnerability pushes some people toward belief, but for me it had the opposite effect. On campus that spring, I started skipping Mass. This proved to be the initial step on a path that eventually led to my rejection of the faith in which I’d been raised. An answered prayer made me an atheist.

In many ways, those years—the turn of the twenty‑first century—were an ideal time to be a budding unbeliever. In 2004, an unknown writer named Sam Harris published “The End of Faith,” a short polemic on the existential threat that religion posed to Western civilization. In rapid succession, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” (2006), Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell” (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” (2007) followed Harris’s book onto best-seller lists, and the so-called Four Horsemen became the public face of a resurgent New Atheism. But I quickly discovered that I was not the audience for these books. I wasn’t looking to talk my way out of a belief in God—I was already out. I wanted to know what to believe in instead.
Advertisement



If I was still in search of beliefs, many atheists would object, I hadn’t really gotten over my religious upbringing. A good atheist deals not in faith but in facts, not in belief but in knowledge. Yet I could find no obvious factual, knowledge-based answer to the question that was most pressing to me: How am I to live?

I don’t mean to suggest that the New Atheists had no moral sense. On the contrary, they were largely fuelled by moral outrage at the needless suffering religion caused. But the nature of morality was seemingly the only thing about which they did not care to argue. They thought it simply self‑evident that we desire pleasure over pain for ourselves, and that any decent person wished the same for others. One of religion’s greatest harms, they believed, was that it turned people away from this basic intuition. Of the Four Horsemen, only Harris aspired to a “science of good and evil” which could subject moral claims to the same rational scrutiny as all other claims, but his chapter on the topic quickly devolves into an argument about the indefensibility of pacifism and the moral necessity of government torture. (It was a strange time.)

Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.

Setting down the popular polemics of the day, I began to read modern philosophy, which I understood to be the primary means by which humans have sought secular answers to life’s questions. I read the philosophers most frequently cited as models by modern‑day atheists—John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill—as well as those whom meaning‑hungry young people habitually embrace as secular gurus: Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Camus. But I also read philosophers who are mostly read just by other philosophers.

Even when I was struggling with the most challenging of these works, the reading felt urgent to me. I wasn’t submitting papers or getting grades; I wasn’t looking to earn a degree or to pursue a career. I wasn’t even trying to impress people at literary parties. (For that, I had thousand‑page postmodern novels.) I was just trying to figure things out. Immanuel Kant’s three “critiques” are often cited as the works that first made philosophy inaccessible to nonspecialists, but in Kant’s opinion he was addressing very straightforward questions—What can I know?, What must I do?, and What may I hope? I was decidedly a nonspecialist, and these were the questions I wanted answered.


Video From The New Yorker

Leonard Cohen on Preparing for Death



Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.

The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.

As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.
Advertisement



Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.

This so-called problem of induction was first identified not by any counter-Enlightenment reactionary but by the Scottish empiricist David Hume. Earlier empiricists like Locke and Francis Bacon believed that the physical sciences should still be grounded partly in metaphysical belief. Hume became one of modern atheism’s great intellectual heroes by rejecting this idea. But he didn’t substitute some other foundation in its place. Instead, he argued that we should simply do without foundations entirely, apart from the rather shaky ones of custom, habit, and expedience. That has been more or less the scientific-materialist answer to the problem ever since: scientific materialism just works.

If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.

Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.
Advertisement



Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.

Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.

A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt. (“Mankind does not strive for happiness,” Nietzsche wrote. “Only the Englishman does that.”) Many romantic-idealist writers have been fascinated by the “problem” of suicide—the problem, in their view, being that there’s no good reason not to do it.

It was this element of romantic idealism which finally led to my rejection of it. I grew tired of being unhappy and anxious all the time, of constantly questioning whether life was worth the trouble. One cause of the feeling, for me, was that the materialists had it right on an important point: there is, indeed, a world outside our heads that cannot be ignored or overpowered through force of will, and denying this is a recipe for misery.

After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.
Advertisement



Roughly a decade has now passed since my return to theistic belief. Barring some extreme change, this second period of faith will soon have lasted longer than my years of atheist wandering. Yet those years will always be with me, and I’m grateful for them. They have made me understand the world around me, one lately marked by sorrow and despair, in a radically different way than I would have otherwise.

The signal predicament of our era is the global rise of illiberalism and intolerance. Secular liberals who have observed these forces with quite justified horror have often linked them to a familiar enemy: religion. In their view, Christian nationalism is one of the primary ideologies behind right‑wing illiberalism. Meanwhile, they tend to see the strain of left‑wing thought which rejects universalist liberal principles as equally under the sway of a kind of faith—the “cult” or “Church” of identity politics. (Richard Dawkins, of “The God Delusion,” speaks for many of them when he declared “woke” to be a “latter‑day Torquemadism . . . with its own religiously enforced dogma.”)

“Religion” is a famously malleable sociological category, but, if we stick to the criterion of theistic belief, the argument that modern‑day illiberalism is primarily a religious movement does not really hold up. Perhaps the crudest way to make the point would be simply to note that the rise of illiberalism has gone hand in hand with a decline of theistic belief and religious practice—both in the United States and around the world. The avatar of American illiberalism, Donald Trump, is the first President in generations who does not even pretend to be influenced or motivated by Christian faith. Trump is best understood as our first Nietzschean President, a man who explicitly embraces the will to power as the ultimate value, a force to which even the truth must give way.

Many of the young and highly educated cohorts who populate the portions of the left most suspicious of universal liberal values are also among those least likely to identify as religious believers. In a different manner than Trump, they hold that so-called objective “truths” are the expression of power dynamics—tools used by the élite to oppress the marginalized. In place of these truths, they champion the importance of identity and authenticity. In other words, large groups of both the left and the right have become romantic idealists, and they have come to pose the same challenge to liberalism and scientific rationalism that romantic idealism has always posed to these traditions.
Advertisement



Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.

For early liberals like Locke, it seemed obvious that liberalism—like empiricism—needed to be grounded in faith, even as it sought to enshrine tolerance for different varieties of belief. For Locke, the fact that we have immortal souls subject to eternal punishment and reward means that it’s irrational to submit to a government that denies God’s will as we understand it, no matter how much coercive power that government has. At the same time, Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.

Many of the Founding Fathers held this same view. But, after Hume, liberals came increasingly to find even the barest invocation of metaphysical principles to be an embarrassment. The great post-Humean liberal theorist Jeremy Bentham called the idea of natural rights “nonsense,” and the idea of inalienable natural rights “nonsense on stilts.” Some liberals have tried to hold on to such abstract concepts without the metaphysical framework in which they make sense, but many eventually came to the Humean conclusion that liberalism could simply do without foundations, so long as it got the job done.

My own passage into and back out of unbelief—one marked by a close reading of works that earlier illiberal societies had attempted to suppress on religious grounds—has strengthened my liberal commitments. But it’s also made me acutely aware of liberalism’s very real limitations. As a means for allowing people with different conceptions of the good to live together fruitfully and peacefully, liberalism seems unmatched in human history. As a means of generating its own conceptions of goodness that feel compelling to most human beings, its record is quite mixed, perhaps because that’s not what it was ever designed to do.

What’s more, when liberals treat some version of scientific materialism as so self-evidently true that it must serve as the default context for public discourse; when they make allegiance to “reason” and “evidence,” as they define these terms, the price of admission into such discourse; and when they attempt to banish metaphysical or spiritual or even frankly religious talk from our politics and our culture, they are not practicing liberalism as its greatest exemplars understood it. They are eliminating from our shared vocabulary many of the concepts on which any justification for liberalism beyond the purely practical would have to depend.
Advertisement



I am not suggesting that the solution to our problems is for secular liberals to find God. But I am suggesting that religious believers be considered natural allies in the fight against irrational illiberalism, rather than its primary cause. This need not mean abandoning secularism, and it certainly doesn’t mean abandoning liberalism. It means, perhaps, seeing liberalism as so many liberals wish believers would see their faith: not as the expression of a universal truth to which every person must eventually submit but as a human construction—one of the finest we have ever made—worth defending even when it is helpless to defend itself, yet capable of being swept away by the same hands that built it in the first place. ♦

This is drawn from “Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer.”





New Yorker Favorites


The irresistible, and false, myth of the Brontë sisters.


Anthony Bourdain’s moveable feast.


The woman who wanted to start a new life with a President’s would-be assassin.


Crying in H Mart.


How did Astoria become so socialist?


The art of decision-making.


Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.
Christopher Beha is a memoirist and novelist.

Ancient Judaism (Max Weber) - Wikipedia

Ancient Judaism (book) - Wikipedia

Ancient Judaism (book)

• Article
• Talk

• Read
• Edit
• View history

Tools

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Ancient Judaism" book – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2024)

Ancient Judaism

First English translation (publ. Free Press)
Author	Max Weber
Genre	religious history
Publication date	1917

Ancient Judaism (German: Das antike Judentum) is an essay written by the German economist and sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. The original edition appeared in the 1917–1919 issues of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Marianne Weber, his wife, published the essays as Part Three of his Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie in 1920–1921. An English translation was made in 1952 and several editions were released since then.^[1]

It was his fourth and last major work on the sociology of religion, after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism and The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. In this work he attempts to explain the factors that were responsible for the early differences between Oriental and Occidental religiosity.^[2] It is especially visible when the mysticism developed by Western Christianity is compared with the asceticism that flourished within the religious traditions of India.^[2] Weber's premature death in 1920 prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with his planned analysis of the Psalms, the Book of Job, Rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity and Islam.

Weber wrote that

Anyone who is heir to traditions of modern European civilization will approach problems of universal history with a set of questions, which to him appear both inevitable and legitimate. These questions will turn on the combination of circumstances which has brought about the cultural phenomena that are uniquely Western and that have at the same time (...) a universal cultural significance^[2]

Weber notes that Judaism not only fathered Christianity and Islam, but was crucial to the rise of the modern Western world, as its influence was as important as those of Hellenistic and Greco-Roman civilizations.

Types of asceticism and the significance of ancient Judaism

Weber noted that some aspects of Christianity sought to conquer and change the world, instead of withdrawing from its imperfections. This fundamental distinctiveness of Christianity (when compared to Eastern religions) stems originally from ancient Jewish prophecy. Weber stated his reasons for investigating ancient Judaism:

For the Jew (...) the social order of the world was conceived to have been turned into the opposite of the one promised for the future, but in the future it was to be overturned so that Jewry could be once again dominant. The world was conceived as neither eternal nor unchangeable, but rather as being created. Its present structure was a product of man's actions, above all those of the Jews, and of God's reaction to them. Hence the world was a historical product designed to give way to the truly God-ordained order [...] There existed in addition a highly rational religious ethic of social conduct; it was free of magic and all forms of irrational quest for salvation; it was inwardly worlds apart from the path of salvation offered by Asiatic religions. To a large extent this ethic still underlies contemporary Middle Eastern and European ethics. World-historical interest in Jewry rests upon this fact. [...] Thus, in considering the conditions of Jewry's evolution, we stand at a turning point of the whole cultural development of the West and the Middle East^[3]

History and social organization of Ancient Israel

Weber analysed the interaction between the Bedouins, the cities, the herdsmen and the peasants, the conflicts between them, and the rise and fall of United Monarchy of Israel and Judah. The brief time of United Monarchy divided the period of confederacy since the Exodus and the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan from the period of political decline following the division of the monarchy.^[4] Weber discusses the organisation of the early confederacy, the unique qualities of Israelite relations to the God of Israel, the influence of foreign cults, types of religious ecstasy and the struggle of the priests against ecstasy and idol worship. Later he describes the times of the Division of the Monarchy, social aspects of Biblical prophecy, social orientation of the prophets, demagogues and pamphleteers, ecstasy and politics, ethic and theodicity of the Prophets.

Those periods were significant for religious history, as the basic doctrines of Judaism that left their mark on Western civilisation arose during those times.^[4]

Reinhard Bendix summarising Weber's work writes:

...free of magic and esoteric speculations, devoted to the study of law, vigiliant in the effort to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord in the hope of a better future, the prophets established a religion of faith that subjected man's daily life to the imperatives of a divinely ordained moral law. In this way, ancient Judaism helped create the moral rationalism of Western civilisation^[5]

See also

• Max Weber § External links for websites containing online works of Max Weber.

Citations

1.  Jacob, Edmond (1973). "Max Weber, Le Judaïsme antique, traduit de l'allemand par Freddy Raphael. « Recherches en sciences humaines », 31. Paris, Pion, 1971". Revue d'Histoire et de Philosophie religieuses. 53 (1): 77–79.
2.  Bendix 1977, p. 200.
3.  Bendix 1977, p. 204.
4.  Bendix 1977, p. 213.
5.  Bendix 1977, p. 256.

References

• Bendix, Reinhard (1977) [1960]. Max Weber: An intellectual portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03503-4.

Further reading

• Hans H. Gerth, Don Martindale (eds.), Max Weber. Ancient Judaism Free Press, 1967, ISBN 0-02-934130-2
• Irving M. Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism: Biblical Criticism from Max Weber to the Present, Polity Press, 1986, ISBN 0-7456-0297-5
• Jacob Neusner. Max Weber revisited: Religion and society in ancient Judaism. Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, 1981.
• Efraim Shmueli, The "Pariah People" and its "Charismatic Leadership"—A Reevaluation of Max Weber's "Ancient Judaism", Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research New York, 1968, 167–247.