Introduction to Jewish Philosophy

Julius Guttmann, the famous historian of Jewish philosophy, said, "Jewish philosophy can be described as a description of Jewish beliefs and practices in terms of the concepts and norms of general philosophy."[1](P4) By "general philosophy" he meant Greek philosophy and the Western philosophy from which it developed. [1](P4) By "general philosophy" he means Greek philosophy and the Western philosophy that developed from it. This popular definition suggests that two elements are needed to constitute Jewish philosophy: Western philosophy and traditional Judaism. It also implies that in the original Israelites there was only religion, not philosophy, and that it was only with the spread of Greek culture and its philosophy that the Jews came to have their own philosophy when they began to interpret their own traditions in terms of the concepts and categories of Greek philosophy.

It is well known that the Israelites' contribution to mankind, the Bible, established monotheism for the first time in human history. However, according to the interpretation of Jewish philosophers such as Goodman, although the Bible, as a religious classic, also contains some philosophical ideas of cosmology and life theory, it is not a philosophical work and there is no systematic philosophy in it. Jewish philosophy arose inseparably from the encounter of Judaism with Greek philosophy.

In 323 B.C.E., Alexander the Great of Greece captured Palestine and brought Greek culture to the birthplace of monotheism, bringing what had been two separate peoples and separate cultural systems into a formal encounter. It was the meeting of a defeated people with a strong people, of a weak civilization with a strong civilization. For the Jews, this encounter was of a "necessary" nature. It is not like a meeting of friends as equals, where there is conflict and confrontation, including the blood price of the Jews' "martyrdom", but there is also a gentle and calm dialog, and a long period of cultivation and gradual mutual integration. Three hundred years after the meeting of the two traditions, the first Jewish philosopher, Philo, was born in Alexandria, in North Africa. While he was a Jew by birth, a true believer in Judaism and a lifelong interpreter of the Jewish Bible, he was also a Hellenized Jew who had grown up in Greek culture and was fluent in Greek language, philosophy, history and poetry. The spirit of Hebrew faith and religion intertwined with the philosophical concepts and rationalism of ancient Greece in the heart of this Hellenized Jew, and after painstakingly synthesizing and reconciling them, a new system of thought was formed that was different from both Judaism and Greek philosophy, and at the same time contained both Judaic beliefs and Greek rationality, which is Jewish philosophy. Although Philo's philosophy was unknown to the Jews for a long time due to historical reasons, and thus did not directly influence later Jewish philosophy, his position as the originator of Jewish philosophy is recognized. In 70 A.D., the army of the Roman Empire burned down the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and since then the Jews lost their own country and were dispersed all over the world, with Babylon, Spain, Germany, and Poland successively becoming the areas with the highest concentration of Jews. After the 7th century A.D., Islam and the Arab Empire, which spanned three continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, emerged. Thanks to the efforts of Muslim scholars, the philosophical works of important Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were translated into Arabic, and the Jews within the empire once again encountered Greek philosophy and gradually molded a large number of outstanding philosophers, making the Middle Ages the first era of prosperity and splendor for Jewish philosophy. Among the famous Jewish philosophers of this period were Saadi Gaon, Judah Halevi, Ibn Daud, Moses Maimonides, Levi Bengtson, and Kleska. Even though these Jewish philosophers were in the Arab empire (which later became a Christian jurisdiction in the south of Europe), they were still confronted with Greek philosophy, and all of them scrutinized the Jewish tradition in terms of Greek philosophical concepts and methods of reason. Thus, Jewish philosophy in this period remained the result of the encounter, dialog, and fusion of Jewish tradition and Greek philosophy.

During the Middle Ages, Jews were forced to live in "separate capitals" separate from Christians, and were persecuted religiously, disenfranchised politically, and discriminated against as human beings. After the French Revolution, the Jews of all European countries were gradually granted citizenship, and achieved equal status with the people of the sovereign state, known as the "liberation" of the Jews. The "Emancipation" allowed the Jews to break through the walls of the "Separate Capitals" and face the challenges of Western culture more directly. Mendelssohn, the leader of the Jewish Enlightenment, argued that Jews should balance the need to adhere to Jewish traditions on the one hand, and to integrate into Western culture and society on the other. For most Jews, this was a painful process of intellectual and cultural encounter and dialog. Subsequently, a number of remarkable philosophers of the post-Enlightenment era emerged from within the Jewish community, such as Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, and Heschel, to name a few. Cohen was originally a master of the neo-Kantian generation and belonged to the rationalist philosophers, but after his retirement he returned to the religion of his own people and developed the system of Jewish philosophy, which influenced philosophers such as Rosenzweig and Buber. This is the general course of the occurrence and development of Judaism. This journey shows that Jewish philosophy is a product of the ancient Jewish tradition and the encounter, collision, dialog and fusion with Greek and later Western philosophy. In the terminology of one Jewish philosopher, it is the result of the meeting of "Abrahamic" and "Athenian" philosophies. As a product of the encounter between East and West, Jewish philosophy is characterized by a mixture of East and West. This is the integration and unification of the faith and mysticism inherent in Judaism and the rational and logical components of Western philosophy.

The mainstream of Western philosophy is rationalist. Rationalist philosophy presupposes the recognition of the intelligibility of objects, and at its core is the conviction that human reason is capable of recognizing the object of study-which may be nature, or the human social order or human nature, or scientific knowledge and language, and so on-and of expressing one's knowledge and ideas logically. Despite the many twists and turns in the development of Western philosophy - the period of prosperity in ancient Greece, the "slave girl" stage in the Middle Ages, the heyday of modern times, and the decline of tradition in the postmodern period - there is no doubt that its dominant aspect is rationalism. Of course, Western rationalist philosophy has different manifestations, including idealist philosophy, such as Plato's Ideology and Hegel's Absolute Idealism, materialist philosophy, such as Ancient Greek Atomic Materialism and Marx's Dialectical Materialist System, empiricist epistemology, such as Locke's, Barclay's, and Hume's classical empiricism as well as the Vienna School's modern Logical Positivism, and theory-only epistemology, such as the critical philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, as well as Kant. There are also schools known for their irrationalism and even anti-rationalism, such as Schopenhauer's voluntarism and Freud's theory of the unconscious. Anti-rationalist philosophies are ostensibly unaffiliated with rationalism, but they are still rationalist in nature. This is because the objects studied or valued by these systems are irrational components, such as the will, emotions, sexuality, etc., while their methods are still rationalist, i.e., the use of reason to systematically analyze the irrational elements and rationally or logically resort to written expression. Postmodern philosophy is known for being anti-traditional, and traditional rationalism is certainly among its objections. However, the basic spirit of postmodern philosophy is also rationalist, because it is a rational critique of ancient and modern traditions, and its way of thinking and expression is still rationalist.