FACKENHEIM, EMIL

FACKENHEIM, EMIL (1916–2003), philosopher. Fackenheim was born in Halle, Germany. After graduating from the Stadtgymnasium in 1935, and despite the encouragement of his classics teacher, Adolph Loercher, to study classical philology, he chose to move to Berlin and enter the rabbinical program at the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums. For three years, he studied Midrash, Bible, history, and philosophy; he also began a degree in philosophy at the University of Halle. His academic career in Germany was interrupted by Kristallnacht and internment for several months in Sachsenhausen. In the spring of 1940 he fled to Aberdeen, Scotland, and matriculated in a degree program in philosophy at the university. A year later, he and other refugees were gathered in camps and dispersed throughout the British Empire. Fackenheim traveled by ship to Canada, was interned in a camp in Sherbrooke, Ontario, and eventually released. He was accepted into the doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Toronto and received his degree in 1945 with a dissertation on Medieval Arabic philosophy and its classical antecedents. From 1943 to 1948 he served as rabbi for congregation Anshe Shalom in Hamilton, Ontario. Invited to teach philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1948, he remained there until 1983, when he retired as university professor. He and his family immigrated to Israel in 1983. He taught at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University for several years. In the 1980s he taught German theological students in Israel and in the 1990s traveled several times to Germany, receiving various degrees and honors. In the postwar period Fackenheim pursued two intellectual interests. First, he examined the tension between faith and reason from Kant to Kierkegaard, writing important essays on Kant on evil and on history and essays on Schelling. Second, he explored the role of revelation in modern culture, in particular Jewish faith, autonomy, the challenge of naturalism and secularism, and the defense of revelation in the thought of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Fackenheim developed an existential account of historically situated agency and self-constitution, which he articulated and defended in his short book, Metaphysics and Historicity, based on his Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University. His philosophical project on faith and reason, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956–57, became a book on Hegel, The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, published in 1968. In the course of the decade that he worked on Hegel, Fackenheim's existential thinking took the shape of a distinctly dialectical style of argumentation and analysis, indebted to his interpretive work on Hegel and to his understanding of the early works of Kierkegaard. Until 1966 Fackenheim had largely avoided dealing with the Nazi assault on Jews and Judaism and the atrocities of the death camps. In the summer of 1966 he delivered a paper on the "death of God" movement and the "self-exposure of faith to the modern secular world," in which he ended by acknowledging the centrality of facing the horrors of Auschwitz. At the   end of that paper, he acknowledged the role that elie wiesel 's autobiographical, fictional reflections might play in showing how Jewish faith could be exposed to those horrors and yet survive. The next spring, on March 24, 1967, at a symposium convened by the American Jewish Committee and organized by the editor of its journal Judaism, Steven Schwarzchild, "Jewish Values in a Post-Holocaust Future," Fackenheim first formulated and presented his imperative for authentic Jewish response to the Holocaust, what he called the 614th commandment, "Jews are forbidden to give Hitler any posthumous victories." He elaborated the reasoning that led to this imperative and its hermeneutical content in "Jewish Faith and the Holocaust," which appeared in Commentary and, in a slightly different form, in the introduction to his book of essays, Quest for Past and Future. Its argument received its most developed form in the third chapter of God's Presence in History, published in 1970 and based on his 1968 Deems Lectures at New York University. In these central writings, Fackenheim argued that no intellectual understanding – historical, political, theological, or psychological – of the evil of Auschwitz is possible; the event has no "meaning" or "purpose." Even the most comprehensive philosophical systems, the Hegelian system most of all, founder on the rock of radical evil. But while no such intellectual comprehension is satisfying and hence no intellectual response acceptable, an existential response is necessary. No theoretical, philosophical, or theological source, however, is capable of framing what a genuine response should be. At this point, thought must go to school with life; one can and must turn to actual lived experience, during and after the event, to grasp how Jews have responded and hence how one ought to respond. Ongoing Jewish life, Fackenheim claims, can be interpreted as a response to a sense of obligation or duty, and this duty is a duty to oppose all that Nazism sought to accomplish in its hatred of Jews and Judaism and in its rejection of human dignity and worth. While for secular Jews, such a duty has no ground but is accepted as binding without one, for believing Jews, the only ground that is possible is the Voice of a Commanding God. Hence, for them, it has the status of a divine command, alongside but not superseding the other, traditional 613 Biblical commandments. It is, in his famous formulation, a 614th commandment. Fackenheim had arrived at this imperative of resistance to Nazi purposes, this duty of genuine post-Holocaust Jewish existence, alongside an ongoing reflection on revelation and modernity and as an expression of a newly appreciated necessity of exposing faith and obligation to a post-Holocaust situation. His journey had capitalized on several crucial insights. One was that after Auschwitz, as he put it, even Hegel would not be a Hegelian, i.e., that Auschwitz was a case of evil for evil's sake and was therefore unassimilable to any prior conceptual system. Even the most systematic philosophic thought was historically situated and was ruptured by the horrors of the death camps. Second was the commitment to existential-dialectical thinking about the human condition and to its hermeneutical character. Third was the recognition that while Auschwitz threatened all prior systems, ways of life, and beliefs, Judaism must and could survive exposure to it. The work of Elie Wiesel and Wiesel's life itself confirmed this hope and this realization. In the 1970s Fackenheim's thought extended the lines of thinking that we have summarized. First, in his book Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy he explored how modern philosophy had ignored or distorted Judaism and had exposed its own inadequacies in so doing. Second, he applied the framework just described to a variety of themes – most notably to the State of Israel, its reestablishment and defense, but also to the belief in God, the relationship between Jews and Christians, and the necessity of struggling against all attempts to diminish human dignity and the value of human life. These efforts continued throughout his life and in effect amount to a ramification of the interpretation of the 614th commandment, for Jews, Christians, philosophers, historians, Germans, and others. Finally, he turned to important philosophical problems with his existential and hermeneutical argument. The crucial problem had to do with the possibility of performing the imperative of resistance or, as one might put it, the possibility of confronting the radical threat of rupture and not giving way to total despair. This was to become the central problem of his magnum opus, To Mend the World, published in 1983 (with new introductory material in 1987 and again in 1993). In the earlier period, culminating in 1970, Fackenheim had argued from the necessity of the commandment or imperative to its possibility, either on Kantian grounds, that duty entails the freedom to perform it, or on Rosenzweigian grounds, that along with the commandments that God grants in an act of grace, He also gives humankind out of the same love the freedom to perform them. By the late 1970s Fackenheim had come to see the extent to which both responses failed to respect the victims of the Nazi horrors. In the crucial chapter of To Mend the World, he systematically and dialectically explores the agency of evil and its victims, in order to arrive at a moment when the victim's lucid understanding grasps the whole of horror, and yet reacts to it and in opposition to it with surprise. He confirms this intellectual grasp with an emblematic case of victims of the camps and the atrocities, who both see clearly what they are being subjected to, what the evil is, and sense a duty to oppose it in their life. He then goes on to claim that this episode constitutes an ontological ground of resistance, and that Judaism, through the idea of a cosmic rupture and a human act that respects and yet opposes it, what is called in the Jewish mystical tradition (Kabbalah) tikkun olam, provides philosophy with a concept essential to grasp the possibility of genuine post-Holocaust life. To Mend the World proceeds to apply these lessons in three domains – philosophy, Christianity, and Jewish existence, in each case locating an emblematic case of tikkun (mending or repair) that respects the evil of Auschwitz as a total and unqualified rupture and yet finds a route to hope and recovery. Hegel, he remarks, had said that the wounds of Spirit heal without leaving scars. Hegel was wrong – while healing is necessary (and hence recovery as a hermeneutical and existential activity), the scars of the Holocaust will and must remain. This line of argument was not without its difficulties, and challenges have been made to it. Fackenheim, in the last two decades of his life, once more extended its lines – with a book on the Bible and how it ought to be read by Jews and Christians, together, in a post-Holocaust world, with a survey of Jewish belief and practice in the 1980s, and with a number of essays on the State of Israel as a paradigmatically genuine response to the Nazi assault, i.e., as a unique blending of religious purposes and secular self-reliance, combining a commitment to a homeland for Jews against the most extreme assault and to its defense. Philosophically, in his last years, Fackenheim focused on two issues that were connected in his mind, one the radicality of the Nazi evil and the question "why they did it," and secondly the character of the type of victim called the Musselmanner, which Primo Levi famously called the "drowned" and identified as the characteristic product of the death camps. These two issues also continue themes of Fackenheim's earlier work, the nature of the radical evil that was Auschwitz and the question whether there is not a type of victim of the Nazi horrors that must be respected and not dishonored, and yet that is outside the bounds of the ontological ground of resistance itself. Fackenheim's philosophical commitments were deeply immersed in existential and concrete realities, most notably the historicity of philosophical and religious thought, the hermeneutical and situated character of human existence, and the unprecedented evil of Nazis and the death camps. Auschwitz led him to expose philosophy, culture, and religion unconditionally to historical refutation; yet his deepest yearnings were to find continued hope and to avoid despair, to appreciate the necessity of Jewish life and the defense of human value and dignity. These dispositions, however, were what we might call "rationally defended yearnings" and hence necessities (duties and obligations) only in a deeply contextual sense. He wanted them to be objective and absolute duties, but in the context of his developed thinking, after the 1960s, there are no such duties, or, if we think there are, they are ones that carry no global or general authority. What force they bear must be defended one by one and situation by situation, within the larger context of a commitment to face the utter rupture of Auschwitz and still go on with life, to heal and recover while nonetheless not expecting the scars of history to disappear. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Greenspan, and G. Nicholson (eds.), Fackenheim: German Philosophy & Jewish Thought (1992); M.L. Morgan (ed.), The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim (1987); idem, Emil Fackenheim: Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy (1996); idem, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America (2001). (Michael L. Morgan (2nd ed.)