The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The 1920s and ’30s were a time of intense intellectual ferment in Germany. Radical questioning was the order of the day in every domain of thought, including religion. Take, for example, the uncompromising debate that took place between the young Leo Strauss and Julius Guttmann, a student of the great neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen and author of the formidable Philosophy of Judaism (1933). In his early work of 1935, Philosophy and Law , Strauss criticized Guttmann’s attempt to understand Jewish philosophy as an aspect of “culture” rather than “law.” For Strauss, Guttmann’s attempt to assimilate Jewish thought to culture showed him to have bought in to questionable liberal presuppositions about the common cultural roots of philosophy and revelation, which, even at this early stage of his career, Strauss insisted on keeping sharply distinct from one another. Against Guttmann’s liberal (and liberalizing) view, Strauss contrasted the thought of medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers who understood religion neither as a “field of validity,” nor as a subjective “turn of consciousness,” nor, least of all, as a “field of culture.” Rather, the medievals never wavered in grounding religion in divinely ordained law .

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The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings