A Practical Turn or Something Other? Theistic Arguments from Morality in Twentieth Century Jewish Thought

In my paper I argue that the turn to ethics in much of modern Jewish thought is not so much about ethics per se as it is about elaborating a phenomenology of the subject`s ethical experience as theo-nomic-ally grounded, which in turn serves the end of establishing continuity between the structure of contemporary experience and the theo-nomic experience which is attested to, albeit in mythical language, in the classical sources of Jewish belief. I will also argue that this phenomenology amounts to a "soft theism" which in its stronger form constitutes a Jewish variant of the "theistic argument from morality" (or from conscience), but which in its weaker form makes a claim on behalf of the continuity of the underlying substrate of Jewish religious experience from antiquity to the present. Thus the Jewish turn to ethics plays a dual, and contradictory role, at once grounding a return to one variant or another of classical Jewish theism or, alternatively, establishing "the ethical" as the secular ground norm of Jewish peoplehood and of Judaism as a civilization. I will also argue that understanding the purpose that lies behind the turn to the phenomenology of ethical experience helps to explain the irony that for all the talk of ethics in the work of these thinkers there is an utter paucity of attention to practical ethics or ethical theory in the thought of these same "meta-ethical" thinkers. In particular, I will engage with the work of Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas.