Michael L. Morgan > Quotes

“Indeed, language, thought, and discourse are not what is most basic and determinative about human life as social and interpersonal. To say that ethics is more primary than philosophy is also to say that praxis is more primary than theory and that acting on behalf of the needs of other persons is more important, more basic, and more the point of being human than thinking about them or even following rules aimed at them or their well-being. Caring for you is the most human thing I can do, and a world in which I act toward you by acknowledging, accepting, and aiding you is best, enriched by my act and the acts of everyone who acts similarly.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas

“Yevgenia had never realized that the human back could be so expressive, could so vividly reflect a person’s state of mind. People had a particular way of craning their necks as they came up to the windows; their backs, with their raised, tensed shoulders, seemed to be crying, to be sobbing and screaming.[17]”
― Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas

“But now we draw near to the second point we have been seeking to articulate: who, then, was the agent of the earlier excursus, of the philosophical inquiry and analysis of resistance that yielded the account of thought’s encounter with the evil as horrified surprise and a surprised horror and utilized, so centrally, the testimony of Pelagia Lewinska? Clearly that agent was Emil Fackenheim. The thought is his; the description of types of resistance and the philosophical analysis of resistance as an ontological category is his.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“But if the threat to philosophy and thought in general was radical, could there still be hope for the future? Could one go on after Auschwitz without capitulating wholly to its evil, to its negativity, to its destruction of our categories and principles? For Jews, what could remain of the ideas of salvation and redemption? Did integrity require complete despair?”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“In essence, all of this fills out the gap left in God’s Presence in History between the identification of the imperative to respond to Auschwitz and the formulation of it as a 614th commandment, with its ramified content.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Instead, knowledge gets its essential unity from the goal that uniquely orients the pursuit of knowledge. And this goal, Kant argues, can be nothing other than knowledge of the system of ideas. This system consists of an infinitely intelligible reality – the thing in itself or the absolute world – which is constituted by God – the ens realissimum or the absolute ground of all reality – who is at the same time the infinite intellect or the absolute soul.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Perhaps most dangerously, Cohen claimed that Spinoza created certain negative stereotypes about Judaism and biblical religion that were later to influence Kant, who depended upon Spinoza’s research. Spinoza thus stands accused of being the chief “prosecutor” of Judaism before a hostile Gentile world.25”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“The ideals of the Enlightenment eventually led to civic emancipation, and however ferocious the opposition, the basic provision for civic equality between Jews and non-Jews would now appear to be largely uncontroversial, and in any case inalterable. To an extraordinary degree, modern Jews today now participate (or, at least, are legally and culturally permitted to participate) in the full range of social and intellectual life in the West.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“This was something already signaled for Fackenheim by Schelling’s treatment of radical evil in Of Human Freedom. See An Epitaph for German Judaism,”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“outrage” (28). This is the perspective of the survivors, and it is one neither novelist nor historians, philosophers nor theologians should try to “transcend.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“who argued that the nomos revealed to Moses on Sinai was equivalent to the law of nature, the supreme norm of both knowledge and virtue.23”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“That the Nazis did not succeed in fully implementing their ‘Final Solution’ is, furthermore, also ‘accidental’; they advanced sufficiently far on that goal, in any event, to mark that act as genocide (a conceptual feature of genocide – in contrast to homicide – is that it need not be ‘complete’).”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“once again from a naturalizing standpoint. What he calls Divine Law is the supreme moral law, and it is distinct from Jewish religious (or ceremonial) law. And the Divine Law, while revealed by Scripture, is in principle discoverable and justified by reason alone; in fact, Spinoza insists, it is “innate” in the human mind. Jewish ceremonial law, on the other hand, is a human convention, instituted by Moses and later codified and systematized by Ezra, the Pharisees, and the Mishnaic sages.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“different terms, does the hermeneutical nature of all human existence and hence of all post-Holocaust life, including that of the philosopher, in any way qualify the status of the earlier reflection as philosophy?”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“He wrote about this claim, that the evils of Auschwitz could not be assimilated into the Hegelian system and hence by implication by any philosophical thought and indeed by any thought at all, briefly in his book The Religious Dimension of Hegel’s Thought, published in 1968, and then again in an essay, “Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“This in itself is a fact to be celebrated.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Consequently, no idea – no complete series of answers to why-questions – can ever be an object of human knowledge. Yet, Kant argues, without ideas morality would be impossible:”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“the Spinoza tercentennial.32 He begins the essay by surveying the reception of Spinoza from condemnation after his excommunication, to partial vindication at the hands of Mendelssohn, to canonization by Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine, to the scholarly neutrality of the twentieth century.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Still more striking is the fact that Kant unites epistemology and ethics specifically through the concept of law.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Lewinska is one of three examples he describes; the others are of Jewish mothers at Auschwitz and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Meisels and his Hasidim in Buchenwald; see To Mend the World, 216–219.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“In this sense, the claim for the Holocaust as indicating or demanding a moral transformation applies more clearly to world-history; that the Jews were the principal victims of the Holocaust only intensifies the irony here. But this does not mean that post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers have not claimed that the Holocaust requires a transformative moral and religious response in Judaism itself; many such claims have been made, and with emphasis. These turn out, however, to represent a minority view that overstates its implications even in its own terms. It does not follow, of course, that formulations that place the Holocaust on a continuum with prior events of Jewish history are by that fact adequate, but even the possibility that the enormity of the Holocaust might nonetheless leave the status of evil in Jewish thought unaltered is significant.9 Admittedly, the question would then arise of how far the meta-historical claim of continuity extends. But also a limited claim of continuity would bear directly on post-Holocaust Jewish thought – among other things, also providing a baseline for assessing accounts that emphasize discontinuity”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Endowed with the infinite attributes of Thought and Extension, Spinoza’s God is identical with the active, generative aspects of nature. In an infamous phrase that appeared in the Latin but not in the more accessible Dutch edition of the work, Spinoza refers to Deus sive Natura, “God or Nature.”8 “By God,” he says in one of the opening definitions of Part I, “I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” In other words, God is the universal, immanent system of causal principles or natures that gives Nature its ultimate unity.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Does Fackenheim accept the hermeneutic for philosophical reasons or because of the radical nature of the evil of the Holocaust as a rupture?”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Strauss’s later judgment on the Kantian-Cohenian idea of ethical socialism was dispositive: Cohen’s thought belongs to the world preceding World War I. Accordingly, he had a greater faith in the power of modern Western culture to mold the fate of mankind than seems warranted now. The worst things he had experienced were the Dreyfus scandal and the pogroms instigated by Czarist Russia; he did not experience Communist Russia and Hitler’s Germany.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“An idea, then, represents a complete series of answers to why-questions. Kant maintains that there are three such ideas: God, the world, and the soul.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Descartes’s God, it was often said by his religious critics, is a “merely philosophical” God – a dispassionate, infinitely powerful cause whose ways are beyond our comprehension, who is not in any way “close” to human beings with the kind of care often portrayed in Biblical writings. And yet even Descartes’s God still has will and understanding,17 and acts with an indifferent, libertarian freedom but nonetheless with reason.18 Descartes’s God has purposes. For Spinoza, on the other hand, God is not even the kind of being of which it is coherent to speak of will or purpose. Spinoza’s God is substance,”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“An idea, as Kant uses the term, is a representation of a “totality of conditions to a given conditioned thing,” made possible by an unconditioned condition or absolute.”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“For those familiar with the work, it is no surprise that the testimony includes that of Pelagia Lewinska, from her memoir Twenty Months in Auschwitz, when she describes her first awareness of the Nazi intent and remarked that she “felt under orders to live” (Lewinska, 41ff., 50).”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy

“Second, the other person is not the object of intentionality, strictly speaking; the self is not conscious of the other person as Other.[30]”
― Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas

“come to the rescue of ethics in a number of ways. One response, to the criticism of the logical positivists, was to interpret moral vocabulary in terms of human responses, in particular attitudes of attraction and endorsement”
― Michael L. Morgan, The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas