From philosophy to religion

Abstract

Abstract When we examine the theory of the social order set forth by the successive documents of the canonical writings of Judaism, we find an account of the way of life, world view, and definition of the social entity. But by ‘way of life’ or ‘world view’ one system need not mean exactly the same category of data that another system adopts for itself, and, it goes without saying, we cannot claim functional equivalency, for obvious reasons as irrelevant as the judgment of relativism. A system selects its data to expose its systemic categories; defines its categories in accord with the systemic statement that it wishes to set forth; identifies the urgent question to which the systemic message compellingly responds. In the study of the three stages in the history of the formation of Judaism—philosophical, religious and, finally, theological—we find that the successor-system held up a mirror to the received categories and so redefined matters that everything was reversed, left becoming right, down becoming up, power turned into weakness, things of real value transformed into intangibles. What the successor-thinkers did was not continue and expand the categorical repertoire but set forth a categorically-fresh vision of the social order—a way of life, world view and definition of the social entity—within appropriate counterpart-categories. The formation of Judaism that took place through the transformation of Judaism from an account of the social order that was essentially philosophical to one that was fundamentally religious was accomplished by reversing the flow of language, specifically taking the predicate of a sentence and moving it to the position of the subject, that is, commencing not from subject but from predicate. This transvaluation of values, through not merely the re-formation but the utter transformation of categories, set forth an essentially fresh answer to a fundamentally new urgent question.