The Mathematical Imagination by Handelman Matthew;

Author:Handelman, Matthew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Rosenzweig’s Messianic Theory of Knowledge and Critical Theory

This chapter has shown, largely in theological terms, the ways in which mathematical techniques for dealing with negativity helped Rosenzweig forge a messianism of the present. And yet Rosenzweig’s messianism was also always a question of knowledge, in the terms laid out by The Star of Redemption, of “knowing the All” (R 2:3). Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno saw in mathematics the reification of knowledge into an instrument of control and domination, Rosenzweig found in mathematics a tool to argue for the epistemological significance of individual action and belief. This epistemological dimension of Rosenzweig’s thought becomes clearer in his essay “The New Thinking” (“Das neue Denken”), published in 1925 as a companion piece to The Star of Redemption. The text of “The New Thinking” not only specifies that the text should be read less as a “Jewish book” than “just a system of philosophy” but also expands the contribution of negative mathematics in Rosenzweig’s messianism into a “messianic theory of knowledge” (eine messianische Erkenntnistheorie; R 3:139–140 and 159). In terms of the project of negative mathematics, Rosenzweig’s messianic theory of knowledge picks up where Scholem’s negative aesthetics left off. Scholem’s negative aesthetics took the restriction of language from mathematical logic as a formal strategy for poetry, indicating the possibility for historical continuity despite catastrophe. For Rosenzweig, the representational link between finitude and infinitude forged by infinitesimal calculus signified the contribution of the work and beliefs of individuals not only to redemption but also to epistemology. As with the uncreated world, mathematics lends a language to a more expansive theory of knowledge, to which I turn in these closing remarks. Rosenzweig’s messianic epistemology redefines knowledge to include the knowledge transmitted by cultural traditions and produced by cultural theory—forms of knowledge, in other words, that cannot be “proved” in the mathematical sense of the word.

At its core, negative mathematics in Rosenzweig’s thinking is a politics of epistemology. A similar politics was at work for Scholem in what negative mathematics revealed about language: language without representation can signify events and peoples that themselves evade or lack poetic and historical representation. For Rosenzweig, the dual sense of representation offered by infinitesimal calculus opens up the concept of redemption to include a Jewish contribution and, in “The New Thinking,” becomes a more inclusive epistemology:

Thus truth ceases to be what “is” true and becomes that which—wants to be verified as true. The concept of the verification of truth becomes the basic concept of this new epistemology, which takes the place of the old epistemology’s noncontradiction[-theory] and object-theory, and introduces, instead of the old static concept of objectivity, a dynamic concept. The hopelessly static truths like those of mathematics, which the old theory of knowledge took as a point of departure without ever really going beyond this point of departure, are to be understood from this perspective as the—lower—limit case, as rest is understood as the limit case of motion, while the higher and highest truths can be grasped only from this perspective as truths, instead of having to be relabeled into fictions, postulates, or needs.

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