Language, Torah, And Hermeneutics In Abraham Abulafia by Moshe Idel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Language as Everything

Abraham Abulafia was a Spanish 13th century Jewish mystic. Roughly contemporaneous with Thomas Aquinas, Abulafia can be said to have played the role of Plato to Aquinas’s Aristotle. Or perhaps a more familiar comparison is between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, the former making the primary philosophical issue one of language, the latter making it one of technique (falsifiability in Popper’s case) which simply presumes the neutrality of language in science.

Abulafia, so far as I know, never mentions Aquinas, but he does mention and is mentioned by the Medieval rabbinical community which was very much in accord with Aristotelian metaphysics. The rabbis, it is fair to say, hated and mistrusted Abulafia for the same reasons Popper hated Wittgenstein. Both Abulafia and Wittgenstein threatened to undermine the stories which their respective communities - one in religion, the other in science - had been telling themselves for centuries, namely that there was a single correct way through which the world can be understood and knowledge of it verified.

Abulafia and Wittgenstein employed very different vocabularies in very different intellectual contexts; nevertheless the messages of both were the same - that the apparent neutrality of language was a myth and, even worse, a lie. Language, both insist, has its own agenda, which is anything but neutral and which relativises all knowledge, scientific as well as religious. Wittgenstein used some rather clever logical analyses to demonstrate the point. Abulafia did something else entirely, which is what makes him of interest to me. His remarkable method is the subject of Moshe Idel’s book, which makes it clear that Abulafia is as important a figure for the philosophy of science as he is for Jewish cultural history.

Abulafia has become known as the founder of the school of Prophetic Kabbalah. Both terms need a bit of introduction: prophecy for Abulafia does not mean clairvoyance or prediction of the future but the appreciation of what actually is, the state of the world as it exists rather than how we might think about it. This is very much a modern, indeed 20th century, point of view which is not incongruent with the philosophical schools of phenomenological and existential philosophy.

Kabbalah, like any religious poetry, is subject to a variety of interpretations about what it really refers to. The world? A spiritual world different from this one? A mystical realm of numbers which reveal esoteric secrets? Actually none of these, despite the cultic aroma that hangs around much of its current popularity. As Abulafia believed, and Idel points out, Kabbalah refers to nothing but itself. It is a self-contained system of thought (or more properly meditative imagination), the purpose of which is not to prove or demonstrate anything but to undermine, to relativise, everything one thinks one knows about the world - even about Kabbalah itself.

This is clearly a noteworthy, self-referential effort, one which has been essentially re-invented in some modern philosophical schools like that of Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction and its theological variant of John Caputo’s Weakness of God. These efforts, ancient and modern, start with a paradox: that language is our route to understanding the world, and each other. But on the other hand language lies. It pretends it is not a thing in the world, that it has nothing to say about itself, and that it can faithfully ‘represent’ the world to us. Just a little thought is enough to see that none of this is the case. Language carries an enormous amount of impedimenta, excess baggage - historical, emotional, political, and plain perceptual baggage - which makes it unreliable at best.

Abulafia‘s method for addressing this paradox is not to try to abstract the world or our experience of it from the grip of language - a clearly impossible quest - but to turn the tables, as it were, on language by making it everything, the only thing in existence. Let’s act, he suggests in effect, as if language constitutes the “entire intellectual universe.” This move does two, somewhat unexpected, things. First it forces complete attention on language which has no referent to distract us from its concrete being. Second, the move reveals the distinctive power of language over human beings. By raising this power to the level of the divine, Abulafia makes this recognition unavoidable.

There is consequently a benign if doubly paradoxical effect of making language divine: it forces the language user to notice language as something which is, not merely something one uses. It is the poetic equivalent of Heidegger’s quip that ‘Language speaks Man’. Language gets caught out in its game and can only blush. Abulafia then takes it apart as if it were parts of the human body, dissecting every letter, every word, every sentence of his text (the Torah) and squeezing each into a mould which makes language itself, not to mention the folk who employ it, very uncomfortable indeed.

By recognising the inevitable subservience of human life to language, Abulafia makes it an object of not simply reverence but also awe. It therefore must be respected and studied carefully as one would any sacred but dangerous object (Abulafia considers Hebrew as the holy proto-language from which all other languages derive, in other words the equivalent of Noam Chomsky’s deep structure). And to study language apart from its nominal referents is to effectively de-construct it, to reveal its hidden intentions. Thus Kabbalah anticipates not just the semiotics of the 19th century, but the dominant philosophies of the late 20th century.

Idel summarises Abulafia’s technique: “The method for attaining wisdom proposed by Abulafia as an alternative to philosophical speculation is essentially a linguistic one. Language is conceived by him as a universe in itself, which yields a richer and superior domain for contemplation than does the natural world. Beyond its practical use, Abulafia claims, language contains a structure that conveys the true form of reality; therefore knowledge of the components of language is equivalent and perhaps more elevated than knowledge of the natural world....”

One might read the last part of this quotation as a sort of medieval scholastic rationalism. But that would be a mistake, because Abulafia makes it clear that what he is getting at is the discovery of the matrix of perception within the user of language himself, a matrix which is inevitably shaped by language: “Language is a thing which brings to actuality, what is imprinted in the soul in potentia... Indeed when man becomes perfect he will understand that the intent behind language is the discovery of the function of the Active Intellect,.. For the essential intention of language is to convey the soul's intent to another soul.”

In other words, the first function of language is the expression of the self to other selves, and, at least as importantly, to itself. This self Abulafia calls the Active Intellect, which is not static or fixed but constitutes a moving target of learning and development. He equates this Active Intellect to the Torah; but for him the Torah comes in two parts - the divinely inspired, and written, first five books of the Hebrew Bible, nominally the work of Moses; and the equally inspired but unwritten (or oral) Torah. This latter is far more extensive than the written component. As Idel points out: “We may see in Abulafia's conception of the oral Torah, an understanding of the sum total of intellectual truths, and in this sense it is identical with the meaning of the Active Intellect.”

In short, the Active Intellect is reality, not the reality which is merely perceived or limited by current science or experience, but the universal and timeless reality known to God.* To approach this Active Intellect, Abulafia considers it necessary to overcome our own intellects, that is that place or process in us which is dominated by language. And he names the faculty which is crucial in this overcoming of intellect: imagination. “The potency of the imagination is a vessel for the apprehension of prophecy, for all of his [i.e., the prophet's] apprehensions are imaginary; they are parables and enigmas... and the sense of this is contained in the plain meaning of the [Hebrew] word DMYVN, which is MDMH [dimyon - imagination; medammeh ־ imaginative faculty] “

I cannot help but equate Abulafia’s ‘imagination’ to Harold Bloom’s creative misreading (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). As Bloom knows, such purposeful misreading of a text or tradition is a kind of betrayal and fraught with psychic trauma. Abulafia suggests the depth of this trauma by using the biblical story of the binding of Isaac by Abraham in preparation for killing him, the so-called Aquedah of Genesis 22: “In analysing the words of Abulafia, we learn that the story of the binding is conceived as an inner conflict, a man testing himself to see if he is capable of having his intellect rule over his imagination... It seems that the very task of this linguistic method, which is similar to that of Abulafia, requires preparation similar to that of Isaac's preparation for the binding to sacrifice. What is implied here is that we must gain control over ourselves and bind our materiality to be able to contemplate the conceptual realm.”

Whether or not one agrees with Abulafia’s approach, it must be regarded as a remarkable undertaking, especially in a religious rather than a scientific context. Abulafia was castigated as a heretic just as Wittgenstein was, and sometimes still is, condemned for undermining truth, science and civilisation as we know it. Their shared intention to disintermediate language constitutes a cultural assault that does not often go unpunished. Nevertheless there are those who are rather courageous in their defense of thought. Idel’s summation could apply equally to Wittgenstein with a few changes in vocabulary:

“All the cunning of reality, all the strategems of the Torah and the craft of the commandments exist in order to bring close those who are far, at the epitome of distance, to the epitome of proximity to Him. All of this is in order to remove all intermediary [levels] that bind man in ropes of deceit, so as to liberate him from their hold, as was the case with the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the sea as on dry land. And this is in order to place only one intermediary between man and God, i.e., the powerful heroic human mind that empowers itself with the power of the Torah and commandment, the revealed and concealed, which in themselves constitute the Divine Intellect.”

*It is relevant here to note Carl Jung’s two fundamental principles of psychology: 1) The contents of the Unconscious are indistinguishable from reality, and 2) the Conscious together with the Unconscious is indistinguishable from God.

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