Talmudic Commentary and the Problem of Normative Self-Critique

Aristotle famously defined humans as rational animals, as creatures whose exclusive defining property is their ability to be moved by reasons. Interestingly, within Jewish tradition one finds a seemingly different human property displayed as exclusive and defining: our capacity for speech. The eleventh-century poet and philosopher Judah Halevy famously distinguished humankind from the inanimate, vegetative, and organic world by its power of speech.1 A millennium earlier, Onkelos, the Aramaic translator of the Hebrew Bible, rendered the famous description of God breathing »the breath of life« into Adam’s nostrils (Gen 2:7) as breathing into them »the spirit of speech«. The two human qualities – rationality and speech – would seem not only to be different, but to pertain to very different realms of human activity: rationality, to the inner realm of mind and self, the essentially intra-subjective sphere of thinking and pondering; and speech, to the essentially outer, dialogical inter-personal, social space of questioning and answering, addressing and responding, agreeing and disagreeing. The two are obviously connected. Both require language, for example, without which options cannot be rationally weighed or even thought about. Thinking is, in an important sense, a form of inner speech. And by the same token, one cannot engage meaningfully in conversation with others without exercising one’s rational capacities. The question of the relative primacy of thinking and speaking has a history of its own. Until recently, most philosophers followed Descartes in maintaining that thinking is primary, and that to speak is merely to convey one’s thoughts to others by means of a shared vocabulary. More recently there has been a resolute tendency to reverse the arrow of explanation, and view speaking as primary and thinking as internalized speech. Michael Dummett and Robert Brandom stand out in this regard.2 The main claim of this paper is different, and has received scarce attention in the philosophical literature to date. It is that one can get only so far by thinking alone; that to act and live rationally requires talking to others. Stronger still : that we can live up to our full rational capacity only by engaging in dialogue with others. And the emphasis will be first on dialogue, namely, on real, non-Socratic, discursive exchange, and second, on others, namely, on doing so with people genuinely committed differently. The following pages first make the case for this twofold claim by defining rationality as I employ the term, exposing its central relation to critique, pointing to the