Memory of the West: The Contemporaneity of Forgotten Jewish Thinkers (Value Inquiry Book, 163) (Philosophy in Spain)

This book looks back in order to look forward. It is a sustained reflection on the great disillusion Europe experienced after World War I. Europeans understood that bombs had buried the Enlightenment. They knew that, to avoid catastrophe, they had to think anew. The catastrophe came, but Cohen, Benjamin, Kafka, and Rosenzweig had sounded the warning.

World War I had a much greater impact on thinkers, artists, and writers than World War II, for the earlier war was proof that the Enlightenment project had failed. It marked the failure of the idea of a politics and an ethics based on reason, reconciliation, or cosmopolitanism. The pessimism of the post-World War I generation was not due to the belief that there was too little reason. Rather, many came to believe that reason has a dark side and that this dark side had finally taken over. The old saying had come true: "the dreams of reason produce monsters."

A group of intellectuals from between the wars clearly saw the need to rethink the Enlightenment in the name of solidarity, coexistence, and dignity. Curiously, the leaders of this movement were those who had most believed in and most suffered from the Enlightenment: the Jews. Their marginality permitted them to see how narrow and sectarian much of enlightened humanitarianism from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries had been. They understood from their experience that the truly universal cannot marginalize.

Although this book is subtitled "The Contemporaneity of Forgotten Jewish Thinkers," it is not a Jewish book. It is a reflection on what our concepts of truth, morality, and politics should be if they are to include everyone and everything, if they are not to exact the suffering of others.

Based on a thorough analysis of the logic of history, this book warns that if we maintain the status quo, the result will be catastrophe. This same thought, elaborated in the heat of the destructive experience of World War I, warned of what could and eventually did occur in World War II.