9/27/2017 Ambivalence as a Jewish Value-print http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/245849/ambivalence-as-a-jewish-value/?print=1 1/7 Print | Close Ambivalence as a Jewish Value A ‘disease of the mind’ or a blessing, a ‘moment of paralyzing indecision that enables us the impossible’ and expresses rationality at its utmost? How the Judaic tradition of criticism of norms creates ‘rational rabbis’ but also leaves us lost for words. By Menachem Fisch | September 27, 2017 12:00 AM I don’t remember ever being struck so utterly speechless as when over a year ago, Christian Wiese, then Dean, wrote to ask if I’d agree to be considered by his colleagues for an honorary degree in religious philosophy at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the Goethe University. It wasn’t shock, as when receiving exceptionally good or bad news, and it was more than being overwhelmingly moved, which, of course, I was. It was a more meaningful loss for words that had less to do with the intensity of what I felt than with the mixture of contrasting feelings I was experiencing. Philosophers are not accustomed to being rendered speechless. It took me several months to better articulate my loss for words. I mention this not to speak of pride or humility as such, but of how they joltingly combined to rob me of words. For my speechlessness struck me as more philosophically significant than the mixture of specific feelings to which it owed. My vocabulary had failed me. But it wasn’t like trying to remember a word I knew, but couldn’t quite place—something that happens to me with frightening frequency in recent years. Nor was it the experience of something quite new for which I didn’t yet have a word. No, my vocabulary had failed me not for being out of reach, or in any way deficient. Something in what I was experiencing confounded my very ability to properly locate it by means of the words I had. It took me a while to realize that, though still lost for words, I had coined a term to characterize such moments of evaluative bewilderedness. I was ambivalated!—not toward the honorary degree, of course, but in my reaction to it. *** Ambivalence is a concept I borrowed from Harry Frankfurt’s account of normative commitment over a decade ago while struggling with the main claim of The View From Within . It has since become central to my work. I liked the way Frankfurt accounted for normative commitment by means of what he termed second-order desires or volitions. The authority with which our norms speak for us, and their power to mobilize us to act on their behalf reside, according to Frankfurt, not merely in what we earnestly want, but in what we earnestly want to want. What renders a desire definitive of who we are is not the mere power of its pull but that we deem it to be a desired desire! The stamp of approval issued by our second- order desires or volitions owes to their wholeheartedness—another of Frankfurt’s most important words. Wholeheartedness is a measure not of the strength of a desire, but of its subjective rightness, in that we find our very wanting it desirable. Not unlike Kant, such a sense of rightness derives its normative authority from being autonomous in the deepest sense of the word. For what is free will, Frankfurt asks, if not wanting wholeheartedly what one wants to want—not the freedom to do anything, but the freedom to do anything we want to do.