THE DEATH AND REVIVAL OF JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

Norbert M. Samuelson

(Harold and Jean Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies, Arizona State

University)

For JAAR, 2002

ABSTRACT

This essay reflects critically on the past twenty-five years of work in constructive Jewish philosophy in order to propose an agenda for future constructive Jewish philosophy in the next twenty-five years. The critical part of the essay focuses on the reasons why Jewish philosophers can no longer function as public intellectuals and why the field of philosophy itself can no longer serve as a focus for Jewish philosophy. The proposed agenda suggests that the primary topics for Jewish philosophy should be drawn instead from the field of religion and science, with an emphasis on the issues that physics raise for ontology, the life sciences for psychology, and what both kinds of studies entail for constructive religious ethics.

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE VALUE OF MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

The 1979 statement of goals of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy (AJP) was “to enable individuals actively involved in some form of Jewish religious life who have professional training to philosophy to think about contemporary Jewish faith in new ways.” Everyone involved in the initial development of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy more or less shared this vision,[1] which presupposed that Jewish philosophy would continue to function in the post-modern world (meaning in the context of European/American Jewish civilization after the two world wars) in much the same way as the intellectual historians, Harry A.Wolfson[2] and Isaac Husik[3], had presented it, viz., as using the skills of critical thinking, armed with the distinctive methodological tools of formal logic , to examine the inherent truth claims of Judaism and to reinterpret them where necessary in order to strengthen Jewish faith and to guide it into the future. In this essay I want first to assess this project in terms of its success and failure as well as its conceptual soundness, and then, second, based on this assessment, to propose an agenda for Jewish philosophy in our current century.

In at least one respect the AJP was successful. When it began few works in Jewish philosophy were published.[4] Today there is a significant number of new publications each year, many of which are direct outgrowths of the regular meetings of the AJP.[5] However, these publications have not served the purpose for which they were intended, and in those respects the AJP has failed. These failures go to the heart of what was wrong in the initial presupposition about the nature of Jewish philosophy.

First, in the past Jewish philosophers were public intellectuals who as such influenced Jewish life. That is no longer the case. Today public intellectuals are mass media celebrities whose skills have little to do logic or critical thinking. Furthermore, Jews have become sufficiently integrated into the general society that today’s Jews are no smarter than anyone else is. However, the problem, at least in the case of Jewish intellectual life, runs deeper. The special problem, at least outside of Israel, is rabbis.

At the time that the Academy for Jewish Philosophy began the field of Jewish studies itself was in its infancy. Except for Jews who grew up in traditional communities where they received a yeshiva education, the primary source for any advanced Jewish education was the liberal rabbinical seminaries. Hence, classes of rabbinical students were a mixture of those committed to (in American terms) a pastoral career and those committed primarily to study. The effect was to raise the level of academic training for the rabbinate to a higher level than is usually found in other professional training schools, including medicine, dentistry, law, and pharmacy. Furthermore, at that time the integration of Jewish studies into regularized faculty appointments and course offerings was only beginning. Most academically oriented students in the seminaries anticipated making their living, like their pastoral colleagues, as pulpit rabbis.[6] One consequence was an emphasis on preaching over other forms of rabbinical activity, and in preaching a transformation of the medium primarily into a form of teaching. In general the growth of academic jobs and graduate programs that train students with a specialization in Jewish studies has had, from a purely academic perspective, a negative influence.[7] Rabbis are less academically oriented than they used to be and, in consequence, less informed about Jewish scholarship.

Nor has the divorce of training in Jewish studies been entirely positive if we focus on the benefits of this scholarship for Judaism and the Jewish people. The seminary training and the employment opportunities for scholars of Judaica forced scholars to apply their academic interests to Judaism and to the Jewish people. Training in and for the secular university freed them from this obligation. On one hand, this freedom enabled them to pursue their studies with a degree of depth that was often difficult otherwise. On the other hand, this freedom has resulted in scholarly products increasingly divorced from any relevant application to either Judaism or Jewish life. As scholarly books and papers become increasingly dependent on training in the scholarly methodology of an academic discipline (of which philosophy is only one example) as well as knowledge of an ever growing canon of books and papers published by scholars, the audience for this work becomes proportionately smaller. There is a point where the interest in professionalism so reduces the possible audience for the scholarship that it is difficult to call the publications public “communication” at all. At the same time we communicate with more scholars on e-mail and over the worldwide web than we communicated with scholars through books and journals thirty years ago. This sheer quantity in itself devalues the printed word. Hence, since there is more and more Judaica scholarship produced for an ever declining audience of professional academics, and since the intellectual level of the Jewish community and its rabbinate becomes increasingly divorced from serious Jewish learning of any kind, it is in no sense surprising to see that Jewish philosophers no longer function as public intellectuals.

Second, increasingly there is no place for Jewish philosophy, not only in Jewish intellectual life, but also in the academy itself. Today new Judaica appointments in philosophy departments are increasingly rare. In part it has to do with what Jewish philosophy has become, but it has even more to do with what academic philosophy has become. From at least the time of Descartes the primary interest has been in epistemology, and that study has focused, at least in the English speaking world, on the study of ideal and conventional (or, “natural”) languages. Today that study has moved out of philosophy departments into departments of computational sciences, mathematics (in the case of ideal languages), and linguistics (in the case of conventional languages).[8]

Linguistics is not the only discipline to separate itself from philosophy and become academically distinct. Increasingly most of the concerns that characterized pre-twentieth century philosophy have moved to disciplines other than philosophy, and, with these changes, it has become increasingly unclear just what value there remains in the formal academic study of philosophy at all. The traditional subject matter of philosophy has been the nature of what is (ontology); the nature of what ought to be (ethics), with the former question resting on issues in theoretical physics and the latter question on issues of individual and collective human nature. Increasingly these subjects receive more detailed and more rigorous treatment in departments other than philosophy – physics (in the case of ontology) and a variety of life and social sciences (including psychology, anthropology, sociology, and political science) in the case of ethics.

At the beginning of the twentieth century at least the study of logic remained distinctively within the domain of philosophy. However, philosophy has lost its dominion within the university on this subject matter as well. The rules of logic are not a distinct discipline; rather, it is simply one instance among many of applied algebra and set theory. As the Russell-Whitehead formalism for logic extended its domain beyond the restrictions imposed by the formalism of Aristotelian logic, so the integration of logic into general mathematics has extended the domain of the study of rational strategies for problem solving beyond the restrictions imposed by the formalism of the Principia Mathematica. Thinking rationally is no less central to doing philosophy than it ever was, but the places today to master this art are departments of mathematics, linguistics, cognitive sciences[9], and the life sciences[10], not departments of philosophy.

What then is left for philosophy as such? I have no clear answer to that question, which discredits at least one critical assumption upon which the AJP’s statement of purpose rests. It no longer is true that the academic study of philosophy can inform the enterprise of contemporary Jewish philosophy.

When the AJP began two proposals for the task of the organization were presented. One was by Steven Schwarzschild[11], and the other by Steven Katz[12] and me[13]. Schwarzschild’s understanding grew out of the on-going tradition of continental Jewish philosophy, from Hermann Cohen through Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. In contrast, Katz and I argued that Jewish philosophy should use the tools of general analytic philosophy in order to rethink and reformulate all of the traditional religious issues of Judaism as well as the new kinds of questions that arise from Jewish secularism. The errors underlying my position and Katz’s have already been discussed, and it is not surprising, in the light of those errors, that (at least in his published writings) Katz ceased to function as a philosopher and became instead an intellectual historian, while I in effect turned away from analytic philosophy to join the program that Schwarzschild advanced.

What both Katz and I missed is that the term “philosophy,” as it is used in the contemporary thought of the past century, is significantly different from how the term was used in the past, and we uncritically assumed that by attempting to do Jewish philosophy now in the way that philosophy is now done, both on the continent and in the English speaking world, we were essentially doing philosophy in the way that the medieval Jewish philosophers did it. We were wrong, because what our ancestors meant by philosophy is not what philosophy means today.

As late as the nineteenth century there was no clear separation between the work of theoretical scientists and philosophers. Mathematically rooted scientists such as Isaac Newton called themselves as well as their contemporaries “natural philosophers.”[14] Today we would distinguish Spinoza’s work in optics, which we would call “science,” from his work in the Ethics, which we would call “philosophy.” Spinoza himself made no such distinction. Both were part of his “natural philosophy.”

For medieval Jewish philosophers – as for their Muslim and Christian counterparts – nature, known through empirical observation, was only one foundational source for philosophy; the other was revelation. Jewish philosophers looked to both, empirical nature and divine revelation, for the premises from which they logically deduced all they could deduce, as lovers of wisdom, about truth.[15] Katz and I wanted to continue to do Jewish philosophy as they did. However, the kind of thinking that our predecessors did in pursuit of wisdom no longer could find its home in departments of philosophy, and our error was to think that it could. In effect, what modern philosophers are is the continuation of the honorable tradition of medieval grammarians, not philosophers, but we aspired to follow in the footsteps of the Jewish natural philosophers, and not those of the grammarians.

The questions upon which the classical Jewish philosophers focused were what is the world, what is God, what does it mean to be human, how do we know how to answer these questions, and to what do our answers obligate us – ontology, theology, psychology, epistemology, and ethics. These subjects were not independent, for what passed then as knowledge was sufficiently simple that someone could actually be a “natural philosopher.” Today, primarily because of the complexity of the task, no one can claim that title. However, it is not the case that the questions then asked are no longer pursued. It is just that they are not pursued in philosophy departments. To study ontology as it was conceived is to study theoretical physics and cosmology; to study psychology on their terms is to study the life sciences in general, for today there is no “scientific” knowledge of what it means to be human that does not in some significant sense integrate the disciplines of paleoanthropology, genetic biology, and experimental psychology. Similarly to study epistemology involves a comparable integration of the relatively discrete disciplines of physical psychology, artificial intelligence, and the other cognitive sciences.

What was once the study of the philosophy of religion is now the emerging interdisciplinary study of science and religion. Hence, to do Jewish philosophy today is to focus on the intellectual intersection between what we learn from Jewish texts and what we learn, not from philosophy per se, but from the sciences. It is a field in which Christian thinkers are now just beginning to focus,[16] but, to my knowledge, it has not (at least yet) attracted the attention of serious thinkers who are convinced that only a believable Judaism can demand allegiance, and a believable Judaism cannot remain divorced from the insights of modern science.

AN AGENDA FOR CONSTRUCTIVE JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

A constructive contemporary Jewish philosophy that is coherent with what Jewish philosophy was in the past ought to be a serious critical study of the interface of the general consequences for understanding the world, the human, and the divine from contemporary empirical sciences with the tradition of Jewish texts, from the Hebrew Scriptures through modern Jewish thought. The goal is to formulate reasonable judgments about the viability of Judaism that are believable and have moral merit. This scholarly activity requires knowledge of relevant texts out of the religious history of the Jewish people as well as familiarity with the claims of contemporary sciences and the ways by which those claims are derived. In accord with this understanding of the discipline, let me now propose an agenda for the field. The agenda presupposes that Judaism has foundational beliefs concerning the origin and general nature of the universe, as well as the nature of humanity in relationship to other citizens of the universe. The first belief is about ontology and falls within the domain of molecular and cosmological physics. The second belief is about psychology and falls within the domain of the life sciences. Both beliefs entail judgments about ethics.

Ontology and Creation

Pre-modern Jewish philosophy interpreted Judaism’s affirmation that the universe was created by God with the ontological categories of Platonic and Aristotelian natural philosophies. It posited a world in which existence was positive and divided into substances and their attributes. It also drew a sharp line of separation between what is material and spiritual, and the spiritual was judged to be inherently better than the material. On this model space and time were nothing and what is nothing is not real. The presupposed ontological categories in contemporary physics are significantly different. It posits a universe of fields of space and time, occupied by very small particles, whose motions and interrelations are determined by sets of forces, also situated within the spatial-temporal fields. Substances are said to exist; they are the simple particles and their compounds. However, attributes as such do not exist, for what they express are reducible to quantitative judgments about the relationships among particles. No sharp line can be drawn between any positive things that exist, since, without real qualitative distinctions, all difference must be explained in quantitative terms. However, there are sharp distinctions drawn between fields and forces on one hand and particles and their compounds on the other. Only the latter are things; the former are not. This distinction is a distinction between substances and processes. Some philosophers think the substances are real and the processes merely describe what the substances do; other philosophers think only the processes are real and the substances are only conceptual expressions of states of the processes. However, most physicists tend not to think in these terms. They instead discuss whether or not particles are discrete entities or continuous waves or both. The issue of the scientists is not unrelated the philosophical question about substances and processes. I personally, in the light of quantum mechanics, am more inclined to see the universe in terms of processes. In any case, few physicists find any ground in their science for dividing the universe into domains of the material and the spiritual, and for maintaining that moral values are exemplified in physical existence. In the universe of physics there are forces, energy, mass, and motion, all translatable into each other, and none of which match what had been called matter and spirit. Furthermore, the laws that govern these actions are quantitative, and, as such, are non-moral. Whatever are the grounds for moral judgments, they cannot be found in the physical universe.

On this model our universe, which may be only one of many, began a finite number of years ago at a point of pure energy of infinite temperature and infinite density that has been consistently expanding ever since. Differentiation of this initial energy into different forms of being – from particles to constellations -- is a consequence of this expansion. The laws that govern this differentiation are purely quantitative. They are instantiations of equations in calculus that express temporal rates of change in space, whose variables involve numerical expressions of density and temperature, whose only other relevant factor is a certain degree of sheer statistically-expressed chance in every state of affairs that ever was, is, or will be. Contemporary physics describes a universe that was created only in one sense; its origin is in time; but it is not created in any other, religiously interesting sense, for it is a picture of a universe devoid of any purpose or moral value. As such, contemporary physics posits a model for the general nature and origin of the universe that at least challenges what Jewish philosophers can reasonably mean by affirming that God created the world.[17]

Psychology and Revelation

Platonic and Aristotelian natural philosophies played no less a role in interpreting the foundational religious concept of revelation than they did with traditional Judaism’s conception of revelation. Revelation was understood to be the on-going relationship between the nation Israel and God, and what defined that relationship was the system of law (HALACHA) which was understood to have its foundation in a posited origin in Mosaic revelation at Sinai. No one in the worlds of the Jewish people seriously questioned that the Torah is a revelation from God to Israel through the prophet Moses. (In fact this commonly held belief might be what most distinguishes modern from pre-modern Jewish intellectual history.) As revelation the words of the Torah were universally accepted in these worlds of Jews and their neighbors to be true. Rather, the issues were (a) what is their correct meaning, because only the correct meaning is true, and (b) how authoritative is this text, for both Muslims and Christians affirmed other texts as revealed and as more authoritative. At least insofar as this debate involved Jews and Muslims, the critical issue was which nation had a greater prophet (the greater the prophet, the more authoritative his revelation), and that debate rested ultimately on mutually accepted criteria of human perfection (the more perfectly human the prophet, the greater his epistemic reliability). It was with an eye to the criteria for judging human perfection that the three Abrahamic faiths turned to the psychology of the natural philosophers of their day.

Platonism and Aristotelianism both assumed fixed, eternal species, but that assumption did not entail, as some religious thinkers claim, that there can be no evolution of the members of one species into another (since they all affirmed both the possibility and the reality of substantial change). Hence, the species ‘human’ is distinct and cannot become something other than what it is; however, the kinds of entities that now are human need not always have been so[18] and need not always remain so. Species were understood to be hierarchically ordered in a pyramid of moral values in which each species was uniquely located relative to others. Humans occupied the highest place in the order of all immediately below the level of the different kinds of entities that the science of the day called celestial “separate intellects” and religious thought called “angels.” Members of species sought through their natures to become perfect instantiations of their species, which they could in fact realize, and, once realized, they were transformed into the lowest level members of the next highest species. In the case of humanity, those entities who so perfected themselves as humans bordered on being angels. These transitional beings, i.e., beings at the very borders separating humans from angels, were said to be “prophets.” Prophets then are the ideal of human perfection and that ideal is defined by what distinguishes humanity from all lesser kinds of beings but does not distinguish it from greater kinds of being except in excellence of realization. With few exceptions, all the philosophers – Jewish, Muslim, and Christian – agreed that the defining train was rational thinking.

A significantly different conception of what constitutes human nature emerges in the modern life and computational sciences. What is most important to our concerns is that while most humans seem to think in ways not shared by the members of other species, the difference is not qualitative. First, the experimental evidence strongly suggests that other species, especially apes, reason, and whatever inferiority there may be in how they reason may have more to do with their anatomies (which limit their ability to develop a spoken language) and their environments than with any inherent intellectual abilities. Second, increasing man-made machines than think better than humans by any of the criteria traditionally used to evaluate intelligence, and the possible convergence of current experiments in robotics and genomics suggest that in the not too remote future these machines may even be capable of self-replication and improvement. What makes human thinking distinctive is not any essential nature, contrary to the Aristotelians, but rather a set of accidents of being born in certain places at certain times. Other kinds of beings than humans had no less possibility of becoming rational and in different circumstances humans need not have been rational. What marks all species as being the kinds of things that they are is their history, not their nature.

The relevant history of humanity is the story of evolution told by paleoanthropologists and genetic psychologists. About twelve million years ago a movement of the earth’s crest divided East from West Africa. From this time on the apes of these two regions have a different genetic history. Our distant ancestors lived in the forests of East Africa where they survived primarily on the fruit they found in trees. Nine million years later another shift in the earth’s crest changes the forests of East Africa into grasslands where fruit was scarce and animals were plentiful. Then and there species to survive had to learn how to hunt and to avoid being hunted. In consequence of these two geological accidents some kinds of East African apes evolved a number of specific physical traits that distinguish them from the other descendants of their more remote ancestors. In terms of vision they became able to distinguish distinct objects at distinct spatial locations. Furthermore, they came to be able to stand erect, grew larger brains relative to body size, developed jaws that enabled them to form sounds into languages, evolved males who were distinctively larger (if not smarter) than the female members of the species, hunted and lived increasingly in societies, used and improved tools, and eventually even produced art. The assumption of evolutionary theory is that all of these changes are causally connected and in some significant way they can be understood to serve the purpose of species survival. Just what the assumed causal relations are is more debatable within the sciences themselves. Some scholars associate bipedalism with the first stage of the above story as a consequence of swinging through trees in search of fruit while other scholars locate this development later with the advantage of being able to look above the grasses to spot predators at a distance. Darwin claimed that bipedalism, enlarged brains, and technology developed simultaneously, and it is the conjunction of these three characteristics that define the human species. Some scientists still agree with Darwin, but many others do not, and locate the development of these three abilities (standing erect, rational thought, and using tools) in significantly different branches of evolution at extremely different periods of time, all of which shows how tenuous the epistemic claims of paleoanthropology are at least relative to the conclusions of the physicists and cosmologists considered above with reference to creation.

The tenuous epistemic authority of the best-reasoned conclusions in different sciences is an important factor in judging their authority for rethinking traditional religious doctrines. Claims that in one discipline would at best be considered only intelligent guesses are based on evidence that in a different discipline could constitute a claim of knowledge. How certain the evidence for a claim need be to be called “knowledge” is relative to how certain the evidence can in principle be for the discipline in question. Obviously not even physics can aspire to the degree of certainty that is possible in mathematics, but physics has in fact and in principle a firmer foundation for making truth claims (its subject matter is relatively simple and its data is reasonably constant and accessible for study) than does paleoanthropology. However, that does not mean that a religious philosopher may simply dismiss the claims of evolutionary psychologists altogether. On the contrary, what they claim has relatively more epistemic authority than any other academic discipline that studies the nature and origin of the human. Still, on the other hand, that they should be listened to need not mean that they should be believed. Here the reasonably desired relation between science and religion is far more tenuous than it is in the case of informed opinions about the nature and origin of the universe in both science and in religion.

What kinds of issues are there when Jewish philosophers attempt to correlate the claims of the modern life sciences with the claims of traditional Judaism about revelation and human nature? They are not the same for Judaism and Christianity. So far Christian oriented studies in science and religion have given primary attention to the apparent conflicts between so-called literal readings of Genesis and the claims of evolutionary psychology and genetic biologists. From the perspective of Jewish philosophy this issue is bogus. First, Jewish philosophy has never assumed that what the Hebrew Scriptures mean is what they literally say. Second, even read literally, these revered texts do not say what so-called Christian “creationists” say that they mean. Even the judgment that all life forms share a common genetic origin and shared procreational purpose is not in itself problematic. After all, Genesis does say that every life form on the earth is formed from the earth, including the human, and every one of these creations share in common God’s first commandment – to be fruitful and multiply. Whatever it is that is distinctive about the human being, which enables him to claim to be created “in the image of God,” it is not that he/she is beyond his/her shared purpose of creation out of his/her shared physical constitution as earth.

Rather, the real issues that arise from taking evolution and genetics seriously have to do with ethics. Let me now briefly list what some of them are. (1) Jewish philosophy has long associated the power of speech with intelligence[19] and has seen both as constituting human distinctiveness. Furthermore, it has associated excellence with respect to both as a human ideal that defines human virtue, human happiness, and the highest expressions of service to God. Both evolution and genetics, for the reasons summarized above, call into question this kind of ethics. Reasoning is not unique to human beings. Furthermore, it is not even clear, at least from the perspective of evolution, how valuable it is. For example, if the good is to be judged by what best promotes species survival, the value of rational thinking is far from obvious. A virus, for example, seems far more adaptable to survival than is a human, and there is nothing about viral adaptation that suggests conscious thought is involved. Minimally, reasoning out solutions to life threatening situations is far too cumbersome to be affective. When faced with danger there just is not sufficient time to think out what is best to do. In at least this respect, viz. speed, the way man-made machines calculate and solve problems is vastly superior to what humans can do with their limited brains.

(2) Are there any moral lessons that can be validly drawn from the conclusions that scientists base on their data? In principle the scientists themselves say no, but what happens in practice does not always agree with this principle. The different stories that evolutionary psychologists and biologists tell of human history suggest that there is a central purpose to the existence of every species, including the human, and that purpose is to propagate. In at least the human case, this primary goal requires differentiation in gender. Men and women are not created equal. Because of the size of the human brain, human children must be born too immature to survive on their own, and require constant care, preferably by the female, for the first two years of their lives. That means that for a period of close to three years every female bearing a child must remain relatively sedentary. Differences in the size of humanoid genders have their source in this goal. Men hunt and women raise families, from which it follows that men are most suited to compete outside of the family unit for the survival of the unit, and women are most suited to remain within the family unit to spread collective information. Does this ancient gender differentiation still make moral sense in our age of technological advancement in which labor outside the family, including fighting wars against “predators”, has more to do with sharing information (the natural talent of the female) than it does with physical aggression (the natural talent of the male)? Now there are all kinds of legitimate questions that can, and should, be asked about the soundness of this picture of human history, not the least of which is the legitimacy of characterizing humanoid genealogy in terms of purposeful direction. However, these are not the questions I want to raise here.

Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that biological functions can be understood as determiners of goal-directed nature and those goals, because they define a life form’s nature, entail moral judgments. If the primary natural directive to the human species is to perpetuate the species, and efficiency in this task requires gender differentiation, is it morally wrong to insist at the political level on gender equality?

It could be argued, even granting these debatable premises, that gender equality is morally correct on the following grounds: Equality is not an absolute principle; whether or not it is applicable to any specific subset of humans depends on the nature of the functions that define the subset. Hence, for example, discrimination on the grounds of height is morally proper in the case of basketball players, but it is not proper in the case of accountants. In a less technologically advanced age, when warfare depended primarily on physical strength, speed, and agility, discrimination on grounds of gender made moral sense in the military, but today, when warfare is primarily a matter of using mechanized weapons guided by information systems, gender differentiation is immoral. Similarly, it can be argued that given current advancements in the technology of conceiving and nurturing human offspring, gender differentiation no longer has the moral force that it once had. That women have loved women and men have loved men is not new in human history, and in most of at least the non-Abrahamic religious civilizations there has been no moral objection to same sex love. However, there have been objections to same sex marriage because marriage served the primary purpose of offering the most advantageous social institution for producing viable offspring, which required intercourse between a male and a female. However, today the technology exists for children can be produced without heterosexual intercourse and this technology is constantly improving. Hence, while it made considerable sense in the past, it no longer makes moral sense to prohibit same sex marriage. To enforce such a prohibition is “sexism” and sexism is no less morally wrong than is “racism,” both of which are guilty of making social differentiation in societies where that the differentiation is irrelevant.

Cannot the same be said about discrimination today on the basis of age? Are not programs of forced retirement, for example, based solely on chronology, guilty of “agism,” which is as immoral as “sexism” and “racism” for precisely the same reasons, viz. a discrimination is made on grounds that have no real relevance to the activities that define the social subset to which it is applied? If the answer is yes, then clearly forced retirement based solely on chronology – as it is practiced in most academic institutions outside of the United States – is morally wrong. The only difference is that young adults, eager to find the meaning that the work place today can provide, not for money to enjoy leisure, but for life fulfillment itself, while able to recognize other forms of discrimination fail (for their own selfish reasons I suspect) to recognize this now growing (thanks to the practical health sciences) form of discrimination. Today we have every reason to believe that people now in their forties and fifties will live into their nineties and they will be as healthy in their seventies and eighties as were their grandparents in their thirties and forties. They will be, that is, as long as they are not forced to retire, for retirement itself has become a killer.

Without question health and longevity raise a serious social-moral problem about equal opportunity between generations. If the old are going to insist on living and being healthy, what room is there for the young to live an equally rewarding life? If, for example, senior academics are going to insist on training students, what room is there for the students to train students of their own? The problem is real, but the proposed solution is immoral, and therefore no solution.

In the days before, in between, and after the two world wars the American labor movement systematically excluded from its ranks blacks and women in order to guarantee jobs for their white male membership. They also fought to close off any opportunity of immigration to America despite the life threats that this exclusion entailed for many of these immigrants, especially Jews. Organized labor’s primary intent, to enable American white males to work, was right, but that right in no way made right its discrimination which in the end had the effect of discrediting, especially but not exclusively, the moral authority of the labor movement. As far as I can see this is the same situation today for the class of adults in western society below the age of forced retirements. However, there is one important difference, which makes ageism more foolish than either the racism or sexism of the past. No white male who discriminated against a woman or a black needed to fear becoming some day a female or a black. However, every defender of forced retirement on the sole basis of chronology will within a very short time reach the dreaded age limit of legally defined unnaturally determined seniority.

Of course the issue is more complicated than this. For example, in most work places salaries and benefits increase with seniority, while expenses decline. It is not obvious on any system of distributive justice that 70-year-old employees should be paid more than their 30-year-old colleagues are if the only functionally relevant distinction between them is their age. Clearly a way should be found to rectify this injustice, but forcing the older employees out of their “livelihood” is not a moral solution.

These are problems that did not exist fifty years ago. I believe they will become in the next generations a major focus of social discrimination, and, as such, they should become now an important question in Jewish philosophy.

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