Professor William Kolbrener explains Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s approach to the emotional side of ethical life.
We have a great social philosophy, a philosophy of sympathy, understanding, tolerance, and social responsibility. – R. Joseph Soloveitchik
I am not choosing to write about one particular ethical virtue, but by way of R. Joseph Soloveitchik, I want to discuss the affective or ethical stance through which virtues are realized in the world. For Soloveitchik, the right kind of emotional connection to the world is a necessary pre-requisite for ethical activity. Before I can act ethically, I have to refine my emotional responses. Some, indeed perhaps most, experience the world through what Soloveitchik refers to as ‘moods’ – immediate and uncritical responses: we get angry, sad or happy, and see the world exclusively through that lens. Such people, because of their uncritical emotional responses, are unable to entertain the world in its complexity. The uncritical mood, Soloveitchik writes, does not allow for a mature ethical stance – that only comes through with the development of critical – analyzed – emotions.
The figure of Job gets a bad rap in R. Soloveitchik’s work: he is the vulgar philosopher and the philistine, but he’s also emotionally and therefore ethically challenged. Soloveitchik’s Job has a simplistic, indeed primitive, emotional life: he fails to get that life is ‘ambivalent,’ and indeed is full of ‘dichotomies and contradictions.’ Job only experiences uncritical moods, and thus is reactive only to the present moment, unreflective and immediate. Mature emotional awareness, by contrast, escapes him – the latter dependent upon placing the reactive and uncritical mood in the context of what Soloveitchik calls a ‘full spectrum of feelings.’ The appreciation of the full spectrum of feelings, allows for what Soloveitchik calls ‘dialectical consciousness’ – through which one always remain aware of the possibility of different perspectives.
This internal emotional experience, for Soloveitchik, is the prerequisite for ethics: for only after I experience the possibility of multiple emotional perspectives, can I appreciate the differing perspective of others, that the world is not merely an extension of myself. By contrast, one who only experiences moods will have a singular experience of the world, and become dogmatic, self-absorbed, even as Soloveitchik writes, ‘fanatical.’ Of Job, Soloveitchik writes critically, ‘he is ready to shut out the whole world in his exultation over his marvelous self.’
Values, Soloveitchik writes, created through partial vision are simply absurd, sometimes even masquerading as chesed or care for the other, when actually serving as a smoke-screen for the pursuit of one’s basest and most vulgar interests. What looks like ethics, in some cases, may be merely self-interest. The complex emotional awareness in Soloveitchik’s religion for adults, by contrast, always holds out the possibility of an opposing experience or perspective. Indeed, such emotional awareness is the precondition for the actualization of the ethical.
When no longer immersed in the demands of a singular and one-dimensional mood, ‘one is freed from self-absorption,’ Soloveitchik writes, ‘and begins to see the other fellow.’ The joy, for example, experienced during the pilgrimage festivals in Jerusalem, described in Deuteronomy, might naturally lead to self-satisfied contentment, but the Torah enjoins the experience of a broader emotional response. The tithe obligations incumbent upon those experiencing festive joy ensures that holiday celebration is tempered by an ‘apprehension of misery, destitution and want.’ Only after I understand, as T. S. Eliot writes, that ‘implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible,’ am I able to begin to live an ethical life. The pilgrim is not single-minded in his joy, and thus forgetful of the other, but the emotional awareness demanded by the Torah foregrounds need even in the presence of abundance.
This emotional awareness, one that cultivates and allows for the possibility of different perspectives, is the prerequisite for ethics, allowing, Soloveitchik writes, ‘the feeling of sympathy to emerge.’ Soloveitchik, drawing on the rich tradition of our sages, understood as Freud did, that ethics are not independent of emotions, that in order to engage in an ethical life, first our emotional life must be in order. Indeed ethics based on simplistic and one-dimensional moods only may lead to fanaticism, even fundamentalism. Only through cultivating an internal awareness – a complex emotional self-consciousness – do we avoid an ethical response masking selfish interests, indeed only through what Soloveitchik calls an ‘analyzed emotional life’ does a genuine ethical life become possible.