Maimonides Lecture on Scepticism (Elliot Wolfson)

14 November 2023

Photo: UHH/SUB HH

We would like to invite you to a Maimonides Lecture on Scepticism on Tuesday, 14 November 2023, at 18:00. Elliot Wolfson (UC Santa Barbara) will talk about "Brokenness of Being and the Errancy of Ontological Untruth: Susan Taubes’s Sceptical Faith".

Brokenness of Being and the Errancy of Ontological Untruth: Susan Taubes’s Sceptical Faith 

This lecture explores Susan Taubes’s criticism of Heidegger's Seinsdenken that pivots around her contention that he absolutized the nothingness of being in a manner analogous to but significantly different than the role assigned to the Godhead on the part of many mystical visionaries. Venturing beyond Heidegger, and yet in some measure indebted to his claim that there is no truth that is not at the same time untruth, Susan characterized truth as the openness to error, the real ontological untruth, that is, a truth that is untrue insofar as it comes forth from the misguided effort to reconstruct the fractured world as an undivided whole. The task rather is to accept the brokenness of our being in the completeness of our incompleteness. At the heart of Susan’s sceptical faith is the commitment to the proposition that to be healed, the brokenness must be broken, but this can come about only by appropriating the perfection of imperfection. Contra Heidegger, Susan maintained that the tragedy of being is mitigated by the openness to the error of untruth exposed as an integral component of the intricacy of life, the threshold of integration that disintegrates after reaching its own limit. Inadvertently, Susan affirmed one of the deeper insights of the kabbalistic tradition: the blemish (pegam) is itself an aspect of the rectification (tiqqun).

Elliot R. Wolfson, a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Date
Tuesday, 14 November 2023, 18:00

Venue
MCAS
Please contact MCAS for further information and registration.

Poster
[PDF]

Contact and registration
maimonides-centre"AT"uni-hamburg.de