Issue #50

Abstract: The article is provoked by the book “Covenant and Metaphysics” by L. Chernyak and M. Roklin, a philosophical book dedicated to Judaism. The article discusses the sacred experience, which is understood as the foundation of each person’s ontological (metaphysical) constitution and involves their sacrificial status. According to the authors, no religion has addressed this issue, but they attribute the emergence of atheism and the decline of the theological component of Western culture to a shift in this constitution. This shift involves understanding the mind as a human mode of existence, rather than a divine, eternal mind, and as a finite, boundary-crossing mind between the Creator and the created. Therefore, the main philosophical question of the book is the age-old question, “What is a human being?” which is explored alongside the concept of sacred experience and the sacred as such. In this understanding of the mind, God can only exist in conjunction with the life of a created being, understood as worship. The difference between Judaism and Christianity lies in the fact that in the former, man sacrifices himself for the sake of God’s divinity, while in the latter, God sacrifices himself for the sake of man. This distinction has led to an intellectual tension between the ancient and modern understanding of the mind, where the mind was seen as a deity and eventually became disconnected from life, and Judaism, where the mind was understood as purely human. This article shows that history is a palimpsest, where the underlying foundations of existence dialogue with each other without destroying each other. In medieval trope-logic, this was expressed by the term equivocation (two-voicedness), represented by a word that, as such, represents the coincidence of opposites. In this way of understanding the word, different meanings appear depending on the changing context in which it is placed. This contrasts with the transcendentalism presented in the book under discussion, which presents an ontology based on a single logic, revealing rather an ontological logic of paradox, which is not aimed at finding false foundations, but rather at pointing out possible directions for conceptual breaks, in the spirit of Nicholas of Cusa’s thinking.