Signs of Salvation: A Festschrift for Peter Ochs

The Wisdom of Peter Ochs

From Common Sensism to Scriptural Pragmatism

—Mark Randall James, Independent Scholar

—Randi Rashkover, College of William & Mary

It is a great honor to present this collection of essays to Peter Ochs on behalf of his colleagues and students. These essays by scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines are a testimony to the generative potential of Ochs’ distinctive pragmatic philosophy.

Ochs’ pragmatism revitalizes the Jewish wisdom tradition within the context of modernity. Classical Jewish sages adopted the ordinary language term wisdom to refer to a practical mode of rationality concretely realizable in individual habits and communal life. So too Ochs identifies the locus of our deepest human wisdom in common sense beliefs implicit in everyday practices. The sages also believed, however, that to speak adequately about wisdom requires speaking about its relation to God as the ultimate source of wisdom and life. In the same way, Ochs speaks of God’s Word which, through scripture, can repair our common sense, bringing life-giving wisdom to communities on the brink of death.

In this introduction, we aim to show how Ochs’ pragmatic reappropriation of the classical wisdom tradition emerges in the confrontation between Judaism and modernity. We offer these words with trepidation. To represent any thinker’s thought in a finite string of words inevitably involves selecting and freezing elements of an infinite living process of thinking. In Ochs’ case, the task is especially difficult because of the remarkable range, subtlety, and generativity of his thought. Nevertheless, we hope that this introduction can serve as one possible entry to the world of Ochs’ philosophy.

We begin in section I by tracing the genealogy of Ochs’ thought to two philosophical traditions that correct modern philosophy by appealing to the rationality implicit in practice. From German and American Jewish philosophers, Ochs learned to respond to modern challenges to the intelligibility of Jewish life by seeking the rationality implicit in Jewish practices. In the American pragmatist Charles Peirce, Ochs found a method of appealing to the logic of scientific practice to correct modern philosophy itself.

In section II, we sketch the common-sensist and scriptural dimensions of Ochs’ pragmatism. In response to the Cartesian anxiety that plagues modern thought, Ochs appeals to the deep wisdom of common sense—vague but indubitable rational commitments implicit in our everyday practices and ordinary language. But in light of the recurring crises of Jewish history that threaten the intelligibility of Jewish life and practice, Ochs also recognizes occasions when common sense may fail and ordinary methods of pragmatic repair prove inadequate. Ochs’ scriptural pragmatism describes how, through scripture, God’s Word can heal communities in crisis, transforming their common sense and renewing their language.

If practice is the locus of rationality, then a philosophical theory’s full meaning can only be determined, and its validity tested, with reference to its practical fruits. Section III examines the ways that Ochsian wisdom has borne fruit in communities of practice. Through the practices of Textual Reasoning and Scriptural Reasoning, modern readers are habituated in a distinctively scriptural wisdom governed by a pragmatic logic. In the Scripture, Interpretation, and Practice program at the University of Virginia, Ochs has built an academic community that shows how this wisdom can correct modern academic practices. In his Hearth to Hearth peacebuilding work and his recently developed method of Value Predicate Analysis, Ochs puts the wisdom of scriptural pragmatism to work creating conditions for interreligious peace.

In section IV, we introduce the essays offered to Ochs in this volume as a small sample of the many ways Ochs’ wisdom has borne fruit in his colleagues and students. As is fitting for a man who preferred to practice face-to-face theology,¹ these essays reflect not only the influence of his thought but, above all, the force of his person as a teacher and friend. We offer these essays in the hope that the wisdom of Peter Ochs will be more apparent as it is refracted in the words of those who have learned from him.

I. Genealogy of Ochs’ Common-Sensism

λόγον σοφὸν ἐὰν ἀκούσῃ ἐπιστήμων αἰνέσει αὐτὸν καὶ ἐπ’ αὐτὸν προσθήσει.

If a man of understanding hears a wise word, he will praise it and add to it. (Sirach

21

:

15

a)

Since the ancient world, Jews have frequently faced a double existential danger from their neighbors: the challenges, we might say, of Gentile wisdom and Gentile swords. Modern Jews in particular must come to terms with what Ochs calls the two fires, metaphorically, of modernity and, literally, of the Shoa.² Jewish philosophy emerges in response to this double challenge to the intelligibility of Jewish life. Its primary task, as Ochs put it in an early essay, is to redirect the dislocated Jew back to the speech community of Israel.³ The Jewish philosopher can be a guide to the perplexed because she bears the perplexity of her people within herself. She participates in two traditions at once—the tradition of Israel, with its ultimate origin in the Torah, and the tradition of Western philosophy—and for this very reason, she tends to dwell at the margins of both.

It is characteristic of Ochs’ pragmatism that he not only recognizes influences on his thought, but explicitly situates himself within both Jewish and Western philosophical traditions of inquiry and refers his thinking to problems that arise within these traditions. For this reason, Ochs’ work frequently takes the form of commentary, clarifying or correcting the words of his teachers. The basic logic of commentary was aptly formulated by Jesus ben Sirach, himself a figure situated between Jewish wisdom and Greek philosophy, in the aphorism quoted above: the wise person praises the wise words she inherits (affirming their rational intelligibility) and then adds to them (clarifying their implications for her own time and place). To understand Ochs’ pragmatism, then, we must begin with the traditions in dialogue with which his thought emerges.

1. Modern Jewish Philosophy

Like many of his contemporaries, the young Ochs identified himself with the critique of modern philosophy’s tendency to erase Judaism’s textual and civilizational resources launched by late nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish thinkers including Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber. Most noteworthy was their collective focus on the philosophical significance of the everyday linguistic practices of rabbinic Jews, in which these thinkers discerned an operative rationality that could not be adequately modeled in terms of modern logical systems. The aftermoderns, as Ochs calls them,

perceived in the grammar of everyday practices, including the everyday practices of the traditional rabbinic Jew, certain norms of reasoning of which the logical systems of the modern philosophers provided no adequate model. These systems did not offer . . . adequate tools for identifying the rationality or rule-governed character of sound common-sense or of the hermeneutical, legal-ethical and liturgical practices of traditional Judaism.⁴

According to these thinkers, thinking happens in and through Jewish language. They discerned in Jewish linguistic practice implicit rational norms for how we speak to others, how we relate to the world, and how we speak to God. Thus Cohen, for example, sought to describe a religion of reason implicit in the sources of Judaism.⁵ So too Rosenzweig identified a new thinking⁶ embodied in dialogical relations that unfold over time. In conversation with these aftermoderns, Ochs’ early work offered a dialogical response to this new thinking in which Ochs discerned a critique and extension of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that looks to us today like the foundations of a rabbinic semiotics.⁷ Yet despite their attention to Jewish linguistic practices, Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Buber each retained residual elements of the modern philosophical approaches from which they sought to distance themselves and paid insufficient attention to the particulars of rabbinic linguistic practice and the context-specific character of their normative speech activity. In Ochs’ view, aftermodern Jewish thought needed to develop a more ethnographic approach to language and locate practices of speech-thinking in their social, or at least literary contexts.⁸

The thinkers who, for Ochs, came closest to practicing this empirical recovery of rabbinic speech-thinking were not part of the canon of German Jewish thinkers, but rather two of his teachers at the Jewish Theological Seminary: Max Kadushin and David Weiss Halivni.⁹ In Kadushin, Ochs found a thinker committed to providing a thick description of the logic of rabbinic thought exhibited by rabbinic texts. Rabbinic reading practices, Kadushin held, display and perform value-concepts, the normative elements or units of a rabbinic derash or interpretation. As Ochs explains, Kadushin’s value concepts have both cognitive and valuational components.¹⁰ This is because they are normative concepts that operate as hermeneutical rules to guide interpretive acts of text study and halakhic action. Throughout rabbinic literature one can find haggadic statements that display the outcomes of these interpretive acts and serve as evidence of the rabbis’ use of value concepts to resolve interpretive questions. The rational potential of rabbinic hermeneutics lay, Kadushin argued, in the network of haggadic statements woven throughout rabbinic literature, since as Ochs puts it, they imply the reason for the judgment they express.¹¹ These haggadic statements instantiate normative rules or value concepts that may be used to resolve other interpretive questions or problems. Since these rules are determined only in relation to particular cases, value-concepts are vague, their full meaning contingent upon their determination across a range of possible contexts. While value-concepts thus sustain a drive toward concretization, they are not tied to any particular manifestation. . . . [E]ach one of them suggests an identifiable, though not a definable idea or notion.¹² Value-concepts are not determinate propositions but literary embodiments that sponsor readers’ open-ended but nonarbitrary deployment of them.

Kadushin’s work was focused primarily on the relation between the Bible and the rabbinic logic it generated. Consequently, as Ochs has argued, Kadushin was less attentive to the pragmatic force of rabbinic interpretation, or how it reformed rules of conduct in some particular community.¹³ Ochs saw this problem as a product of the limits of Kadushin’s method. In order to secure the objective validity of his thought, Kadushin tended to hypostasize value-concepts, abstracting them from the conditions of their ongoing use. But if interpretation, as Ochs has repeatedly maintained, is a context-specific, historically conditioned activity, then value-concepts must function in relation to particular communities who use them to guide their interpretive judgments. Which value-concepts assume significance and in what systemic order depends upon the particular historical conditions of existing reading and speaking communities. What Ochs comes to call rabbinic pragmatism would seek not only to explicate the operative norms of rabbinic rationality, but also to offer an account of how these norms might be taken up to address the specific problems troubling particular Jewish communities.

If Kadushin modeled a pragmatic method for reconstructing rabbinic rationality, it was his teacher David Weiss Halivni who showed how to bring rabbinic rationality to bear on the defining catastrophe of modern Jewish life: the Shoah. For Halivni, a Talmud prodigy and a Holocaust survivor, the event of the Shoah is (in Ochs’ words) a condition of ultimate disruption that calls into question every level of Judaism, every Jewish habit of study, belief, and action in the world.¹⁴ In theological terms, it constitutes a radical rupture in the covenant. Halivni’s holocaust memoir The Book and the Sword begins with a midrash:

The sword and the book came down from heaven tied to each other. Said the Almighty, If you keep what is written in this book, you will be spared this sword; if not, you will be consumed by it (Midrash Rabbah Deuteronomy

4

:

2

). We clung to the book, yet we were consumed by the sword.¹⁵

As a sign of this rupture, Halivni describes how the relief he found through Torah study during the intensifying sufferings of his community in the ghetto of Sighet reached its limits in the concentration camps. I had no desire or ability to study Torah amid people ready to kill us.¹⁶

Yet in the years that followed his liberation, Halivni charted a path forward that profoundly shaped Ochs’ own response to the Holocaust. Halivni discerned in rabbinic sources a pattern of divine response to the traumas suffered by the Jews throughout their history in which communal restoration comes by way of the interpretive activities of the great sages. For Halivni, the prototype of this activity was the work of Ezra in the post-exilic Jewish community. Drawing on rabbinic traditions about Ezra’s work of correcting the Torah,¹⁷ Halivni argues that as a consequence of Israel’s sin during the prophetic period, the post-exilic community found itself with a maculate text, a text wounded by textual errors and corruptions. As both prophet and scribe, Ezra repaired the text by making emendations (tikkunot) and by transmitting interpretive traditions that diverge from the plain sense, enabling the written text to continue to guide Israel after the exile. Halivni takes Ezra’s correction of the written Torah as a prototype for his own scholarly labors, which use academic methods of study to repair the oral Torah, those living traditions of interpretation and practice that we might call the deep common sense of the rabbinic community. Halivni realizes that academic methods are necessary to this process, but deployed for the sake of healing the wounded community, what Ochs calls pragmatic historiography.¹⁸

Underlying Halivni’s proposal is the theological insight that the wounds of the Jewish community are intertwined with wounds afflicting its texts and interpretive traditions. The wounds of interpreters mirror the wounds of the text, with the surprising result (though a result at the heart of Jewish life) that the apparently impractical work of reinterpreting troubling texts can become the means by which the divine Word heals troubled readers. As Ochs describes this process,

When I bring my suffering to the text of scripture, I notice its wounds, first; I am drawn to tend to them; and, only after being engaged in the work of mending them do I realize that my own wounds correspond to the text’s and that the more deeply I care for the text’s wounds, the more deeply my own wounds are healed.¹⁹

Scriptural revelation is the process by which God’s Word heals his people through reparative scriptural reading—not by delivering a collection of clear propositions (the meaning of scripture) but by transforming the linguistic practices by which the community derives meaning from its scriptures, effecting what Ochs calls a radical change in the relations that bind the words of a language together.²⁰ Ochs’ scriptural pragmatism will offer a theory that explains how this process works.

2. Charles Peirce

As a Jewish philosopher, Ochs participates not only in the Jewish linguistic community but also in the tradition of Western philosophy. Inheriting the problems of modern philosophy, Ochs sought methods for internally critiquing modern philosophy that can also guide dislocated modern Jewish communities. It was through Max Kadushin that Ochs first encountered the work of Charles Peirce, the founder of pragmatism.²¹ Over time, Ochs came to regard Peirce’s pragmatism as one of the best instruments for articulating the rationality displayed in the classical sources of Judaism using the language of Western philosophy.

One of the core insights of pragmatism is that the locus of rationality is not consciousness but practice. According to Peirce, a belief is not primarily a mental entity, but rather a habit or rule of action, of which our self-consciousness is only a fallible sign.²² Clarifying the content of our beliefs thus requires explicating their implications for practice, as expressed by Peirce’s pragmatic maxim:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.²³

For Peirce, a practicing laboratory scientist, this maxim implicitly guides the practice of modern science, for which concepts are only meaningful insofar as they have implications for a possible experiment.

Because practices are the locus of rationality, pragmatic inquiry, on Peirce’s view, begins with problems that arise within our practices, registered to consciousness as doubt provoked by irritation or suffering. As Peirce says, The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief. . . . With the doubt . . . the struggle begins, and with the cessation of doubt it ends.²⁴ Pragmatic inquiry is guided by the problems that give rise to doubt, and on Peirce’s view, it can have no purpose beyond the fixation of some new belief, some new rule of action according to which the problem that gave rise to doubt no longer arises. Ochs thus found in Peirce a model of inquiry as what Nicholas Adams has labeled reparative reasoning,²⁵ reasoning whose goal is the amelioration of the problematic conditions that stimulated it, prototypically the problematic condition of suffering.²⁶

As inquiry into rationality, the central concern of Peirce’s philosophy is logic. It is a symptom of our artificially narrow late-modern conceptions of rationality that for many readers the word logic denotes only the formal analysis of deductive reasoning in the tradition of Aristotelian syllogistic. Although Peirce made significant contributions to modern symbolic logic, his conception of logic also includes the empirical study of actual reasoning practices and normative questions about the relation of thinking to its objects, what Kant called transcendental logic.²⁷ On Peirce’s view, the logical intuitions that serve as sources for formal logic are not insights into eternal laws of thought, but rather symptoms of deep beliefs, embodied in practices, that certain rules of reasoning prove reliable, and their validity extends only to those contexts in which they continue to prove reliable in practice.

Peirce’s mature view was that logic in its broadest sense is identical to what he called semiotic, the theory of signs.²⁸ Peirce’s sophisticated semiotic theory provided Ochs with a set of analytic tools capable of making intelligible the rationality of Jewish practices. Unfortunately, Peirce’s use of the term semiotic is as likely to mislead contemporary readers as the term logic, and for analogous reasons. Contemporary notions of semiotics, especially in the humanities, tend to derive from Saussure’s account of the sign as a cultural unit of meaning, a conventional and arbitrary equivalence between a signifier and a signified. The Saussurean sign is a social entity, where social functions as the logical contrary of natural.²⁹ By contrast, Peirce’s identification of semiotics with logic inherits the classical tradition of semiotics as a theory of inference. On this view the paradigmatic sign is not linguistic meaning but rather material inference: if P then Q.³⁰ This is why Ochs describes the objects of Peircean semiotics as rules of reasoning:

Peirce’s theory of signs offers a set of conventions for diagramming any patterns or rules of reasoning. Consider, for example, his conventions for diagramming semantic reference or signification. The fundamental unit of reference is the sign: a signifier that displays its object (reference or meaning) only with respect to a particular interpretant (context of meaning, interpretive mind-set, or system of deep-seated rules).³¹

It is one of Peirce’s core insights that the sign is irreducibly triadic—that is, that inferential reasoning is a relation involving at least three irreducible terms: that from which some inference may be drawn (the signifier), that about which one infers (the object), and those habits or practices of reasoning by means of which this inference may be drawn and which are themselves affected in the process of reasoning (the interpretant). Unlike the Saussurean sign, these embodied habits of inference in relation to which signs operate are not social in opposition to natural because they emerge from the biological dimension of human life. Animals communicate and draw inferences, and these natural capacities are continuous with the sorts of inferential reasoning that function within human social practices like language and scientific inquiry.³² Moreover, because these practices are formed diachronically through interaction with the empirical world, signs are not intrinsically arbitrary, though they may become arbitrary in limit cases when they lose their capacity for self-correction. Peirce’s semiotic theory thus shows how a community’s linguistic practices can embody relatively reliable rules of reasoning.

II. Beyond Common Sense

וְלֹא הַמִּדְרָשׁ הוּא הָעִקָּר, אֶלָּא הַמַּעֲשֶׂה.

The fundamental thing is not interpretation but action.

(Pirkei Avot

1

:

17

)

While Peirce aimed primarily to correct modern philosophy in light of the scientific method, his core insight that rationality is practical is not new. William James famously called pragmatism a new name for some old ways of thinking, identifying Socrates and Aristotle as ancient forerunners.³³ Peirce himself framed the pragmatic maxim as commentary on the words of the rabbi of Nazareth, calling it an application of the sole principle of logic which was recommended by Jesus; ‘Ye may know them by their fruits,’ and adding that it is very intimately allied with the ideas of the gospel.³⁴ Ochs takes Peirce’s remark as an important clue that pragmatism recapitulates the practical orientation of the scriptural wisdom tradition that Jesus’ aphorism so aptly summarizes.³⁵ Pragmatic thinking also shapes the rabbinic wisdom tradition, as with Shimon ben Gamaliel’s aphorism above, in which we might hear another echo of the pragmatic maxim: it is not interpretation (merely verbal clarification), but action (lived practice), that gets to the root of a matter.

Ochs’ thought deepens pragmatism by recalling it to its scriptural roots. His magnum opus—Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture—is a reparative account of Peirce’s own intellectual development as a process of pragmatic inquiry, culminating in Peirce’s post-1905 reformulation of his philosophy as a critical common-sensism that identifies indubitable rules of reasoning in common sense beliefs implicit in everyday practices.³⁶ Ochs frames his own scriptural pragmatism as commentary on Peirce’s critical common-sensism, clarifying (as Peirce does not) how common sense itself may be repaired by God’s Word through scripture during times of crisis. Scriptural pragmatism is the form critical common-sensism takes in light of scriptural communities’ recurring experience of possibilities of healing and repair that transcend human capacities. It is, we might say, an account of how human wisdom can be healed by divine wisdom.

1. Critical Common-Sensism

Peirce calls his late pragmatism critical common-sensism to identify an affinity between his response to Cartesian skepticism and that of the Scottish common sense philosophers. Provoked by the massive social and intellectual upheavals of early modern Europe, Descartes argued that modern philosophy must begin anew by adopting a method of systematically doubting every belief in order to discover secure first principles that cannot be doubted. He thought he had discovered such principles in beliefs that are clear and distinct to the individual thinker (the cogito). According to Ochs, however, by failing to analyze the contextual conditions that gave rise to his doubt, Descartes misinterpreted his doubt as a universal problem afflicting human beings in general. As a result, Descartes sought to resolve his doubt by identifying clear conditions grounding all human knowing. By taking the generality and clarity of the theoretical sciences as the paradigm of philosophical repair, Descartes sought his foundational principles in concepts whose truth is purportedly guaranteed by their clarity and distinctness for any rational mind. Ochs argues that this foundationalist strategy fails to resolve adequately the real doubts that animate its inquiry, generating instead either dogmatic philosophical systems that tacitly place obstacles in the course of inquiry or skeptical misologies that abandon confidence in rational inquiry altogether.

Common sensists like Thomas Reid sought to repair Cartesian philosophy by grounding knowledge in first principles common to philosophers and to the vulgar.³⁷ These principles would be instinctive beliefs given by nature along with our other faculties,³⁸ rather than principles—like Locke’s simple ideas or Leibniz’s principle of contradiction—whose supposed self-evidence is clear only to philosophers.³⁹ By attempting to ground all human knowledge in a set of universally evident beliefs, Scottish common sensism undoubtedly reiterated Cartesian foundationalism; but in its insistence that the philosopher’s doubt must be answered by appeal to principles implicit in everyday practice and ordinary language, it anticipated a core insight of pragmatism.

Since the philosopher may find her community’s common-sense rules operative within ordinary linguistic practices, a characteristic tendency of common sensism is to approach language as a potential source of rationality rather than as mere subjective opinion or social convention. There is a logic to our living linguistic practices, a Socratic intuition that pragmatists share with Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers. Part of the common sense philosopher’s task is thus explicative, or in Ochs’ language, diagrammatic. She must introduce context-specific clarity to deep rules of common sense in order to correct particular philosophical problems. Peirce’s pragmatic maxim exemplifies this process. Aphorisms like the proof is in the pudding or by their fruits ye shall know them express a common sense belief with a great deal of vagueness. Peirce’s various formulations of the pragmatic maxim explicate this belief by introducing further clarity relevant to the particular failures of modern philosophy.

Ochs argues that one reason modern philosophers have struggled to extricate themselves from Descartes’ mode of thinking is the difficulty involved in understanding how a tradition of inquiry can correct its own deepest norms and commitments. It seems that one must both affirm and criticize his own method of reasoning,⁴⁰ and it is difficult to see how this is possible without asserting (as Descartes did) that some of one’s existing normative commitments are beyond the possibility of rational criticism. Peirce resolved this problem by arguing that the deepest corrective principles to which we appeal are different in kind from the rules of reasoning they correct. The rules of reasoning that govern everyday life are frequently used but very liable to error. Peirce called these B-reasonings. When a B-reasoning fails, stimulating a doubt, we do not correct it by appeal to a rule of the same order. Rather, we appeal to rules embodying deeper convictions that are rarely useful, but highly reliable when applicable. Peirce called these deeper principles A-reasonings. The activity of self-correction may then be understood as the use of a deeper A-reasoning to correct some errant B-reasoning.

As Ochs points out, the notion of reasonings of different depths can be iterated: a deeper corrective rule may itself be in need of correction, and so on. In iterating Peirce’s model, Ochs transforms his distinction between B- and A- reasonings into a distinction between what we might call finite and infinite reasonings. A finite (B-) reasoning is one that diagrams and corrects another such B-reasoning.⁴¹ Such reasoning is stimulated by a problem in another reasoning, of which it provides some map or analysis (a diagram) and recommends an action or habit change to alleviate the problem (a correction). These reasonings are finite because they are stimulated by a finite class of problems whose resolution is the criterion of its success and which come to an end when the problem that stimulated them is resolved. Because B-reasonings are corrected by other B-reasonings, they can be organized hierarchically in an ordered series of corrective reasonings of increasing depth. The intuitive reasonings we use to solve problems that arise in everyday life are finite (B-) reasonings in this sense, but so are the reasonings that guide doctors and engineers, medical researchers, and physicists.

By combining this hierarchical model of reparative rationality with Peirce’s architectonic classification of the sciences⁴² and Dewey’s pragmatic analysis of social institutions,⁴³ Ochs arrives at an account of reparative reasoning as a social activity occurring within hierarchically ordered institutions of repair.

We might conceive of social institutions as if they were progressively ordered to serve the relative ends of repairing suffering, then of repairing the repair of suffering, and so on. Say we start with the Lebenswelt, or the world of everyday practices that includes not only doing this or that but also repairing how one does this or that. A doorknob won’t open, so I oil it. Then I scratch myself, so I put on a Band-Aid.⁴⁴

When finite rules of reasoning like if you scratch yourself, apply a Band-Aid prove insufficient—if the wound is too deep, for example—then we may seek repair through what Ochs calls practical arts practiced in service institutions like hospitals, mechanics, and churches, which operationalize higher-order rules of repair. These institutions in turn may lack the capacity to resolve our problem—the doctors may not know how to cure an ailment, the priest may find herself at a loss for words. In these cases, we may develop higher-order practices to repair the repairers, which Ochs calls theoretical sciences or reparative sciences, such as those practiced in research institutions like the modern academy. But these institutions may themselves fail to address the problems of the practical sciences they serve. It is the task of the philosopher to analyze and repair (diagram-and-correct) theoretical sciences.⁴⁵

We may think of Cartesian doubt as a symptom of a crisis threatening the philosopher’s ability to perform her reparative function. Ochs suggests that Descartes suffered from an infinite doubt—doubt not about a particular finite rule of reasoning (that might be repaired by another, deeper but still finite rule of reasoning), but rather about an entire infinite series of B-reasonings. Infinite doubt is, for Ochs, a philosophical performance of the logic appropriate to historical moments when one’s world comes crashing down and nothing seems intelligible. Despite his critique of Descartes, Ochs does not reject the validity of infinite doubt; indeed, he can say that, like Descartes, pragmatic logicians are motivated by infinite doubt.⁴⁶ But pragmatists reinterpret this doubt as a symptom of a deep problem that arises in a particular context rather than as a universal problem facing human beings as such. Descartes’ problem is that by correcting his doubt by appealing to clear and distinct (hence, finite) principles, he makes a kind of category error, failing to note that the doubt one has about any particular B-reasoning must be of a different kind than the doubt one might have of all B-reasonings.⁴⁷ By treating philosophical reasoning as grounded in finite principles, whether on the model of practical or theoretical sciences, modern philosophers tend, like Descartes, to apply finite rules appropriate for repairing a specific problem as though they were relevant to every problem.

For the pragmatist, however, an infinite doubt requires an infinite reasoning to repair it, a reasoning capable of repairing an entire problematic chain of corrective reasonings. Ochs identifies these infinite reasonings with Peirce’s A-reasonings.⁴⁸ Infinite reasonings avoid the Cartesian tendency towards either dogmatic arbitrariness or skeptical misology because they differ in two important ways from Descartes’ first principles. First, Cartesian first principles are supposed to be self-evident, and hence immune to any possible doubt. Pragmatic infinite reasonings are, by contrast, indubitable beliefs in the more modest sense that one cannot bring oneself to doubt them in one’s actual conduct. They are immune not to any possible doubt but to any actual doubt. As Ochs comments,

The difference lies in the etiology of the two sets of indubitables and, thus, in their empirical import. A priorists [such as Cartesian foundationalists] arrive at their acritical beliefs by tracing a series of imagined doubts to a finite limit. . . . Pragmaticists [i.e. critical common sensists], on the other hand, would arrive at their indubitables by tracing a series of actual doubts to a finite limit. . . . This difference is revealed only in practice: indubitable beliefs are successfully tested and refined against everyday experience; a priori beliefs show themselves, in the long run, to be empirically untestable.⁴⁹

In this respect, the logical difference between a Cartesian and a pragmatist emerges only diachronically. Viewed synchronically, the beliefs of a critical common-sensist share the same hierarchical structure and indubitable basis as a foundationalist system. But while the Cartesian understands her first principles as self-evident to any human being, the indubitable beliefs of a pragmatist are formed through a temporal process of corrective reasoning—for Peirce, not only a socio-historical process but also a biological evolutionary one—and they may in principle be called into question in the future. Pragmatic ultimate commitments prove themselves indubitable practically, by their history of reliably resolving actual doubts and emerging unscathed from criticism.

Second, indubitable beliefs are irremediably vague. An irremediably vague belief is one that guides action, yet whose consequences for action in particular cases cannot be fully determined prior to the occasions in which action is required.⁵⁰ Infinite reasonings must be vague in this sense, Ochs argues, because they make reference to an infinite series that cannot be determined fully by some finite rule. One must avoid clarifying irremediably vague beliefs prematurely, since doing so would amount to making rash prejudgments about cases without adequate reason. Ochs follows Peirce in arguing that one of the most egregious errors of modern philosophy has been to neglect vagueness as a distinct logical mode alongside individuality and generality and then to regard nonvagueness (clarity and distinctness) as a sign of truth. Indeed, the opposite is more nearly the case. Because the consequences of a clear idea are more precisely determined, it is far more fallible and dubitable than a vague idea. This is why clarifying the implications of a hypothesis is an important step in submitting it to empirical verification. A vague idea is harder to disprove precisely because it determines less.

Indubitability and irremediable vagueness are also characteristic features of our deepest common sense beliefs in contrast to claims generated through more precise technical discourses. This is why the pragmatic philosopher performs her most radical reparative task not by drawing on clear principles evident to philosophers, but rather by appealing to deep rules of common sense implicit in everyday practice—rules such as the pragmatic maxim itself. By doing so, the pragmatic philosopher returns the sciences to the problems of everyday life that stimulated their inquiry in the first place.

2. Scriptural Pragmatism

For the common-sense pragmatist, there is always already some rule implicit in a community’s everyday practices that may be brought to bear for the repair of some philosophical problem; it is simply a matter of unearthing it. This reparative appeal to common sense may take the form of a relatively confident reappropriation of deep resources already present within a particular tradition; but it may also take increasingly radical forms.⁵¹ Through mathematics, the science of the possible that, according to Peirce, posits hypotheses, and traces out their consequences,⁵² human beings explore the internal possibilities of common sense in a controlled and systematic way, often hitting upon hitherto neglected concepts and relations. Through playful or anarchic practices like art, poetry, or musement, human beings open their minds to generative wells of creative possibility immanent in the created order. Such practices may even take on a religious character, but in Ochs’ framework they remain within the bounds of a kind of natural theology or immanent Logos philosophy, and hence within the broadest sphere of possibilities available to common-sense philosophers.

The need for a specifically scriptural pragmatism arises for those who believe that communities may face situations so traumatic they challenge even their most fundamental beliefs, so catastrophic that no rule of common sense, no traditional wisdom, and no insight of human rationality, however radical, provides an adequate response. In these situations, Ochs says,

the world itself may be brought into question. The world of experience is served by a finite set of common-sense beliefs, and there are terrible occasions when this world breaks down and common sense is confounded.⁵³

For modern Jews, the Shoah is a civilizational crisis of this magnitude. The tragedy of the Shoah is not only the unspeakable destruction of innocent human life but also its challenge to the intelligibility of Jewish tradition. As for most Jewish thinkers of his generation, the Shoah casts a dark and heavy shadow over Ochs’ thought. Ochs’ response is to seek communal restoration in the God of Israel, a source of repair deeper than common sense (though one to which Jewish faith acquired through millennia of experience bears witness). "There is more than this world, however, Ochs insists; for scriptural pragmatists, there are resources out of this world for correcting the inadequacies of this world."⁵⁴

Scriptural pragmatists are common sense philosophers—not only Jews, but also Christians, Muslims, and others—who believe that such radical crises may occur and that divine help may come through a certain kind of appeal to scripture. This reparative use of scripture differs from its function during what we might call ordinary times, when a community remains relatively confident in the adequacy of its common sense as embodied in its traditions, doctrines, and linguistic practices. The scriptures are, of course, always integral to the life of scriptural communities as objects of study, scripts for prayer, or guides for action. But during ordinary times, a scriptural community interprets its scriptures in tradition-bound ways that accord with its common sense commitments. Members of such communities tend to experience the meanings of their most important texts as plain or obvious, but this intuitive sense of scripture’s clarity reflects their implicit confidence in the general reliability of the communal linguistic rules by which they interpret scripture.

For just this reason, however, scripture cannot deliver new reparative rules directly, through its plain sense. "The Bible is not, Ochs says, a source of alternative common sense. . . . The Bible’s plain sense guides everyday practice only when it reinforces common sense (however much that common sense has been reshaped by previous biblical legislations)."⁵⁵ To appeal directly to the scriptures in what we might call extraordinary times of crisis is to reproduce Descartes’ error of assuming that ultimate reparative rules should be both indubitable and clear. This characteristically modern strategy ends up foreclosing the more radical kinds of repair that are needful