Correlation

He'll tell me where philosophy goes wrong in dealing with religion, W. says over pints at The Trout. The problem must be understood from the perspective of Judaism, and in particular the Judaism of Cohen and Rosenzweig, he says.

Redemption for the Jew, says W., doesn't lie ahead of time, in some distant future, but is already within the present, deep inside it. What matters is our relation to it. The world to come is not a utopia, if we mean by that word a world which is different from our own, made from different material and reality, but it is the same world related to in a different way.

Everything is about relation, says W. very emphatically, the logic of relations. That's what Rosenzweig takes from Cohen when he writes about the three elements of religion, God, man and world, which correspond with the three points of triangle. We can certainly think these elements abstractly, but we cannot live them so. They only have a lived religious meaning in their relation to one another.

Religiously, therefore, you can only testify to the correlations between them, such as between man and God, God and world, or man and world, but never man, God or world in abstraction, W. says. That's how metaphysics tries to deduce them, man, God and world, as abstractions, as though these terms were not relata but substances in themselves that one could prove in isolation. But this is where metaphysics goes wrong, W. says. And it's where the new atheism that springs from metaphysics goes wrong.