Personhood

When Rabbi A. J. Heschel describes God in personal terms, he talks about God's logos, pathos, and ethos.Footnote ¹ He uses these terms somewhat idiosyncratically. Imposing some order upon his terminology, I define these terms as follows:

• • A being possesses logos so long as it has a set of beliefs with non-normative content (that is to say, non-prescriptive content describing non-moral states of affairs).

• • A being possess pathos if there is something that it feels like to be that being, and if that feeling has an emotional valence.

• • A being has an ethos so long as it has a set of beliefs with normative content.

Inspired by Rabbi Heschel, I argue that personhood combines logos, pathos, and ethos. Moreover, a being cannot be a person without possessing these properties reflectively so that it should be aware that it has them. In what follows, I shall demonstrate that this conception of personhood captures the essence of personhood as that concept has appeared in the history of Western Philosophy.

According to Aristotle, the capacity for ‘intellectual perception’ is what makes a person a person. To see that 1 + 1 = 2, we don't need to use our eyes. Our intellects simply perceive, without the mediation of sense organs, that it's true. This, he claims, is the faculty that separates us from non-persons.Footnote ² Thus began the association between personhood and logos.

John Locke defines a person as, ‘a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places’ (Locke, Reference Locke1997, II.xxvii.9, p. 302). In other words: self-consciousness extended over time by means of memory, stretching into the past, and anticipation, stretching into the future, is what binds the various temporal stages of a person together. This helped Locke to answer questions of personal identity over time. But as we shall see, the person's temporal consciousness is key to what makes a person a philosophically significant being to begin with. Moreover, from Locke we inherit the notion that only if a being is conscious of possessing the (other) key characteristics of personhood can it be considered a person.

According to many systems of ethics, the possession of desires and preferences, even though non-persons can have them too, will be an essential ingredient for the creation of the special ethical significance of persons. To illustrate this claim, consider the status of persons for utilitarianism, for Kantian ethics, and for virtue ethics.

Utilitarianism: All sorts of animals have desires and preferences, but given their temporally extended self-consciousness, only persons can have future-oriented desires.Footnote ³ Consequently, only persons can suffer the disutility of thwarted expectations or future-oriented anxiety. Only persons have the capacity to suffer from the possession of painful memories. Consequently, utilitarians, whose ethical universe recognizes only pain and pleasure, will accept that persons are worthy of special ethical consideration (Singer (Reference Singer1993), 90–91).

Kantian ethics: For a Kantian, a person should never be treated as a means, but always, at the same time, as an end (Kant (Reference Kant1998), Ak: 4.429, p. 38). It is the possession of a free will that bestows this significance upon her, but the possession of a will requires the possession of preferences.

A self-driving car manifests purpose. It purposefully directs its motion towards its predetermined location, while avoiding obstacles en route. According to Kant, the extra ingredient required to transform this sort of purpose into a will is self-consciousness (Ibid., Ak: 4.449, p. 54). This is what self-driving cars lack. This requires a representation of oneself as an ‘I’ (Kant (Reference Kant, Louden and Zöller2010), Ak: 7.127, p. 239).

But, according to Christine Korsgaard, what really makes a person an end in herself is that only a person can face ‘the problem of the normative’. This is the problem that emerges when we recognize that there may be a tension between what we want and what would be right (Korsgaard (Reference Korsgaard1996), 93). The potential for tension between a person's emotional drives and her faculty of reason is part of what makes her a self-legislating being, a source of her own normativity, an end in herself.Footnote ⁴ Self-driving cars can have no internal conflicts for a rational will to overcome.

Virtue ethics: According to virtue ethics, the moral life concerns acting virtuously and cultivating virtues. Acting virtuously is about doing virtuous deeds. Cultivating virtues is about creating the disposition to perform such deeds when called upon. And thus, the inner life of the agent seems to have no role to play in the moral universe. Rosalind Hursthouse begs to differ.

Suppose that a person (a) performs a virtuous deed, (b) that she knows that the deed she performs is virtuous, and (c) that she acts as she does because she recognizes that it's virtuous (in other words, she doesn't act for ulterior reasons, or under compulsion). But then, imagine that, even though all three of these conditions are met, she performs the virtuous deed ‘reluctantly’ while someone else ‘does the same easily and gladly’ (Hursthouse (Reference Hursthouse1999), 125). In such cases, she argues, the virtue ethicist ‘may have to admit that the agent with the inappropriate feelings “acts morally” and acts (fairly) well, but we can insist that the agent with the appropriate feelings acts better’ (ibid.).

In other words, virtue ethics requires that people perform virtuous deeds, but (ideally) it also requires that they perform them virtuously. This latter requirement demands an inner life of moral motivation. It is the possession of such an inner life (one that can be refined over time, or left to deteriorate) that makes people members of the ethical universe.

Moreover, as Hursthouse points out, ‘The virtues (and vices) are all dispositions not only to act, but to feel emotions, as reactions as well as impulses to action. (Aristotle says again and again that the virtues are concerned with actions and feelings.)’ (ibid., 108). Moreover, dispositions are, by definition, temporally extended (Shoemaker (Reference Shoemaker2015), 437), and thus the possession of temporally extended emotions, preferences, and desires is a central ingredient of what makes people ethically significant, either because they play a role in making us ethical agents (for the Kantian and the virtue ethicist), or because they make us worthy of special consideration (for the Kantian and the utilitarian), or both.

Accordingly, Rabbi Heschel was right to think of personhood in terms of the reflective possession of (1) logos, (2) pathos, and (3) ethos. The only problem with this account is that it doesn't capture the inherently social nature of personhood. It captures personality without capturing inter-personality. To that extent it remains incomplete.

How does a being open itself up to interpersonal relations? Dan Zahavi (Reference Zahavi2015) distinguishes between three states: (1) emotional contagion; (2) empathy; and (3) shared emotion. The third, he suggests, is the key to deep interpersonal interaction. You cannot experience another person in a distinctively second-personal way (as a you instead of an it) if you cannot share emotion with them. Moreover, you cannot view another as a potential collaborator, for the construction and maintenance of social institutions (in ways described, for instance, by John Searle (Reference Searle, Cohen, Morgan and Pollack1990, 414; Idem (Reference Searle1995)), if you cannot view other people in a second-personal way.

So, what is shared emotion, and how does it differ from contagion and empathy?

Imagine that you walk into a football stadium. You feel swept away by the euphoria of the crowd. Your euphoria will not be shared with individual members of the crowd; ‘you might not even be aware of the others as distinct individuals’ (Zahavi (Reference Zahavi2015), 87). Their happiness just rubs off on you. That's emotional contagion.

Contagion must ‘be distinguished from empathy, since the latter involves a focus on and an awareness of the other’ (ibid.). Indeed, empathy is ‘a form of other-directed intentionality, which allows foreign experiences to disclose themselves as foreign rather than as one's own’ (ibid., 88). Mirror neurons are apparently responsible for generating the sensation that, when empathizing with another, you have something like direct access to their emotional state. The autistic person, by contrast, who we now know to suffer from decreased mirror neuron activity (Ramachandran and Oberman (Reference Ramachandran and Oberman2006)), often has to conclude that someone is happy by inference. They don't tend to have this sense of direct access to the states of another.Footnote ⁵

Emotional sharing goes one step further than empathy. Emotional sharing is more than two people having the same emotion concurrently. It is more than two people being aware of concurrently experiencing the same emotion. Rather, the emotion itself is structured and qualified, for each person, by the awareness that the emotion is shared. For example:

Emotional sharing has a lot in common with the phenomenon of joint attention, so much so that the former is probably a prerequisite for the latter:

Joint attention isn't merely two people attending to the same thing at the same time. It's two people experiencing the world in ways that are ‘co-regulated’ and ‘interdependent’. Most cases of joint attention in the literature focus on triangulation – two or more people focusing on some third object, external to them both. But the first experiences of joint attention tend to occur without triangulation, directly between baby and caregiver (Rochat and Striano (Reference Rochat, Striano and Rochat1999); Rochat (Reference Rochat2014)).

To the extent that this capacity underlies collective intentionality, and to the extent that collective intentionality is what lies at the foundation of our most complex social structures, as communal and social beings, we are clearly talking about some of the faculties that set persons (be they human or dolphin or what have you) apart from non-persons. To the extent that a person cannot enter interpersonal relationships, their personhood must surely be impaired.

If God is a person, I assume that His personhood isn't impaired (given His perfection). Therefore, when I ask whether God is a person, I want to know whether He satisfies four criteria: the reflective possession of (1) logos, (2) pathos, and (3) ethos, in addition to (4) the capacity to engage in joint attention (a capacity which sustains interpersonal relations). So, is God a person?

Maimonides

According to Maimonides, what we would call personhood only really emerges after ‘the fall of man’. Before they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, Adam and Eve were – according to Maimonides – purely rational, characterized exclusively in terms of logos. The ultimate values of logos are truth and falsehood. To eat from the tree was, therefore, to be introduced to the hitherto alien world of pathos, with its entirely new values of good and bad; desirable and ugly (Maimonides (Reference Maimonides2000), 1.2).

As Lawrence Berman (Reference Berman1980, 8) summarizes:

But we should ask: are the categories of good and evil really so far removed from logos, and from truth? Are there no moral truths? Is morality, for Maimonides, nothing more than a question of postlapsarian convention, a consequence of the descent into the passions?

Some scholars conclude that Maimonides must indeed have been an ethical non-cognitivist (e.g. Fox (Reference Fox1990), 181). But if prelapsarian man had no knowledge of ethics, how could he have known that it was wrong to disobey God's commandment? How could he be held responsible? Moreover, as Rabbi Soloveitchik noted:

In fact, neither Maimonides nor Aristotle can fairly be labelled non-cognitivists, nor can they be accused of demoting ethics to mere opinion. Like Aristotle, Maimonides thought that ethics could never be a full-fledged science. This is because the ethicist must respond to the contingent features of the human situations in which we find ourselves. Ethical reasoning must therefore be guided, in part, by consensus and convention rather than the a priori proofs of a purely theoretical science (see Aristotle (Reference Aristotle2009), I.3, p. 4).

But Aristotle doesn't deny that there are ethical facts. Moreover, Aristotle accepts that some general ethical principles can be known a priori. For example, Aristotle might consider it a demonstrable, analytic, a priori truth that ethics aims towards the achievement of human flourishing. But, since each human is different, it will be a contingent matter what best achieves that aim in any given situation. Accordingly, ethics cannot be a general science.

Similarly, Maimonides defines a good action as one directed towards a ‘noble end’ (Maimonides (Reference Maimonides2000), 3:25), and declares that intellectual perfection is the telos of the human being (e.g., ibid., 1:1). Far from ethical non-cognitivism, what emerges is a strident consequentialism: good actions promote the intellectual perfection of their agents (or, perhaps, the net intellectual perfection of humanity). Anything that gets in the way of this aim is, objectively, bad (Harvey (Reference Harvey, Pines and Yovel1986), 134).

At this point, Maimonides appeals to something alien to Aristotle – revelation. As Daniel Rynhold (Reference Rynhold, Frank and Segal2021) explains, God revealed to the Jewish people, in the form of the Torah:

Even the Divine law cannot trade in demonstrable truths. Its moral proclamations, in any given instance, cannot be demonstrated a priori. As Maimonides acknowledges (Maimonides (Reference Maimonides2000), 3:34), and Rynhold (Reference Rynhold, Frank and Segal2021) summarizes, ‘God can only deliver rules that will, in the long run, and for the most part, achieve [intellectual] perfection.’

When Maimonides distinguishes between truth and falsehood on one side, and good and bad on the other, he doesn't mean there are no ethical truths. Rather, the scientific mindset – which pursues only a priori investigations – can discover only their most general contours. Those general ethical facts fall on the truth–falsehood side of the distinction. But the detailed prescriptions of an ethical system, by contrast, fall on the other side. Those prescriptions were largely irrelevant to prelapsarian humans. They had very little need for the categories of good and bad, beyond the very general ethical truths that they could discover a priori. Then came the fall of man, a descent into the world of pathos, and the temptations of the flesh. This required a padding out of our ethos, applying general ethical truths to a new set of practical questions, with no certain way of discovering the right answers. This was when Adam and Eve descended into personhood.

Prelapsarian humans, by contrast, possessed logos, a purely general ethos, and no pathos. Likewise, the God of Maimonides, to the extent that words can do Him justice, has logos and a purely general ethos. But God, in His perfection, like prelapsarian humans, has no pathos.

But what about the Bible? Doesn't God display emotion in the Bible? Maimonides was committed to the truth of scripture and so felt compelled to read it in ways that respect the findings of a priori philosophy. Even if God really had an emotional life, which, for Maimonides, was out of the question (Maimonides (2000), 1.52, p. 70), we can, at least, know a priori that, irrespective of how the Bible presents Him, the creator of the universe suffers no change in emotional state from situation to situation.

God can't change because change is necessarily a transition from potentiality to actuality. In his fourth argument for the existence of God, Maimonides establishes – along familiar Aristotelian lines – that God is the unmoved mover (ibid., 2.1); the ultimate explanation of change in the cosmos. If He too were subject to change, we would have to appeal to another being to explain that change.

How then should we read the Biblical account of God's dynamic emotions? When the Bible says that ‘God has emotion X’, it really means that God's causal imprint on the world around us corresponds to the causal imprint that our actions tend to have when we are motivated by X (ibid., 1.54). Given the causal imprint that God leaves on the world, we experience Him as if He experiences changing emotional states.

God doesn't perform multiple actions, each at different times and places; rather, His one timeless action gives rise to various, changing effects in our world. Maimonides compares this to a flame which has different effects on different substances – some it softens, others it hardens, some it darkens, others it lightens, but all the while, the flame just does what it does without change (Reference Maimonidesibid., I.53).

Likewise, God knows all things, but – according to Maimonides – He knows them all together as a single item of knowledge (ibid., 3.20, p. 291). God doesn't know things by standing related to various discrete facts, say P, Q, and R. That would be to divide His knowledge. It would also make His knowledge reliant on things outside of Him – namely, P, Q, and R. Rather, God is thought somehow to know all things in virtue of knowing only Himself.

This theory of Divine knowledge, if coherent, rules out interpersonal relations. God's emotional states cannot be ‘constitutively interdependent’ upon the states of others. That would render Him a patient undergoing changes in response to them.Footnote ⁶ Therefore, God cannot experience emotional sharing. God can't even empathize. Empathy requires more than the propositional knowledge that, at time t, a given person is experiencing a certain emotion. Empathy requires a direct awareness of another, an unmediated awareness of their emotional state as their emotional state. All of God's knowledge, by contrast, is mediated by God's knowledge of Himself.

That the God of Maimonides lacks empathy doesn't entail that He's callous. As Herbert McCabe points out: the fact that the God of Aquinas (and, Maimonides) cannot suffer with His creatures, shouldn't entail that ‘God must by nature be unsympathetic, apathetic, indifferent, even callous’. Similarly, the fact that ‘God could not be a supporter of Glasgow Celtic’ doesn't entail that God is ‘a Rangers fan’ (McCabe (Reference McCabe1985), 466). This God is neither sympathetic nor callous. In fact, this God isn't too distant to be empathetic. Sympathy is a bridge between two persons, and God is too close to require a bridge:

I can see how this line of reasoning might be comforting to the believer in such a God, but we should be under no illusion: this God is not a person. However close He might be to you, He feels nothing.

The God of Maimonides has no pathos, nor can He engage in interpersonal relations. The only thing we share with Him is logos. Indeed, that is all that the Bible means, according to Maimonides, when it says that we were created in God's image (Maimonides (Reference Maimonides2000), 1.1). Like God, we have the power of intellectual perception. In that sense alone, human nature ‘has been compared – though only apparently, not in truth’ to the nature of God (ibid.). Note: the likeness is apparent rather than veridical.

According to Maimonides, everything said about God can only be more or less false (including this statement). He arrives at this paradoxical view because of his arguments for God's existence (ibid., 2:1). They demonstrate (if sound) that God is the first cause. This entails that God isn't composite. If God were composed of parts, one could reasonably ask what causes those parts to hold together. That question presupposes, per impossibile, a cause prior to God (ibid., introduction to volume 2, premise 21). Therefore, God must be simple. But whenever you say something about God – given the subject-predicate syntax of language – you make a distinction between God and God's properties. This misrepresents His simplicity (ibid., 1:51).Footnote ⁸ Moreover, to predicate something of God is to place Him under some species or genus when, as first cause, He is supposed to be above every genus and species. Hence: everything ever said about God must be more or less false.

Nevertheless, when speaking with the vulgar, Maimonides is, like the Bible, willing to represent God as a rational being. By contrast, he thinks it important to disabuse even the uneducated masses of the belief that God has a body (ibid., 1.35). Talk of God's rationality is more tolerable, even though, strictly speaking, false.

The God of Maimonides is not a person. To the extent that we can say anything about him, we can say – when speaking with the vulgar – that He possesses logos and a general, limited, ethos. That's as far as his theology can go in the direction of divine personhood.

Crescas

Medieval theology was able to take us further in the direction of divine personhood than Maimonides. Even Maimonides envisages a blissful disembodied afterlife in which only the intellect survives and enjoys an uninterrupted beatific vision.Footnote ⁹ Accordingly, Maimonides has some notion of a purely intellectual joy. So why can't God experience that joy too? Indeed, a number of classical theists believe that the joy that our disembodied intellects will experience in the beatific vision is God's own joy (Augustine (Reference Augustine1972), IX.23, p. 368).

Since God knows all things in virtue of knowing Himself, God is constantly contemplating Himself. Consequently, He is constantly contemplating completely unqualified perfection. The appropriate response to contemplating such perfection is joy; just the sort of intellectual joy that Maimonides promises the righteous in the afterlife (cf. Aquinas (Reference Aquinas2007), II-II, Q. 28, articles 1–4).

In this way, and even if Maimonides doesn't, the classical theist can make room for an emotion within the mind of God; a constant intellectual joy. Perhaps Maimonides refuses to take this route because intellectual joy, though an appropriate response for creatures to the perfection of God, isn't obviously an appropriate response for God to His own perfection.Footnote ¹⁰ Hasdai Crescas also refuses to take this road towards divine emotion, but for different reasons. Indeed, Crescas ends up attributing a much fuller species of joy to God.

First, Crescas rejects the radical apophaticism of Maimonides. God is simple, but that simplicity isn't misrepresented by the syntax of language. God's various attributes hang together so beautifully that He has (at most) one property.Footnote ¹¹ His power, love, goodness, and wisdom are all just aspects of His one indivisible essence (Crescas (Reference Crescas2018), 1.3.3, p. 109). Moreover, if a predicate applies to God, it does so not in virtue of God's instantiating some sort of Platonic universal that differs numerically from Him. God's essence doesn't hang above God – God just is what He is essentially; He is His essence. Rather, a predicate applies to God iff God is the perfect exemplar that gives meaning to that predicate.Footnote ¹²

When we say that something is wise, we mean that it resembles God in respect of God's wisdom. When we say that something is strong, we mean that it resembles God in respect of God's strength. The same is true for any other predicate of perfection. But note:

1. (1) These resemblances are a matter of degree. The Bible says that God can't be compared to any other being, not because there are no predicates that apply both to God and to His creatures, but because the difference in degree of perfection is always infinite.

2. (2) The multiple aspects of resemblance don't track multiple properties of God. God is perfectly simple, but His simple essence allows for an infinite amount of logical division into an infinite number of attributes (i.e. modes of resemblance) (ibid., pp. 108, 323).Footnote ¹³

Crescas allows us to talk about God with fewer qualifications than Maimonides. But, according to Crescas, it would still be wholly inappropriate to predicate intellectual joy of God. That sort of joy would be an appropriate response either to the surprise of discovering a new fact or to overcoming an intellectual obstacle. God never transitions from ignorance to knowledge. He is never surprised. There are no intellectual obstacles in His way (ibid., 1:3:5, p. 117). Instead, God experiences a pure joy, namely the feeling that one has in the act of bestowing love upon others:

You might think the joy we experience, receiving God's love, would be more intense than the joy that God experiences. Indeed, if we're honest, it's often more exciting to receive a gift than to give one! Crescas insists otherwise. If a predicate applies to God, it does so because God is the perfect exemplar of its meaning. The predicate will apply primarily to God, and only derivitively to mankind. Accordingly, if God experiences joy, our joy is but a pale reflection of that joy; a joy which Crescas – following certain biblical cues – goes on to describe in terms of חשק, which corresponds to a passionate, even erotic love (ibid., p. 118).

In this way, Crescas arrives at a theology that preserves the central tenets of classical theism, with its immutable and impassible God, but gets much closer to personalism than Maimonides or even Aquinas. This God doesn't merely have a causal imprint that makes Him look like an emotional being, nor does He enjoy only a rarefied intellectual pleasure. He experiences the constant and intense joy of passionate love.

For Crescas, any negative emotion – any note of suffering – would imply that things aren't right with God; that God is in need. That cannot be.Footnote ¹⁴ But note: according to Crescas, God experiences joy with such intensity that all of our emotions would seem positively mild in comparison. What God lacks in terms of emotional range He more than makes up for in terms of emotional depth. Moreover, there exist human persons with severely limited emotional range. That isn't sufficient to disqualify them from being persons, nor must it even impair their personhood.

Think, for example, of people in the midst of accute unipolar depressive episodes. They experience strong emotions, drawing only from a narrow range of feelings. A growing consensus claims that some people suffer from unipolar mania (Makin (Reference Makin2019); Stokes, et al. (Reference Stokes2020)): extended episodes of extreme euphoria with little room for any other state. These conditions don't mar the personhood of those who suffer them. In fact, there's a sense in which their personhood is rendered especially salient by their vulnerability. Consequently: Crescas's God shouldn't be excluded from personhood merely because His emotional range is limited.

Without equivocation, the God of Crescas meets three of the necessary conditions for unimpared personhood. He reflectively has logos, pathos, and ethos, but is He open to interpersonal relations?

Classical theists tended to agree that the following three things (at least, in the case of God) are identical: (1) an intellect, (2) its act of intellectual perception, and (3) the thing that the intellect intellectually perceives. Crescas could barely contain his disdain for this view. It entails that every item of knowledge is identical to every other item of knowledge, or it entails that you become a numerically different intellect every time you learn something new (ibid., 2.6.1, p. 213; 4.11, pp. 351–352).

Crescas insists, what God knows is not identical to what God is (ibid., 4.13, p. 354). How could all of the intelligibles be rendered one, and in turn rendered somehow identical to an omniscient God, and to His act of knowledge? Rather, if God knows every particular, then He must know them severally. He cannot be identical to all of them. But how will Crescas avoid the problems that pushed classical theists to their strange position to begin with? How can God's multiple objects of knowledge be rendered consistent with Divine simplicity? How can we block the inference that God is made knowledgeable by the things that He knows, which entails that things outside God are contributing to His perfection, or at least, acting upon God (ibid., 2.1.2, p. 124)?

Crescas responds as follows. Typically, an object is ontologically prior to human knowledge about it. If it didn't exist already, how could we come to know of it? God's knowledge is different. God's knowledge confers existence on the things that it knows (ibid., 2.1.4, p. 139). Humans are perfected (and acted upon) by the things that they know because those things play a role in giving rise to human knowledge, but in the case of divine knowledge, the order of explanation is reversed; God's knowledge gives being to the things that He knows.

As I understand the view, an analogy can be drawn between God's causal activity, and His knowledge. As we discussed above, God can perform just one action that gives rise to a panoply of various effects – like the single flame that causes some things to soften, some to harden, some to get darker, and some lighter. Crescas is, I think, suggesting, analogously, that in one single act of knowledge, God knows every particular. He knows them severally, and His knowledge of them is responsible for giving them their being.Footnote ¹⁵ The singularity and unity of God's knowledge is secured: in one single glance, God sees all things; directly and severally, without mediation. The things that God knows don't constitute His intellect; that would pollute His simplicity. On the contrary, God is what gives being to the multiple things that He knows.Footnote ¹⁶

God's knowledge of the changing states of particulars doesn't imply that God's knowledge undergoes change. This can be guaranteed in multiple ways. One could place God and His knowledge altogether beyond time.Footnote ¹⁷ He eternally knows all things (past, present, and future) in His eternal present; a perspective from which God can monitor all of the changes that occur on the timeline, in one single glance, without the need for any succession or change in God Himself. Alternatively, insist that God, even if He exists within time, always knew everything that was ever going to happen (this option is easy for Crescas to adopt since he was anyway committed to determinism). When God's knowledge of future things becomes knowledge of present things, God merely undergoes something analogous to what we would nowadays call a Cambridge change.

You are now reading this article. Yesterday God knew that you would be reading this article today. That knowledge entailed, yesterday, that you would be reading this article today. Right now, He knows that you're reading this article now, which entails that you're reading this article now. Moreover, it's already the case that God will know tomorrow that ‘yesterday, you were reading this article’. All that seems to be changing here, from moment to moment, is the tense of what God knows, but nothing fundamental is changing in God Himself (ibid., 2.1.4, p. 140) – hence the analogy to a Cambridge change.

This brings us back to empathy. The God of Crescas can be directly aware of a person and her emotional states. God isn't held at bay from the particulars He knows. His knowledge isn't mediated. God's only emotion may be joy, but He can be directly aware of your sadness, as your sadness, empathizing amidst His joy.

You might say that you cannot empathize with an emotion you've never experienced. But the claim is that God does experience these emotions, but not as His own. It's not that he knows them merely cognitively, through some propositional knowledge. He knows these emotions directly.Footnote ¹⁸ Accordingly, He can know what it would feel like to be you, and to feel your emotions as you do, even if He couldn't know what it would feel like to be sad Himself, since the only emotion He can experience as His own is joy. Again, this doesn't mean that God cannot experience other emotions, He just can't experience them as His. Footnote ¹⁹ Nevertheless, He has direct epistemic access to the emotional states of others, and thus, He would attain to what Linda Zagzebski (Reference Zagzebski2013) calls omnisubjectivity.

In fact, Crescas presents a challenge to Zagzebski's claim that an impassible God can't be omnisubjective (ibid., 45). Zagzebski there assumes that one can only have direct knowledge of another person's emotions if that person's possession of emotions somehow acts upon you. But, according to Crescas, that assumption doesn't hold for God's knowledge of our emotional states since the standard direction of dependence of knowledge upon the known is reversed in the case of divine knowledge. Our emotions don't act on God's knowledge. Rather, God's knowledge of our emotions is what gives rise to our emotions. Crescas’ God is perfectly impassible. Nothing acts upon Him, and yet He is perfectly empathetic.

Empathy is precisely the ability to experience a phenomenal state, but not as your own. You don't have to have had a given emotion to be able to see it in the face of another. In so doing, there's a sense in which you feel it too – but again, not as your own. We know that mirror neurons play a role in facilitating this sort of experience in human brains. For example, reading or listening to a narrative tends to trigger an offline neurological simulation, involving mirror neurons, of witnessing the events described (Young and Saver (Reference Young and Saver2001); Oatley (Reference Oatley2008); Marr (Reference Marr2011)), allowing us to empathize with fictional characters in situations very distant from any we've ever witnessed before.

Admittedly, humans can only simulate experiences that they have the neurological hardware to experience for themselves. We can empathise with emotions that we don't currently experience, and even with emotions that we haven't previously experienced, but we can't empathise with emotions that are impossible for us to feel. Consequently, Ryan Mullins fears that there's a conceptual confusion in thinking that God can understand phenomenal experiences that He's incapable of having for Himself (Mullins (Reference Mullins2020), 48).

But consider Tolstoy. Does Tolstoy know what it feels like to be Anna Karenina? I understand why we might say no. He's a man. She's a woman. She can therefore have experiences that he can't have. On the other hand, Tolstoy's knowledge of Anna Karenina (or his act of imagining her) is what brings her and her feelings into existence (to the extent that they exist at all). This might justify the claim that he knows exactly what she feels. Crescas would say the same thing about God, and with more warrant since God's far more cognitively powerful than Tolstoy.Footnote ²⁰

But even if the God of Crescas is empathetic, it takes more than empathy to be fully personal. Deep interpersonal relations require joint attention, which requires the capacity for emotional sharing. This is a step too far for the God of Crescas. He is always an agent and never a patient. When He empathises with you, your emotional states don't act on Him; rather, His knowledge brings you, along with your emotional states, into being. God's own emotional states cannot be ‘constitutively interdependent’ with those of another (which is required by the definition of emotional sharing).

Crescas’ God is possessed of logos, pathos, and ethos. He is so empathetic that He knows what it feels like to be a person. But He isn't one. He cannot maintain interpersonal relations. The theology of Crescas comes as close to divine personhood as medieval Jewish philosophy ever did, but his God is still not a person. Sadly, impersonalism generates the objections explored in the next section.

Problems with impersonalism

Personalism

What we've come to see is that God cannot be fully personal if He isn't open to the sort of interactive relationship that requires a being to undergo change in response to the states and experiences of another. But a being cannot undergo change if that being is outside time. The only way to allow for a personal God therefore seems to require that God should be a temporal being; a being in time. This type of theology is known as open theism. (Of course, placing God within time is going to raise various problems that Maimonides and Crescas sought to avoid. These problems will come back upon the adoption of open theism (see objection 3, in the next section of this article). But this merely helps to motivate the central antinomy of this article, as we recognize pressures forcing us to think of God both as personal and impersonal; as temporal and atemporal; as moved and unmoved. But, for a moment, let's put our concerns with open theism to one side. Let's instead try to get a better grasp of the view and its strengths.)

Open theists insist that God can be open to change even while being constantly perfect. Enter William Hasker, and his perfect watch:

Perfection can allow for change, but only if the perfect being – like Hasker's watch – is located in time. A timeless God, by contrast, needn't change to keep up with the passage of time.

Hasker argues that there is a reason to situate a perfect God in time, since only if you do so can God grant human beings freedom; and, you might insist, we clearly do have free will. If God is somehow outside of time, and possesses the perfection of omniscience, then He must know all things from the vantage point of His eternal present. Our past, present, and future would all be present to Him. But, if our future is, so to speak, already present to God, then the future must already exist.Footnote ²² If the future is already written, and God already knows it, then it seems as if we don't have the power to write our own future.

Maimonides tries to escape this problem with two claims: (1) God can know the future even though it doesn't exist and (2) God can know infallibly that something will happen without necessitating that it happen (Maimonides (Reference Maimonides2000), 3.20). Granted: human knowledge requires existing facts to be known and necessitates that what is known is true. But God's knowledge is different. Gersonides was unimpressed. If ‘knowledge’ is so radically equivocal that it behaves so differently in the case of the Divine, then we can have no sense of what we really mean when we say that God knows the future. This reconciliation between free will and timeless omniscience is at best a pyrrhic victory (Gersonides (Reference Gersonides1987–1999), vol. II, p. 79).Footnote ²³

Another option is to deny that we have libertarian freedom (namely, the sort of freedom that cannot be determined by forces external to the willing agent herself). This was the route that Crescas took (as did John Calvin and Mulla Sadra). Crescas insisted: although our actions are predetermined, we do have free will. He makes room for this combination of views by endorsing a compatibilist account of freedom. Freedom is the power to act in accordance with your preferences. It shouldn't matter to your freedom that those preferences were predetermined.Footnote ²⁴

What if you share the intuition that compatibilist freedom is a hollow counterfeit of libertarian freedom? Why would God reward you for doing good if you couldn't have done otherwise? Why would He punish you for sin if you had no ability to refrain? Crescas has various responses to these questions, but one can understand why a libertarian Jewish philosophy would be desirable.

To reconcile God's omnipotence, omniscience, and the human possession of libertarian free will, without the word games that Maimonides is accused of playing, Hasker endorses open theism. God is a temporal being. He decided to create a world and give people libertarian freedom. This decision entails that major parts of the future were left over for humans to shape. God knows everything there is to know, but regarding human choices, there is no future for Him to know.Footnote ²⁵ God has to wait upon the passage of time. Only a temporal God can give His creatures freedom in this way.

According to open theism, there's a sense in which ‘God is a risk-taker’ – that is to say, ‘in expressing his love toward us’, and granting us freedom, God ‘opens himself up to the real possibility of failure and disappointment’ (ibid.). God is aware of all possible eventualities and their likelihoods. At any point, God can temporarily rescind a person's free will, or otherwise interfere with the natural order. He can guarantee that His promises to the prophets will be realized by hook or by crook. But to grant us freedom was nevertheless to volunteer to be ignorant about aspects of the future. The God of open theism is a perfect but temporal being, as changeable as Hasker's clock. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, certain Jewish theologians seemed to move in the direction of open theism.

That the creation was a risk comes to the fore in the writing of Rabbi Sacks:

Rabbi Heschel tells a plausible story as to why open theism must adopt a theology of pathos. Indifference, for a being who doesn't have to be indifferent, would be a terrible vice. ‘The God of the philosophers’, he complained, ‘is all indifference, too sublime to possess a heart or to cast a glance at our world’ (Heschel (Reference Heschel1951), 244). But indifference is ‘an evil’ that renders one ‘neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done to other people’ (Heschel (Reference Heschel2001), 364). The God of Greek philosophy had to be indifferent.Footnote ²⁶ The cause of causes had to be uncaused. But the God who grants humans freedom is a temporal being. He can shed indifference, and so He must. The God of Aristotle was an unmoved mover. The God of Rabbi Heschel is the ‘most moved mover’.Footnote ²⁷

If God ever wants to intervene, in human history, He can. That God doesn't intervene more often is a source of pain and confusion (cf. Held (Reference Held2013), 180). But ultimately, the open theist is bound to see the weight of responsibility for moral evil hanging, primarily, on the shoulders of man. We should not seek to shift ‘the responsibility for man's plight from man to God’ (Heschel (Reference Heschel1951), 151). The same attitude is evidenced in the words of Rabbi Sacks:

The God of Jewish open theism has logos, pathos, and ethos.Footnote ²⁸ He is open to emotional sharing and joint attention. Prayer, on this picture, can be ‘the touch of two selves’ (Sacks (Reference Sacks2000), 78). This theology owes more to the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud than it does to Aristotle and Athens. It escapes every objection we levelled against Maimonides and Crescas above. Sadly, as we shall see, it isn't free from problems of its own.

Problems with personalism

A middle way

As Kant hoped to show in his antinomies, there can sometimes be equally strong arguments for and against a certain thesis. The question is, what to do when such a tension emerges? We have seen strong arguments against divine impersonalism. We've seen equally strong arguments against divine personalism. In this section, I argue that the tension is resolved upon the adoption of ‘Hassidic Idealism’.

We've mentioned in passing the doctrine of tzimtzum – first articulated by Rabbi Isaac Luria. His student, Rabbi Hayyim Vital (Reference Vital1999), provides the first explicit account of the doctrine. He describes pre-creation. The infinite light of God was uniformly extended, leaving no space untouched; then there was a contraction of that light, leaving a circular void; finally, a thin line of light formed a channel between the inside and outside of the circle:

Tyron Goldschmidt and I (Goldschmidt and Lebens (Reference Goldschmidt and Lebens2020)) tease out an argument from these words. On our reading, Rabbi Vital's talk of light filling all of space is a metaphor. We're not really talking about light, or spatial extension. Rather, the talk of God's light getting in the way of creation is a metaphorical way of conveying that some divine attribute or other (call it perfection P), metaphorically rendered as ‘light’, makes creation impossible.

If God has P, then there is no logical space for creation; if there is no logical space for creation, then the creation cannot occur; but since creation does occur, God must have contracted P. To complete the analysis, we merely need to substitute P for an actual Divine perfection and explain why that perfection leaves no room in logical space for creation.

Omnipotence could do the trick. Since God is omnipotent, He has a perfectly efficacious will. Consequently, any features of any object are wholly dependent upon the mind of God willing (or, at least, allowing) it to have those features. If God willed otherwise, things would be otherwise. But if all of the features of an object are wholly dependent upon a mind willing (or at least, allowing) it to have those features, then that object is an idea in that mind. So, if God is omnipotent, all objects are ideas in His mind.

This is an argument from theism to idealism. The only controversial premise (for a theist), is the following:

• • if every feature of x is wholly dependent upon a mind willing (or allowing) it to have those features, then x is an idea in that mind.

You might have a number of counterexamples ready, but I refer readers to Goldschmidt and Lebens (Reference Goldschmidt and Lebens2020) for further motivation and discussion. If the argument is sound, then God's omnipotence entails that He cannot create objects beyond His mind. And thus, either (a) God relinquishes or contracts His omnipotence, to make room for creation; or (b) the creation doesn't take place outside God's mind.

Option (a) requires God to give up, even if only for the duration of the existence of the universe, His omnipotence. But we've already discussed the troubles that emerge for voluntarily suspended perfect omnipotence.

Alternatively, many Kabbalists, especially within the Hassidic movement, endorse (b). A perfect God is self-sufficient. He doesn't want to create a world outside Himself, since He has no wants, and no such world could exist. But He can tell Himself a story in which He imagines His creating a world. The desire to do so is self-contained within His self-sufficient being. He simply wants to express Himself. In fact, it's not really a desire at all, it's merely His nature to express Himself. This He does in His timeless eternity.

God didn't contract His omnipotence to create a world outside His mind. That's not possible. Instead, He timelessly creates a world that appears to be outside His mind, but which, in actual fact, has been in His mind all along. This is Hassidic Idealism.

If God imagines Himself as a character in the story that He imagines, and if, in the story, He is the creator of all that exists outside His mind, then, in the story, it must be true that He contracted his omnipotence. But of course, this is just a story. God in actual fact is immutable. He never changes. He never contracts. He just imagines that He does, and thereby creates an imaginary world. What's true for us, on the whole, is simply what's true in the story that God imagines. What's true for God, by contrast, is what's true outside the story. Within the story, it's true to say that tzimtzum occurred; our physical world exists, created ex nihilo. From God's perspective, by contrast, tzimtzum is just a story. Our world is just an idea.

When the Bible describes God's omnipotence,Footnote ³⁷ it's talking about God qua author, outside the story. When Maimonides or Crescas describe a totally impassible God, they too describe God outside the story. But when Maimonides says that God merely manifests as having emotions, he fails to recognize that if that's how God manifests, then that's how He really truly is, qua character in His story.

Religious experiences of a second-personal nature may well be experiences of God qua character in His own story. These are encounters, within the story of the world, and as real as the world itself, between two persons in that world. Religious experiences of an impersonal nature, by contrast, may give a person a glimpse of God beyond the story.

In our world – on this side of tzimtzum – God is a person who engages in covenantal relations. He shares His pathos with prophets and grants us libertarian freedom. This is true even if there exists a perspective, beyond our ken – on the other side of the contraction – in which it's true to say that we're not free at all, but merely characters in a Heavenly tale.

You might think that we haven't really given weight to God's personhood if we only allow it to exist on this side of the illusion of creation. Surely, it's still the case, even for Hassidic idealism, that God, in actual fact, has no empathy or love for us because He is impassible and, from His point of view, we're not even real. But there are two responses to this concern.

First: there is a type of love and empathy that one can feel for a fictional creation. Tolstoy was said to cry upon realizing how Anna Karenina's life would end. So, even beyond the veil of tzimtzum, where we can no longer talk about interpersonal relationships, we can still talk about love and empathy.

Second: Hassidic Idealism stratifies reality into two levels – there's what's true within the image that God imagines, and there's what's true beyond it. Even if we are imaginary from God's transcendent perspective, and God is impassible, it's also the case that we are real within the story in which we live, and God is temporal in that story too, and, in that story, we have a relationship with Him, and He loves us. All of those claims are as true as the very claim that you exist as a person of flesh and blood. That should be enough for us!

Beyond the story, God is immutable and eternal, eternally telling our story. Inside the story, He swims alongside us in the flow of time. Beyond the story, a perfect God lives in self-sufficient bliss. Like the God of Crescas, He possesses logos, pathos, and ethos, but is impassible. He cannot and need not enter into personal relations. For that reason, He isn't a person, even if He is a mind.Footnote ³⁸ Accordingly, it will be difficult for the Hassidic idealist to maintain the robust apophaticism of Maimonides, even when talking about God in His transcendence. God in His transcendence might not be a person, but this is only because God in His timelessness and in His ontological solitude cannot enter into interpersonal relations with temporal being like us. But, in order to imagine our world into being, He must, at least, be a mind. That's the sort of substantial theological assertion from which Maimonides would recoil. Nevertheless, the Hassidic Idealist maintains, recoil or not, that beyond the story of the world, even though God is not a person, He is a mind.

Alternatively, there may be reasons for thinking that beings within a story would have certain epistemic and linguistic constraints that systematically impede their attempts to describe the reality beyond their story (much like brains in a vat, according to Hilary Putnam (Reference Putnam1982), are unable to say truly that they are brains in a vat). On this suggestion, our talk of God, beyond the story, being a mind that imagines us into being, is at best a sort of illuminating falsehood, aimed at gesturing towards something beyond our grasp (like the false but illuminating utterances of Putnam's brains in vats, stating falsely, ‘I'm a brain in vat’, while gesturing towards a truth that they cannot articulate; see Lebens (Reference Lebens2020), §1.7.1).

God within the story is a person of tremendous power, who lovingly creates lesser people, like us, with whom to commune. Beyond the story of our world, God is – if we follow Crescas – a non-personal mind, and – if we follow Maimonides – He isn't even that.Footnote ³⁹