February 7, 2026
Disclaimer: The primary use of the phrase is in various forms of philosophy, and I am not a philosopher. When I read philosophy, I often don't understand what I'm reading, and even when I think I understand it, it often turns out that that I have misunderstood it. Also, some of the important primary sources are in German, French, or Hebrew, and have not been translated. So this is a haphazard tour of some diverse places where I have found interesting usages of this phrases or similar phrase, with as much detail as I had patience to assemble.
The first naivety of the child is characterised by the attitude of trust (Vertrauen) and the affirmation of being (Bejahen des Seins). This is usually replaced by the scepticism (Skepsis) and doubt (Zweifel) i characteristic of adulthood. A subsequent second naivety consists in the overcoming of both stages, that is, in a “pious equilibrium of scepticism and regained affirmation of being.” ... “Childhood” and “adulthood” are, of course, used by Wust as analogies for a premodern and a modern attitude towards religion, respectively
In the attitude of a `second naivety,' as it were, the new encounter with ancient Judaism took place and continues to take place today among the many who, in Frankfurt and elsewhere, have followed in Rosenzweig's footsteps. It is noticeable in each case that this is not the first naivety of the child or the orthodox believer, which stands before the scientific fall from grace. This new immediacy has passed through the indirect and the mediated: it has learned from critical science what can only be learned from it, and does not want to romantically or homiletically reveal any of its (truly) `certain results'. It is free, and it is also liberated; never again will an ecclesiastical ban be able to imprison its thoughts, but — to use a phrase that Bialik once used, not entirely correctly, in praise of the youngest generation of Hebrew poets — it is also `free from the intoxication of freedom.'Simon again invoked the concept of "second naïveté" in a 1935 essay on Bialik:
(Quoted in (Negel, 2013) from (Simon, 1965). All of the translations from from Negel were done by DeepL with a little postediting. Thanks to Julia Hockenmaier and Thore Husfield for their assistance.)
In the last years of his life and poetry, [Bialik] gained a new spiritual attitude, that of second naivety. After he had learned everything there was to learn, experienced everything there was to know, and asked everything there was to ask, the world of faith, undestroyed in his innermost being, rose up in him again, and he embraced it with regained childlikeness.Simon continued to write about "second naïveté" throughout his life. (When he wrote in Hebrew, he used the phrase תמימות שניה "t'mimut shniya".) Negel (2013) writes:
(Quoted in (Negel, 2013) from (Simon, 1965).)
The theme of "breakthrough to a second naivety" preoccupied Simon throughout his life, not least for biographical reasons. While Peter Wust, a Catholic, had painfully alienated himself from the Christian faith in his younger years and only found his way back to tradition via a detour through philosophy, Ernst Simon had grown up in a secular home from the outset; unlike Wust, Simon first had to work his way toward religion. But that is precisely why he knew, like Wust, that faith achieved against all odds is not a permanent possession, but rather that it permanently carries within it the “fractures” of shattering doubts about faith³¹. It is useless to deny these fractures or to cover them up with the attitude of a self-confident convert. “Second naivety” in Simon's sense means rather to overcome these fractures again and again in the course of a reflective life practice. Simon was always aware that this way of life is not only a valid one in the secular world, but also one that must be valid for it.
For Ricœur, modernity is characterised by two fundamental attitudes towards texts, others, and ourselves: on the one hand, there is a “willingness to listen” (volonté d’écoute), and on the other, a “willingness to suspect” (volonté de soupçon). The former is best exemplified by the phenomenology of religion, while the latter by the so-called “masters of suspicion” (maîtres du soupçon) which includes Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. It is clear that, for Ricœur, this opposition is asymmetric: he sees modernity as containing a tendency of excessive suspicion, which he finds important to complement with an attitude of listening in interpretation. This is not to say, however, that he would denounce the exercise of suspicion: on the contrary, he regards it as a necessary step, but one which can only be transitional and which must be followed by a form of listening. In general, therefore, one of the main characteristics of Ricœur’s hermeneutics is this quest to go not only beyond our naïve understanding of ourselves and others, but also beyond the methods of suspicion and objectification which present themselves as the ultimate keys to the right interpretation. This motive is expressed in various ways throughout Ricœur’s writings
Ricouer stated emphatically that he was a "philosopher and a Protestant" not a "Protestant philosopher" and as far as I can determine, he proposed ``second naivete'' as an approach to interpretation of texts generally, not specifically to interpretation of the Bible, still less to faith. However, he has been very influential among Christian thinkers of various kinds. Richard Rohr (2024), a Catholic priest and writer, summarizes his own view of Ricouer as follows:
Beyond rational and critical thinking, we need to be called again. This can lead to the discovery of a “second naiveté,” which is a return to the joy of our first naiveté, but now totally new, inclusive, and mature thinking.
The phrase "post-critical naïveté" is also used here and there (e.g. in (Teeuwen 2025). It seems to mean much the same thing as Ricouer's "second naïveté".
Putnam introduces the phrase as follows:
But I later came to see that there is another, fundamentally different, way to conceive of use. On this alternative picture (which, as I have argued elsewhere, was that of the later Wittgenstein), the use of words in a language game cannot, in most cases, be described without employing the vocabulary of that game or a vocabulary internally related to the vocabulary of that game.31 If one wants to describe the use of the sentence 'There is a coffee table in front of me', one has to take for granted its internal relations to, among others, facts such as that one perceives coffee tables. By speaking of perceiving coffee tables, what I have in mind is not the minimal sense of 'see' or 'feel' (the sense in which one might be said to "see" or "feel" a coffee table even if one had not the faintest idea what a coffee table is), I mean the full-achievement sense, the sense in which to see a coffee table is to see that it is a coffee table that is in front of one.I have quoted these two paragraphs in full because I don't wish to misrepresent Putnam, and I don't understand a word of this, so I can't summarize or paraphrase it. Moreover, the article is long and discursive, and I don't find any description of the "second naivete" that is either concise or clear.There is, of course, a sort of cultivated naivete about the move I have just ascribed to Wittgenstein — the Israeli philosopher, Avi Sagi, suggested to me that what I am advocating is "second naivete," and I happily accept that description. The difference between the scientistic and the Wittgensteinian purport of the slogan "meaning is use" is stark. Taken in the scientistic way, the slogan fits perfectly into the Cartesian cum materialist picture I described before: the "use" of language in this sense is something that can be described in terms of dispositions to respond to "mental representations." If I am right about where the appearance that "How can we so much as per- ceive things outside of our own bodies?" and "How can we so much as refer to things outside of our own bodies?" are deep problems comes from, then the slogan "Meaning is use" will not help one bit if one understands the notion of "use" in that way.
However, I do have a general impression of what Putnam might be getting at. I have no confidence in this. My idea is this:
Let us say that Ann has a coffee table in front of her. Ann is sighted and awake; her gaze is directed toward the table; and there is nothing between her and the table that occludes it. So speaking casually, one might well say that Ann sees the table. In fact, she herself says, "I see the table".
Bob observes the situation, or otherwise finds out about it. Bob has never studied philosophy or cognitive science, and so his understanding is unenlightened / uncorrupted. This poor boob / no-nonsense salt-of-the-earth believes that Ann is real, that the table is real, that Ann is really seeing the table, and that Ann's utterance means that Ann sees the table. Bob is a naive realist.
Carol has studied philosophy and cognitive science in depth. She is aware, and can easily demonstrate, that Bob's viewpoint is hopelessly naive. His metaphysics is impossible, and his theory of mind is impossible, and his theory of language is impossible. Carol has a sophisticated philosophical understanding.
However, if you ask Carol what actually is going on here and what would be the right way to talk about it, that's not so simple. Carol's answer is really quite difficult to follow — for Bob, certainly, but even for us — and she admits that her theory is incomplete. Moreover, one cannot spend all day on philosophical Olympus; Carol, like the rest of us, has to get through her daily routine of eating a healthy breakfast and driving to work and the rest of it; and in those mundane settings, it is certainly convenient to be permitted to talk about people seeing things and even, perhaps, useful to be permitted to think about people seeing things.
Fortunately, at this point Hilary arrives with glad tidings. To everyone's relief Hilary explains that actually it's perfectly fine to talk like Bob and even to think like Bob, as long as you keep in mind that actually Carol is perfectly right and that that manner of talking and thinking is hopelessly naive. This is the second naivete.
Doing a search in Google Scholar, I confirmed that there is a substantial literature discussing Putnam's notion of ``second naïveté''. I hunted up one of these with the promising title ``Second Naïveté: Essays on the Structure of Experience'' by Matthew Kennedy (2006), which turned out to be a PhD thesis done at Notre Dame. I was rather surprised to find that only occurrence of the phrase ``second naivete'' in this 222 page dissertation is in the title, and that there is only one mention of Putnam, in a footnote. However, it does include a chapter on John McDowell, who is not, actually, associated with the phrase ``second naivete'' but apparently is the chief exponent of what he calls ``second nature''.
According to Marino (2017),
The concept of second nature has a long and complex history, having been widely employed by several philosophers and even scientists (see, for instance, Edelman 2006), each of whom has understood and developed it in an original way. In recent times, the most famous thinker who has employed the concept of second nature, and has actually grounded his original and indeed ambitious philosophical program (not by chance defined as “Naturalism of Second Nature”) precisely on this notion, is probably John McDowell. However, it is also possible to find some occurrences of the concept of second nature (zweite Natur) in Nietzsche‟s writings, both published and unpublished.
Later on Marion writes
The basic question at issue here concerns the distinction between human and non-human animals, and among the fundamental concepts employed by these authors in order to adequately account for this distinction we find the notions of "second nature" and "world vs. environment". Now, it is extremely interesting to notice how this complex philosophical and also scientific question, that various authors have dealt with by basically employing the same abovementioned concepts, may be somehow used as a sort of fil rouge that allows one to connect to each other such different authors as Nietzsche, Scheler, Gehlen, Heidegger, Gadamer and, through the latter‟s decisive mediation, in the final analysis also McDowell.
I leave it to others to follow this fil rouge. I did, however, look up Gerald Edelman's (2006) book Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge. He explains his title as follows:
There is nature and there is human nature. How do they intersect? The title I have chosen reflects this question and is to some extent a play on words. The term ``second nature'' usually refers to an act done spontaneously, easily and without the need for exertion of learning. I use the term here to include this meaning but also to call attention to the fact that our thoughts often float free of our realistic descriptions of nature. They are a "second nature".I see no indication that Edelman's choice of title has any relation to any of the philosophical usages of ``second nature'' or of ``second naivete.''
The “Prague” Symphony contains, in its slow movement, a further example of the marvelous fusion of the galant and “learned” that Mozart attained at the end of his life… [K 504, 2nd movement, mm. 8 ff.]… There are hundreds and thousands of such passages; they are evidence of that "second naïveté" for which only a few masters in all the arts were predestined and which actually presuppose a long life — in Mozart they are the more miraculous since he lived to be only thirty-six. (p. 155 f.)
[Of the piano concerto #27 in B flat major]: This last Piano Concerto is also a work of the highest mastery in invention – invention that has the quality of that "second naïveté" of which we have spoken. It is so perfect that the question of style has become meaningless. The very act of parting from life achieves immortality.
Sieffert explains his own understanding of the phrase in this context:
Intuitively, I already knew immediately what Einstein meant by `second naïveté' the first time I read it: our very original, `first', i.e., childlike `naïveté' is astonished, innocent, innocuous, simple, guileless, genuine, natural, healthy, trusting, communicative and often enough also original. Anyone who has children knows what I’m talking about. Many melodies of the late Mozart speak to us directly in precisely this sense, touch us in our innermost being, because they are obviously not (or are no longer) `constructed' (for example, through counterpoint, complex harmonisation, surprise effects, etc.), but come precisely from an adult composer who, as a human being, had, on the one hand, long since lost his childlike innocence (amongst other things, through his ability to reflect and his experience of suffering and loss), and as an artist had had, on the other hand, to leave his child-prodigy naïveté behind. And we listeners feel intuitively and longingly the loss of our own innocent childhood — insofar as we are at all able to maintain an openness for such deep emotional access to music.
Seiffert speculates that Einstein got the phrase from Ernst Simon, as both men were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.
There is this critical school that says, "I won't believe anything unless it is proven to me." At the other extreme, there's me, the most gullible historian imaginable. My principle is this: I believe anything written in ancient Latin or Greek unless I can't. Now, the things that prevent me from believing what I read are, they are internally contradictory, or what they say is impossible, or different one contradict each other and they can't both be right. So in those cases, I abandon the ancient evidence. Otherwise, you've got to convince me that they're not true.Now you might think of this as indeed gullible. A former colleague of mine put the thing very, very well. He spoke about, and I like to claim this approach, the position of scholarship which we call "the higher naivete". The way this works is, you start out, you don't know anything, and you're naive. You believe everything. Next you get a college education and you don't believe anything. And then you reach the level of wisdom, the higher naivete, and you know what to believe even though you can't prove it. OK, be warned: I'm a practitioner of the higher naivete.
So I think the way to deal with legends is to regard them as different from essentially different from sophisticated historical statements, but as possibly deriving from facts, which have obviously been distorted and misunderstood, misused, and so on. But it would be reckless, it seems to me, to just put them aside and not ask yourself the question, "Can there be something believable at the root of this?"
As far as I can tell, Kagan's unnamed colleague coined the phrase ``the higher naivete''. However, it seems likely that derives from ``the second naivete'', perhaps combining it with ``the higher criticism'' and that phrase was either deliberately modified or, more likely, misremembered. In any case, Kagan's description of the process by which someone attains the higher naivete aligns well with the philosophical accounts and is more vivid than most of those.
Gerald Edelman (2006). Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge. Yale University Press.
Elie Holzer (2006). "The Concept of Second Naïveté in the thought of Ernst Simon and Paul Ricœr." Languages and Literatures in Jewish Education, Studies in Honor of Michael Rosenak ed. J. Cohen, E. Holzer, and A. Isaacs. Jerusalme: Hebrew University and Magnes Press, pp. 325-344 O
Donald Kagan, (2008). The Dark Ages, Introduction to Ancient Greek History YouTube recording of lecture.
Matthew Kennedy (2006). ``Second Naïveté: Essays on the Structure of Experience.'' Ph.D. Thesis, Notre Dame.
Stefano Marino (2017). "Nietzsche and McDowell on The Second Nature of The Human Being.'' Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy, 9(1):231-261
Joachim Negel (2013). "Zweite Naivität" in Welt als Gabe: hermeneutische Grenzgänge zwischen Theologie un Phänomenlogie, pp. 259-288
Hilary Putnam (1994). ``Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Powers of the Human Mind,'' The Journal of Philosophy, 91(9):445-517.
Richard Rohr (2024) SIMPLICITY: A Second Simplicity. Personal blog.
Wolf-Dieter Sieffert (2024). ``On Mozart's Second Naïveté (Alfred Einstein)'' Blog on the G. Henle Verlag site.
Ernst Simon (1931) ``Franz Rosenzweig und das jüdische Bildungsproblem'' Published in E. Simon, 1965, Brücken: Gesammelte Aufsätze, L. Schneider. I have not found a citation for the original 1931 publication, if there was one. Cited in Negel (2013)
Matthias Teeuwen (2025). "Imagining a Second Naïveté," https://www.cusas.socanth.cam.ac.uk/imagining-a-second-naivete/
Mark Wallace (1990). The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricouer and the New Yale Theologians. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press