Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy

This page intentionally left blank

franz rosenzweig and the systematic task of philosophy Benjamin Pollock argues that Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption is devoted to a singularly ambitious philosophical task: grasping “the All” – the whole of what is – in the form of a system. In asserting Rosenzweig’s abiding commitment to a systematic conception of philosophy often identified with German Idealism, this book breaks rank with the assumptions about Rosenzweig’s thought that have dominated the scholarship of the last decades. Indeed, the Star’s importance is often claimed to lie precisely in the way it opposes philosophy’s traditional drive for systematic knowledge and upholds instead a “new thinking” attentive to the existential concerns, the alterity, and even the revelatory dimension of concrete human life. Pollock shows that these very innovations in Rosenzweig’s thought are in fact to be understood as part and parcel of the Star’s systematic program. But this is only the case, Pollock claims, because Rosenzweig approaches philosophy’s traditional task of system in a radically original manner. For the Star not only seeks to guide its readers on the path toward knowing “the All” of which each being is a part; it at once directs them toward realizing the redemptive unity of that very “All” through the actions, decisions, and relations of concrete human life. Benjamin Pollock is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He is author of articles in the philosophy of religion and in modern Jewish philosophy appearing in AJS Review, Jewish Studies Quarterly, and other leading journals, and he is coeditor with Michael Morgan of The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust.

Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy Benjamin Pollock Michigan State University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521517096 © Benjamin Pollock 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009

ISBN-13

978-0-511-50850-9

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-51709-6

hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

or Allison, Asaf, Ayelet, and Hadas

m

Contents

Acknowledgments

page xi

Introduction: The Star of Redemption as “System of Philosophy” 1.

System as Task of Philosophy: “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” I. System and the Philosophy of Rosenzweig’s Time II. The One and All III. System and the Dangers of Reduction: Jacobi’s Spinoza-Critique IV. Kant’s Groundwork for a System of Philosophy iv.1 The Unanswered Question Regarding Kant’s System iv.2 The Systematic Implications of the Kantian Subject V. Absolute Act versus Absolute Being: Fichte’s Self-Positing “I” VI. Absolute Idealism and the Systematic Standpoint of the “Program” VII. The System-Program’s Lack of Systematicity VIII. System as Philosophical Program IX. Rosenzweig’s Recovery of System as Philosophical Task for His Time X. “My Real Teacher in Philosophy”: Excursus on Hans Ehrenberg’s Early Project of System and the Neo-Kantian Context

2.

“A Twofold Relation to the Absolute”: The Genesis of Rosenzweig’s Concept of System I. The Path to a New System-Concept i.1 “System Is Not Architecture” i.2 System as Dialogue of Absolute Monologues i.3 Rosenzweig, Rosenstock, Weizsäcker, and the “Coitus of Two Sciences” II. “A Twofold Relation to the Absolute”: Rosenzweig’s “Urzelle” vii

1 14 16 21 26 30 30 35 36 41 43 48 54

61 66 69 69 77 83 92

viii

C ON T E N T S

ii.1 Nature, Revelation, and the Anamnesis of Freedom ii.2 Human Freedom in the System: Realizing God as the “One and All” in the “Urzelle” ii.3 Questions That Remain: From System-Concept to Star 3.

Alls or Nothings: The Starting-Point of Rosenzweig’s System I. Breaking Up the All for the Sake of the All i.1 Fear of Death, Particularity, and the Argument over Nothing i.2 The Particularity of Nothing and the Hope for the All: Rosenzweig’s Alternative to the Systematic Starting-Point of German Idealism i.3 The Particular Nothings of God, World, and Human Being i.4 The Differential as Determinate Nothing: Setting Out on the Path to System between Nihilism and Idealism II. Factuality as Method: The Self-Generation of the Elements out of Their Nothings ii.1 God, World, Human Being: The Elements as Systematic Unities ii.2 Elemental Stability and Instability: The Need for Relation and the Threat of Falling Back into Nothing III. Excursus on Beginning in Difference

4.

“The Genuine Notion of Revelation”: Relations, Reversals, and the Human Being in the Middle of the System I. Reversals into Relations, or, How God, World, and Human Being Realize Themselves in Realizing the All i.1 Elemental Promises in Need of Fulfillment i.2 Reversals into Creation i.3 The Factuality of Creation i.4 Reversals into Revelation i.5 Excursus on the “I” as Medium of Identity within the All i.6 The Factuality of Revelation and the Limits of Factuality Prior to Redemption i.7 Reversals into Redemption i.8 Realizing the All: Redemption and the Futurity of Factuality II. Experiencing System from the Middle ii.1 The Human Being as the Height of Factuality: Reversals, Relations, and Experienced Actuality ii.2 “Already-Being-There”: Experiencing Creation from the Middle

96 102 116 120 120 126

136 144 149 157 157 169 177 181 188 188 194 201 204 210 212 216 225 236 236 239

C ON T E N T S

ii.3 The Call to I-Hood and the Call to System: Experiencing Revelation from the Middle ii.4 Anticipating the Kingdom: Experiencing Redemption from the Middle ii.5 The Reciprocal Confirmation of Promise and Fulfillment ii.6 The Unity of the All and the Figure of the Star III. Excursus on Questions of Method: Factuality and Reversals, Thought and Experience 5

Seeing Stars: The Vision of the All and the Completion of the System I. The Immediacy of Vision as Complement to Discursive Knowledge: The Model of Intellectual Intuition II. Cyclical Time and the Visualization of the All III. Mirroring the All: Jewish and Christian Liturgical Calendars IV. Beyond Life? The Possibility of an Immediate Vision of the Redemptive All V. The All, the Star, and God’s Face: Vision and Life at the End of The Star of Redemption Conclusion: The All and the Everyday

ix

240 243 244 248 253 258 267 276 283 297 304 312

Bibliography

317

Index

331

Acknowledgments

This book began as a doctoral dissertation project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It evolved as it accompanied me through an immensely valuable postdoctoral stay at the University of Toronto, and it attained book form after I joined the faculty in the Department of Religious Studies and in the Jewish Studies Program at Michigan State University. I want to express my deepest thanks to colleagues and friends at each of these institutions for the intellectual, professional, and personal support they have shown me during many years of study. Paul Mendes-Flohr first introduced me to modern Jewish philosophy when I took his course in contemporary Jewish religious thought as an undergraduate on the one-year program in Jerusalem in 1991. Three years later he guided me through my first serious reading of The Star of Redemption, and he has watched over this project ever since, offering encouragement and sage direction along the way. The meticulousness and the humanity with which he writes about GermanJewish intellectual history have set the standard in the field for a whole generation of scholars. Christoph Schmidt’s seminars in German philosophy at the Hebrew University taught me much about how to read philosophical texts with the requisite appreciation for the ideas alive in them. I hope a bit of the excitement with which he teaches philosophy has rubbed off on this book. I still find it both ironic and deeply fortuitous that the first scholar of Rosenzweig’s work to take this project seriously was someone whose reading of Rosenzweig is markedly different from – if not utterly opposed to – my own. Robert Gibbs’s enthusiasm for this project, when it was still in its early stages, was of inestimable value for me. The generosity Bob has shown, as a reader of my work and as a mentor to me during the years since, is exemplary. He has given me renewed faith in the possibility of philosophical conversation through disagreement (“You’re wrong, but …”). I had the privilege of working with the late Emil Fackenheim for a number of years before his death, and I am thankful for all that he taught me about Jewish philosophy, and about what it means to be committed to it. It is also thanks to Emil Fackenheim that I have gotten to know his onetime student and longtime partner in philosophical conversation, Michael Morgan. Mike has been an important teacher and friend to me ever since. He read drafts of this xi

xii

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

book and offered both encouragement and valuable criticism. Without his support this book would not have appeared in the form, and at the time, that it has. From early on in this project, I imagined an ideal reader for my work: he or she would be in equal measure knowledgeable about and perplexed by the philosophical problem of systematicity, would be familiar with Rosenzweig, and would at once be so much more philosophically grounded than I that he or she would find in my book a range of weighty philosophical ideas that I did not even realize were there. Now, writers often go about their work with an ideal reader in mind. But I had the distinct good fortune of actually meeting my ideal reader in person, and precisely at the moment when I most needed his critical insight. Paul Franks read numerous drafts of this book. He encouraged me and challenged me on some of the most important questions raised in it. Conversations with him and with Hindy Najman have opened me to the philosophical possibilities inherent to academic life, possibilities that I would have otherwise never thought were there to be pursued. Markus Kartheininger discussed with me many of the questions that appear in this book before they took written form, and he read each chapter as I wrote it, challenging my reading of Rosenzweig and insisting that in my attention to minutiae I not excuse myself from addressing questions of fundamental philosophical import. Martin Kavka read a late draft with remarkable care, and with a keen sense of what I still needed to refine in it in order to realize its aims. Martin also saved me from what would have been some egregious errors of translation. Leora Batnitzky read an early draft of this book and pressed me to think harder about the consequences of what I was saying for contemporary thought. For conversations over these last years that helped me sharpen different aspects of my thinking about Rosenzweig and systematicity, I thank Yehoyada Amir, Peter Eli Gordon, Kenneth Hart Green, Dana Hollander, Axel Hutter, Pini Ifergan, Jens Mattern, Michael Roubach, Eli Schonfeld, Hartwig Wiedebach, and Dror Yinon. I received generous financial support at many different stages during this project, and I am pleased finally to be able to thank my benefactors. While still working on the dissertation version of this book, I received financial support from the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, from the Ignatz Bubis Memorial Scholarship Fund, and from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. My stimulating two years of work and study at the University of Toronto were graciously supported through a Ray D. Wolfe Fellowship in Jewish Studies and through a Halbert Exchange Fellowship at the Munk Centre for International Studies. I would like to thank the archivists of the Leo Baeck Institute archives at the Center for Jewish History in New York, and of the Landeskirchliche Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche von Westfalen in Bielefeld, for making available to me original sources that greatly informed my research.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

xiii

I wish to thank Andy Beck at Cambridge University Press for overseeing the publication of this book with patience and care, and the team at Newgen Imaging Systems for ensuring such a smooth and professional production process. I turn now to some more long-standing debts. Solomon Goldberg has been my friend and teacher in all matters philosophical since we first met almost two decades ago. There is hardly an idea in this book that he has not thought through with me (or for me). I thank my parents-in-law, Larry and Eileen Joseph, for many years of warm support and interest. I thank my parents, Scott and Karin Pollock, for their unwavering encouragement, and for teaching me at a young age that analyzing what seem to others to be the most commonplace, everyday situations always reveals insights worth thinking deeply about. I thank my sister, Annika Pollock, for her sincerity, for her song, and for helping me hone my argumentation skills (even if they still do not hold a candle to hers). I thank Hadas, Ayelet, and Asaf for filling my life with their ideas and their projects, with their antics and their questions, and for thereby constantly reminding me of the path that spans between the everyday and “the All.” To Allison I am thankful for much that I can put into words and for much that I cannot. She and I have grown up together during these years that Rosenzweig’s books and papers have cluttered my desk. I am thankful for her love and support, for her creative talents and her vitality. During the ten years I have worked on this project, through life in four different homes in three different countries, Allison has waited patiently (for the most part) for the auspicious day when I would finish this book and finally clean off my desk. I am thankful that I am at last able to do so – until next time.

Introduction: The Star of Redemption as “System of Philosophy”

his book argues that Franz Rosenzweig’s the star of Redemption is devoted to a singularly ambitious philosophical task: grasping “the All” – the whole of what is – in the form of a system. Since Rosenzweig himself insisted his book be understood solely as a “system of philosophy,” such a claim would certainly appear straightforward were it not for the curious fact that so many of Rosenzweig’s readers, from his time down to ours, have sought to locate the significance of the Star anywhere but in the book’s systematic character. Indeed, the Star’s importance is often claimed to lie precisely in the way it opposes philosophy’s traditional drive for systematic knowledge and upholds instead a “new thinking” attentive to the existential concerns, the alterity, and even the revelatory dimension of concrete human life. In what follows, I will show that these very innovations in Rosenzweig’s thought are in fact to be understood as part and parcel of the Star’s systematic program. But this is only the case, we shall find, because Rosenzweig approaches philosophy’s traditional task of system in a radically original manner. For the Star not only seeks to guide its readers on the path toward knowing “the All” of which each being is a part; it at once directs them toward realizing the redemptive unity of that very “All” through the actions, decisions, and relations of concrete human life. Now, by all accounts, the initial reception of the Star in early-1920s Germany was a source of great frustration for the book’s author.1 For while the book met with no small amount of praise, few of its first readers appeared to have any idea what Rosenzweig was trying to say in it. Rosenzweig’s Christian friends read the book and were convinced that he had finally accepted Christianity as the true path to salvation.2 The German-Jewish community, on the other hand, touted the Star as a nice “Jewish book,” taking it to be, as Rosenzweig bemoaned, “an admonition to

1

2

Cf., Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the German Philosophical Tradition,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 13–14. See Rosenzweig’s correspondence with Hans and Rudolf Ehrenberg during the summer of 1919, in Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. I.2: Briefe und Tagebücher [henceforth BT 2], pp. 634–43, as well as his letters to Margrit and Eugen Rosenstock during the same period, in Die “Gritli”-Briefe. Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy [henceforth Gritli-Briefe], pp. 349–95.

1

2

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

kosher eating.”3 Aiming to curb the confusion surrounding the book, Rosenzweig took it upon himself to clarify the character and purpose of the Star as he understood it, in a 1925 essay entitled “The New Thinking.” In the essay’s opening lines, Rosenzweig declares, [The Star of Redemption] is not a “Jewish book,” at least not in the sense that those buyers, who were so angry with me, think of a Jewish book; for while it deals with Judaism, it deals with it no more comprehensively than it deals with Christianity, and barely more comprehensively than it deals with Islam. Nor does it claim to be a philosophy of religion. How could it do this, given that the word “religion” does not even occur in it! Rather it is merely a system of philosophy.4

In the face of the misunderstandings to which Rosenzweig considered the Star subject, we find, Rosenzweig insists the Star be read neither as a “Jewish book” nor as a “philosophy of religion,” but rather as “a system of philosophy.” Insist as he may about how the Star should or should not be understood, however, we may forgive those first readers of the Star – and indeed, the generations of scholars who have tried to make sense of the book since then – for not feeling entirely satisfied by Rosenzweig’s clarification. It may be helpful to learn that Rosenzweig saw his book neither as “Jewish,” in any conventional sense, nor as a “philosophy of religion.” But for anyone who has struggled through the colossal, cryptic tome which is The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig’s definitive identification of the book as a “system of philosophy” hardly seems to clarify much of anything. At first glance, Rosenzweig’s statement leaves us puzzled: surely Rosenzweig could have classified his book in a manner that is more precise, more helpful, and – let us face it – more interesting than that! Perhaps it is, in part, because Rosenzweig’s authoritative designation of the Star as a “system of philosophy” has struck scholars as generally unhelpful that it has done little to limit the proliferation of claims concerning what the real message or purpose of the Star is. Indeed, although often acknowledging Rosenzweig’s designation of the Star as a system, scholars of Rosenzweig’s work have long sought to read the Star along different lines than those stressed by Rosenzweig in the opening of “The New Thinking,” to imagine, as it were, a different ending to Rosenzweig’s words of clarification than the one he gave it (“merely a …”). Thus, the Star has been presented as a work of existentialism that takes its lead from the thought of the late Schelling and rivals the writings of Buber, Heidegger, and Tillich. It has been read as a philosophically rigorous argument for revelation as a real religious possibility for the modern individual. The book has been combed, much as it was in Rosenzweig’s own time, for elements that might help guide assimilated 3 4

Rosenzweig to Hans Ehrenberg, March 11, 1925, in BT 2, p. 1026. Franz Rosenzweig, “Das neue Denken,” Gesammelte Schriften 3: Zweiströmland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken [henceforth GS 3], p. 140; translated in “The New Thinking,” Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 110.

I N T RODU C T ION

3

Jews back to a traditional Jewish lifestyle. The Star has been examined for how it provides the groundwork for interfaith dialogue between those of different religious backgrounds. And most prominently, of late, the Star has been hailed as a monument of early postmodernism, a work that rejects the totalizing character of philosophy’s traditional drive for absolute knowledge, and points to a new dialogical or hermeneutical or deconstructive way of thinking, a way of thinking that celebrates difference and remains open to what is “other.” For the most part, such diverse readings of Rosenzweig’s work do not ignore the fact that what they take to be the Star’s deepest insights are presented within some kind of broad systematic framework. They just claim that what is vitally important or significant in the Star lies not in the book’s systematic character, as Rosenzweig’s statement might suggest, but elsewhere. Thus Stéphane Mosès concedes, in his System and Revelation, that “taken in its totality, the [Star] presents itself as a system that somehow unfolds in front of the reader in the manner of the idealist system itself which Rosenzweig denounces ceaselessly.” But Mosès then feels compelled to add, “Yet all of the innovative aspects of The Star lie in the idea that existence could not be understood as the moment of a system but rather that it is … irreducible to any totalizing thought.”5 When juxtaposed to the diverse interpretations of the Star offered by its most astute readers, therefore, Rosenzweig’s identification of the Star as “merely a system of philosophy” presents us with an interpretive riddle of sorts: why, if the Star really aims to make a point about revelation or existence, about the limits of traditional philosophy, or about the possibility of living a Jewish or Christian life in the modern period, does Rosenzweig place preeminent emphasis on the book’s systematic character? Why does Rosenzweig identify as central to the Star an aspect of the book scholars from his own time down to ours have seen as peripheral, accidental, or even contrary to Rosenzweig’s own genuine intentions? The riddle of Rosenzweig’s designation of the Star as a “system of philosophy” is compounded significantly, moreover, when we compare it to key elements within the Star itself. For if Rosenzweig claims that the Star is a system of philosophy, he thereby identifies his own philosophical project with that of the very same “three great charlatans”6 – Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel – who appear as his philosophical nemeses in the Star. Indeed, by Rosenzweig’s own assertion, the “whole notion of system as the task of philosophy is … nothing self-evident, but rather a discovery of German Idealism.”7 But how can the Star be understood on the grounds of the very philosophical project of German Idealism which Rosenzweig so obviously 5 6

7

S. Mosès, System and Revelation, p. 97. Rosenzweig (citing Schopenhauer) to Eugen Rosenstock, September 4, 1917, Gritli-Briefe, p. 30. See Arthur Schopenhauer, “Über das metaphysische Bedürfnis des Menschen,” Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung vol. II, in Sämmtliche Werke II, p. 206, and Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, in Sämmtliche Werke III, p. 104. “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” GS 3, p. 41.

4

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

rejects in the book itself? Does the Star not begin with a scathing critique of philosophy’s quest to grasp “All” that is, a quest which Rosenzweig presents as culminating in the philosophical systems of German Idealism? Is it not precisely the systematic hubris of German Idealism which Rosenzweig attacks in the opening pages of the Star, condemning the way Idealism “weav[es] the blue mist of its All-thinking around the earthly,” the way it “denies everything that separates the individual from the All, [wrapping it up] in the fog of the One-and-All concept.”8? Does the Star as a whole not lead from systematic philosophy’s failure to quell the quintessentially human “fear of death,” through the experience of revelation, and “into [a] life” that is possible not within the cold confines of an Idealist “All”, but rather within the living liturgical communities of Judaism and Christianity? Given how puzzling Rosenzweig’s emphasis on the systematic character of The Star has been for scholars, and how contrary such emphasis seems to be to key elements of the Star itself, it is all the more curious how frequently Rosenzweig revisits this assertion. Indeed, lest one imagine Rosenzweig’s statement at the beginning of the “New Thinking” represents an isolated utterance, it is worth noting that Rosenzweig hardly missed an opportunity to advertise the Star as the system of philosophy he insisted it was. From the moment the core ideas that would later appear in the Star began to crystallize together for Rosenzweig, through the writing of the Star itself, and into the years after the book’s publication, Rosenzweig consistently identifies the Star by its systematic character. In his letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg of November 18, 1917, later dubbed the “ ‘Germ-Cell’ [Urzelle] of the Star of Redemption,” Rosenzweig first announces his arrival at “the ‘systematic.’ ”9 On August 27, 1918, as Rosenzweig prepares to begin writing the Star itself, he sends Gertrud Oppenheim an “unabashed pre-announcement of my system.”10 On August 30, he tells Margrit Rosenstock that for the duration of the war, he “can do nothing more than write my system,”11 and on September 4, he informs Rudolf Ehrenberg that he has “begun to write a book … my system, I must well say.”12 Reflecting on the “defeatist” attitude of his fellow soldiers on September 30, 1918, Rosenzweig notes that one needs “courage … for revolution-making and systemwriting”; and even after scoffing at some of the soldiers around him whom he overhears discussing the meaning of “faith,” on October 11, 1918, Rosenzweig mocks his 8

9 10

11 12

Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, p. 4/The Star of Redemption, p. 4. The translations from the Star into English given throughout the book are my own, but in translating I have consulted the Hallo English translation, and thus I cite the page numbers of this translation alongside the German. In 2005, after most of the work on this book had been completed, Barbara Galli published a new English translation. My reference to the page numbers of the Hallo translation in my notes should not be understood as a preference for one translation over the other. GS 3, p. 126. See Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften I.1: Briefe und Tagebücher. 1900–1918 [henceforth BT 1], p. 599. Gritli-Briefe, p. 136. BT 2, p. 603.

I N T RODU C T ION

5

own pretentiousness and quips, “How clever one is when he has a system!”13 On February 3, 1919, he tells Bertha Badt-Strauss that after beginning to read Hermann Cohen’s Logic of Pure Cognition in August of the previous year, he “had to stop on account of my own systematic works.”14 On February 9, 1919, as he begins to write the final section of the Star he notes, “It is indeed a kind of system that has never been given before.”15 Six months later, having completed the editing of the manuscript of the Star, Rosenzweig writes to Martin Buber to inform him that “in the last months of the war and in the first of the revolution, August [19]18 to February [19]19, the forces which had been gathered up [within me] released themselves in a greater systematic book.”16 And on November 22, 1920, Rosenzweig tells Margrit Rosenstock that “system of philosophy” is what “I always give now as answer to inquiries” regarding “the * of Redemption.”17 This book emerged out of my growing impression, as I studied the Star, that Rosenzweig meant what he said when he thus designated the Star – at almost every opportunity! – a “system of philosophy,” and that scholars may have passed too quickly over this designation when trying to make sense of Rosenzweig’s monumental work. It gradually became clear to me that understanding what this designation means offers a key to grasping the philosophical aims of the Star in its entirety. In characterizing the Star in this way, I came to conclude, Rosenzweig is not simply offering a general means of classifying his book or a directive against reading the book as a religious or Jewish text. Instead, by designating the Star as a “system of philosophy,” Rosenzweig identifies the specific philosophical task toward which his book is directed. According to Rosenzweig, the German Idealists “discovered” system as the task of philosophy, but in doing so they simply brought to light what Rosenzweig came to consider to be the fundamental problem of the whole philosophical tradition, one which had perplexed philosophers from philosophy’s earliest beginnings up to his own time. What exactly is this task of system? In the pages that follow, I will claim that Rosenzweig understood this task as that of grasping, articulating, and indeed realizing truth as the identity and difference of “All” that is. A “system of philosophy,” as Rosenzweig understood it, seeks to understand all beings both in their plurality as diverse, different beings, and at the same time insofar as they share in a single, common unity. The task of system asks whether it is possible for us to know or to recognize the individual beings around and beyond us each as uniquely particular, as unique unto itself, and at once insofar as it shares an identity in common with all others. The systematic knowledge that is the goal of the task of system would thus know what is as the “One and All,” as both a single unity and as the most 13 14 15 16 17

Gritli-Briefe, pp. 154, 168. BT 2, p. 623. Gritli-Briefe, p. 234. Undated, estimated at end of August 1919, BT 2, p. 644. Gritli-Briefe, p. 686.

6

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

comprehensive diversity. Or, if we wish to use Rosenzweig’s own shorthand, we may say that systematic knowledge knows “the All,” so long as we bear in mind how this designation conveys both the most comprehensive multiplicity (the ALL) and at once the most radical unity (THE All). This task of system demands a rigorous method that enables the thinker to grasp all particulars in their identity and difference; it makes the boldest of claims about the nature of things as a whole. But Rosenzweig will take pains to show that the task of system emerges, all the same, from perhaps the most basic of questions human beings ask themselves: Am I really my own unique individual? Am I really someone and something that no one else is? But how can I be if I share so much, if I share the quality of “being” itself, with all other beings out there? In what sense is my own personal identity intertwined with or intimately related to the identities of all other beings, be they natural, personal, or divine? What kind of responsibility do I have to myself and to these others? Is there a common goal toward which I should strive together with all other beings? How can such a goal be conceived without denying the diversity of desires and aims different individuals and communities set up for themselves? Basic human questions such as these crystallize together for Rosenzweig in the problem of “the All,” in the task of system. When we take seriously Rosenzweig’s own understanding of The Star of Redemption as a system, we thus discover that Rosenzweig does not understand “system” in the way it is so often depicted today: system, for Rosenzweig, is not some kind of totalizing force of intellectual oppression that reduces all difference, and all human individuals, to cogs in a machine, to batteries powering the Matrix. Rather, system, for Rosenzweig, is the philosophical response to a fundamental human problem, a philosophical task: grasping, articulating, and – as we shall soon explain – realizing “the All.” It is to this task that Rosenzweig points, I seek to show in what follows, when he insists that the Star be understood as a “system of philosophy.” The aim of this book is to explore the significance and the ramifications of the philosophical task of system as it is carried out by Rosenzweig in the Star. Along the way, I pursue what are essentially two interrelated objectives, one general and one specific. I aim, first, simply to explicate the task of system which Rosenzweig undertakes in the Star, and to demonstrate how the Star can be fruitfully understood in its entirety as an attempt to articulate “the All” in its identity and difference. I aim, second, to spell out, as precisely and as exhaustively as possible, the specific character of Rosenzweig’s system: its starting-point and presuppositions, its method and parameters, how it may be distinguished from the systems of German Idealism – in short, what is “new” about Rosenzweig’s systematic “thinking,” and why Rosenzweig’s system takes on the peculiar form that it does in the Star. At this point, I would like to make a few prefatory remarks about both objectives.

I N T RODU C T ION

7

The more general claim I will advance, that Rosenzweig’s self-appointed task in the Star is to know “the All” in its identity and difference, already takes what is an unusual stance within the context of contemporary scholarship devoted to Rosenzweig’s thought. In making such a claim I am suggesting that Rosenzweig’s philosophical work be viewed primarily within the context of what he understands to be the German Idealist project of system, rather than as an example of an existentialist or protopostmodern critique of totality in favor of a celebration of difference.18 I am suggesting that the Star’s account of the Jewish and Christian liturgical communities; its forays into the “theological categories” of creation, revelation, and redemption; and even its highlighting of the radical particularity of the individual vis-à-vis the All of philosophy can best be understood as serving the systematic goals of the Star as a whole, rather than as components out of which Rosenzweig constructs a critique of or an alternative to the project of system. To claim that Rosenzweig’s attention to the particularity of the individual, or to the irreducible difference inherent to different kinds of beings (i.e., God, world, human being), is an expression of Rosenzweig’s rejection of the systematic project of Idealism, I will argue, reflects a misunderstanding regarding the nature of that project itself. As will be shown, the task of system in philosophy was never understood as the task of reducing all particulars to a single unity, or of grasping particulars merely as parts of a single totality. The task of “system” which Rosenzweig claimed was the “discovery of German Idealism” is conceived from its inception as the task of grasping all that is in its identity AND difference. Now, the fact that Rosenzweig comes to criticize the Idealists for failing to grasp difference within their systems – much as Hegel and Schelling criticized each other on the same grounds – is another matter. But such criticism in no way marks Rosenzweig’s break from the project of “system”; rather, Rosenzweig carries out his critique of Idealism from within the context of the project of system itself. His critique amounts to the claim that the “systems” of German Idealism did not in fact succeed in fulfilling the task of system they undertook. Thus, to understand Rosenzweig’s concomitant drives to grasp “the All,” on the one hand, and the uniqueness of the individual, on the 18

I am hardly the first to present the Star as standing in some kind of intellectual proximity to the German Idealists, and I have benefited especially from the following works: Else Freund’s Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence, Moshe Schwarz’s ‫[ ממיתוס להתגלות‬From Myth to Revelation], Stéphane Mosès’s System and Revelation, Heinz-Jürgen Görtz’s Tod und Erfahrung, and Ulrich Bieberich’s Wenn die Geschichte göttliche ware: Rosenzweigs Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel, as well as important essays in the field written by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Shlomo Avineri, Otto Pöggeler, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Myriam Bienenstock, and Reiner Wiehl. What distinguishes my approach from that of earlier scholars, I would submit, is that I claim Rosenzweig’s affinity to the Idealists is neither the result of his particular allegiance to Schelling or to Hegel nor the result of Rosenzweig’s inability (despite his own intentions) to free himself from the Idealist way of thinking; rather it is the result of his enduring commitment to the view that system is the central problem or task of philosophy. Please see my discussion of the polemics in the field over the question of whom Rosenzweig is most indebted to (Schelling or Hegel), and why I seek to remove myself from such polemics, in Chapter 1.

8

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

other, does not demand that we supplement Rosenzweig’s quest for system, say, with his appreciation for the individuality of human existence or his experience of revelation. Instead, it demands that we come to terms with the meaning of the task of system itself as it is worked out in the Star.19 The first objective of my account of the Star as system is thus to return The Star of Redemption to the playing field of systematic philosophy upon which Rosenzweig suggests his book should be placed. We will certainly find that, on this playing field of systematic philosophy, Rosenzweig plays against the German Idealists. But I will suggest that in the attempt to understand how Rosenzweig’s thought breaks from German Idealism as the supreme, culminating expression of the philosophical tradition, scholars have by and large lost sight of the fundamental conception of the task of philosophy which Rosenzweig shares with the Idealists, a conception of philosophy’s task which Rosenzweig does not presuppose as “self-evident,” but rather takes on with full intent and commitment – the task of system. Alongside this general claim regarding the task of system which Rosenzweig takes on in the Star, the account that follows will also assert a specific claim regarding the particular character of Rosenzweig’s own system, regarding the manner in which Rosenzweig carries out this task of system, and regarding the sole standpoint out of which Rosenzweig comes to see this task as realizable. After all, while the “New Thinking” does open with a declaration of the Star’s systematic character, it nevertheless proceeds to point out that “the systematic principle of this philosophy is different” from that of other systems.20 In this context I will propose that Rosenzweig arrives at a conception of system which I will call “system as quintessentially human knowledge.” With this label I wish to indicate Rosenzweig’s rejection of the Idealist conviction that “the All” can only be grasped and articulated through a rise beyond the limits of human finitude to the standpoint of the Absolute. Rosenzweig comes to the conclusion, to the contrary, that only in

19

20

There have been a number of important scholarly works devoted to Rosenzweig’s thought which do indeed reflect on the fact that the Star is a system; see especially, E. Freund’s Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence, M. Schwarz’s ‫[ ממיתוס להתגלות‬From Myth to Revelation], and S. Mosès’s System and Revelation. I would submit, however, that the discussions in these otherwise valuable studies suffer from the fact that they do not inquire sufficiently into the question of what Rosenzweig means by “system.” It is a lack of clarity about the meaning Rosenzweig attaches to the task of system, I will suggest in what follows, that has led these and other scholars of Rosenzweig’s work to make what appear to me to be untenable claims when seeking to reconcile the systematic character of the Star with, say, the critique of totality at the beginning of the Star, and when seeking to distinguish the systematic character of the Star from the systematic character of German Idealism, viz., that the systematic form of the Star is a stubborn vestige of the very kind of philosophy Rosenzweig was trying to get away from but ultimately could not, or that Rosenzweig sought to combine in the Star the virtues of systematic thought with a truth or factical reality that has its ground beyond the system. Please see my extended discussion of the literature on this question at the beginning of Chapter 3. Franz Rosenzweig, “Das neue Denken,” GS 3, p. 141/”The New Thinking,” Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 112.

I N T RODU C T ION

9

recognizing one’s position as a finite human being within the middle of the All can the philosopher hope to attain knowledge of the All in its identity and difference. It is this conviction regarding the specifically human standpoint out of which systematic philosophy is possible, I will suggest, that leads Rosenzweig to present his system in the form in which it appears in the Star, that is, as a “course” upon which fundamentally and primordially distinct particular beings – divine, worldly, and human – step into relations with each other, relations which will realize “the All” in the redemptive completion of that course. According to Rosenzweig, the German Idealist systems fail to grasp the inherent difference of individual beings – their particularity and finitude – because they assume the unity and, indeed, the divinity of “the All” as primordial or original. Rosenzweig, to the contrary, conceives of this ultimate unity of all that is as the redemptive goal toward which all beings strive. In Rosenzweig’s system, particular beings emerge not out of a common Absolute identity, but rather out of their own particular “nothings.” Our finitude is such, however, that having emerged out of our own respective “nothings,” we remain, according to Rosenzweig, ever at risk to fall back into nothing. It is by stepping into relations with others – with other human beings in the world, and with the ultimate divine other – that we enter into a process of collective unification whereby all beings attain a common, reciprocal securing of their being and are thereby “redeemed” from the risk of falling back into nothingness. The process of the unification of all particular beings through relations, the process of the unification, that is, of God, world, and human beings, spans the whole course of cosmic history, according to Rosenzweig, from creation, through our present moment, and culminating in a redemptive moment in which all beings will have united to form “the All.” Standing as we do in the middle of the course of the gradual unification of “the All,” human beings have the ability to grasp the whole of the system – to know the All – as future, as “not-yet” what it will ultimately be in redemption. In doing so, we come to recognize the truth of the interconnectedness of all beings; we come to understand how everything that is must take on systematic form in order to be what it is – and not to be “nothing.” But in the middle of the course of the All, the human being also experiences revelation – the call or command to enter into loving relations with others which will realize “the All” that is yet to be completed. Revelation, we shall find, summons the individual to a moment of decision: to take her place in the systematic realization of “the All,” or to turn away from the relations that realize the All. It is a decision, we shall see, between “All” and “nothing.” In Rosenzweig’s Star, we will thus find, the human being is called on to realize in her concrete decisions, actions, and relations the very same “system,” the same “All,” which the philosopher can come to know. System, for Rosenzweig, thus not only designates an intellectual or theoretical task to be fulfilled – grasping and articulating the All – but also points to a concrete, practical task to be carried out in the context of everyday life. System comes to designate nothing less than the

10

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

vocation human beings are called upon to fulfill in the world. It is the human being who, by entering into relations of love with others in the world, brings about the actual redemptive unification of all particulars, the actual systematic realization of “the All.” Judaism and Christianity play vital roles, we shall find, in both the theoretical and the concretely practical aspects of the Star’s systematic task. Judaism and Christianity both serve as communal contexts within which, and out of which, the gradual advance of the redemptive relations toward the All is carried out in the world. Moreover, the cyclical shape of their respective liturgical calendars at once gives human beings a context within which they can envision the redemptive end of the system – the “All” in its ultimate unity – from their standpoint in the middle of the system. Once we recognize this task of system as Rosenzweig conceives it for what it is, we shall find, the interpretive riddles and contradictions which have long hampered any attempt to make sense of Rosenzweig’s claims regarding the systematic character of the Star cease to disturb us. It becomes clear, for example, that the task of system properly understood not only is not opposed to the “critique of totality,” but actually demands such a critique as its precondition. It becomes clear that far from being a kind of neutral, dead structure within which Rosenzweig sets his ideas about existence and revelation, Judaism and Christianity, philosophy and faith, system is itself the overarching task, the problem, that leads Rosenzweig to think about existence and revelation, philosophy and faith, Judaism and Christianity, in the interrelated form in which we find them in the Star. In what follows, I hope to show how approaching the Star as the “system of philosophy” Rosenzweig claimed it was offers valuable insights into the character and purpose of the book as a whole. One cannot deny, however, that in declaring the Star to be a system Rosenzweig at once stamped his book as eminently unfashionable. Indeed, the reception of the Star, among readers in Rosenzweig’s time and in our own, exemplifies how the very systematic character which Rosenzweig takes to be essential to the Star’s aims is precisely that aspect of the book that is least appealing, least accessible, and least satisfying to contemporary sensibilities. Who, after all, writes philosophical systems today? On the contrary, it can well be said that one of the very few things that philosophers across the analytic-continental divide have agreed upon since Rosenzweig’s time is that systems are not the business of rigorous or responsible philosophers, that “system” designates a task that is either too epistemologically dubious or too politically dangerous to warrant serious philosophical scrutiny.21 The project of system is one with which we simply do not identify today. And it may be that part of the reason why it has been so difficult 21

Cf., Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism, pp. 2–3, and Dieter Henrich’s introduction to Ist Systematische Philosophie Möglich?, pp. 9–10.

I N T RODU C T ION

11

for scholars to take seriously Rosenzweig’s claim about the Star’s systematic character is that we cannot fathom how the same Rosenzweig whom we so admire for challenging the philosophical establishment on behalf of the underdogs of the philosophical world – frightened individuals, strangers, believers, and various sordid “others” among them – could have at the same time taken on that task which has come to epitomize the philosophical establishment more than any other, a task that could hardly be more foreign to our own sensibilities. Now, it is surely the right of each generation of thinkers and scholars to decide for itself “what is living and what is dead” in the thought of the past. But when we declare certain philosophical projects dead prematurely, we risk closing ourselves off to fundamental insights and lines of questioning to which the thinkers of the past are attuned and into which they seek to initiate us, questions and insights which – if fundamental – demand our most serious attention, but which remain otherwise blocked from our view by the regnant assumptions and fashions of our own time and place. It may ultimately be the case that we have good reasons for relegating the task of system to its proper place in the museum of the history of philosophy, where the sometimes-quaint, sometimes-grand ideas of the past are safely preserved for periodic viewing. But such a conclusion should only be drawn, it seems to me, after a thorough investigation of the project of system itself. Moreover, I would submit that Rosenzweig’s Star offers an especially intriguing window through which to explore the philosophical task of system in our time, precisely because Rosenzweig does share so much of the skepticism toward the German Idealist systematic project that prevails today, because he shares our contemporary concern over totalizing modes of thought and action and – nevertheless – takes up this systematic task of philosophy and makes it his own in the Star.22 In an attempt to clarify the conception of system which governs the Star, I will begin, in the first chapter of what follows, with an analysis of Rosenzweig’s 1917 essay “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” in order to determine as precisely as possible the conception of “system as task of philosophy” which Rosenzweig believed himself to have inherited from the German Idealists. My account will seek to show, moreover, how Rosenzweig uses his essay on the “Oldest System-Program” as a means of retrieving the task of system for his own time. When Rosenzweig later makes this task of system his own in the Star, I will thus claim, he does not do so simply because he philosophizes in an era in which the 22

Contemporary philosophical interest in the possibility of systematic philosophy – across the continental-analytic divide – may be said to have enjoyed something of a revival in recent decades, and this book aims to take part, in its own modest way, in this relatively recent trend in scholarship. In the context of the growing scholarship in this area, I have found the following studies especially illuminating for my own work: Dieter Henrich, ed., Ist Systematische Philosophie Möglich?; HansDieter Klein, ed., Systeme im Denken der Gegenwart; Sally Sedgwick, The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; H. F. Fulda and J. Stolzenberg, eds., Architektonik und System in der Philosophie Kants; and Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism.

12

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

assumptions of systematic thinking still dominate. To the contrary, decades after what he takes to be the breakdown of the Hegelian system through a series of critiques – the scientific critique of positivism, the political critique of Marx, and the existential critiques of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – Rosenzweig revives the task of system as a response to the plight of philosophy in his own time. Through a reading of Rosenzweig’s correspondence between 1916 and 1918, the second chapter attempts to detail Rosenzweig’s arrival at his own concept of system, whereby he expresses the need to break from the regnant form of system in German Idealism precisely in order to fulfill the task of system which the German Idealists undertook. In this chapter, I will attend to the way Rosenzweig comes to spurn the Absolute standpoint of the Idealists in favor of a quintessentially human systematic standpoint, in which the philosopher attains a view of the whole from the middle of the system in which she stands. Rosenzweig comes to clarify this new standpoint, we shall find, through an intense exchange over the nature of system he conducted with two of his intellectual peers, Eugen Rosenstock and Viktor von Weizsäcker. We will be introduced here, finally, to the specific practical demands Rosenzweig sees system placing upon the individual in the middle of “the All,” demands experienced in the call of revelation. Chapter 3 then begins the task of reconstructing the Star’s account of the identity and difference of All that is on the grounds of the concept of system gleaned from the analyses of the first two chapters. Chapter 3 addresses the starting-point of Rosenzweig’s system in the fear of death and traces the way the human experience of the fear of death leads Rosenzweig to posit the rootedness of all particular beings – divine, worldly, and human – in their respective particular “nothings” rather than in a single Absolute nothing. In this chapter I explore how Rosenzweig’s reflections on the basic particularity of being and nothingness revealed in the fear of death lead him to construct a “factual method” through which divine, worldly, and human beings may be said to generate themselves out of their own particular nothings. Together with the logic of “reversals” we will explore in the fourth chapter, this “factual method” is presented by Rosenzweig as a rigorous systematic method that accounts for difference more faithfully than does the Hegelian dialectical method to which Rosenzweig contrasts it. Chapter 4 analyzes the path of relations the Star charts from creation through revelation to redemption, relations into which particular beings enter and through which they ultimately realize the “true All.” Here, I will devote particular attention to the “reversals” which particular beings must undergo in order to step into reciprocal relations, and to how such reversals offer Rosenzweig the methodological means to grasp the redemptive unification of the All realized by such particular beings without reducing these particulars thereby to mere parts of the All. Chapter 4 will at once highlight the position of the human being in the middle of this course of relations, and the redemptive vocation the human being is called on to carry out as part of the realization of the All.

I N T RODU C T ION

13

Chapter 5, lastly, investigates how Rosenzweig complements the discursive knowledge of the path from difference to the unity of the All as offered in the first and second parts of the Star, with an immediate form of knowledge – vision – that grasps the unity of the All itself. In doing so, Chapter 5 examines the role the liturgical calendars of Judaism and Christianity play in making the entirety of the course of the All visible to the human being who stands in the middle of that course. Chapter 5 ends with an account of how Rosenzweig indeed completes his systematic quest for “knowledge of the All” in the immediate vision of the All in the shape of the “Star of Redemption,” with which the book itself comes to its finale. Finally, the short concluding chapter will revisit the concrete, practical side of the task of system and highlight the “everyday” demands which it places on those readers of the Star who finish the book and return from it “into life.” In attempting to reconstruct the conception of system which guides Rosenzweig in the writing of the Star, I have relied heavily on Rosenzweig’s own statements about system as they appear in his published and unpublished writings. My attempt to demonstrate the way in which the Star comes to articulate the systematic identity and difference of all that is rests on a close reading of the structure and arguments of the Star itself. But in the process of working through the enigmatic style of Rosenzweig’s letters and notebooks, on the one hand, and the thorny details of the Star, on the other, I have become well aware of how many interpretive decisions I have had to make every step of the way. I have often taken certain interpretive positions rather than other plausible ones, no doubt, as a result of my own assumptions about what the task of system entails and about what it would mean to fulfill such a task. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that in order to answer the perplexing, but somewhat naive historical question with which I began work on this project – that is, what did Rosenzweig mean when he labeled the Star a system of philosophy – I have had to engage in a philosophical reconstruction of the task of system as I have found it carried out in the Star. Faithful as this reconstruction tries to be to the letter of the Star, therefore, its spirit is no doubt branded by the assumptions and limitations of the reconstructor himself. Perhaps it will not be taken amiss if I concede that I am less committed to the account I offer of the specific form in which Rosenzweig seeks to fulfill the task of system in the Star than I am to the position that system – that is, “knowing the All” – names the task which Rosenzweig seeks to fulfill in the book, and I can well foresee changing my own views regarding some of the details of my reconstruction in the years to come. My hope is that this work will do its part in showing the importance of asking the question of system in reading Rosenzweig, and in spelling out the demands such a question places on us as interpreters of the Star.

1

m System as Task of Philosophy: “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism”

n March 1913, the Leo Liepmannssohn auction house offered up for sale a two-page manuscript, a “slightly discolored” but “very interesting treatise about ‘An Ethics,’” hand-written by none other than “Hegel (G. W. Fr.), the great philosopher (1770–1831).”1 The Prussian State Library in Berlin purchased the manuscript, and Franz Rosenzweig found it at the library the following year while conducting research for his book Hegel und der Staat. Rosenzweig read this apparent fragment of a Hegelian essay with great excitement, but something about the text troubled him, too. After comparing the text first to the myriad Hegelian manuscripts amid which he was immersed at the time, and then to other groundbreaking writings of early German Idealism, Rosenzweig arrived at two bold conclusions regarding the character and the authorship of the short text, conclusions which had dramatic consequences both for the fate of the short text itself, and for the way in which the development of German Idealism came to be understood in its light.2 Rosenzweig’s first conclusion was that while the manuscript was unquestionably written in Hegel’s hand, most likely in the early summer months of 1796, neither the ideas presented in the text nor its cavalier style seemed to fit what was known about the melancholic, intellectually uncertain Hegel of the mid-1790s. “Only one person in the philosophical Germany of 1796 possessed this youthful-victorious tone”3 that pervades the text-fragment, Rosenzweig determined, and that was Hegel’s former schoolmate and philosophical brother-in-arms, F. W. J. Schelling. In all likelihood, Rosenzweig surmised, Schelling had sent or shown an original version of the text to Hegel, who, in turn, had copied it over for future perusal. The original had since been lost, and only Hegel’s copy remained. Since the existing copy was in Hegel’s handwriting, Rosenzweig concluded, the text had been mistakenly assigned to Hegel himself.4 1

2

3

4

Auction entry announcement cited by Dieter Henrich, “Aufklärung der Herkunft des Manuskriptes ‘Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,’” in Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegel’s “älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” pp. 145–6. For a concise account of Rosenzweig’s discovery of the “Oldest System-Program,” see Paul MendesFlohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the German Philosophical Tradition,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 2–4. Franz Rosenzweig, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” GS 3, p. 10. Hereafter cited as OSP. OSP, pp. 8–10.

14

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

15

Rosenzweig’s conclusion regarding the authorship of this short text on “An Ethics” sparked a scholarly controversy, at times heatedly polemical, which continues to this day.5 But it is in fact Rosenzweig’s second conclusion regarding this text that most interests us here. For in the wake of his critical analysis of the manuscript, Rosenzweig not only concluded that the assumed authorship of the text should be revised but, additionally, that the text’s received name should be replaced as well. The designation of the text as “An Ethics,” Rosenzweig deduced, was a mistake resulting from the fact that the text’s “first two words – unfortunately underlined – were taken for a title,” and not recognized instead as the last two words of a “sentence beginning on a lost preceding page.” Once this false assumption is removed, Rosenzweig concluded, the guiding theme of the text can be identified: system. The text is not a “ ‘treatise about “an Ethics,” ’ but rather a complete system-program,” indeed, a system-program which precedes by two or three years “the work which up to now has been considered … the first systematic attempt of the Idealistic movement, in a certain sense the first attempt in the whole history of philosophy, to bound the whole philosophical world between the covers of a book, Schelling’s [System of] Transcendental Idealism.”6 As a result, Rosenzweig concluded that the text should no longer be called “An Ethics,” but instead should be recognized for what it is: “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism.” In his 1917 essay by this name, Rosenzweig published the two-page text itself, together with a demonstration of his own conclusions and a determination of the position the text might be said to occupy within Schelling’s early writings.7 “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” will serve as the first station in our quest to determine Rosenzweig’s own conception of system, as well, not least of all because of its name. Before we turn, in later chapters, to a discussion of Rosenzweig’s reshaping of the idea of system, we must first understand the conception of system Rosenzweig believed to have inherited from his philosophical predecessors. And if Rosenzweig sees fit to rename this text-fragment a “systemprogram,” then we may infer that Rosenzweig recognizes the salient features of a system of philosophy programmatically laid out in this text.8 Furthermore, by designating the manuscript not simply as a system program but rather as the oldest system-program, he assigns to this text-fragment – remarkably – a degree of authority unrivaled by even the most prominent systems of German Idealism. 5

6 7

8

There are several collections of essays devoted to the debate over the character and authorship of the “System-Program,” the best of which – to my mind – is Das älteste Systemprogramm: Studien zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus, ed., R. Bubner. See also Mythologie der Vernunft cited previously, and Frank-Peter Hansen, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus”: Rezeptiongeschichte und Interpretation. OSP, p. 7. Rosenzweig actually finished writing the essay in 1914, but it was first published as “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus: Ein handschriftlicher Fund,” Sitzungberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse, 1917, number 5. Cf., Moshe Schwarz, ‫[ ממיתוס להתגלות‬From Myth to Revelation], p. 21.

16

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Rosenzweig’s title implies that we have in this recovered manuscript, if only in fragmentary form, nothing less than the first articulation of the idea of system, the first identification of system as the task of philosophy in German Idealism, and “in a certain sense,” in the entire history of philosophy. The title of Rosenzweig’s essay thus leads us to believe that we may expect to find in Rosenzweig’s own analysis of this two-page text an explanation of what it means – or what it first meant – for system to be the task of philosophy. As we shall discover, this expectation will be fulfilled only in the most unexpected way. The two-page “Oldest System-Program” will reveal to us what it means for system to be the task of philosophy, but it will do so just as much through its systematic failings as it will through its achievement. In fact, the title Rosenzweig assigns to the manuscript not only reflects his insight into the way this text projects the idea of system, but also reflects his recognition of the ways the text does not: the manuscript is not a “system,” but merely a “system-program,” and it presents not the “original” concept of system, but only the “oldest” system-program. We will thus assert, in this chapter, that what Rosenzweig understands as the definitive idea of system in German Idealism can best be revealed by grasping not only the way in which Rosenzweig identifies the notion of system in this text, but also the way in which he finds this notion of system missing. And so we turn to Rosenzweig’s essay, “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” with several questions in mind, in order to discover that definitive idea of system which Rosenzweig identifies as somehow lying hidden in the two “slightly discolored” pages which the Prussian State Library acquired from the Liepmannssohn auction house in 1913. We ask: What does Rosenzweig understand by the notion of system? What does it mean for this two-page manuscript to be a system-program? What degree of originality is granted to this text when Rosenzweig declares it to be the oldest program for a system in German Idealism? How does system define German Idealism over against the rest of the history of philosophy? And finally, what is the significance of the idea of system for Rosenzweig’s own time?

I. System and the Philosophy of Rosenzweig’s Time We begin, actually, with the last question. For before attempting to grasp the meaning of the idea of system which Rosenzweig discovers in the “Oldest SystemProgram,” one might rightfully question the relevance of an idea such as system for the philosophical era in which Rosenzweig comes of age. Indeed, at first glance, no question seems more foreign to the philosophical mood of Rosenzweig’s time than the question of system. If anything unites the disparate philosophical movements which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the movements of positivism and scientism, of neo-Kantianism, of historicism, and of the

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

17

various philosophies of life and of Weltanschauung – it would seem to be precisely the struggle against system.9 Everywhere, it seemed, the particular was held up against the presumptuous totality of the Hegelian system, whether that particular was the particular empirical results of scientific research, the particular rigors of method and epistemology as divorced from the imprecise claims of metaphysics as a whole, the particular value of any given historical era, or, simply, the unique irreducible life-perspective of the particular human being. This struggle against the unity of the system, moreover, often pitted one particular fragment of the system against the other: Weltanschauung philosophers and life-philosophers accused positivists and neo-Kantians of losing sight of the basic questions of human existence in their insistence on the rigors of method and research; neo-Kantians and positivists accused life-philosophers and Weltanschauung-philosophers of being romantic enthusiasts and not philosophers. Thus not only had the absolute subject-object totality of Hegel’s system broken apart by the beginning of the twentieth century, but subject and object themselves had broken up into numerous mutually opposed subjects and objects, each declaring the subject-matter of philosophy, and the practice of philosophy itself, to be something different.10 Into this fragmented state of philosophical affairs surrounding him, Rosenzweig makes the following surprising claim. “Outlasting the overthrow of the Hegelian system,” he asserts, toward the end of the “Oldest System-Program,” “was the common conviction formed in it, that it is the task of philosophy somehow to come to a system.”11 Rosenzweig’s claim regarding the persistence of the idea of system seems most curious when weighed against the prevailing philosophical trends of his time. If we examine the claim closely, however, it does much to illuminate the kind of philosophical baggage which Rosenzweig believed his own time to have inherited from the era of German Idealism. According to Rosenzweig’s statement, what lives on after the period of German Idealism is not a specific completed system, for instance, the Hegelian – to be accepted or discarded – but rather the conviction that system is “the task of philosophy.” Strangely enough, Rosenzweig implies, what lies behind the countless contemporary philosophical attempts to overthrow Hegel’s system, indeed, what may in fact justify such an overthrow, is none other than a tacit agreement with Hegel that it is philosophy’s task somehow to become system. As Rosenzweig goes on to show, however, while contemporary philosophy continues to reflect the conviction that philosophy must become system, it does so only in the most confused, fragmented way. Only in this current situation in which 9

10

11

For an account of the philosophical change in attitude toward the notion of system as task resulting from the development of the empirical sciences, see the chapter “Science” in Herbert Schnaedelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, pp. 66–108. On the turn-of-the-century “identity crisis” in philosophy, see Schnaedelbach, p. 92. Cf., Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, pp. 21–30. OSP, p. 41.

18

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the completed system of Hegel has been overthrown, but yet the task of system has been preserved, Rosenzweig claims, could ideas gain credence such as that it is incumbent upon philosophy to do nothing but grasp together the “results of the individual sciences.” Even the call “back to Kant,” which became audible with the overthrow of the Hegelian system, was accompanied by assurances that a new, better-secured system would be attained through critical consciousness again in the future. And only since then have the philosophical individual-investigations become accustomed to finding their own justification in that somehow – be it still far away – they “prepare” the future system; indeed, the doubt is raised whether individual investigations as such are scientifically admissible in philosophy. Now, this whole notion of system as the task of philosophy that lies at the ground of these different views is, as said, nothing self-evident, but rather a discovery of German Idealism.12

If the state and direction of contemporary philosophy present a confused picture, Rosenzweig suggests, there is a common ground that rests beneath its myriad views, and this ground is none other than the “notion of system as the task of philosophy,” that task which was “discovered” by German Idealism. But as Rosenzweig describes in this passage, the relationship of contemporary philosophy to this ground is itself vague and ambivalent, and this vague and ambivalent relationship is reflected by the different contemporary philosophical trends in different ways. Scientism and positivism debase the majestic if presumptuous idea that system is the task of philosophy by claiming that the only job left for philosophy is to hold together the different branches of empirical science.13 Neo-Kantianism, on the other hand, does assert the need to attain a more secure and methodologically sound system than Hegel’s; indeed, neo-Kantians find the justification for their “return” to Kantian “critical consciousness” on the very grounds of the quest for system. But at the same time, neo-Kantianism pushes this “system” off into the future, losing the sense of the immediacy of this philosophical task beyond the horizon of epistemological questions raised for the present.14 Finally, the idea of 12 13

14

Ibid. Wilhelm Wundt attributes to Comtean positivism the view that “the task [of philosophy] remains to set together the results of the individual sciences” but himself defines philosophy “as the universal science which has to unify into a contradiction-free system the universal knowledge mediated through the individual sciences,” W. M. Wundt, System der Philosophie, pp. 15, 17. See also the ending of Wilhelm Windelband’s Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 552: “[Philosophy] can only live on as the doctrine of universally-valid values. It will no longer force itself into the work of the individual sciences. … It has neither the ambition to want to know once again from its side what these have known, nor the desire to patch together a most universal structure out of the ‘more universal individual results’ of the particular disciplines.” Rosenzweig is likely alluding here to the editors’ introduction to the inaugural volume of the neoKantian journal for the philosophy of culture, Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, 1 (1910), p. v: “Our time does not stand under the rule of a system of philosophy, but rather it has its meaning more in the manifoldness and subtlety of philosophical minute-work, which however only reveal their ultimate meaning in the formation of a system. As preparation and

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

19

system remains present – but only vaguely so – as the bogeyman for all those who philosophize from out of the individual standpoint, haunting their consciences with the doubt that their thoughts are not philosophically sound, leading them to justify their philosophizing through the claim that they actually “prepare” some future system, remote as it may be.15 Rosenzweig implies that all these philosophical movements, different as they may be from one another, share two important characteristics: they all share, as the ground of their disparate views of philosophy, the notion that system is the proper task of philosophy, and they all share an unclear representation of or relation to this ground of their view of philosophy. A sharp critique of the prevailing movements of contemporary philosophy can thus be drawn from Rosenzweig’s words: in its repeated attempts to overthrow the Hegelian system, contemporary philosophy has not succeeded in freeing itself from the basic view of the task of philosophy which Hegel put forth; rather it has only succeeded in obscuring the nature of that task. Philosophy in Rosenzweig’s time is still grounded in the same fundamental conviction which pervaded German Idealism system is its task. But contemporary philosophy no longer understands the meaning of this task, and certainly no longer dares to fulfill it. Instead, the task of system in Rosenzweig’s own time is either projected far into the future, or reduced, in the present, to the menial job of holding the sciences together. Thus, even before we have examined what Rosenzweig understands by the notion of “system” in the “Oldest System-Program,” Rosenzweig’s reflections here shed significant light on the impact that a discovery of an “oldest system-program” would have upon the state of philosophy in Rosenzweig’s own time. For if contemporary philosophy is determined by the task of system, and if it suffers, at the same time, from an unclear understanding of this task, then the discovery of the earliest expression of this task in the short program written in Hegel’s hand would be more than a simple scholarly find: it would represent the discovery of the source of the

15

underpinning for this, there is required a philosophical penetration of the most different realms of culture.” Edmund Husserl whose classic “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” appeared in that first volume of Logos, likewise expressed his conviction that philosophy must become rigorous science “precisely in this place, in the beginnings of Logos which … wants to prepare the ground for the future ‘system’ of philosophy” (p. 291). I have taken Rosenzweig’s reference to “philosophical individual investigations” to mean something like the philosophizing out of the individual standpoint popular in Rosenzweig’s time in the form of the philosophy of life or of worldview. I am unsure of this interpretation. It is supported, on the one hand, both by Rosenzweig’s comment at the very end of the “Oldest System-Program” to the effect that the notion of system stamps “all enthusiastic philosophizing on that side, and all aphoristic philosophizing on this side as in principle unscientific” (OSP, p. 44) and by the fact that in the Star Rosenzweig identifies the central problem facing the worldview philosophy embodied by Nietzsche to be its questionable scientific character. But Rosenzweig may also intend here simply the contemporary philosophical vogue of abandoning the attempt to achieve system in philosophy in favor of specialized philosophical investigations, exemplified in the editorial introduction to Logos cited in the previous note.

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

20

very conception of philosophy which vaguely governs Rosenzweig’s own time. It would thereby offer the possibility of clarifying that ruling notion of philosophy which has at once become unclear, the possibility of recovering the meaning of the philosophical task which lies hidden at the ground of the different contemporary views of philosophy. Rosenzweig thus shows us that the very question about the meaning of system which seemed, at first glance, to be least relevant to the philosophical mood of his time is in fact most vital. The purpose of philosophy has become unclear; what remains is a vague, haunting sense that philosophy must become system; what is required is a reacquaintance with the meaning of system as the task of philosophy. This reacquaintance demands a return to the beginnings of German Idealism, for it is here that “the task of philosophy was fixed in a new way”; and yet, Rosenzweig claims, this fixing of the task of philosophy anew is carried out by German Idealism “in connection with … the whole development” of the history of philosophy “up until then.”16 Indeed, as we noted earlier, Rosenzweig asserts that the “notion of system as the task of philosophy” is the “discovery of German Idealism.” Idealism “discovers” system as its proper task – it neither invents this task out of nowhere nor inherits it from the past, but rather the Idealists are the first to uncover that task of philosophy which has always been implicit or hidden within the history of philosophy. Thus Rosenzweig asserts, “only here [i.e., in German Idealism] the idea attained form which had been hidden, since its first design, in that short statement which stands at the beginning of western intellectual history: that ‘all’ ‘is’ water.”17 The notion that system is the task of philosophy stands in the very first utterance of ancient philosophy, but it stands there hidden, according to Rosenzweig, and it remains hidden over the course of the entire history of philosophy until the German Idealists discover it some 2,500 years later and give it articulate form. If this is the case, then the document in which the discovery of the task of system is first recorded, “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” would represent not merely the first articulation of a new conception of the task of philosophy inaugurated by the Idealists, but rather the first articulation of the most original task of philosophy. The “Oldest System-Program” would represent for Rosenzweig that moment in the history of philosophy in which the meaning of the entire philosophical tradition comes to light, in which the task of system hidden in its first words becomes explicit for philosophical consciousness. Given the amount of time it took philosophy to attain clarity regarding its true task, it is perhaps no surprise that the decades following the decline of the popularity of Idealism returned this task to obscurity. But the discovery of a 16 17

OSP, p. 44. OSP, p. 41.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

21

hitherto-unknown “oldest” system-program by Rosenzweig makes a recovery of this moment of clarity possible. System as task of philosophy can become clear once again, if Rosenzweig can discover the meaning of system anew in the “Oldest System-Program” itself. Our task is to show how Rosenzweig does so.

II. The One and All It may be worth noting, first of all, where Rosenzweig chooses to define the idea of system in his essay on the “Oldest System-Program.” Rosenzweig does so, in fact, only at the very end of the essay, after he has presented the system-program itself and his conclusions regarding its authorship and its position within Schelling’s early writings. One might justly ask how Rosenzweig expects his readers to recognize the “system” in the system-program if Rosenzweig only defines system for them at the end of the article. Such a recognition of system would seem to be made possible, ironically, through the same vague sense of system which Rosenzweig identifies as grounding the present-day conception of philosophy. Everyone, Rosenzweig seems to imply, has some notion of what system is. The task of Rosenzweig’s essay, as we have suggested, is to lead his readers from this vague sense of the meaning of system back to its “oldest” meaning, and the order of the article follows this very scheme: Rosenzweig assumes a vague sense of system at the beginning of the article and defines system precisely only at the article’s end, after he has derived this precise meaning from his analysis of the two-page system-program itself. Rosenzweig does in fact allude to the vague, common sense of system at the very beginning of his article, in a passage that we have already encountered. Before Rosenzweig has even questioned the authorship of the text, he suggests that the character and the dating of the manuscript in Hegel’s handwriting would imply that herein lies “a program for a system” written two to three years before that work which has been considered up to now to be “the first systematic attempt of the idealistic movement … to bound the whole philosophical world between the covers of one book, Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism.”18 Here Rosenzweig points playfully to the most generally accepted sense of the aim and scope of systems of philosophy: systems seek to grasp everything! Systems have the presumption to collect and to order all knowledge, “the whole of the philosophical world” within one volume or, as the case may be, within one set of volumes. Whether one praises systematic philosophy as the only “scientifically admissible” philosophy or indicts it on charges of swallowing up particularity and diversity within its totalizing walls, both the merit and the dangers assigned to philosophical systems seem to rest on just this claim to unity and comprehensiveness. Systems seek to unify the “whole” of philosophy, they seek to reveal knowledge as grasping what is both as a totality 18

OSP, p. 7.

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

22

or an “All” (“whole of the philosophical world”) and as something singular (“one book”), as “One.” Such is the vague, but playfully accessible meaning of system that Rosenzweig articulates at the very beginning of his essay. That this vague meaning of system already points to the true, more precise meaning of system in German Idealism becomes clear only in the closing section of the article, when Rosenzweig reflects on the very historical significance of the system-program which we have observed. Rosenzweig writes: So we really grasp in our program the moment in the history of philosophy where for the first time knowledge of the ultimate truth grew together with knowledge of the whole [of] actuality. Being [das Sein] and that which is [das Seiende] become one united-single problem, stamping all enthusiastic philosophizing on that side, and all aphoristic philosophizing on this side as in principle equally unscientific.19

Rosenzweig here repeats his claims regarding the historical significance of the discovery of system. He reiterates both the significance of the “oldest systemprogram” in relation to the history of philosophy which precedes it, and the way in which the notion of system still haunts contemporary forms of philosophy – the “enthusiastic” and “aphoristic” philosophies of life and of Weltanschauung – with doubts as to their scientific character. But Rosenzweig also sets forth, in this passage, a definition of the idea of system itself. He formulates the meaning of system in two ways. The moment in which system is revealed as the task of philosophy is, according to Rosenzweig, the moment in which knowledge of the ultimate truth grows together with knowledge of the whole of actuality, or, alternatively, the moment in which Being [das Sein] and that which is [das Seiende] become one united philosophical problem. To explain Rosenzweig’s definition, here, we might begin by noting what this more precise definition shares in common with the vague sense of system with which Rosenzweig begins his essay: in both cases, system seeks to grasp the whole. In our present passage, the whole is the “whole actuality” which has “grown together” with the most traditional object of the philosophical quest, the ultimate truth. Rosenzweig thus suggests that what distinguishes the task of systematic philosophy over against prior conceptions of philosophy is, first of all, its view of the relationship between truth and actuality. The notion that system is the proper task of philosophy implies that truth is not wholly transcendent to actuality; it is not to be pursued through the negation of the world, or through a springboarding away from the actual to a realm of ideas. Truth is to be grasped, rather, only in its interconnection with the whole of actuality. What this unification of the “ultimate truth” and the “whole actuality” implies is further disclosed in Rosenzweig’s second formulation of the meaning of system. According to this formulation, Rosenzweig suggests that systematic philosophy is 19

OSP, p. 44.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

23

not content to inquire solely into the problem of Being, it does not seek merely the single all-embracing concept that encompasses and is common to everything that “is,” but rather, it seeks to grasp the particular which is as such [das Seiende] as well, and it seeks to grasp this particularity together with the unity of the concept of Being. The notion of system thus implies, according to this second formulation, the unification of the question of Being, on the one hand, and of the question of the diversity of particular beings, on the other. System inquires into the unity that holds between the Being which is identical for all that is and the unique difference inherent to each particular being. Thus, what emerges from Rosenzweig’s two concise formulations is in fact a rather precise notion of the task of system. System seeks to grasp the ultimate truth of Being together with the “whole” of actuality, and this whole of actuality is itself not something singular; rather it is a complete collection of particular beings. What discloses itself within the framework of system is the interconnectedness of the one truth with all the particulars of actuality. A system of philosophy is hence nothing less than knowledge of the “One and All” as such and in their interconnectedness; it is the philosophical unification of the conceptual identity which is common to all that is together with the unique difference of each actual particular: system is the unity of the One and All, of identity and difference.20 When we recognize Rosenzweig’s determination of the meaning of system as knowledge of the “One and All,” then we can also recognize the way in which this meaning was already foreshadowed in Rosenzweig’s first loose depiction of system as the attempt to fit the “whole philosophical world” within one book, for here, already, one recognizes the task of system indistinctly as the unity of unity and multiplicity, of the “whole” and “one.” More importantly, when we identify system as knowledge of the One and All, we can also understand how Rosenzweig finds the notion of system embedded within the philosophical tradition, ever-present yet “undiscovered” since its first utterance. In a passage that we examined as separate statements earlier, Rosenzweig points to the presence of the notion of system stretching from his own time all the way back to the time of the pre-Socratics. That passage, in its entirety, reads as follows: Now, this whole notion of system as the task of philosophy that lies at the ground of these different views is, as said, nothing self-evident, but rather a discovery of German Idealism. Only here the idea attained form which had been hidden, since its first design, in that short sentence which stands at the beginning of western intellectual history: that “all” “is” water. Since then, the task of all philosophy has been not just

20

For an alternative interpretation of these lines from the “Oldest System-Program,” see Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, p. 24. See also, Ulrich Bieberich, Wenn die Geschichte göttlich wäre: Rosenzweigs Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel, pp. 60–1; Myriam Bienenstock, “Auf Schellings Spuren im Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung,”, p. 277.

24

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

to express the unity of the whole Being [Sein] but rather to determine it somehow through intertwining with that which is [mit dem Seienden].21

The task of system, Rosenzweig asserts here, is “hidden” in that short sentence which begins the history of philosophy, for Thales’ statement already suggests the fundamental connection (“is”) between the “unity of the whole Being,” that is, “all,” and something particular in actuality, that is, water, and it already thereby declares the task of philosophy to be the grasping of this connection. But Rosenzweig is careful to point out that this task is only “hidden” in Thales’ statement. Thales does not posit the unification and interconnection of the “One” Being with “All” particulars, but instead declares “All” of what is to be determinable by one particular being. The multiplicity of the “All” undergoes a transformation over the course of Thales’ statement through the singular “is”: once “All” is determined as something that “is,” it no longer represents the multiplicity of beings, or the complete collection of all particulars, but rather the all-embracing name for the one “whole Being,” which Thales then declares to be equivalent to water.22 The hiddenness of the notion of system in Thales’ statement is thus reflected in the very ambiguity and malleability of the term “All” itself. For the word “All” can imply both multiplicity – indeed, the most wide-ranging multiplicity possible – and unity; it includes all beings, but it is something singular: it is “the All.” The term “All” can in fact encompass within itself both the One and All whose unification is sought in the task of system, for All is both singular and comprehensively plural: it is itself One and All. One might suggest, therefore, that we shorten our designation of the task of system; we need not say that system seeks knowledge of the One and All, but simply that it seeks knowledge of the All. But the problem is that the term “All” also contains the possibility of meaning only singularity or only multiplicity. It can be understood merely as a singular All over against the multiplicity of particular beings, or as the multiplicity of All beings over against the one Being in which they all participate. Both the ambiguity of the term “All” and the specific direction in which Thales pulls the term are highlighted in Rosenzweig’s citation of Thales: he sets the “all” and the “is” in separate quotations. By so doing, Rosenzweig indicates the fact that “all,” which is cited by Rosenzweig without any definite article [“alles”], need not be understood as something singular [i.e., das All], but it is understood this way by Thales, who declares that all “is” water. 21 22

OSP, p. 41. See Aristotle, Metaphysics A3, 983b: “Most of the first philosophers thought that principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things; for the original source of all existing things, that from which a thing first comes-into-being and into which it is finally destroyed, the substance persisting but changing in its qualities, this they declare is the element and first principle of existing things. … Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says that it is water,” cited in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield eds., The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, pp. 88–9.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

25

The idea of system is thus “hidden” in the first statement of the history of philosophy, but embedded within this first statement is also the first corruption of the idea of system, and the reason why this idea had to be “discovered” some 2,500 years later. Thales projects the idea of system insofar as he asserts that the truth about being can only be grasped as the union of a conceptual unity and particularized actuality. But he hides this idea insofar as he determines “All” being to be one thing to the exclusion of “all” others, by declaring that “All” “is” water. What is remarkable is that the reduction of “All” that is to one thing in Thales’ statement not only hides the idea of system, so that it must be discovered by German Idealism, but also foreshadows the very criticism brought against system itself after it becomes the ruling conception of the task of philosophy. Thus it is claimed that system by definition ignores or destroys or excludes the uniqueness of each particular by declaring All that is to be One. We may suggest, therefore, that the true idea of system, of a knowing which grasps the One and All, the unity and difference of what is as such and in their interconnection, always carries with it the possibility of hiding itself, of being corrupted into a reduction of All beings to One, of excluding difference through an overeager elevation of the identity which holds together All that is. We thus find the whole problematic character of the task of system already revealed in the term “All,” in what Rosenzweig takes to be the first word of the first statement in the history of philosophy. For if the “All” is grasped in its broadest sense, then knowledge of All represents the highest aim of all philosophy which understands its task as system: the comprehensive and ramified knowledge of the One and All as such and in their interconnection. At the same time, however, the moment the All is taken up, one-sidedly, as the All, as something singular, then it runs the risk of reducing All that is to One thing or one concept, of celebrating the identity of all things at the cost of negating their inherent particularity. Alternatively, if “All” is grasped solely as multiplicity, and not as both unity and multiplicity, then knowledge of All becomes the task of collecting a mere aggregate of particulars: that is, it becomes the very same “holding together of the individual sciences” to which the task of system has been reduced by scientism in Rosenzweig’s time.23 As we shall see, Rosenzweig will take advantage of this multivalence of “knowing the All” in the opening of The Star of Redemption, using the phrase in its broadest sense to designate the very systematic task of the Star itself, and in its narrow, reductive sense to designate what he comes to see as the failings of the attempts at system which precede him. One might surmise that it was precisely a recognition of the pitfalls into which the task of system risks falling, of the dangers inherent to the philosophical unification of the one ultimate truth with the whole of particularized actuality, which 23

Cf. Bambach, p. 27. See also, Section IV.A in this chapter on Kant regarding the difference between grasping the totality of knowledge as a system or as an aggregate.

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

26

led ancient philosophy to pass over or to reject system as the task of philosophy. Whatever the reason, however, it is clear to Rosenzweig that the notion of system as the proper task of philosophy is absent for the ancients. In Plato, for example, particular “realities are always only starting-points in order to advance to the Ultimate [Truth].”24 On the whole, Rosenzweig asserts, the great ancient thinkers, who have often been compared to the German Idealists as the systematizers of antiquity, are in no way systematizers in the sense which the word has taken on over the last hundred years. Because it did not strike them that a path must lead from the ultimate truth to an understanding of the totality of the actual.25

Despite the fact that common usage may refer to the ancients as systematic thinkers, that one often hears reference to the “philosophical systems” of Plato or Aristotle, Rosenzweig explains, the notion of system as the task of philosophy has only taken on its proper meaning since that meaning was “discovered” by German Idealism. The ancients did not possess the notion of system that we have come to understand with Rosenzweig’s aid, the notion that the one truth and the totality of what is actual, the One and the All, must be grasped in their interconnection. The first signs of the surfacing of this notion of system had to await the beginning of the modern period.

III. System and the Dangers of Reduction: Jacobi’s Spinoza-Critique Rosenzweig’s designation of the task of system as the attempt to grasp the One and All of what is, as the attempt to unify the investigation of Being in general together with the investigation of beings in their particularity, has a further implication to which we must now point. One may state this implication as follows: the task of grasping what is both in its unity and as a totality of particulars demands that one grasp not only the difference inherent to every particular being as such, but also the different kinds of particular beings which make up the manifold of what is. Over the course of the history of philosophy leading up to German Idealism a general agreement emerged regarding the nature and the number of the basic kinds of beings. All beings were divided into three fundamental kinds – divine being, physical being, and human souls, or, roughly speaking, God, world, and selves – as a result of which the philosophical study of Being was traditionally divided between a “general metaphysics,” which treated “Being as such,” and three distinct but interconnected fields of “special metaphysics”: theology, cosmology or physics, and psychology. This traditional division of the philosophical investigation of Being had roots reaching as far back as Plato and Aristotle, attained 24 25

OSP, p. 41. Ibid.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

27

dominance during the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, and received its classical modern articulation in the metaphysics of Christian Wolff, who asserts, “There are three parts of philosophy. One part treats of God, another part treats of human souls, and the third part treats of bodies or material things. We do not know any other beings except God, human souls, and bodies. Therefore, since we are aware of only these three genera of beings, there cannot be more than three parts of philosophy.”26 In the light of this recognition of God, world, and human selves as the three fundamental kinds of Being, anyone seeking to give a systematic presentation of the unity of Being together with the totality of particular beings would thus have to give an account not only of the nature of unity and particularity as such and in their interconnection, but also of the particular natures of the three different kinds of beings themselves in their identity and difference. The task of system hence demanded that one attain knowledge of God, world, and the human self, each as a particular kind of being [i.e., Seiende], without losing sight of the fact that all three were representatives of the same identical Being [Sein]; and, at the same time, it demanded grasping the identity of God, world, and the human self without losing sight of the particular difference of each. Only by preserving and unifying the identity and difference of the fundamental kinds of being, just as one preserved and unified the identity and difference of the unity of Being and the totality of particular beings could one claim to attain knowledge of the One and All. According to Rosenzweig’s account, we have already noted, the first signs of the notion that such knowledge of the interconnection of the One and the All is the task of philosophy emerged at the dawn of the modern period. Only with Spinoza, Rosenzweig writes, was “the first attempt made to sketch an image of one world growing forth out of one root.”27 The idea of system in German Idealism, Rosenzweig explains, emerged specifically as a response to Spinoza, as a “counterpart to Spinoza’s Ethics.”28 But if Rosenzweig recognizes Spinoza as presenting the 26

27

28

Christian Wolff, “Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General,” p. 33. For a fascinating account of the division of metaphysics in Plato and Aristotle and in their successors see Philip Merlan, From Platonism to Neoplatonism. Merlan traces the relationship between the soul and mathematicals as two kinds of intermediate forms of beings between the physical world and the divine, a relationship with roots in Plato’s Timaeus. Out of this relationship there developed two traditions of “special metaphysics,” one divided into physics, mathematics, and theology, and the other divided into physics, psychology, and theology. Cf., Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 5–8, and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 80. OSP, p. 42. Rosenzweig identifies Spinoza’s attempt as taking up the “Cartesian suggestion.” He alludes thereby to Descartes’s “The Principles of Philosophy,” in which Descartes declares that “philosophy as a whole is like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches, which issue from this trunk, are all the other sciences,” cited from The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I, p. 211. But cf., Nicholas Rescher’s identification of Leibniz as the thinker who first introduced the term “system” in philosophical discourse, in “Leibniz and the Concept of a System,” Studia Leibnitiana 13 (1981): 113–22. Ibid.

28

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

“first attempt … to sketch an image of one world growing forth out of one root,” why does he not identify the Ethics as the first system of philosophy? What makes system the discovery of the Idealists and not of Spinoza himself? Rosenzweig suggests an answer to this question in his characterization of Spinoza’s philosophical project which we have just repeated. Spinoza attempts to present an image of one world growing out of one root. In so doing, Rosenzweig intimates, Spinoza merely spells out in full the reduction of All to One which Thales first carries out. Spinoza’s is not a system of philosophy that grasps the One and All, the unity and multiplicity of what is; rather, it carries out the reduction of multiplicity to unity. Such was the accepted critique of Spinoza’s philosophy made famous by Jacobi, which the German Idealists inherited, and which Rosenzweig hints to by drawing attention, through his repetition, to the one-sided character of Spinoza’s thought. This critique saw Spinoza’s reduction, furthermore, not only as a reduction of particularity in general to unity, of difference to identity, but also as a reduction of the different kinds of beings to one. Jacobi’s claims regarding Spinozism which are most relevant to our discussion of system may be loosely summarized as follows. First of all, by asserting the identity of God and the natural world in the Ethics, as the respective active and passive sides of the same one Substance, Spinoza loses the unique character of God as that which is absolutely different from the finite world, and as a result, his philosophy leads to atheism. Second, by designating all particular beings – including human beings – as modes of this one Substance, “determined to exist and to act in a definite way from the necessity of the divine nature,”29 Spinoza eliminates that essential characteristic which seems to differentiate the human being from other particular entities in the world, that is, her freedom. Spinoza’s philosophy thus leads to fatalism. Finally, this same relationship between God, the one Substance, and the particular entities that form its modes does not grasp, in any positive sense, the unique way in which particular entities “are”; but rather it assigns them being only insofar as they express the “absolute being” of the one Substance. Particular entities possess being only insofar as they are not particulars; as particulars, they are not, or, they are nothing. Summarizing Spinoza’s account of particulars, Jacobi thus writes, “Individual things … so far as they only exist in a certain determinate mode, are non-entia, the indeterminate infinite being is the one single true ens reale.”30 Instead of representing the first true system, the first true conception of the task of philosophy as the knowing of the One and All, Spinoza’s philosophy – when 29 30

Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics, I P29, in Complete Works, p. 234. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn,” Werke. Band 1, 1, p. 100, translated into English in “Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn,” The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, p. 220. Cf., Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, “From 1914 to 1917,” in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 32–3; and Paul W. Franks, “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, pp. 96–100.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

29

viewed through Jacobi’s critical lens – loses both the multiplicity of the All and the specific differences of the three fundamental kinds of being in the identity of its single Substance. It thereby points to the same kind of corruption of the notion of system that we found in Thales. But the very “systematic” nature of Spinoza’s apparent failure forces one to question the possibility of system itself. For Spinoza does attempt to articulate the connection between the One substance and All its particular modes, but this attempt results in the negation of All particulars. One begins to wonder whether the task of system has perhaps been shirked over the history of philosophy from Thales to Spinoza not because of any failing of earlier philosophers, but rather because these philosophers recognized such a task as impossible. Perhaps it is impossible to grasp the One and All without reducing the multiplicity of the All to One substance, or contrarily, without losing the unity of being in the multiplicity of the All. Perhaps it is impossible to grasp the identity which unites God, world, and human being without losing sight of the inherent differences of each. The fact that such fundamental doubts arose surrounding Spinoza’s philosophy meant that anyone who did posit system as the task of philosophy, and anyone who grasped this task of system as demanding knowledge of the One and All as such and in their interconnection, would have to show that the pitfalls of Spinozism could be avoided. He would have to present the task of system as “a counterpart to Spinoza’s Ethics.” This, according to Rosenzweig, was precisely the mission that Schelling took upon himself, a mission made possible by the ground-breaking work of Kant and Fichte before him. Thus Rosenzweig writes: Schelling, who was the first within the Idealistic Movement who grasped the idea of system, thought to set up a counterpart to Spinoza’s Ethics. The intention was to allow the whole philosophical cosmos to come into being out of the concept of the absolute act, as Spinoza had out of the concept of absolute being. Both Kant and Fichte were necessary assumptions of this idea.31

As we shall see in the following section, the significance of Kant’s role in bringing the task of system into full view for the Idealists cannot be overemphasized. Rosenzweig already alludes to the nature of the philosophical revolution which Kant carried out, and which Fichte transformed into the basis for the notion of system as the proper task of philosophy, by formulating Schelling’s first thoughts on system in opposition to the philosophy of Spinoza. Schelling’s first glimpse of the task of system, according to Rosenzweig, took the form of the emergence of “the whole philosophical cosmos” from out of the concept of the “absolute act,” just as Spinoza had allowed it to emerge from out of the concept of absolute being. Rosenzweig implies, thereby, that the discovery of system as the proper task of philosophy; indeed the ascent from Spinoza’s corruption of the notion of system 31

OSP, p. 42.

30

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

to the disclosure of system in its true sense was made possible by this change in the understanding of the principle or ground of all that is from that of an absolute being to an absolute act. In order to make sense of this change and to grasp its significance for the discovery of system in German Idealism, we must examine the systematic implications of Kant’s Copernican revolution in some detail.

IV. Kant’s Groundwork for a System of Philosophy iv.1 The Unanswered Question Regarding Kant’s System The Idealists themselves understood their discovery of system to be the consequence of the revolutionary change that Kant brought about in the focus and direction of philosophical thinking during their time, a change that can be summed up in two words: the subject.32 This turn to the subject as the playing field upon which the search for truth is to be grounded and carried out not only brought the task of system into view for the Idealists, but also determined the direction which the philosophical discourse on system would take from the time of the Idealists up through Rosenzweig’s own day. Our quest to understand the first true notion of system that Rosenzweig assigns to Schelling in the system-program thus demands that we first understand how the development of philosophy through Kant and Fichte led to a new conception of knowledge that made a “counterpart to Spinoza” possible. We must first understand, that is, how Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy drew the true idea of system out of its 2,500-year-old hiding place. Kant drew the idea of system out of hiding – but Rosenzweig designates neither Kant nor Fichte as the pioneer who discovered system as the task of philosophy. To understand each’s role on the path to this discovery demands, therefore, that we grasp how Kant and Fichte both made this discovery possible and, at the same time, failed to make this discovery on their own. It is just Kant’s own ambiguous but unquestionably significant relationship to the discovery of system as the task of philosophy that Rosenzweig points to at the beginning of the last section of the “Oldest System-Program.” Here Rosenzweig writes, “It is an unanswered question whether, and in what sense, Kant wanted a system. … But the epoch in the history of philosophy begun by him culminated in a system.”33 32

33

See, e.g., J. G. Fichte’s “Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” Sämmtliche Werke I, pp. 468–91; F. W. J. Schelling, “Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie,” Sämmtliche Werke I/10, pp. 73–5. OSP, p. 40. Rosenzweig’s handwritten draft of the “Oldest System-Program” article shows that he initially began the last section of the article as follows: “Kant did not want a system. Nevertheless, he … [Ein System hat Kant nicht gewollt. Gleichwohl er hat …].” But this beginning is crossed out in the draft and replaced with the formulation we have in the published version (i.e., “It is an unanswered question …”). See “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” 1914 (Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 [manuscript in series II, subseries III, Box 2, Folder 29], Leo Baeck Institute, p. 41.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

31

Rosenzweig asserts that it is unclear whether and in what sense Kant wanted a system, and one can certainly claim that such a question remains “unanswered” in Rosenzweig’s eyes only because it seems to be answered in both directions by Kant himself. Indeed, if one were to ask this question of the Kant who wrote the opening pages of the “Architectonic of Pure Reason,” his answer would seem to be affirmative. Furthermore, the “sense” of the system that Kant describes in the beginning of the “Architectonic” not only foreshadows the Idealist notion of system which Rosenzweig determines as knowledge of the One and All, but also refines this notion in a manner which indelibly stamped the task of system which the Idealists sought to fulfill. “Systematic unity,” Kant declares at the beginning of the “Architectonic,” “is that which first makes ordinary cognition into science”; and thus “architectonic,” in being the “art of systems” is at once “the doctrine of that which is scientific in our cognition in general.”34 Kant announces here, in no uncertain terms, that what distinguishes science from ordinary knowledge is that science is systematic knowledge. What, we may ask, makes knowledge systematic for Kant? His answer is as follows: I understand by system … the unity of the manifold cognitions under one idea. This is the rational concept of the form of a whole, insofar as through this the domain of the manifold as well as the position of the parts with respect to each other is determined a priori. The scientific rational concept thus contains the end and the form of the whole that is congruent with it. The unity of the end, to which all parts are related and in the idea of which they are also related to each other, allows the absence of any part to be noticed in our knowledge of the rest, and there can be no contingent addition or undetermined magnitude of perfection that does not have its boundaries determined a priori. The whole is therefore articulated (articulatio) and not heaped together (coacervatio).35

Kant defines system, we see, in terms which foreshadow in important ways Rosenzweig’s understanding of system in his “Oldest System-Program” essay: system is the “unity of the manifold cognitions under one idea”; it is the unity of All cognitions in their relation to One idea. But in Kant’s words, the relation between the One and All is defined more precisely. For in system, the manifold cognitions must be grasped “under” the one idea, or, as Kant goes on to say, only that unity of a manifold which arises “in consequence of an idea (where reason provides the ends a priori and does not await them empirically) grounds architectonic unity.”36 For a body of knowledge to be systematic, Kant suggests here, one must possess from the beginning the idea that holds this body of knowledge together as a whole. 34

35 36

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A832/B860, cited from Critique of Pure Reason, p. 691. Henceforth, CPR. Ibid. CPR, A833/B861.

32

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

A system cannot be “heaped together” empirically, part by part, because in constructing a unity of parts from parts alone, one would never know when one had reached the whole which those parts were meant to form. Only grasping the “form of the whole” from the outset permits one to know “the domain of the manifold” and the “position of the parts with respect to each other.” Just like the architect who has an idea of a whole building in her head, or on paper, before the first brick of that building is laid, so the architectonic thinker must have an idea of the whole of philosophy before its parts are examined in themselves. Kant emphasizes, furthermore, one particular aspect of this prior view of the whole as ensuring the completeness and the certainty of the system to be constructed. What holds the parts of a whole of knowledge together, Kant tells us, is the “unity of the end” to which “all parts are related,” and it is therefore the “idea” of that end which enables one to grasp the totality of manifold parts from the beginning. To grasp the form of the whole of a system from the beginning, therefore, is to grasp from the beginning the end toward which all parts are directed, and only insofar as one grasps this “unity of the end” from the beginning, can one’s knowledge be considered science. Kant projects here a model for systematic knowing which is to have tremendous influence on his successors. Here, in germ, one already glimpses the schematic structure of the later systems of German Idealism. For knowledge to be scientific, that is, systematic, Kant determines, it must trace the movement from a single idea that anticipates the whole, through its manifold particulars, to the unity of the system’s end. It is a movement from the One to the All to the One, from identity to difference to identity, wherein the final unity has passed through, and been mediated by the knowledge of the multiplicity of the system’s particular parts. Thus, fifteen years before the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” that Rosenzweig presents in his essay, Kant already seems to have laid out that plan for system which would be decisive for German Idealism. Nonetheless, Rosenzweig declares it an “unanswered” question whether and in what sense Kant truly wanted a system. And, indeed, one need only follow the continuation of Kant’s own discussion in the same “Architectonic of Pure Reason” in order to understand the reservations that Rosenzweig ascribes to Kant. For while Kant proceeds to declare categorically that only “the system of all philosophical cognition is philosophy,” or in other words, that any philosophy worthy of its name must be a system, he nevertheless qualifies this definition with an equally categorical disclaimer. “Philosophy,” which Kant has just defined as “the system of all philosophical cognition,” he now claims is a mere idea of a possible science, which is nowhere given in concreto, but which one seeks to approach in various ways until the only footpath, much overgrown by sensibility, is discovered, and the hitherto unsuccessful ectype, so far as it has been granted to humans, is made equal to the archetype. Until then one cannot learn any philosophy,

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

33

for where is it, who has possession of it, and by what can it be recognized? One can only learn to philosophize.37

The picture Kant draws in this passage is striking. Human beings possess the “idea” of philosophy as system, as a “possible science,” but this system is in fact nowhere to be found in this world. The attempts to attain system have resulted, rather, in merely “unsuccessful” copies of the true archetype of system. Human beings may indeed find the path that leads to the approximation to the true system, “so far as it has been granted to humans,” but until then, Kant suggests, philosophy in its true sense cannot even be learned! The true architect of systematic knowledge, that architect who has in sight both the whole of the system and its parts, Kant implies, lives beyond the human realm. And we have been left with faded copies of the divine blueprints. Human knowledge thus seems fated forever to remain in a state of limbo, with the goal of systematic knowledge always in sight on the horizon, but never within reach. And yet, even here Kant’s ambiguous relation to system does not stop vacillating. For in the Critique of Pure Reason, the very systematic unity of knowledge whose realization Kant had to deny to speculative reason, he upholds for reason in its practical capacity. The end of the first Critique hints at a “special kind of systematic unity, namely the moral,”38 and the significance of this turn to the practical for Kant’s view of the task of system seems to depend on whether one reads these comments on practical metaphysics as an appendix to the first Critique, or as an introduction to the second and third. Immediately following the passage in the “Architectonic” that we have just examined, in which Kant denies the possibility of system as something concretely given, and hence denies the possibility of learning philosophy as such, he draws a distinction between two different concepts of a system of philosophy. The first he names the “scholastic concept [Schulbegriff],” which designates the system of cognition that is sought only as a science without having as its end anything more than the systematic unity of this knowledge, thus the logical perfection of cognition. But there is also a cosmopolitan concept [Weltbegriff] (conceptus cosmicus), that has always grounded this term, especially when it is, as it were, personified and represented as an archetype in the ideal of the philosopher. From this point of view, philosophy is the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae) and the philosopher is not an artist of reason but the legislator of human reason.39

In opposition to the scholastic concept of philosophy, which unifies the system of knowledge solely toward the end of the unity of that knowledge itself, Kant 37 38 39

CPR, A838/B866. CPR, A807/B835. CPR, A838/B866-A840/B868.

34

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

here posits a cosmopolitan concept of philosophy.40 This concept of philosophy grasps the system of human knowledge in relation “to the essential ends of human reason,” the highest of which is “nothing other than the entire vocation of human beings, and the philosophy of it is called moral philosophy.”41 Such a concept of a system of philosophy which grasps All that is in accordance with the idea of the vocation of the human being, that is, of freedom, is intimately connected to the ideal of the philosopher, in approximation to which every individual “philosopher” seeks to unify all knowledge within herself toward the goal of fulfilling her vocation as a free human being. Kant’s distinction between the scholastic and cosmopolitan concepts of philosophy notwithstanding, several vital questions emerge regarding Kant’s view of this system at the end of the first critique. Does this cosmopolitan vision of system project the very “primacy of the practical” which enabled Kant later to assert the systematic unification of the critiques themselves? Is this the same vision according to which Kant would later declare “the concept of freedom” – known not through speculative reason but rather as a sheer “fact” of reason – to be the “the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason”?42 Is it the same vision according to which Kant later subordinated theoretical philosophy to the demands of the practical that the world be conceived as amenable to the attainment of the “highest good” in it?43 More pressingly, is this concept of a system, unified according to the proper ends of human beings, subject to the same reservations as the system of philosophy which Kant declared to be “merely the idea of a possible science” only a few pages before? Or do Kant’s own critiques make possible not only the “discovery” of the “only footpath” to system, which he seemed to regard with great suspicion in the passage we examined previously, but even the “making [of] this footpath into a highway” upon which “human reason” could be brought “to full satisfaction in that which has always, but until now vainly, occupied its lust for knowledge,”44 as Kant boldly suggests in the closing lines of the first Critique? An examination of Kant’s statements about system thus leaves us, as it left Rosenzweig, with “unanswered questions” regarding whether and in what sense Kant wanted a system. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Kant’s recognition of system as the fundamental problem for human reason had an overwhelming influence on the philosophy that developed after him.

40 41 42

43

44

Named thus, according to Kant, because it “necessarily interests everyone” (ibid.). Ibid. I. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, in Werke V: 3, translated in Critique of Practical Reason, p. 3. I. Kant, Werke V: 120–46, Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 100–21. Cf., Paul Guyer, “The Unity of Nature and Freedom: Kant’s Conception of the System of Philosophy,” The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. CPR, A855/B883.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

35

iv.2 The Systematic Implications of the Kantian Subject It was not only Kant’s recognition of reason’s demand for system that influenced the development of the notion of system in German Idealism. As Rosenzweig notes, Kant pointed to the demand for system in the very manner in which he structured theoretical knowledge within, or at least in relation to, the knowing subject. This was the centerpiece of Kant’s Copernican turn, in which, Rosenzweig tells us, Kant “founded the indissoluble connection of form and content, out of which the concept of system had to emerge.”45 The “indissoluble connection” to which Rosenzweig refers is the connection between the “two fundamental sources” of knowledge “in the mind,” intuition and understanding, wherein the mind receives the content of its knowledge through the manifold of its intuitions and provides the form for its knowledge through the concepts of the understanding.46 By insisting on the “indissoluble connection” between – and not the identity of – the understanding and intuition, by preserving the distinction between the two while locating them both within the thinking subject, Kant changed the focus of philosophical questioning without losing the distinction between the thinking subject and the world that subject observed. For as much as intuition was located within the subject, it still required “things-in-themselves” to appear in order to give it something to intuit. On the other hand, Rosenzweig hints that “the concept of system had to emerge” from such an “indissoluble connection,” insofar as intuition and the understanding were placed within the selfsame subject. And Kant himself tempted his successors to find the point of union between the two sources of theoretical knowledge by suggesting the possibility of a “common but to us unknown root” of intuition and understanding and by asserting that “the manifold representations that are given in a certain intuition would not all together be my representations if they did not all together belong to one self-consciousness.”47 “The concept of system had to emerge” from the “indissoluble connection” that Kant posits between the understanding and intuition for one further important reason, as well. We recall that according to Rosenzweig’s designation, the One and All which system seeks to grasp is not merely a “One and All” of ideas, but rather, system points to a new understanding of the relationship between truth and actuality: it points to the philosophical unification of the unity of the one concept of Being, or of the one “ultimate truth,” with the multiplicity of the “whole of actuality.” Such a concept of the relationship between the unity of thought and the multiplicity of sensible actuality lies at the heart of Kant’s conception of theoretical 45 46 47

OSP, p. 42. CPR, A51/B75. CPR, A15/B29, B132. I have examined Rosenzweig’s conception and adaptation of Kant’s “common root” in an article that has yet to appear in print: “Die ‘geheimnisvolle Wurzel’ von Rosenzweigs System der Philosophie,” which is to appear in Alpha-Bet: Jahrbuch des Franz-Rosenzweig-Zentrums, Herausgegeben von Alfred Bodenheimer und Jens Mattern.

36

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

knowledge. For Kant, cognition is nothing other than the “synthetic unity,” carried out by the understanding, of the “manifold” given “in intuition.”48 In every act of knowing, Kant suggests, the subject carries out a miniature version of the systematic act; he unifies the unity of his own concepts with the multiplicity presented to him through his intuition. The “indissoluble connection” between form and content, understanding and intuition, in Kant’s thought thus points to the very “indissoluble connection” between thought and actuality which the task of system assumes. Our examination of Rosenzweig’s summary of Kant’s influence on the development of the idea of system in German Idealism thus points to several ways in which Kant draws the notion of system out of hiding: his ambivalent position regarding the simultaneous necessity and apparent impossibility of system for human reason, his hints toward the possibility of grounding all knowledge in the self-consciousness of the subject, and his insistence that all knowledge is nothing but the unification of the unity of thought with the multiplicity of actuality. But it was Fichte, and not Kant, who drew those systematic consequences of Kant’s thinking which inaugurated the age of German Idealism. Fichte did so precisely by combining Kant’s insight into the “self-consciousness” which Kant claimed must accompany all our cognitions together with Kant’s insight into the “priority of the practical” in human reason. It was only in the wake of this transformation of Kant’s insights into the firm ground of Fichte’s unified philosophical approach to system that Schelling arrived at the possibility of generating the “whole philosophical cosmos” out of an “absolute act.” It is thus Fichte who leads us from Kant’s ambiguous relation to the notion of system, to Schelling’s discovery.

V. Absolute Act versus Absolute Being: Fichte’s Self-Positing “I” In both expanding on and opposing Kant’s thought, Fichte discovered the ground of theoretical and practical philosophy to be one and the same: the free act of selfconsciousness, an act that the freethinking philosopher could recollect through the same kind of “intellectual intuition” which had enabled Kant to know freedom as a fact of reason. Indeed, Fichte claimed, the “fact” [Tatsache] of freedom that Kant recognized had to be traced back to the one free “act” [Tathandlung] of an original self which grounded and unified the very same system of human knowledge which “Kant envisaged.”49 It was the way Fichte grounded the multiplicity of knowledge in this single, unified original act of the self that had such significant consequences for the Idealist notion of system. According to Fichte, in the original act the self 48 49

CPR, B104. J. G. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke I: 466, 472, 478; translated in Science of Knowledge, pp. 40, 46, 51. Cf., Paul W. Franks, “Freedom, Tatsache, and Tathandlung in the Development of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 79, 3 (1997): 331–44.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

37

freely posits itself as an “I.” In so doing, however, the self comes into contact with what is outside it, of which nothing more can be said than that it is a “check” or “limitation” to the I.50 As a result of this contact between the free self and a “limitation” the self comes to feel itself as limited, as determined, and no longer simply as free. The originally absolute self thus discovers difference within itself: it is both a positing, free I and a determined “not-I.” Out of the latter it develops its knowledge of the “system of the world,”51 and out of the former it seeks to shape that “world” according to the goals of freedom. In Fichte’s account of the self, furthermore, the original free act of self-positing not only offers a unified ground for both the multiplicity of the world and the actions of the self; it also posits as goal the systematic reunification of self and world, of I and not-I. For despite the emergence of a not-I within the self, the self is still by definition one self who is simply because it has freely posited itself. As a result, the self seeks to overcome the not-I within itself; it is driven to overcome this division within itself through its own free action. Such a complete overcoming, however, is a goal which the finite self cannot reach. Hence, Fichte writes, “if … we can call this total harmony with oneself ‘perfection,’ in the highest sense of the word, then perfection is man’s highest and unattainable goal. His vocation, however, is to perfect himself without end.”52 By thus radicalizing Kant’s Copernican turn to the subject, by locating both subject and object, theory and praxis, within the self, Fichte revealed in dramatic fashion the possibility of attaining a unified system of knowledge. Here, within the self, one glimpsed both One and All, identity and difference, the unity of the original self, the multiplicity of the objective world grounded in it, and the demand of the self to reclaim its own unity. Fichte himself noted how in his Wissenschaftslehre, “One leads to All and All to One,”53 a movement we have seen anticipated in Kant’s own formulation of the concept of system in the “Architectonic.” Fichte further built on Kant’s systematic considerations from the “Architectonic” in the way he located the philosophical system within the philosopher himself. If Kant envisioned a “cosmopolitan” concept of system unified according to the ends of human reason and “personified and represented as an archetype in the ideal of the philosopher,” Fichte also indicated the intimate link between the notion of system and the philosopher who seeks to attain it. “What philosophy one chooses depends on what kind of human being one is,” Fichte writes. “For a philosophical system is not some dead household effect that one can give up or 50 51 52

53

E.g., J. G. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke I: 277, 489–90. J. G. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke I: 490. J. G. Fichte, “Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten,” Sämmtliche Werke VI: 300, translated as “Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” in German Idealist Philosophy, p. 129. J. G. Fichte, “Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, oder der sogenannten Philosophie,” Sämmtliche Werke, I: 59.

38

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

take on as it pleases us; rather it is ensouled through the soul of the human being who has it.”54 What “ensouled” Fichte’s system, so he claimed, was freedom. This grounding of philosophy in freedom was a crucial step toward the crystallization of the idea of system as Schelling would later develop it. It was the step that first made possible what Rosenzweig describes as Schelling’s unfolding of the “whole philosophical cosmos” out of the concept of an “absolute act,” just as Spinoza had done out of the concept of an “absolute being.” We must therefore ask: What is the significance of the difference between grasping the origin of All that is as an absolute being or as an absolute act? And how did the recognition of this difference lead Schelling to the first discovery of the true concept of system? We recall that while Rosenzweig suggests that Spinoza presented the first modern precursor to the notion of system as it was to be developed in German Idealism, Spinoza’s work, when read through the lens of Jacobi’s critique, did not grasp the One and the All as such and in their interconnection, but rather reduced All particularity to One Substance, and in so doing reduced God’s preeminence, human freedom, and the world’s multiplicity, equally, to nothing. In the eyes of Kant, Jacobi, and their successors, the failings of Spinozism were intimately linked to his understanding of the character of being itself. Jacobi designated the “spirit of Spinozism” to be “the ancient a nihilo nihil fit” – nothing comes from nothing.55 What this pithy characterization meant for Jacobi was that according to Spinoza’s Ethics, everything that is has a cause in something else that is, such that all particular entities follow through an infinite but determinate chain necessarily from the absolute nature of the One Substance.56 To claim that “nothing comes from nothing” thus meant that Spinoza understood being as “absolute being,” as having no relation whatsoever to what might be posited outside being, say, to nothing. Everything conditioned by the one Substance would forever remain within the realm of being just as nothing could enter that realm of being from anywhere else. Spinoza’s apparent denial of any relationship between nothing and being was what led his critics to accuse him of fatalism, because the idea of a free act entails precisely that ability to initiate a series of effects without being compelled to do so, or, in other words, freedom entails the spontaneous creation of something out of nothing. Thus Spinoza’s understanding of the one Substance as an “absolute being” amounted to a denial of freedom. In the unity of his one Substance, Spinoza failed to account for the subject. 54 55 56

J. G. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke I: 434. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Über die Lehre des Spinoza,” Werke. Band 1, 1, p. 18. See Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, pp. 83–5, and Paul W. Franks, “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, pp. 97–9. Both Beiser and Franks point out that Jacobi’s a nihilo nihil fit is simply the negative form of the principle of sufficient reason.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

39

It was Fichte’s grounding of all knowledge in an “absolute act,” according to Rosenzweig, which demonstrated the systematic consequences of the Kantian turn to the subject and which opened up a path for Schelling to oppose Spinoza’s strict determinism with a “counterpart to Spinoza’s Ethics.” As we have seen, Fichte grounds both freedom and necessity not in a determinate “absolute being” but rather in the free self-positing of the absolute self. In so doing, however, Fichte opened himself up to the very opposite criticism of that which was leveled at Spinoza: if Spinoza lost the free subject in the objective being of the one substance, Fichte seemed to lose the world in the subjective ground of his absolute act. Fichte’s supposed system remained caught within a “magic circle” between the original self and its “limitation,” and it constructed its reality out of an I and not-I within the self without being able to say anything about this limitation.57 Furthermore, while Fichte may have pointed to the possibility of a common ground for freedom and necessity, the self and the world, and, hence, the possibility of grounding all knowledge in one act, the system of One and All to which Fichte pointed never reached its conclusion. For Fichte, system did not signify the task of grasping the One and All of what is, but rather, it signified the infinite, never-ending task of striving to transform what is into the system that ought to be. As Schelling came of age in the 1790s, he thus seemed forced to decide between two equally irrefutable and yet equally problematic approaches to philosophy: Spinoza’s dogmatism, which dissolved All that is in the “absolute being” of the one Substance, or Fichte’s subjective idealism, which seemed to lose the multiplicity of the outside world within the subject. By grasping his own task as “a counterpart to Spinoza’s Ethics,” Rosenzweig asserts, Schelling initially limited himself to the Fichtean alternative and thereby failed “to break through the ‘magic circle’ drawn by Fichte.”58 But the very balance in the opposition between Spinoza and Fichte, the very fact that, in Fichte’s own words “neither of these two systems can directly refute its opposite,”59 suggested to Schelling the need and the possibility of attaining a higher standpoint which would grasp both positions as moments within itself. In the mid-1790s Schelling thus sought the grounds of an absolute philosophical standpoint that would both rise above and grasp within itself idealism and dogmatism, subject and object, freedom and necessity, act and being. It is this absolute philosophical standpoint – and it alone – which Rosenzweig recognizes as the standpoint that guarantees the first discovery of the true notion of system as task of philosophy. It was this notion of system which Hegel would later describe in his Phenomenology of Spirit, when he claimed that to understand that “the True is actual only as a system” means grasping the fact “that Substance 57

58 59

Cf., OSP, pp. 42–3. For Fichte on his own “circle,” see Sämmtliche Werke I: 92, 281–2. See also Hegel’s critique of Fichte in the Differenzschrift, in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 2: Jenaer Schriften, p. 67: “to break through [this] circle is the only interest of philosophical need.” OSP, p. 42. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke I, p. 429.

40

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

is essentially Subject”; it means grasping the “True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”60 We have thus taken a rather long detour through the systematic ground laying of Kant and Fichte not simply because Kant and Fichte are, as Rosenzweig states, “necessary assumptions” of Schelling’s first idea of system, but also because only by tracing the path from substance to subject, from “absolute being” to “absolute act,” do we begin to understand why Rosenzweig would claim that the true notion of system can only be attained in the act of transcending these two possibilities and reaching a higher standpoint. Spinoza anticipated the notion of system in the relationship he asserted between One substance and All modes, but at the same time he dissolved both the multiplicity of All beings and the specific particularity of God, world, and human being in the “absolute being” of his single Substance. Kant anticipated the notion of system by revealing system as a movement leading from a single anticipatory idea to the multiplicity of the system’s parts and on to the end toward which all of these parts lead, and he did so by pointing to a unique, practically grounded concept of system which was intimately linked to the vocation of the human being embodied in the philosopher herself. But Kant’s equivocation regarding the different kinds of system and the possibility of attaining any one of them left it “unanswered” whether system was in fact the task of philosophy or whether it was rather an illusory goal whose impossibility philosophy should recognize. And Fichte anticipated the notion of system by grounding the multiplicity of All cognitions within the One act of the free self. But he thereby reduced the multiplicity of the world to the invention of the self, and the neverending character of the task of unifying that self projected the very systematicity of his system – its unity and comprehensiveness, its One-and-All nature – into infinity. Thus, Spinoza, Kant, and Fichte – and the early “Fichtean” Schelling as well – all revealed system as the task of philosophy in a certain way, but they kept that task hidden at the same time. System was only discovered, Rosenzweig suggests, the moment German Idealism became Absolute Idealism. System was discovered when German Idealism recognized that in order to attain knowledge of the One and All as such and in their interconnection, in order to grasp God, world, and human being as such and in their interconnection, one had to philosophize from an Absolute standpoint which made it possible to grasp the substantiality of the actual world together with the subjectivity of the human being, the necessity of being together with the freedom of action, which thus made it possible to grasp world and human being as such and yet at the same time from the standpoint of the God which grounded and transcended and encompassed them both. Only thus could one avoid the reduction of All beings to either Spinoza’s singular Substance or Fichte’s singular subject; only thus could one overcome the hesitancy 60

GWF Hegel, Werke 3. Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 23, 28, translated in The Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 14, 9.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

41

of Kant. According to Rosenzweig, if it was Hegel, in the end, who “carried out that unity of the philosophical system” from the standpoint of the Absolute, it was Schelling who first attained this absolute standpoint, who “in the last pages of the ‘[Philosophical] Letters [on Dogmatism and Criticism],’ completed in the beginning of 1796, designated this position of the ‘Absolute’ beyond the two opposed system-possibilities” suggested by Spinoza and Fichte.61 It was out of this standpoint, according to Rosenzweig, that Schelling wrote the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” in the middle of that year.

VI. Absolute Idealism and the Systematic Standpoint of the “Program” It is most significant, therefore, that Rosenzweig declares this two-page text from 1796 to be the “oldest” system-program, because in doing so, he permits us to determine more precisely the concept of system he understood to have emerged in German Idealism. If system in its proper sense only arrives here, in Rosenzweig’s eyes, and not in Spinoza’s or Kant’s or Fichte’s or even Schelling’s own earliest writings, then we can identify the notion of system that he believes to have inherited from Idealism to be the knowledge of the One and All as attainable from the standpoint of the Absolute alone. According to Rosenzweig, this is the standpoint which Schelling begins to point toward in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, and which he outlines in the system-program. It is the standpoint which Schelling articulates in the form of one question, one “problem of all philosophy,’’ which accompanies Schelling over the course of his whole career, a question whose answer, according to Rosenzweig, would yield nothing less than a “finished, closed system,” the question of “how the Absolute can go out of itself and set up a world over against itself.”62 This question, coupled with Schelling’s realization that “in the completed science [one must] deduce … from the original absolute unity which precedes all synthesis, the claim that every synthesis ultimately goes to absolute unity,”63 elevates the structure and movement of the One to the All to the One suggested by Kant to the level of the Absolute. Here, as in Kant’s “Architectonic,” the Absolute must be grasped as a unified whole from the beginning, and yet one must also grasp both the way this Absolute freely breaks up into the manifold parts of the world and how these parts subsequently unite freely into a now differentiated form of the same Absolute out of which they first emerged. As in Fichte, this movement initiated by the Absolute is grasped as a “positing” [setzen], an act, and it thus assumes the very possibility of a “free creating out of nothing” which Spinoza denies; yet this act is carried out by an Absolute that transcends the Fichtean self 61 62 63

OSP, pp. 43. OSP, pp. 37, 12. See F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke I, p. 310. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke I, p. 297.

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

42

and creates “a world.” It is in this form of an Absolute that emerges from itself to set up a world over against itself, and then returns from out of the multiplicity of this world back to itself as Absolute, Rosenzweig suggests, that “the Philosophical Letters of 1795 first outlined the … connection of I, world, and God.”64 According to Rosenzwieg, it is with a distinct sense of an imminent solution to the “problem of all philosophy,” and of the fulfillment of the task of system such a solution would yield, that Schelling wrote the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” soon after the Philosophical Letters. Bearing in mind how Rosenzweig came to identify system as that knowledge of the One and All which would be made possible by the attainment of the Absolute standpoint, we can imagine the great excitement with which he must have read the first lines of the two-page fragment he found: An Ethics. Since the whole [of] metaphysics in the future will rest in morals, of which Kant has only given an example with his two practical postulates, and has exhausted nothing, so this Ethics will be nothing other than a complete system of all ideas, or what is the same, of all practical postulates. The first idea is naturally the representation of myself as an absolutely free being [Wesen]. With the free self-conscious being there steps forth at once a whole world – out of Nothing – the single true and thinkable creation out of Nothing.65

Having traversed some of the ground between Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, we can begin to make sense of what Rosenzweig saw in the opening lines of the fragment that he found. Indicated here is the grounding of system in the practical to which Kant alluded and which Fichte first carried out in his “I,” the identification of “ethics” with “a complete system of all ideas.” Moreover, as a complete system of all ideas which recognizes such ideas at once as “practical postulates,” the program’s opening announces itself as “an Ethics” in the true sense, as a “counterpart to Spinoza’s Ethics,” which had denied its own name by remaining mired in a substantial conception of the Absolute. Yet, here too, Rosenzweig seems to glimpse the move beyond Fichte’s practical position. For while the selfconsciousness of “myself ” may be my first idea, according to the program, the author of the text immediately declares that this consciousness brings with it, “at once,” the consciousness of a world outside the self. And if both “myself ” and the “world” “step forth at once,” then this suggests the grounding of both self and world in something higher, that is, an Absolute, or God, which freely posits both. Precisely this free positing on the part of the Absolute would be the “only true and thinkable creation out of Nothing.” Thus, God, world, and the self; nature and freedom, emerge from the opening lines of this fragment individually and in their

64 65

OSP, p. 13. OSP, p. 5.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

43

mutual connection.66 It is no wonder, then, that in reading these lines Rosenzweig identified this text as the first concise articulation of “a complete system of all ideas,” which offered the possibility of grasping One and All as such and in their interconnection without reducing the All to one substance or subject, which would grasp the identity and difference of God, world, and human self, and of being and free action.

VII. The System-Program’s Lack of Systematicity The problems begin with the fact that these lines are not all that Rosenzweig reads in the text-fragment. And the first impression one receives upon continuing past these first lines is not the cohesion, the structure, the careful articulation one would expect to find in a “system-program,” but rather just the opposite: one is struck by the lack of cohesion of the whole, by the apparent indecisiveness regarding first principles, and by the multiple possibilities the text offers for combining and grouping the compelling ideas presented in it. It is true that the idea of “system as task,” the sense that the One and All must be grasped philosophically, seems to permeate every line. To this extent, one would have to concur with Rosenzweig that the text could not be understood without a prior conception of the very idea of system that Rosenzweig articulates as knowledge of the One and All. But it is not clear how, if at all, the different ideas of the system-program themselves fit together systematically. And even if we grant that the system-program assumes the idea of system as the task of philosophy, it is hardly irrelevant to the question of the text’s systematicity that it does not construct a system, or even an outline for a system, on the grounds of this idea of system. Instead, every few paragraphs of the text seem to offer a different possibility for grasping the One and All. If the text appears to begin from the perspective hinted at toward the end of the Philosophical Letters, in which world and self, “ideas” and “practical postulates,” nature and freedom, are 66

This is not the only possible interpretation of the first lines of the system-program. Indeed, while O. Pöggeler highlights the way in which the text “lets the free self-conscious I and the world spring out at once in a creation out of nothing” (“Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” Mythologie der Vernunft, p. 133), as do C. Jamme and H. Schneider (“Einleitung der Herausgeber,” Mythologie der Vernunft, p. 54), D. Henrich seems to understand the world to spring out of the I itself – and not together with the I as the result of the Absolute self-creation out of Nothing – insofar as he claims that “only out of the I is such creation thinkable” and stresses “the dependence of the world on the I” in the program (“Systemprogramm? Vorfragen zum Zurechnungsproblem,” Das älteste Systemprogramm: Studien zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus, p. 11). Rosenzweig seems to hover between both interpretations in his essay, just as he sees Schelling hovering between a practically weighted standpoint and the Absolute standpoint throughout the system-program as a whole. I have inclined toward the “Absolute” reading of the opening of the program because it best highlights what would be new (or “oldest”) about the standpoint Rosenzweig sees becoming manifest in the program. Had Rosenzweig seen in the program simply a further permutation of the Fichtean “I” creating the world out of itself, it would be hard to discern what would be “oldest” about it. For an alternative reading of the opening of the program, see Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism, p. 21.

44

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

grasped as evenly balanced poles grounded in a higher Absolute standpoint, then it seems to fall back, only a few lines later, into a practically weighted system, by asking, “How must a world be created for a moral being?”67 No sooner has the text fallen back thus into the practical, then it suddenly presents a model of a worldcentered system. Indeed, prescient of attempts in Rosenzweig’s own time to unify the pure principles of philosophy with the manifold data of empirical research, the text suggests that “if philosophy gives the ideas and experience gives the data, we could finally get a physics whose greatness I [would have] expected in later ages.”68 When the text then moves from the objects of physics to those of history, it asserts that contemporary political ideas such as Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” are “only subordinate ideas of a higher idea.” The text does not bother to tell us, however, what this “higher idea” is, and before we assume, on the basis of the beginning of the fragment, that it is freedom, we should follow the text a few lines farther to the point in which it tells us that it is rather the “idea of beauty” that is the “highest act of reason” which “includes all ideas” and “unifies them all,” insofar as “truth and goodness are only siblings in beauty.”69 If we succeed then in acclimating to the idea of transforming the ethical system of the beginning of the fragment into an aesthetically intuited One and All, the text suddenly turns us toward a religious One and All. “Monotheism of reason and of the heart, polytheism of the imagination and of art is what we need,” the text declares, and it proceeds to suggest that only a “new mythology,” a “mythology of reason” which combines the sensible nature of actuality with the purity of philosophy, will lead the “enlightened and unenlightened [to] hold out their hands to one another.” Such a fusion of myth and reason in a “new religion,” the text concludes, will lead to an educational transformation of the whole of humanity into a One and All in which the One-and-All completeness of each individual will coincide with the One-and-All completeness of All individuals together. “Only then,” the text states, nearing its denouement, “is there expected for us equal instruction of all faculties, of [i.e., within] the individual, as well as of all individuals.”70 67

68

69 70

OSP, p. 5. Cf., Rosenzweig’s diary entry of June 3, 1914: “The ground-idea with which he still approached ‘physics’ at that time (how must a world be created for a moral being), is however still Fichtean. The writings of [17]97 then already appear – if Metzger is right – to overcome this construction out of the moral I, and to [re]place it with the theoretical [I],” Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 (transcript of diary VI in series II, subseries I, box I, folder 21), Leo Baeck Institute. OSP, p. 5. Cf., Rosenzweig’s diary entry of June 3, 1914, included in BT 1, p. 155: “What is characteristically Schellingian in the climbing-down to physics, is that he does it not simply for the sake of philosophy, but rather also for the sake of physics. … This is more than Fichte and shows how he can become here the ‘theoretician of knowledge’ from out of the “‘moralist.’” OSP, p. 6. OSP, pp. 6–7. In his diary of May 26, 1914, Rosenzweig reacts with excitement to this last line of the system-program: “‘of the individual, as well as of all individuals’ (out of the System of 1796) – Schiller’s concept of ‘totality’ and the revolution’s concept of universality in one!” Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 (transcript of diary VI in series II, subseries I, box I, folder 21).

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

45

The so-called system-program thus in no way constructs an outline for a system; instead, it seems to bombard us with conflicting glimpses of possible paths for attaining the One and All. There are ways, of course, of grouping together some of these different glimpses of the One and All presented in the program. To give but one example: emphasis on the “idea of beauty” precisely as an act of reason seems to offer the possibility of both holding on to the practical flavor of the system-program, that is, the extent to which “the whole [of] metaphysics” is to “rest in morals,” and at the same time transcending the freedom of the self in an intellectual-aesthetic intuition of the Absolute which grounds that freedom. What is not explained in this attempt at the unification of the program, however, is why the philosopher would then need a “mythology of reason” to make her thought “sensible”: that is, it is unclear what the relation is among aesthetics, mythology, and religion, each of which seems, separately, to provide the glue that holds a system together. No less troubling than the apparent lack of systematicity in the text that Rosenzweig designates a “system-program” is the fact that, in his essay, Rosenzweig does not even attempt to clear up the confusion of the text. Indeed, because he has declared this text to be the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” one would expect Rosenzweig to devote his essay to proving the systematicity of the text itself, to reconciling for his readers the different reflections of the problem of system in the text. But Rosenzweig does nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Rosenzweig uses his essay to emphasize precisely the plurality of system-possibilities with which Schelling seemed to be toying in the years preceding and succeeding the “system-program.” Here Rosenzweig reiterates how Schelling took “ ‘autonomy’ for a long time as the point where theoretical and practical philosophy connect”71 but then presents the possibility that “Schelling believed for a while, in 1795, to have the completing-concept of philosophy in the concept of the organism.”72 Yet, already in that same year, Rosenzweig shows, Schelling suggested that it is rather aesthetics that “ ‘first shows the entry into the whole of philosophy, because only through it can be explained what philosophical spirit is.’ ”73 Rosenzweig recalls, furthermore, that the year 1795 also marked the time when Schelling began to conceive of history as the framework in which the “principle of unity” inherent to humanity is realized.74 And in 1800, when Schelling did spell out the systematic connection between ethics and aesthetics, Rosenzweig claims that Schelling had already begun to see a different systematic task: “Even when he wrote the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling had seen another realm, beyond art, where philosophy, in itself incapable of ‘universal validity,’ would become a matter for all: through mythology.”75 71 72 73 74 75

OSP, p. 14. OSP, pp. 14–15. OSP, p. 22. OSP, p. 17. OSP, p. 23.

46

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

The troublesome fact that the very text which Rosenzweig declares to be the “oldest system-program” is itself not systematically constructed has not escaped the attention of scholars. Rüdiger Bubner rightly suggests that it is in large part “because a compelling ordering” of the content of the program “into a systematic outline has not yet been achieved,” that “the struggle over the authorship of the text has not come to rest”76; that is to say, precisely the multiplicity of possible connections between the ideas of the system-program makes it attributable to different authors at once. It is for this reason that Rosenzweig himself has been criticized by many for misleading later scholars regarding not only the author but also the genre of the text. Dieter Henrich declares that “if one takes the system-program at its word philosophically-theoretically … then it cannot be made consistent. … The system-program is certainly not the ‘oldest of German Idealism,’ and in the strict sense it is not a system-program at all.”77 Echoing Henrich’s conclusion, Otto Pöggeler also points to the “inappropriate title”78 which Rosenzweig gave to the text. And in an essay whose title – “System-program?: Preliminary Questions towards the Problem of Attribution” – emphasizes the very confusion surrounding the question of the systematicity of the system-program, Henrich writes, “the title which Rosenzweig gave an anonymous and title-less page, suggests a misunderstanding: it suggests the opinion that one would have at hand the original form of a system-outline in which the theory of Idealism, which was later called ‘Absolute,’ is conceptualized for the first time.”79 Henrich proceeds to claim, to the contrary, that the text is “at least as much a program of agitation as it is a sketch of a system.”80 It is not our task, here, to take sides in the ongoing scholarly debate over the proper title or genre of the “slightly discolored” manuscript which Rosenzweig presents as “The Oldest System-Program in German Idealism.” Our goal is to understand the notion of system that Rosenzweig believed to have inherited from the Idealists, and not to argue the legitimacy or the illegitimacy of this notion. And yet, precisely if we seek to grasp how Rosenzweig understood the notion of system, we cannot afford to ignore the unsystematic character of the “system-program.” For Rosenzweig does not deny that the system-program is unsystematic; his essay does not seek to prove the program’s systematicity – as it seeks to prove Schelling’s authorship – only to be refuted by later scholars. Rather, Rosenzweig’s designation of the text as a “system-program” and his own recognition of the text’s lack of systematicity seem to coexist quite unproblematically in the essay. One can point, 76

77

78 79

80

Rüdiger Bubner, “Einleitung,” Das älteste Systemprogramm: Studien zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus, p. 1. Dieter Henrich, “Aufklärung der Herkunft des Manuskriptes ‘Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,’” in Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegel’s “älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, pp. 158, 160. Otto Pöggeler, “Das Menschenwerk des Staates,” in Mythologie der Vernunft, p. 177. Dieter Henrich, “Systemprogramm?: Vorfragen zum Zurechnungsproblem,” in Das älteste Systemprogramm: Studien zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus, p. 5. Ibid., p. 11

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

47

in fact, to two equally important goals that Rosenzweig sets before himself in writing his account of the system-program. Rosenzweig takes great pains, at the end of his essay, to explain the idea of system that lies embedded in the program and that came to light in Idealism as the task of philosophy. At the same time, however, Rosenzweig devotes most of the essay to showing how all of the different possibilities for system that Schelling entertains over his career lie implicit in this program. Rosenzweig wishes to reform the “image that we had of Schelling up until now” as the “ ‘Proteus of Idealism’ ” who, Hegel claimed, “carried out his development before the public.”81 Rosenzweig suggests that the system-program shows, on the contrary, that even if, in the years following the program the interest in philosophy of nature ruled, then the interest in philosophy of art, and finally the interest in philosophy of religion, still all three forced themselves upon him at the same time and with the same force from the beginning of his breakthrough through the “magic circle.” His system was never quintessentially that of a philosophy of nature. If he constructed the philosophy of art as its conclusion, he still did not forget to permit there to appear beyond it, like a distant mountain, the outlook on the mythology of the future. And from that moment of “breakthrough” on, he recognized in the new religion revealed by a higher spirit “from heaven” – in which the Idealistic philosophy would surround itself with the clothing of a new mythology – the “last great work of humanity.”82

According to Rosenzweig, we see, even if Schelling’s philosophical work “developed” over the course of his career, the ideas that mark the guide posts of that course occurred to Schelling all at once, at the beginning. In the program, as in Schelling’s later development, the philosophy of nature already points to a more fundamental systematic framework within which it functions, and in the program, as in Schelling’s later development, the aesthetic unification of the system already points beyond itself to a realm of myth, a “new religion” appearing “like a distant mountain.” Thus, what is remarkable about Rosenzweig’s analysis of the “systemprogram” is that Rosenzweig is just as careful to point to the different systems implicit in the program – and to the way in which each system-possibility in the program already seems to culminate in the appearance, on the horizon, of a new system-possibility – as he is careful to define the idea of system which underlies them all. The awareness with which Rosenzweig holds together his claims that the system-program contains both the origin of the idea of system and a multiplicity of system-possibilities leads us to the realization that the obvious lack of systematicity in the program, noted by subsequent scholars, does nothing to deter Rosenzweig from asserting the program’s systematic nature. What Rosenzweig understands by the notion of system as the task of philosophy must 81 82

OSP, p. 33. OSP, p. 34.

48

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

therefore be compatible with the text’s lack of systematicity, or rather, with the fact that it presents a multiplicity of system-possibilities.83 In the remainder of this chapter, I will try to clarify this connection between the notion of system as task of philosophy and the multiplicity of system-possibilities presented in the program. I aim to show, as I suggested in the beginning of the chapter, that Rosenzweig’s understanding of system is revealed just as much by the way in which the system-program is not a system as it is by the program’s systematic nature. To do so, we shall see, demands arriving at a more precise understanding of the title Rosenzweig gives the text itself; it demands that we come to understand the way in which the title Rosenzweig gives this text denies the very systematicity which it at once assigns it.

VIII. System as Philosophical Program By attributing the “oldest system-program” not to Hegel, whose handwritten copy has been preserved, but rather to Schelling, Rosenzweig is led to a curious conclusion: the very Idealist who “first grasped the idea of system” never arrived at a “finished system” himself. The irony of this conclusion is not lost on Rosenzweig. He points to the fact that the very “problem of all philosophy” which he finds implicit in the opening of the system-program, the question “of the Absolute’s going out of itself,” is the problem with which [Schelling] never really came to an end, and that prevented him from ever fulfilling that promise given in his first great philosophical text: to set 83

OSP, p. 23. In a diary entry of June 29, 1914, BT 1, pp. 166–7, written while he was composing his “Oldest System-Program” essay, Rosenzweig jots down notes on a transcript from a lecture-course devoted to “Schelling’s Identity-Philosophy” which his cousin, Hans Ehrenberg, had given in 1912–13. Ehrenberg’s third lecture in this course is devoted to Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, and in it Ehrenberg suggests that the difficulty of this text stems in part from the fact that there are “three systems which cross through one another in Schelling’s thinking in 1800,” one which begins with Fichte’s “I”, passes over into the philosophy of nature, and then concludes with a kind of philosophy of spirit; a second which recounts how the “Absolute … divides itself into two thoroughly equal justified parts,” i.e., philosophy of nature, on the one hand, and transcendental Idealism, on the other; and a third which shows theoretical and practical consciousness to find their unity in aesthetic consciousness (“Vorlesungen über Schelling: Identitätsphilosophie,” Hans Ehrenberg Archiv, 3:17-II/X, Lecture III, pp. 7–11). Rosenzweig’s notes show he is particularly interested in the relations among these three different system-concepts, and at the end of his diary entry he lists them together with a fourth system-possibility: “I. I-Nature-Spirit. III. Theoretical-Practical-Aesthetic. II. Absolutism < Nature Spirit . IV. Absolute-Mythology-Revelation.” To this list he then adds the following conclusion: “And this now indeed already prefigured in 1796.” Rosenzweig’s notes suggest that he saw grounds not only to add an additional system-form – one assignable to the “late Schelling” – to Ehrenberg’s list of system-forms confronting Schelling in 1800, but that the “Oldest SystemProgram” suggested to him that all these system-possibilities were already present for Schelling, struggling for supremacy, in 1796 when he wrote his program. On Rosenzweig’s indebtedness to Ehrenberg’s early work and instruction in German Idealism and systematic philosophy, see Section X at the end of this chapter.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

49

up a “counterpart to Spinoza’s Ethics.” The new 1809 edition of [On the I] had to confess that he had not yet constructed such a “finished, closed system”; and he was never able to withdraw this confession either. Thus, as strange as it may sound, the “system” most balanced in itself that did emerge from him, that short program of 1796, which indeed never arrived before the public, really remained testament to that first moment where he overlooked his future kingdom with one glance. He never attained that inner certainty of the ultimate standpoint, which would have enabled him to take full possession of the claimed inheritance. He remained his life long the pretender, or, to resume the previously dared comparison: the Wunderkind who, promising all, keeping much, still never came to the last resolute simplicity of a man, but rather, remained his whole life, in a certain sense, what he was at the beginning: a genius kid.84

Schelling never does attain a “finished, closed system,” Rosenzweig explains, and as a result his youthful promise goes unfulfilled.85 The closest Schelling approaches to “system” is the system-program itself, a program which ironically – given Schelling’s reputation – never arrived before the public! According to Rosenzweig, Schelling never advances past the position from which he “overlooks his future kingdom with one glance” – he never enters that land of promise himself. Nor is Rosenzweig’s subsequent comparison of Schelling to a “Wunderkind” arbitrary. We have seen how both Kant and Fichte draw a strict connection between the notion of system and the philosopher who constructs it: Kant pointed to the “ideal of the philosopher” in whom the goal of system is “personified,” and Fichte likewise asserted that one’s system of philosophy depends on the kind of human being one is. It is thereby no accident that, according to Rosenzweig, in not completing his system, Schelling fails to attain the “last resolute simplicity of a man”; he remains his whole life the same Wunderkind capable of glimpsing system as philosophy’s task, but not capable of fulfilling it. Such a strange combination of genius and apparent failure in the same thinker gives us cause to reflect. Why does Schelling fail to attain the very system that he is the first to recognize as the task of philosophy? The answer seems to lie in the very first line of the passage cited: it is the problem of system that prevents Schelling from ever attaining the goal of system. Schelling never does “come to an end” regarding the question of how the Absolute emerges from itself to posit a world over against itself, the very same question which, we saw, allowed Schelling to formulate the task of system in the first place. It is as if Rosenzweig believes Schelling sees the problem of system too clearly, understands too well both the necessity and the fundamental difficulty – if not impossibility – of grasping the One and All, of grasping God, world, and human being, in their interconnection to complete such an 84 85

OSP, p. 37. Ernest Rubinstein notes that Rosenzweig writes “about Schelling with evident sympathy, and not a little feeling for the pathos of unfulfilled promise that seemed to haunt this longest-lived of the idealists,” in An Episode of Jewish Romanticism, p. 20.

50

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

undertaking.86 And indeed, it seems to be this very perpetual presence of the problem of system before Schelling’s eyes in Rosenzweig’s account which is revealed in the system-program itself: no sooner is one system-possibility suggested than something appears “like a distant mountain” behind it, pointing to the need to formulate system anew. Each new possibility points to the limitations inherent to the others: the question of “how the world must be created for a moral being” is shown to be one-sided by the possibility of a perspective beyond that moral being, of a perspective which grasps the self and world as emerging together “at once” in “a complete system of all ideas, or what is the same, of all practical postulates.” The “idea of beauty” then suddenly usurps this higher perspective, claiming aesthetics, and not ethics, as the realm in which ideas and practical postulates, truth and goodness are unified. And the notion of a “new religion,” a “mythology of reason,” points to the need and the possibility of unifying the rational and the sensible, the enlightened and the unenlightened, in a way that even aesthetics cannot attain. The problem of system thus constantly breaks up the unity posited in each system-possibility of the system-program and thereby constantly breaks up the unity of the majestic human being that Schelling promised to become through it. With his failure to complete his promise, however, Schelling’s life does attain a kind of unity. It is not the unity of the completed system which holds Schelling’s life together, according to Rosenzweig, but rather the unity of the problem of system. As Rosenzweig tells us, “At the end of his life, Schelling himself saw only the meaning of the task, and not the task itself, differently than he first knew it in early 1796.”87 The idea that unifies Schelling’s life, we see, is precisely that idea which Schelling first discovers and presents in his system-program of 1796: the notion of system as the task of philosophy.88 86

87

88

Cf., Martin Heidegger’s assessment of Schelling’s awareness of the magnitude of the problem of system, in his Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, p. 21: “Schelling’s efforts [were] … dedicated to the foundation, the building of the system of freedom in a formed work. … We already stated that this work got stranded. It got stranded because of essential inner difficulties which Schelling himself saw so clearly.” OSP, p. 44. Of interest in this regard is Rosenzweig’s own reflection on the program years later, prompted by Wilhelm Böhm’s article claiming Hölderlin to be the true author of the program: “At that time, I had read the program only as a program of a life, of a life’s work. If one reads it, with Böhm, as a program for a journal article, it no longer seems absolutely Schellingian. … But as far as the question whether it can be thought of as a program for a journal article, I cannot answer it in the affirmative,” Rosenzweig to Ludwig Strauss, BT 2, p. 1102. Please see the discussion of the meaning of “program” in the coming pages of this chapter. Cf., Wilhelm Böhm, “Hölderlin als Verfasser des ‘Ältesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistegeschichte 4 (1926): 339–426, as well as Ludwig Strauss, “Hölderlins Anteil an Schellings frühem Systemprogramm” together with Böhm’s rebuttal to Strauss, “Zum ‘Systemprogramm’: eine Erwiderung,” both in Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 5 (1927): 679–734. In his careful and compelling account of the development of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology and of Schelling’s influence on Rosenzweig’s own philosophical project, ‫ממיתוס להתגלות‬, Moshe Schwarz claims that Rosenzweig identifies in the system-program the “unified basic direction” of Schelling’s whole life work: the systematic construction of a “new mythology” (e.g., pp. 211–12).

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

51

We arrive, thereby, at a curious conclusion. System, Rosenzweig has taught us, is knowledge of the unity of the One and All as such and in their interconnection. Schelling is “the first,” according to Rosenzweig, to grasp this notion of system as the task of philosophy, and the first to glimpse the Absolute standpoint out of which this task may be fulfilled, articulating what he sees in the “System-Program.” In so arriving at the standpoint that makes system possible, it is Schelling – not Spinoza or Kant or Fichte – who first grasps the notion that system is the task of philosophy. And yet Schelling does not succeed in fulfilling this task. Over the course of his whole life, system remains a possibility to be actualized, something promised to be fulfilled in the future, a promise that is fulfilled, in fact, by someone other than Schelling. Noting the future tense of much of the program, Rosenzweig writes, “logic, indeed, the ‘complete system of all ideas,’ and the philosophy of history too appear here within their over-reaching regions, metaphysics and ethics, under the weighty sign of the future. Here too he [Schelling] sees tasks, tasks indeed which he himself carried out only gropingly afterwards, and which only another carried out in great style.”89 Schelling sees tasks, tasks, and more tasks; systems, systems, and more systems. He does so, Rosenzweig suggests, because his thinking remains “under the weighty sign of the future.” He “gropes” for the completion of the system, but it is left to another to carry out this task “in great style.” This other, as the very next line reveals, is of course the same Hegel who, Rosenzweig suggests, copied down a version of the system-program in his own handwriting and thereby preserved it for posterity. For Rosenzweig, the “oldest system-program” is thus the defining moment, the starting point, of two different paths within German Idealism, both of which grasp system as the task of philosophy. It is the defining moment for Schelling’s own path, whereby his whole life is unified in advance by the problem of system, by the notion of system as task. But it is also the starting point of a path leading toward the fulfillment of this task, toward the completion of the task of system, the path of Hegel.90 It is Hegel, not Schelling, according to Rosenzweig, who truly does become “the philosophical conqueror of the actual world,” while Schelling remains “pretender” to that throne.91 If, as Rosenzweig has already told

89 90

91

While there is no doubt that the idea of a new mythology is present in the system-program, and that this idea fascinated Schelling over much of his career, I cannot agree with Schwarz that Rosenzweig saw in the idea of a new mythology the unifying idea of Schelling’s life work. The idea of mythology is one of the forms of the problem of system – i.e., mythology as a way of unifying the idealism of the philosophers with the sensible realism of common people – in the system-program, but hardly the ruling form of that problem. OSP, p. 34. See Reinhold Mayer, Franz Rosenzweig. Eine Philosophie der dialogischen Erfahrung, p. 19, who also highlights the system-program as a double starting-point within German Idealism: “Rosenzweig recognized this program … both as the core of Schelling’s philosophy and as the starting point of Hegel’s.” OSP, pp. 39, 37.

52

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

us, “we grasp in our program the moment in the history of philosophy where for the first time knowledge of the ultimate truth grew together with knowledge of the whole actuality,” then this moment points directly to Hegel’s systematic accomplishments. “Already here” in the system-program, Rosenzweig continues, “the task was seen, without the ‘how’ of the solution becoming clear, which Hegel later undertook to fulfill through the concept of dialectical method.”92 It is the task of system, of the unification of the One and All, of the “ultimate truth” and the “whole actuality,” which is first grasped in the system-program. But the task is grasped in it without the solution to that task being clear. Only the grasping of system as task of philosophy makes Hegel’s “solution” possible, but the task itself is not the solution. What crystallize within the system-program are therefore the possibility of system and the demand that system be carried out. Its actuality, however, has to await Hegel’s “dialectical method.”93 If we return now to the enduring significance which Rosenzweig assigns to the notion of system for philosophy in his own time, we will recall an intriguing point. According to Rosenzweig, it is not Hegel’s solution to the problem of system that still governs philosophy in Rosenzweig’s own time, but rather precisely that notion of system as task which the system-program first presents. “Outlasting the overthrow of the Hegelian system,” Rosenzweig claims, “was the common conviction formed in it, that it is the task of philosophy somehow to come to a system”; this “task,” furthermore, “has not been forsaken, even today.”94 If Rosenzweig’s own time has inherited a notion of system, Rosenzweig suggests, it is not the systemsolution which Hegel completes, but rather the system-task of the program. This is not to say, however, that Schelling somehow “outlasts” Hegel. For it is only in Hegel’s completed system that the notion of system as the task of philosophy becomes a “common conviction”; only by being fulfilled does the task of system become universally accepted as the task of philosophy. At the same time, however, the completion of a system by Hegel obscures an essential aspect of the nature of system, as well. It obscures just that notion of system as task, as the goal toward which philosophy must “grope.” After Hegel, system is taken to be a “solution,” an orderly collection of answers that are accepted or rejected as the case may be. After Hegel, system is taken to be the organization of the “whole philosophical world between the covers of one book.” What is lost, thereby, is the sense of urgency that accompanies the notion of system as task, the sense that the philosopher is called upon to unify truth and actuality, the One and the All, in her thinking. What is lost is the sense that philosophy is not a collection of answers, but rather a human possibility to be actualized. 92 93

94

OSP, p. 44. Rosenzweig’s concession that only Hegel’s “dialectical method” makes the fulfillment of the task of system possible may be a nod to his cousin, Hans Ehrenberg, who claimed as much in his introduction to Hegel’s Jena system. See Section X at the end of this chapter. OSP, pp. 41, 44.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

53

We now begin to understand the significance of a return to Schelling’s “discovery” of system as the task of philosophy for Rosenzweig’s own time.95 For if Rosenzweig claims that the notion of system as the task of philosophy stands obscurely in the background of all contemporary attempts to philosophize, we can now see that the cause of the present obscurity of this task is not only the fall away from system after Hegel, but also the very completion of the task of system in Hegel’s own work! But Rosenzweig’s recovery of an oldest system-program would offer the possibility of drawing this notion of system as task back into the light, of tearing it free both from the solution-character of Hegel’s complete system and the subsequent breakup of that solution preceding Rosenzweig’s own time. Rosenzweig’s discovery would offer the possibility of recovering that moment when system was task and not solution. It would offer the possibility, one might say, of recovering that first moment when system was a program. We recall the criticism leveled at Rosenzweig by subsequent scholars for assigning a misleading title to the manuscript he found written in Hegel’s hand. The “system-program,” one readily sees, is not systematically constructed; it offers no outline for a system, but rather presents, one after the next, many possibilities for system. In doing so, it assumes system as its task; it assumes that philosophy seeks to grasp the One and All as such and in their interconnection. It is indecisive, only, regarding the proper path that will lead to the accomplishment of this task. It posits the task of system before its readers as a demand for the immediate future, and in the form of multiple possibilities. I would like to submit that Rosenzweig’s designation of this two-page text in Hegel’s handwriting as a “system-program” is not at all arbitrary. Rosenzweig does not call the text an “outline” or a “presentation” of a system – terms with which Schelling characterizes some of his own texts96 – but rather, he recognizes this text as a system-program. What does the term “program” mean? The different meanings of the word “program” derive from the Greek programma, which is itself built from the term gramma signifying something written down, and the prefix pro, meaning “before,” in either a temporal or spatial sense. Out of its Greek origins, one can point to two distinct meanings which the term “program” takes on in modern usage. “Program” has come to mean a “public notice,” that is, something “written” that is set “before” the public, but “program” has also come to mean something akin to a “prospectus,” something written beforehand which is to give an account of what is to follow. This second meaning also contains within it a third, closely 95

96

See Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism, p. 25, where he makes a similar point: “Schelling invites his philosophical descendents to systematize his thought in a way, for example, that Hegel does not. One accepts the perfect system or rejects it; one does not continue in its project. It is Schelling, not Hegel, who left a task that may be taken up again even, as Rosenzweig says, today.” E.g., “Presentation of My System of Philosophy,” “First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature.”

54

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

related meaning: program as “manifesto,” as a declaration of that which is to be done, of a task that is to be carried out.97 The relation of the different meanings of the term “program” to the systemprogram itself is striking. Insofar as Rosenzweig explicitly aims to overturn Schelling’s reputation as one who has “made his development before the public,” he directs us to understand “program” according to the second or third meaning. These definitions, moreover, offer a rather clear picture of what Rosenzweig sees in this text. The system-program is not an outline of a system, but rather a written document which sets the notion of system forth as task into the future, a written document which sets before philosophers of the future the idea that system is the task of philosophy.98 I would submit that if we take Rosenzweig to intend his designation of the text as a “system-program” in the precise sense which we have uncovered, we can then recognize and accept the “unsystematic” nature of the system-program to which later scholars have pointed and of which Rosenzweig was well aware. But we can also recognize and accept Rosenzweig’s own designation as pointing precisely to the way in which system is set forth as a task in the “program” without being fulfilled, the way it demands the carrying out of the task of system without being clear regarding a single possible path which will lead to this goal.99

IX. Rosenzweig’s Recovery of System as Philosophical Task for His Time On the right-hand margin of one of the last pages of Rosenzweig’s handwritten draft of his “Oldest System-Program” essay, Rosenzweig added a note that includes 97

98

99

See Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, newly revised by Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), Volume II, pp. 1473, 1465, Volume I, p. 358; Brockhaus Wahrig Deutsches Woerterbuch, eds., Gerhard Wahrig, Hildegard Kraemer, Harald Zimmermann (Stuttgart: F. A. Brockhaus, Wiesbaden, and Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1983), V. V, p. 215. See also, The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), V. VIII, pp. 1438–9. Compare Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s comments about the oldest systemprogram in the introduction to their The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, p. 33: “A will to System is visible from the first paragraphs of the text forward. … It is indicated, finally, by its announcement in the future, by the announcement of the ‘programmatic’ fact according to which the System is envisaged in the name and in the form of an exigency, a desire, or a will; the System is not there (does not exist). It is ‘to do’ (the goal is ‘practical’ as well), but only as the last thing to do, the last task and the last work of humanity.” My whole discussion of “system as task” in this chapter (and in this book as a whole) has drawn much from Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. See, e.g., p. 19: “We must consider that under this term (‘scientific world view’) a decisive task of the philosophy of German Idealism is hidden, a task which is best announced by the key word of that philosophy: the system,” and p. 27: “To be sure, the false form of system and the business of constructing systems must be rejected again and again, but only because system in the true sense is one, indeed the task of philosophy.”

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

55

the following reflection: “The relationship of Absolute and disciplines taken up in the system-program shows … a pre-connection 1) with Hegel, 2) but with late Schelling, and thereby 3) with all future philosophy insofar as it is only possible and will only be possible on the assumption of the Idealist movement that has completed-itself and overturned itself.”100 Rosenzweig’s comment identifies three different moments in the history of philosophy that stretch between the date he assigned to the “Oldest System-Program” and his own time: the moment of Hegel, the moment of the late Schelling, and “all future philosophy,” that is, all philosophy subsequent to Hegel and Schelling, of Rosenzweig’s own time and of the future. Future philosophy is only possible, Rosenzweig suggests here, on the assumption of the completion and overturning of the Idealist movement, personified, we might surmise, in Hegel and the late Schelling, respectively. But underlying the differences among these three discrete moments is a common identity, a “preconnection” [Vorzusammenhang] which Rosenzweig sees present in the “Oldest System-Program” itself. Rosenzweig cites the “relationship of the Absolute and the disciplines,” that is, between the unified absolute ground of all beings – the object of metaphysics – and the particular domains of beings grasped by particular sciences. These are the very terms, we shall see, with which his cousin Hans Ehrenberg designated the One and All in his own attempt to revive the task of system. Rosenzweig suggests that this very question of the relation between the Absolute and the particular disciplines of human knowledge, the One and the All, taken up through the task of system, both unites his own time with the time of German Idealism and determines the task of philosophy for the future, as well. By returning to the “oldest” articulation of the notion of system as task of philosophy, Rosenzweig thus recovers the possibility of system as task for the philosophy of his own time. He thereby recovers it not merely for “his time,” as if his time were an abstract, impersonal category, but rather for the particular philosophers of his time, indeed, we might say, for one of those particular philosophers in particular. In the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” that is, Rosenzweig recovers the task of system for himself. Rosenzweig says as much in a letter to Margrit Rosenstock of June 19, 1919. Remarking on the last part of the “Oldest System-Program” in which, we have seen, Rosenzweig articulates both a definition of system and an account of the significance of the discovery of system for the history of philosophy, Rosenzweig writes, “it contains my own ‘System-program.’ ”101 A scant few months after finishing his own self-proclaimed “system of philosophy,” The Star of Redemption, we find, Rosenzweig looks back on his recovery of system in the “Oldest System-Program” as setting forth his own 100

101

Franz Rosenzweig, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” 1914 (Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 [manuscript in series II, subseries III, Box 2, Folder 29], p. 44. Gritli-Briefe, p. 335.

56

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

systematic task. He sees in his study of the system-program his own decisive step into the task of system itself. The claim that Rosenzweig recovers the notion of system as the philosopher’s task for himself, that Rosenzweig takes this task upon himself as philosopher, raises familiar questions regarding who the decisive “influences” are for Rosenzweig’s own notion of system. These are important questions. There is no doubt that Rosenzweig is influenced by numerous philosophers who precede him, and – as we shall examine more closely in the next chapter – by teachers and friends from his own time. The determination of influences is vital, furthermore, in establishing the context within which Rosenzweig thinks, in establishing the interlocuters with whom he engages in philosophical dialogue. Among those influences from the philosophical past, both Hegel and Schelling loom large for Rosenzweig. As a consequence, however, the scholarly research on Rosenzweig’s relation to German Idealism tends to divide itself along party lines. It tends to ask the question, Is Rosenzweig more indebted to Schelling or to Hegel? Predictably, there is enough material to support the advocacy of either Idealist as Rosenzweig’s primary philosophical influence so that scholars on both sides of the subsequent argument feel vindicated in their conclusions. Hence U. Bieberich can justifiably claim that “Schelling, Nietsche, H. Ehrenberg, Weizsäcker, Rosenstock, Goethe, and whatever other influences one can name, are not there in order to find a way out of the Hegelian edifice of thought [Gedankengebäude] but rather in order to re-structure this edifice anew from within.”102 M. Schwarz, on the other hand, can find good reason to “claim – in explicit opposition to [E.] Freund – that in terms of the construction of his system, Rosenzweig remained faithful to Schelling,”103 while H. J. Görtz can criticize S. Mosès for emphasizing “one-sidedly” “the significance of [Schelling’s] Weltalter for the structure of the Star” instead of “setting the dialectical process of the Star in relation to that of Hegel’s Phenomenology.”104 For a serious philosophical understanding of Rosenzweig’s work, it is certainly necessary to determine the extent and the limits of both Hegel’s and Schelling’s influence. But in this quarrel over which Idealist is more influential for Rosenzweig something essential is lost. What is lost, I would argue, is precisely that which makes Rosenzweig a philosopher and not just an heir to the philosophical insights of others. Rosenzweig is a philosopher not because he continues the philosophical project of Schelling or Hegel; he is a philosopher because he recognizes the philosophical task to which the works of both Schelling and Hegel point, and because he takes that task upon himself – at least for a time – as his personal vocation. That Rosenzweig conceived of his own transformation into a philosopher as a 102

103 104

Ulrich Bieberich, Wenn die Geschichte göttlich wäre: Rosenzweigs Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel, p. 178. Moshe Schwarz, ‫[ ממיתוס להתגלות‬From Myth to Revelation], p. 231. Heinz-Jürgen Görtz, Tod und Erfahrung: Rosenzweigs “erfahrende Philosophie” und Hegels “Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewusstseins,” p. 356.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

57

consequence of his assuming this task of system can only be shown in the coming chapters. But one can already derive this conviction from the very way in which Rosenzweig declares his article on the “Oldest System-Program” to have been his “own ‘system-program,’ ” preparing the way for his own “system of philosophy.” Thus I believe it is misleading to understand Rosenzweig too narrowly either as being philosophically “faithful to Schelling” or as taking on the “re-structuring” of the “Hegelian edifice of thought” “from within.” It is clear that Rosenzweig owes a philosophical debt to both Hegel and Schelling – he owes them precisely because for Rosenzweig these two thinkers make the notion of system as the task of philosophy clear for the first time, Schelling insofar as he is the first to grasp this task, and Hegel insofar as he is the first to carry it out to completion, and thereby the first to transform the notion of system as philosophy’s task into a “common conviction.” But the notion of system as the task of philosophy does not belong to Hegel or Schelling; it is not Hegelian or Schellingian. Hegel and Schelling point out the demand for and the possibility of system for philosophy, but the task of system transcends their work. Indeed, as we shall see in the coming chapters, Rosenzweig’s own “system” sets out to show the extent to which philosophy must transcend Idealism not in order to denounce the task of system which the Idealists reveal, but rather precisely in order to carry out the task to which they point. We recall that Rosenzweig recognizes the determination of system as the task of philosophy in German Idealism to be neither an invention nor something inherited from the philosophical past, but rather the “discovery” of something “hidden” since the inception of philosophy. Rosenzweig suggests, thereby, that ever since human beings began to reflect on the nature of things, the idea of system has been present for them, even if it has taken the discovery of system in German Idealism to make them aware of it. We might ask: What is this original idea of system? What is the significance of the fact that an original notion of system seems to be present, according to Rosenzweig, wherever human beings reflect? Where did human beings get the idea of system in the first place? According to Rosenzweig, the two-page handwritten text that he found in the Prussian State Library is the “oldest” system program in German Idealism, and “in a certain sense … in the whole history of philosophy.” If we seek to understand the relation of the system-program to an “original” idea of system, then we must attempt to grasp Rosenzweig’s designation of this system-program as the “oldest” of its kind with the same degree of precision that we demanded of his designation of the text as a “program.” We understood the fact that the text is a “system-program” to suggest that it is a written text (gramma) which sets forth into the future (pro) the notion of system as task of philosophy. One cannot help but notice, in this connection, the “written” character of any program. It is curious, therefore, that it is precisely on account of the “written” character of the “system-program” that Rosenzweig raises doubts concerning its origins. One recalls Socrates’ Phaedrus to the effect that “written [discourse] can be fairly called an image” of “the living,

58

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

breathing discourse of the man who knows,” a mere “image” which cannot “yield results that are clear or certain.”105 The system-program is in fact a mere “image” in multiple ways. It is, first of all, a handwritten record of the “discovery” of the notion of system which has remained present but hidden for human beings since they began to reflect. But it is also a mere image insofar as it is a “copy” of that text in which the discovery of system was actually announced, a copy, Rosenzweig asserts, written down by someone other than its author. The original program is lost – and we have access to the ideas of the original only insofar as we possess a copy. A remarkable parallel emerges, I would suggest, between Rosenzweig’s claim regarding the discovery of the notion of system, on the one hand, and his claim regarding the originality of the handwritten program itself. The system-program is that text in which the notion of system that has accompanied philosophy since its inception – hidden as it may have been – is first copied down in writing. The handwritten manuscript itself is likewise a copy of a lost – or hidden – original. Dieter Henrich has pointed out that Rosenzweig’s attribution of the system-program to Schelling depends, almost exclusively, on the absence of the original text, and he questions whether Rosenzweig, who claimed that the Liepmannssohn auction house “could give no information regarding the origin of the handwritten text,” truly carried out a thorough investigation in this regard.106 Whether or not we question the sincerity of Rosenzweig’s investigations into the text’s origin, Rosenzweig does seem to take multiple steps to problematize the originality of the system-program. Indeed, despite the great lengths he takes to demonstrate the position of the program within Schelling’s early works, Rosenzweig’s most significant scholarly move seems not to be the attribution of the program to Schelling, but rather the way in which he undermines the attribution of the program to Hegel. In so doing, Rosenzweig transforms what was thought to be an original into a copy. And Rosenzweig would have known that so long as the “original” program is not found, or so long as the manuscript itself is considered to be a copy, no one can claim with certainty that Schelling or Hegel or Hölderlin or anyone else is its true author. Rosenzweig problematizes the attribution of an original notion of system to any particular Idealist philosopher in a further manner, as well. In his discussion of the first line of the “System-Program,” Rosenzweig makes an astounding insinuation. We recall that Rosenzweig interprets the words “an Ethics,” with which the text begins, not as a title, but rather as the continuation of a previous page or set of pages. What might this previous set of pages have presented? Rosenzweig suggests that “the lost previous part may have contained a general 105 106

Plato, “Phaedrus,” (275c–276b) in Complete Works, pp. 552–3. Dieter Henrich, “Aufklärung der Herkunft des Manuskriptes ‘Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,’” in Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels “älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus”, pp. 144–6. Cf., OSP, p. 3.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

59

preparatory remark on the system of philosophy. The preparatory remark was perhaps totally comprehensive and the short program of the system itself added to it only as a crowning conclusion. Indeed, there is an almost unlimited field left here for speculation.”107 Rosenzweig’s innocent “speculation” here should not be taken lightly. We recall the strange manner in which Rosenzweig balances the multiplicity of systempossibilities present in the program together with the specific notion of system as task which these possibilities assume. In this unsystematic system-program, Rosenzweig identifies the “oldest” expression of the notion of system as the task of knowing the One and All, made possible by the attainment of the Absolute standpoint. But in these lines just cited Rosenzweig makes a suggestion that, in a sense, undermines the very authority which he assigns to the system-program vis-à-vis this notion of system. For Rosenzweig suggests here that a “totally comprehensive … remark on the system of philosophy” may have preceded the fragment that remains of the program. If this is the case, not only does the original manuscript, of which Hegel’s is a copy, remain lost, but Rosenzweig suggests that what may be lost with it is nothing less than a comprehensive account of the notion of system! This lost section and it alone would then be the original Idealist account of system, of which the existing program is merely a “crowning conclusion.” In the very act of recovering the task of system from obscurity, of returning to the defining moment in which system is discovered, we find, Rosenzweig insists on the enduring hiddenness of the true notion of system. I would suggest that the way in which Rosenzweig problematizes both the originality of the manuscript in Hegel’s handwriting and the originality of the notion of system presented in the remaining fragment is closely related to his recovery of system as the task of philosophy for his own time. Rosenzweig reveals the meaning of system as task – and not as solution – precisely by tearing the first discovery of system as philosophy’s task out of the hands of the thinker who fulfilled that task. In so doing he not only revives for philosophy the sense of urgency which accompanied the notion of system as task in Idealism; he also raises questions regarding the originality of the very notion of system written down in the texts of Idealism. He makes it possible, thereby, to question the clarity with which even the Idealists grasped the original notion of system. After all, the Idealists only “discovered” system; an original idea of system has lay hidden before human beings all along. This means, furthermore, that the philosopher who takes on the task of system in Rosenzweig’s time must aspire not to copy the copy of this notion of system in Idealism, but rather to grasp the notion of system toward which both Schelling and Hegel point, to grasp it, if possible, even more clearly than did Schelling and Hegel themselves. Furthermore, the manner in which Rosenzweig insists on the problematic character of the system-program’s originality, I would suggest, is itself implied 107

OSP, p. 28.

60

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

in the very title Rosenzweig assigns to the text. Rosenzweig calls the text the “oldest” system-program and thereby grants the text a dubious attribute: old age. Rosenzweig does not call the text the “original” system-program or even the “first” system-program,108 both of which would express, in a far less equivocal manner, the primacy of the program’s notion of system. As we have seen, however, Rosenzweig seems just as intent on making the originality of this text – and its notion of system – questionable as he does on granting it authority. By giving the text the name that he does, Rosenzweig can imply that the text is old, very old, even the “oldest” articulation of the notion of system and at the same time that it is not original, but rather remains, even in its old age, a mere copy. In our examination of the ambiguous manner in which Kant presents the idea of system in the “Architectonic of Pure Reason,” we saw how Kant himself questions the possibility of attaining the goal of system. Philosophy is system, Kant explained, but as such is merely the “idea of a possible science nowhere given in concreto,” an “archetype” which human beings try to approximate, but which has yet to be matched by the human “ectype.” The human articulation of system, Kant implied, is always a copy; indeed according to Kant, it must be a copy, because only insofar as the philosopher has the idea of the One and All from the beginning of her act of philosophizing, that is, only insofar as the “original system” is somehow present for her before she even begins to construct her system, may she hope to complete her own copy. If Schelling does in fact show the possibility of making the human copy adequate to the original, if Hegel shows how this human copy can reach completion, neither thereby constructs the original system itself, but rather, as we have claimed, Hegel and Schelling point to that original, and they thereby point to the architect whose blueprints they have copied. Our examination of Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” has thus yielded a complex picture of the notion of system which Rosenzweig believed to have inherited from German Idealism. It has done so by showing how Rosenzweig recovers the idea of system as the task of philosophy, and by showing how his recovery is made possible by the way in which that text both reflects and continues to hide the notion of system whose discovery it announces. We have attempted to show, furthermore, that this very questioning of the text’s notion of system is reflected in the carefully chosen title which Rosenzweig assigns to the text he discovers. In the chapter that follows, we will see how Rosenzweig claims for himself the very task of system he recovers for his own time from the oldest system-program of German Idealism. And we will see how Rosenzweig arrives at the conclusion that taking up this task of system discovered in German Idealism demands that he break away from the specific form in which the Idealists carried out the task of system themselves. 108

But see Section X of this chapter, on the relationship between this “Oldest System-Program” and Hans Ehrenberg’s publication of Hegel’s Jena system in 1915 under the title Hegels erstes System.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

61

X. “My Real Teacher in Philosophy”: Excursus on Hans Ehrenberg’s Early Project of System and the Neo-Kantian Context This chapter has argued that Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program” essay seeks to revive that task of systematic philosophy for Rosenzweig’s own time which Hegel and Schelling (and for a time Hölderlin) shared in their own. In reassessing the significance of German Idealism for his own time, Rosenzweig was not alone. Indeed, as he well knew, in the very years during which he discovered and published the “Oldest System-Program,” there were a growing number of scholars and students in Germany calling for a reconsideration of that German Idealist philosophy which had been rejected by the philosophers of the fin de siècle. Wilhelm Windelband’s landmark lecture of 1910, “Die Erneuerung des Hegelianismus,” acknowledged the “amazement” with which his generation took in this revival of interest in Hegel among the youth and sought to explain the rise of neo-Hegelianism as a reaction to “the poverty of positivism and desolation of materialism” in his time. The more the younger generation “seeks to raise itself out of the overwhelming mass of particulars and externals to a sense-of-the-whole of all actuality,” Windelband reflected, “the more fascination is elicited by the impressive unity and grandiose closedness of systematic composition in which the Hegelian pan-logism presents itself.”109 One of the members of that younger generation who sought to attain a path back from particulars to a “sense-of-the-whole of all actuality” through an engagement with Hegel’s system was Windelband’s student – and Franz Rosenzweig’s cousin – Hans Ehrenberg. In the early 1910s, Ehrenberg was a Privatdozent at the University of Heidelberg, teaching courses on German Idealism, theology, and systematic philosophy. During these years he composed a number of works whose explicit goal was the revival of the task of system for the philosophy of his time.110 Although Rosenzweig’s stature as a thinker would later overshadow that of his older cousin, Rosenzweig long considered Ehrenberg “my real teacher in philosophy,”111 and at the time of his publication of the “Oldest System-Program,” he intended to dedicate the essay to Ehrenberg. Writing to Ehrenberg of his plans to do so, on March 2, 1917, Rosenzweig said, “The dedication must still be made. … I’ve perhaps never done anything where it belongs as much as here. Indeed, I learned the concept ‘system’ from you, in all these years.”112 Rosenzweig’s expression of debt to Ehrenberg for that concept of system which apparently guided his own writing of the “Oldest System-Program” essay offers us 109 110

111 112

Wilhelm Windelband, “Die Erneuerung des Hegelianismus,” Präludien I, p. 278. For a list of courses Ehrenberg taught during this period, see Günther Brakelmann, Hans Ehrenberg: Ein judenchristliches Schicksal in Deutschland, pp. 31–2. Rosenzweig to Ernst Simon, BT 2, p. 809. Rosenzweig to H. Ehrenberg, March 2, 1917, BT 2, p. 357.

62

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

valuable insight into the context within which Rosenzweig saw himself writing. For in Ehrenberg, Rosenzweig had a mentor in philosophical matters who was determined to revive the project of systematic philosophy at a time when the meaning of that project had become unclear or even anathema to contemporary thinkers. In his “Kant’s Table of Categories and the Systematic Concept of Philosophy,” published in the 1909 volume of Kant-Studien, Ehrenberg declared that “philosophy is nothing without system” and attempted to develop the full range of philosophical concepts dialectically from one another – beginning with the concept of freedom, passing through theoretical philosophy and aesthetics, and culminating in the Absolute – according to the schema of Kant’s table of categories. Ehrenberg viewed this attempt as merely experimental but nevertheless concluded his article with the bold assertion that “here, for the first time, philosophy once more appears consciously systematic and no longer the luggage-carrier of the empirical sciences. It shows at once that it is possible and is time to unify Kant and Hegel.”113 In his 1911 Parteiung der Philosophie: Studien wider Hegel und die Kantianer, Ehrenberg took further steps toward a “preparation for the system” by trying to bring about a synthesis of the philosophical standpoints of Hegel and the neoKantians. Parteiung is an ambitious work which seeks to overcome what it depicts as the mirror-image limitations of neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism – on one side, the neo-Kantian rejection of the Absolute, and the lapsing back into positivism it courts as a result; on the other, the Hegelian subordination of the particular disciplines of science to the overpowering unity of logic – in a theologically grounded account of philosophy. According to this account, philosophy – while grasping the whole in itself – at once grasps itself as a mere part of the whole of actuality. “The possibility of system depends,” Ehrenberg declares, “on philosophy grasping itself as a part of the whole that is, i.e., of the Absolute.”114 If Rosenzweig expressed a debt to Ehrenberg for “the concept of ‘system’ ” which was central to Ehrenberg’s writings at the time, it appears to have been a shared interest in this notion of system which directed both Ehrenberg and Rosenzweig to inquire into the origins of that notion, to seek out the “oldest” or “first” historical moment in which the project of system became manifest. It cannot be coincidental that in precisely those months of 1914 in which Rosenzweig was completing his “Oldest System-Program,” Ehrenberg was preparing for its first publication Hegel’s so-called Jena system, with his own introductory essay, under the title Hegel’s First System.115 In his dating of the “Oldest System-Program,” Rosenzweig thus determines that his manuscript was composed “three or four

113

114

115

Hans Ehrenberg, “Kants Kategorientafel und der systematische Begriff der Philosophie,” KantStudien 14 (1909): 436, 437–8. Hans Ehrenberg, Die Parteiung der Philosophie: Studien wider Hegel und die Kantianer (1911), pp. 127–8, in reprint (1998), p. 100. Hans Ehrenberg and Herbert Link, eds., Hegels erstes System.

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

63

years before Hegel’s own first attempt in the direction of system, the Jena system which Ehrenberg edited.”116 In the footnotes to the first chapter of this study, I have noted some points in the “Oldest System-Program” essay where Rosenzweig alludes to Ehrenberg’s work on German Idealism and systematic philosophy, but one of Rosenzweig’s nods to his cousin surely occurs when he declares that only Hegel’s “dialectical method” made possible the fulfillment of that task of system which Schelling had discovered. In his introduction to Hegel’s First System, Ehrenberg claimed that the Jena system shows how Hegel’s dialectical method developed out of the need to overcome the finitude of Fichte’s position, on the one hand, and the divorce between the Absolute and the finite in Schelling’s philosophy of identity. “If Fichte awoke Hegel’s refutation in the concept of the Absolute, so Schelling awoke his refutation in the treatment of the individual stations of the system. He finds Schelling here too immediately directed to the Absolute,” Ehrenberg writes. “Through dialectic, Hegel escapes the Fichtean bad infinity and the Schellingian leveling of finite distinctions and sails through unharmed between the destruction of the individual stations of the system and the pressing-down of the Absolute. The great task is solved.”117 Ehrenberg suggests, thereby, that only dialectical method allows Hegel to complete the task of system, reconciling the Absolute through it with the manifold of finite particulars. My impression is that Rosenzweig’s first forays into the systematic philosophy of German Idealism and, indeed, his first steps toward taking up the task of system for himself, might well be seen as his attempt to take part in the renaissance of systematic thought which his cousin sought to initiate in their time. Rosenzweig begins his own path to system, that is to say, as Ehrenberg’s disciple. There is no doubt, moreover, that the manner in which the Star presents the possibility of the philosopher’s attaining a kind of completion of systematic knowledge of “the All” from a point in the middle of the systematic “All” in which she yet lives is indebted to Ehrenberg’s account, in the Parteiung, of philosophy’s grasping itself as part of “the whole.” Rosenzweig’s close personal and intellectual connection to Ehrenberg highlights, by way of contrast, the quizzical relationship the development of his thinking has to the leading philosophical movement of his time: neo-Kantianism. For Rosenzweig to designate his cousin as his “real teacher in philosophy,” despite the fact that he studied with some of the most important and influential figures of the southwestern neo-Kantian school, suggests how utterly detached he felt his thinking was from the professors in whose classrooms he learned. Now, there are reasons not to take Rosenzweig’s sense of distance from neo-Kantianism as wholly authoritative. Heinrich Rickert, in particular, was instrumental in getting 116 117

OSP, p. 7. H. Ehrenberg, “Einleitende Bemerkungen,” Hegels erstes System, pp. xvi, xx.

64

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program” article published,118 and Rickert’s own systematic work contains key themes and concepts too many of which pop up in Rosenzweig’s Star for such overlap to be coincidental.119 Still, Rosenzweig’s relatively constant mockery of the neo-Kantians in his letters120 and his equally telling silence regarding the neo-Kantians in the Star itself – which treats German Idealism as the last great philosophical movement, and as if its reign over the philosophical scene had come to an end only recently (with the innovations of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche)! – confirms for me the insight we have gleaned from reading Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program”: to Rosenzweig’s eye, neo-Kantian “systems” are by and large signs of the contemporary confusion over the true task of philosophy, a confusion that can only be cleared up through a return to the beginnings of German Idealism and the “oldest” articulations of the task of system found there.121 Hans Ehrenberg was instrumental – so it seems to me – in guiding Rosenzweig to such a conclusion. 118

119

120

121

The cover page of the original “Oldest System-Program” article in the Sitzungberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse introduces the article as “imparted [mitgeteilt] by Franz Rosenzweig” and “submitted [vorgelegt] by Heinrich Rickert.” And see the deliberations in the correspondence between Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock on whether to appeal to Rickert for help in publishing the article: E. Rosenstock to F. Rosenzweig, October 4, 1916, and November 19, 1916, and F. Rosenzweig to E. Rosenstock, October, 1916, and November 30, 1916, BT 1, pp. 247, 255, 301, 302. Rickert intended his System der Philosophie, erster Teil: Allgemeine Grundlegung der Philosophie (1921) to be – as its title suggests – the first part of a system of philosophy. The book opens with a compelling apology for systematic philosophy and its engagement with “the All.” A thorough study of Rosenzweig’s intellectual relationship to Rickert would have to inquire into Rickert’s use of the following concepts and Rosenzweig’s possible adaptation of such concepts (pages in parentheses cite Rickert’s System der Philosophie): the notion of “the And as bond” which makes possible the “synthetic unity of multiplicity” in a manner different from Hegelian synthesis (pp. 61, 70–1, 268–76); the notion of “personal name” (pp. 6–7) and even the Faustian expression of Gefühlsmonismus – “Name is sound and smoke” – against which Rosenzweig will formulate the call of the personal name in the Star (pp. 250–1); the need to distinguish between questions of “Weltanschauung” and “Lebensanschauung” (p. 32); the play on the term Voll-endung (completion, full-ending) (pp. 26, 49); and, of course, the general systematic engagement with “the All” as that which “redeems us from the nothingness of relativism” (e.g., p. viii). I will cite only two examples. Rosenzweig’s estimation of Rickert can be gathered from a comment he makes in a diary entry on July 20, 1922: “Spinoza refutes Descartes, Leibniz refutes Spinoza, Kant refutes Leibniz, Fichte refutes Kant, Schelling refutes Fichte, Hegel refutes Schelling, and Hegel, through the advance of history is ‘more than refuted, he is judged.’ But Nietzsche does not refute Schopenhauer and I do not refute Nietzsche. He who still busies himself today with refutations (e.g., Rickert with Nietzsche, for what is the philosophy of value other than a struggle against the ‘transvaluation [of values]’?), proves in so doing that he is not a philosopher,” BT 2, p. 804. Reporting on a meeting with Jonas Cohn – who was also one of Rosenzweig’s teachers at Freiburg – while still in the midst of writing the Star, Rosenzweig writes, “Now he wants to write his system (‘also,’ I think naturally) and has been working it out for 5 years now. I had to think about mine – probably – for five child-months. But I kept myself from telling him about it; I just couldn’t,” Rosenzweig to M. Rosenstock-Huessy, November 24, 1918, Gritli-Briefe, p. 199. Rosenzweig’s personal and intellectual connection to Hermann Cohen is, of course, an exception to Rosenzweig’s general rejection of the neo-Kantian movement. But Rosenzweig’s appropriation of Cohen’s thought is selective, and I am not convinced that Cohen’s work significantly influenced

SYST E M A S TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

65

Nevertheless, the development of Rosenzweig’s own concept of system, which we will chart in the next chapter, is in some ways a move away from Ehrenberg’s formulation of their shared philosophical concerns. As a result of both personal and intellectual differences which appear to have moved to the fore in the wake of the failed Baden-Baden project, Rosenzweig drifted away from Ehrenberg for a time during the war years.122 As the next chapter seeks to show, it was rather Rosenzweig’s exchanges with Eugen Rosenstock and Viktor von Weizsäcker which were decisive during these years for Rosenzweig’s advance to that conception of system which he would oppose to the systems of German Idealism and later elaborate in the Star.

122

the way Rosenzweig came to view the task of system itself. It should nevertheless be noted that after Cohen’s death, Rosenzweig’s ire over obituaries written by Cohen’s students (Cassirer in particular) was sparked by the failure of these students to acknowledge Cohen’s status as “the single systematic head, … the single philosopher in the German Cathedral … at least since Lotze’s death,” Rosenzweig to his mother, April 17, 1918, BT 1, p. 540. See likewise Rosenzweig’s suggestion, in his “Einleitung in die Akademieausgabe der Jüdischen Schriften Hermann Cohens,” that Cohen was “the only one among his peers [Zunftgenossen] in these decades, to go the way to System. He does so in conscious rejection and unconscious following of the great thinkers, who had, at the beginning of the century, melded together Kant’s thinking and Goethe’s life into the cultural power of German Idealism,” GS 3, 181. But see Rosenzweig’s account of “anticipation” and his criticism of the notion of “infinite task” in Chapter 4, Section II.4. See, e.g., Rosenzweig to H. Ehrenbeng, October, 1916, BT 1, 241–2, and April 29, 1918, BT 1, 547–8. Cf., Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, “Hans Ehrenbergs Einfluss auf die Entstehung des Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig im Gespräch mit Ehrenberg, Cohen, und Buber, pp. 67–72.

2

m “A Twofold Relation to the Absolute”: The Genesis of Rosenzweig’s Concept of System

O

ur study of Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” has enabled us to pinpoint the conception of system that Rosenzweig recovered from German Idealism for his own time, and it thereby leads us an important step toward understanding what Rosenzweig means when he designates his own Star of Redemption as nothing other than a “system of philosophy.” We have learned that system, according to Rosenzweig, is the philosophical articulation of the One and All as such and in their interconnection. We have learned that this task of system entails grasping what is, both as a single all-encompassing whole and as a totality of particulars, and that it demands grasping together both the shared identity of all that is and the unique difference inherent to each particular being that is. We have learned, moreover, that understanding the identity and difference of all that is also demands that one grasp the identity and difference of the fundamental kinds of being, that one grasp the identity of God, world, and the human self, without losing sight of the particular difference of each. And we have seen, finally, how Rosenzweig comes to determine the system-program he recovered to be the “oldest” of German Idealism, in part, because he recognizes in it the first written formulation of Absolute Idealism, of the conviction, shared by Hegel and Schelling, that system can only be attained from an Absolute standpoint that transcends the limitations of finite human knowledge and grasps subjectivity and substantiality, thought and actuality, humanity and world, as moments on the path of its own divine self-bifurcation and return to unity. When we arrive at the Star itself in the next chapter, we will indeed discover that by declaring his opus to be a “system of philosophy,” Rosenzweig seeks to present the Star as the fulfillment of the task of system whose discovery by the German Idealists he documented in his “Oldest System-Program.” As do the systems of German Idealism, we will see, the Star aims to articulate knowledge of the One and All as such and in their interconnection; it seeks to present the identity and difference of God, human being, and world. Yet Rosenzweig struggles against no form of philosophy more deliberately in the Star than against Absolute Idealism. This is due, in large part, to the development of Rosenzweig’s thinking about system in the few years between his “Oldest System-Program” and the writing of the Star. During this period, Rosenzweig arrives at a new formulation of system, a conception of system which purports to fulfill the task of philosophy discovered 66

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

67

by German Idealism precisely by breaking out of the specific form system acquired in German Idealism. The goal of this chapter is to trace the contours of the new conception of system which Rosenzweig attains between 1916 and 1918, and to explain the corresponding critique of Idealism which accompanies this new conception of system. One may, I believe, formulate the transformation in the notion of system which Rosenzweig effects during these years as follows: if Absolute Idealism understands system to be the knowledge of the One and All that is possible solely from the standpoint of the Absolute, then Rosenzweig comes to deny to the philosopher the possibility of rising to such an Absolute standpoint as would transcend and at once encompass all finite perspectives within itself. Instead, he suggests that the relationship between the individual and the Absolute must be rethought in such a way as to show that the possibility of Absolute knowledge, and hence of the completeness and comprehensiveness of the system, finds its ground within the individual perspective of the philosopher herself, insofar as the philosopher grasps herself as both a “part” of the All and at the same time a “whole” human being. The significance of this change in the way the standpoint enabling systematic knowledge is understood and portrayed, and the ramifications of this change for how the philosopher must come to formulate the identity and difference of the One and All, can only become clear over the course of this chapter. The extent to which it is this change that leads Rosenzweig to construct a system of philosophy in the form of the Star of Redemption can only be evaluated in the chapters that follow. The period in which Rosenzweig’s new conception of system begins to take form commences with Rosenzweig’s intense six-month-long correspondence with Eugen Rosenstock, ushered in, in the early summer months of 1916, through Rosenstock’s reading of Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program.”1 It reaches its zenith in a letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg on November 18, 1917, identified later as the “Urzelle” of the Star of Redemption, and in Rosenzweig’s explicit declaration and formulation of his new concept of system in a follow-up letter to the “Urzelle,” written to Rudolf Ehrenberg on December 1, 1917. The period concludes, finally, in August 1918, with Rosenzweig’s multiple announcements that he has begun to write his own “system,” the Star of Redemption itself. For we who are trying to reconstruct a picture of Rosenzweig’s conception of system from the years leading up to the writing of the Star, the period between the summer of 1916 and the summer of 1918 offers a collage of correspondence. Indeed, we will discover that Rosenzweig achieves a clear formulation of both his own conception of system and his critique of the Idealist form of system only 1

See Rosenstock to Rosenzweig, May 29, 1916, BT 1, p. 191: “Your paper, this masterpiece of textual illumination, has stirred me more than will appear necessary to you. But – it is all so totally present for me. I have you to thank for a clarification of the revolution 1789–1800 … and this while I finally believe to have taken the redeeming step into system … not as a follower of one of my colleagues from 1800, but nonetheless as one alive with -g, -l, -e [Schelling, Hegel, Fichte].”

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

68

as a result of intense correspondence and cophilosophizing with several close friends and colleagues during these years. Yet despite the philosophical depth and incisiveness of Rosenzweig’s letters, and despite the fact that Rosenzweig’s mother teasingly designated Rosenzweig’s profession in these years to be that of “letterwriter,”2 we may not ignore the specific limitations inherent to the epistolar nature of our material in this chapter. Accordingly, a few words of apology regarding the methodological constraints of what follows might be permitted at this point. If Rosenzweig found himself faced, in his “Oldest System-Program,” with the task of explicating the oldest conception of system in German Idealism out of a mere two-page fragment, we find ourselves faced, in this chapter, with the task of explaining Rosenzweig’s arrival at a new conception of system out of a collection of letters, some personal and some formal, some thoughtful and some confused, written in different moods under different conditions to different correspondents. This incidental or occasional nature of letters has led me to make certain practical decisions and concessions regarding the presentation of material. First of all, I have abandoned a strictly chronological account of Rosenzweig’s thinking between the summer of 1916 and the summer of 1918 and have often presented the content of letters written later before those written earlier in this period. I begin, for example, with Rosenzweig’s letter to R. Ehrenberg from December 1, 1917; turn briefly to a letter to E. Rosenstock from September 1917; and only then turn back to Rosenzweig’s correspondence with Rosenstock from the previous year. I have allowed myself the liberty to do so because my aim in this chapter is not to offer a date-by-date chronology of Rosenzweig’s reflections on system from these two years leading up to the writing of the Star, but rather to provide as coherent and complete a picture as possible of Rosenzweig’s systematic thinking as it emerges from this period taken as a whole. Indeed, while one may certainly speak of a “development” in Rosenzweig’s thinking about system during these years, this development – at least insofar as it is represented in his letters – is not of a purely linear nature. Instead, ideas arise in and disappear from Rosenzweig’s discourse during these years, only to return later as part of an increasingly coherent, comprehensive, and consistent philosophical standpoint. Furthermore, just as Rosenzweig could only really explain the meaning of system embedded in the fragmentary text of his “Oldest System-Program” by relating it to the fully articulated attempts at system in German Idealism, I too must concede from the outset that we will only be able to confirm the interpretation of Rosenzweig’s conception of system given in this chapter when we turn to the Star itself. The letters we examine in this chapter offer vague articulations of Rosenzweig’s thoughts on system during these years, and I aim to shed light on these articulations without overinterpreting them, so as not to make them appear more clear or unambiguous than they are. At the same time, however, I hope to show that as preliminary as these 2

Gritli-Briefe, p. 472.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

69

meditations on system from Rosenzweig’s letters are, when taken together they do offer us a distinct representation of the One and All which, while not yet thought through rigorously in all its ramifications, nevertheless can be distinguished from the regnant form of system in German Idealism. I thus submit that clarifying both the critique of German Idealism and the articulation of a new concept of system that crystallize in Rosenzweig’s thinking during the period between his “Oldest SystemProgram” and the Star leads us a vital step closer to understanding the concept of system Rosenzweig had before his mind’s eye when he began writing the Star. We will turn first, by way of formal introduction, to Rosenzweig’s most concise formulation of his new concept of system, his letter to R. Ehrenberg of December 1, 1917. We turn first to this letter because it best introduces the specific web of questions surrounding system which occupies Rosenzweig during this period between his correspondence with Rosenstock and the commencement of his writing of the Star, and it best highlights the way Rosenzweig comes to define his own concept of system in contradistinction to the Idealist conception of system which we encountered in the previous chapter. As we shall see, the concept of system Rosenzweig tries to articulate in his letter of December 1917 remains in large part enigmatic, ambiguous. But its very ambiguity will help us to formulate specific questions about Rosenzweig’s new concept of system, questions whose answers we hope to find by piecing together some of the central themes which preoccupy Rosenzweig’s thought as a whole between 1916 and 1918.

I. The Path to a New System-Concept i.1. “System Is Not Architecture” Rosenzweig writes to Rudolf Ehrenberg on December 1, 1917, as follows: His [Weizsäcker’s] concept of system … is in fact just mine and Rosenstock’s as well. I formulate it as follows: System is not architecture, where the stones assemble the edifice and exist for the sake of the edifice (and otherwise for no reason); but rather system means that every individual has the drive and the will to relation to all other individuals; the “whole” lies beyond its conscious circle of vision; it sees only the chaos of the individuals into which it stretches out its feelers. [Whereas] in the Hegelian system every individual position is only anchored in the whole … now the question-mark of the “and” is thrown out in all directions. … But where then does the Absolute remain, which philosophy cannot do without? So Weizsäcker asks and I ask it too. I say: if the “whole” is no longer the content of the system, then it must be the form of the system; or said otherwise: the wholeness of the system is no longer objective, but rather subjective. … The philosopher is the form of philosophy. … And now I believe Weizsäcker too is on the path to the knowledge of subjectivity as the only objective framework of the system.3 3

BT 1, pp. 484–6.

70

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

As we have traversed the path that leads Rosenzweig to the discovery of system as the task of philosophy in the “Oldest System-Program,” and have discovered thereby for ourselves the preconditions for this discovery of system, Rosenzweig’s reflections on system in this letter strike us as familiar and foreign at once. We recognize here the central elements of the concept of system which we encountered in the last chapter. System here continues to name the philosophical task of grasping the relation between the single all-encompassing whole of what is and the manifold particulars within it, between the “One and All.” Rosenzweig’s letter likewise reflects on what we now recognize as the Absolute Idealist conviction that true and certain knowledge of the One and All can only be attained if the philosopher overcomes the relativity of any one particular standpoint and grounds her knowledge of the One and All in a viewpoint that is Absolute. But the concept of system that Rosenzweig advocates in this letter at once flies in the face of the criteria for system which Rosenzweig illuminated for us in the “Oldest System-Program.” Rosenzweig openly opposes what we have learned to identify as the “architectural” presuppositions of system, he questions the manner in which Hegel’s system grounds the individual in the whole, and he seems to rule out the possibility of rising beyond the individual perspective to an Absolute standpoint. Rosenzweig tells us that he shares his conception of system not with Hegel or Schelling, but rather with two of his friends and colleagues: Eugen Rosenstock and Victor von Weizsäcker. At first glance, at least, this notion of system Rosenzweig shares with his friends seems to entail the very kind of standpoint philosophizing whose dubious scientific character and whose lack of awareness of its own systematic presuppositions Rosenzweig highlighted for us in his “Oldest SystemProgram,” or else some kind of Fichtean subjective systematic that articulates nothing of the world outside the subject. In order to make some initial sense of both Rosenzweig’s critique of the Idealist systems and the conception of system he appears to advocate in their stead, let us take a closer look at Rosenzweig’s own words. In doing so, we will first address the negative formulation Rosenzweig gives to his new system-concept and only afterward turn to the positive formulation. Rosenzweig opens his letter by formulating his new concept of system negatively. “System,” he claims, “is not architecture.” In the light of what Rosenzweig has taught us in the last chapter regarding the nature of systematic knowledge, we might rephrase Rosenzweig’s statement here as follows: the One and All of what is cannot be grasped in architectural form. The reason why the One and All cannot be grasped in architectural form, Rosenzweig proceeds to explain, is that the architectural model presents the multiplicity of particular beings within the All as nothing more than “stones [which] assemble the edifice and are there for the sake of the edifice.” The architectural model precludes true systematic knowledge, Rosenzweig suggests, because it loses sight of the unique difference inherent to particularity. Instead of presenting the One and All as such and in their interconnection, it reduces the multiplicity of the All to One single structure.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

71

The tenor of Rosenzweig’s negative formulation of his new concept of system here is familiar to us from the last chapter. Indeed, Rosenzweig’s claim that a certain formulation of the systematic project fails to grasp particularity and instead reduces all particulars to One recalls the very claim Jacobi and the German Idealists brought against Spinoza: that his exposition of the One and All as a single substance, whose necessary being determines the essence of all its particular modes, amounts to a reduction of all particularity, all freedom, even all divinity, to nothing.4 By identifying the reductive approach to system he seeks to overthrow as architecture, however, Rosenzweig overtly turns the Idealist critique of Spinoza against itself. For we recall that it was Kant whose “Architectonic of Pure Reason” posited the task of system in architectural terms, demonstrating that the possibility of grasping the One and All demanded that the philosopher grasp, from the beginning, “the idea of the whole,” “the unity of the end, to which all parts are related and in the idea of which they are also related to each other,” just as the architect must see the blueprint of an entire building before construction commences.5 And as we saw, it was the Absolute Idealism articulated in the works of Schelling and Hegel which sought to realize the possibility of such an architectural vision of the whole. Only the attainment of the Absolute standpoint permitted Hegel, as Rosenzweig claims here, to “anchor” “every individual position in the whole.” But in the letter before us, Rosenzweig accuses the Idealists of the same shortcomings that they in turn had attributed to Spinoza. Rosenzweig implies that the very Absolute, architectural perspective which purports to grasp the “whole” in its “conscious circle of vision” actually fails to grasp the particulars which make up the All as anything more than “stones that exist for the sake of the edifice.” Indeed, Rosenzweig’s emphasis on the material character of this architectural metaphor suggests that despite the Idealists’ intent to grasp subject and substance together in one systematic perspective, the Idealists in fact fail to transcend the “substantial” view of the One and All they aim to overcome. Where is the individual subject, Rosenzweig seems to ask, amid all this stone and mortar? Rosenzweig’s negative formulation of his concept of system thus defines this concept against the reigning concept of system in German Idealism. But Rosenzweig’s critique of Idealism here leaves us with important questions unanswered. We do not know, for example, why Rosenzweig now views the systems of Absolute Idealism as having failed to grasp the individual as anything more than a part that exists for the sake of the whole. We must assume, from Rosenzweig’s words, that he locates the Idealist failure to grasp particularity in the way Hegel ultimately finds the anchor for every given particular position “only in the whole.” And we can gather from Rosenzweig’s hints that he believes knowledge of the uniqueness 4 5

See Chapter 1, Section III. Immanuel Kant, CPR, A832/B860. See Chapter 1, Section IV.1.

72

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

of particularity to have been lost somewhere in the German Idealist ascent from the particular to the Absolute perspective. We can clarify Rosenzweig critique of the concept of system in German Idealism as architecture if we turn our attention briefly to a letter Rosenzweig wrote to E. Rosenstock on September 18, 1917. In this letter, Rosenzweig criticizes the dialectical relationship Hegel establishes between part and whole within his system. “In Hegel’s system,” Rosenzweig claims, “the system-parts ‘develop’ themselves to the whole in it. … The Telos builds itself up out of the Teloses Telossen … and the drive of these part-Teloses to absoluteness exhausts itself in that they contribute to the construction [Aufbau] of the whole.”6 Rosenzweig’s focus in this letter to Rosenstock is directed upon the dialectical development of the Hegelian system, whereby every successive stage in the system must be shown to “exhaust itself ” in its drive to “absoluteness,” to negate itself as the ultimate truth, in order that the Absolute Spirit which pervades every stage come to realize itself completely. In the resultant systematic structure, Rosenzweig claims, the ultimate “Telos” of the whole, the ultimate end goal of the system, is attained at the expense of the plurality of ends within the system. Each individual end or purpose must come to recognize itself as no absolute end in itself, but rather as merely a step toward the ultimate end, as merely a “part” contributing “to the construction of the whole.” As a result of this sublation of particular ends within the whole, Rosenzweig’s letter to Rosenstock goes on to assert, “there emerges an edifice” in the Hegelian system, “but no kingdom of ends; each does not depend on all others, but rather all merely [hang] together in the whole.”7 Rosenzweig’s claim here is illuminating for us because it makes use of the same architectural metaphor to designate the faults of the Hegelian system that Rosenzweig will invoke two and a half months later in his letter to Ehrenberg of December 1, 1917. We learn here that Rosenzweig defines the Hegelian system as architecture, in which the “stones exist [solely] for the sake of the edifice,” because of the manner in which the particular parts of the Hegelian system are shown to negate their own particular ends in order to construct the whole of the system, and, if we may extrapolate, for the way in which every particular perspective in the system must reveal itself as yielding only partial truth, as forming one step on the path of the Absolute. The letter to Rosenstock of September 18, 1917, thus helps clarify the train of thought that leads Rosenzweig to diagnose the “edifice complex”8 of the Hegelian system in his letter to R. Ehrenberg of December 1917. No less significant for us than this diagnosis, moreover, is the model of system which Rosenzweig 6 7

8

Gritli-Briefe, pp. 36–7. Gritli-Briefe, p. 37. I have italicized here the passage that is underlined in the original letter and have set the passage that is twice underlined in boldface italic. See Mark Wigley’s use of this marvelous term in his study of the architectural metaphors that dominate Derrida’s project of deconstruction, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

73

juxtaposes against this architectural model in his letter to Rosenstock. Rosenzweig asserts, namely, that the Hegelian system is an edifice and not a “kingdom of ends.” “Kingdom of ends” is the term Kant used in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to name the ideal “union of various rational beings” wherein “all rational beings stand under the law that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as means, but always at the same time as ends in themselves.”9 Such a union, Kant claimed, allows us “to think of a whole of all ends in systematic connection.”10 What is remarkable about Rosenzweig’s use of Kantian terminology in this letter to Rosenstock is that by juxtaposing the Hegelian “architectural” system against what appears to be a notion of system as a “kingdom of ends,” Rosenzweig actually pits one systematic structure with Kantian roots against another. Indeed, both edifice and kingdom, both the idea of grasping the systematic whole through “the unity of the end, to which all parts are related and in the idea of which they are also related to each other,” and that of conceiving “of a whole of all ends in systematic connection,” were bequeathed by Kant to his systematically minded successors. For Kant himself, of course, it is the human being’s autonomy that grants him the unique character of being an end in itself within the world, but Rosenzweig here seems to suggest that all particular beings, all “system-parts,” be considered both as ends-in-themselves and at once as parts combining to form a systematic whole.11 Indeed, if the architectural model of system posits particulars as parts that must be grasped in relation to the end which unites them into a whole, then by pointing to the notion of a “kingdom of ends,” Rosenzweig would seem to oppose to this architectural model of system a demand for a system which grasps and articulates particular beings not merely as “means” to the common end of the whole, but rather as both means and ends in themselves, as both parts of the greater whole and individual wholes in themselves. What Rosenzweig envisions when he points to this possibility of a systematic whole formed by the totality of particulars which are at once means to the ultimate end of the whole and ends in themselves is as of yet unclear. We do not yet know what it means for each particular being within the One and All to be both part of the systematic whole and an individual whole in itself. But we can understand Rosenzweig’s allusion to the Kantian “kingdom of ends” as a way of pointing out what he believes is wrong with the systems of German Idealism. Rosenzweig 9

10 11

Immanuel Kant, “Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten,” Kants Werke IV: 433, translated as “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” Practical Philosophy: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, p. 83. Ibid. Rosenzweig even includes such entities as soul, language, and law in his list of such “system-parts” in his letter to Rosenstock of September 18, 1917, Gritli-Briefe, p. 37. On the instability of Rosenzweig’s distinction between the individual entity or thing and the individual human subject during these years, see note 14. The connection between Rosenzweig’s concept of revelation and the Kantian notion of autonomy will be discussed in Section II.2, devoted to the “Urzelle.”

74

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

suggests, namely, that in their quest for system, the German Idealists were obliged to articulate the relationship between particular and whole in such a way that reveals the particular to be both its own end in itself and at one and the same time a part of the systematic whole. But according to Rosenzweig, the Idealists succeed merely in showing how particular beings form parts of the system and fail to grasp the inherent independence, the inherent difference, of every particular being in itself. If German Idealism has in fact failed to grasp the inherent difference of particularity, then a new conception of system is an urgent necessity for philosophy. For if, as we recall, system demands knowledge of the One and the All in their interconnection, if true systematic knowledge requires the philosophical unification of the conceptual identity common to all that is together with the actual unique difference of every particular being, then the systems of Idealism are not in fact “systems” at all in the truest or most technical sense. As audacious as such a claim seems to be, it is implied in the concise assertion with which Rosenzweig begins his letter to Ehrenberg of December 1917: “System is not architecture.” Rosenzweig does not say my system is not architecture; he does not wish merely to add a new notion of system to those already extant; rather Rosenzweig declares system itself not to be architecture. He thereby suggests that the true articulation of system as knowledge of the One and All has not in fact been realized in the architectural form that German Idealism gave to it. Such a bold assertion penned by the same writer who recognized the German Idealists themselves as responsible for the discovery of system as the proper task of philosophy demands more than a critique of German Idealism. It demands a positive formulation of the vision of system that Rosenzweig seeks to articulate in its stead. And just as Rosenzweig’s critique of Idealism focused on what he believed to be the reductive treatment of the individual within the Idealist system, so too his own positive meditations on system in his letter to Ehrenberg of December 1917 begin with the individual. “System,” Rosenzweig asserts, “means that every individual has the drive and will to relation to all other individuals; the ‘whole’ lies beyond its conscious circle of vision.” Rosenzweig’s initial positive formulation of his concept of system here sets a puzzling image before us. At first glance, the representation of the individual Rosenzweig presents seems anything but systematic; Rosenzweig’s description seems antisystematic, antitotalistic, indeed relativistic. After all, this individual is not grounded in the whole; it is certainly not a part that exists solely for the sake of the whole. Rather, this individual simply stands there in relation to other individuals. Before we conclude hastily, however, that Rosenzweig’s account removes all that is systematic from its so-called system, we must pay careful attention to Rosenzweig’s wording here. The individual, Rosenzweig asserts, has the will and drive to relate himself to all other individuals, and although the “whole” lies beyond the individual’s “circle of vision,” it is nonetheless present, beyond the individual,

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

75

in Rosenzweig’s account. Indeed, Rosenzweig’s account of system seems so puzzling, at first, because Rosenzweig does not seem to decide between the individual and the whole. He preserves the individual’s particularity, pointing to its multidirectional relations to all other individuals; he does not simply anchor it in the single all-encompassing whole, as he accuses Hegel of doing. At the same time he preserves the whole beyond the individual, unseen by the individual and yet, strangely enough, still posited by Rosenzweig himself. Rosenzweig’s lip service to the “whole,” however, cannot of course be accepted as an adequate substitute for the kind of comprehensive account of the interconnection of the individual and the whole that would amount to systematic knowledge. Indeed, Rosenzweig’s description of the individual, standing within the whole and yet unable to see the whole, seems to preclude such knowledge. It suggests that every particular individual can only see part of the whole, a part whose truth must be determined in relation to the respective views of the whole seen by all other individuals. If this is the case, however, Rosenzweig has merely traded one systematic failing for another. He has saved the particular perspective that he claims has been lost in German Idealism by giving up the very Absolute perspective which first appeared to grant the Idealists knowledge of the One and All, by leading them beyond the limitations of finite, relative human knowing. Rosenzweig in fact acknowledges that the portrait of system which he has sketched thus far in his letter to Ehrenberg yields only “a philosophical relativity principle.” It is precisely in the light of the inadmissibility of such a principle as the ground for a philosophical system that Rosenzweig’s letter continues, “But where then does the Absolute remain, which philosophy cannot do without?” Even before we turn to Rosenzweig’s answer to his own question, here, we must appreciate what Rosenzweig’s question itself confirms for us about his enduring agreement with German Idealism over the fundamental requirements of system, an agreement that remains intact even as Rosenzweig sharply opposes the specific form system takes on in German Idealism. Rosenzweig, namely, acknowledges the need to demonstrate that his new conception of system preserves the very absolute character of knowledge which he seems to neglect in his initial portrait of the relationship between the individual and the whole. And while Rosenzweig may criticize the manner in which German Idealism loses the perspective of the individual in its rise to an Absolute perspective, he at one and the same time accepts the German Idealist determination that systematic knowledge of the One and the All demands some kind of absolute grounding. He accepts the German Idealist conclusion that only an Absolute perspective grants true knowledge of the whole. How then does Rosenzweig hope to preserve the perspectives of both particular and Absolute, individual and whole, at one and the same time? Rosenzweig’s answer is as follows: “I say: if the ‘whole’ is no longer the content of the system, then it must be the form of the system; or said otherwise: the wholeness of the

76

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

system is no longer objective, but rather subjective. … The philosopher is the form of philosophy. … Subjectivity [is] the only objective framework of the system.” Rosenzweig’s solution here to the problem of how to preserve the identity and difference of individual and whole within his new concept of system flirts with obscurity. But if we consider it together with Rosenzweig’s negative formulation of system as “not architecture,” we may be able to clarify Rosenzweig’s meaning somewhat. Rosenzweig intends to assert, I propose, that while he rejects the possibility of grasping the whole as a kind of objective “content” which reduces being to an edifice, he still sees the possibility of attaining the comprehensiveness and certainty of Absolute systematic knowledge within the whole of the philosopher’s own subjectivity. We notice that Rosenzweig is careful not to present this subjective wholeness of the system as “merely” subjective, as relativistic, as denying knowledge of the world outside the subject, or as a philosophy of the personal standpoint. Indeed, according to Rosenzweig, subjectivity is precisely the “objective framework of the system”; the philosopher has “the Absolute,” and he has the “wholeness of the system” within himself. Rosenzweig thus does not abandon the Absolute, the whole, or objectivity in his new concept of system, but rather, he locates the Absolute, the whole, and the objective within the philosopher himself. Despite the periodic obscurity of Rosenzweig’s letter to Ehrenberg of December 1917, we may conclude, Rosenzweig’s different formulations of his new concept of system, when taken together, do present a picture of the relationship between the individual and the whole, and hence of the One and the All, which we can distinguish from that of German Idealism.12 In German Idealism, according to Rosenzweig, the meaning of every particular is only determined by grasping its place within the whole, by showing the way each particular being sublates its own particular end in order to contribute to the construction of the whole. Grasping the place of every particular within the whole demanded of the German Idealist philosopher, in turn, that he rise above his own particular perspective to trace the movement of the One and All from the standpoint of the Absolute. Rosenzweig offers a different account of the relationship between the particular and the whole. According to him, the individual stands somehow within the whole, but instead of being “anchored only in the whole,” the individual is driven into relations with all other particulars. As such, the individual cannot grasp the whole that is “beyond its conscious circle of vision.” There is no Absolute perspective from 12

Moshe Schwarz also sees in this letter one of the keys to answering the question of “how the two impulses, so opposed to one another, of the form of systematic philosophy, which demands of itself knowledge of the ‘All,’ on the one hand, and the form of subjective, individualistic philosophizing, on the other, are reconciled in the world of Rosenzweig,” ‫[ ממיתוס להתגלות‬From Myth to Revelation], pp. 221–2. Schwarz answers the question by pointing to the relationship of Rosenzweig’s thinking to Schelling’s Weltalter. Elliot R. Wolfson has recently offered an interpretation of this letter in his Language, Eros, Being, pp. 88–9, where he notes Rosenzweig’s “wish to preserve a viable notion of system that will not be subject to his own criticism of the totalizing and essentializing tendencies inherent to Idealist philosophy.”

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

77

whose standpoint the individual can watch the whole system unfold. At the same time, Rosenzweig claims, the individual is an end in itself, the individual has “the ‘whole’ ” within himself, and the possibility of an absolute grounding of knowledge is somehow wrapped up in this individual wholeness. In Rosenzweig’s announcement of his new concept of system in his letter of December 1, 1917, we thus catch a glimpse of a system in which at one and the same time the individual stands within the whole, and the whole stands within the individual. And yet, we must concede, such a “concept of system” raises more questions for us than it answers. We must ask: What is the relationship between the individual who stands within the whole, who is driven into relation to all others, and the individual who has the whole within itself? Are they one and the same or are they different? Conversely, we ask, what is the relation between the systematic whole within which the individual enters into relations with others but which itself stands beyond the individual’s field of vision and the systematic whole within the individual? Are they somehow one and the same, or are they different? Finally, we must ask: even if we grant the possibility of grasping the individual as some kind of whole, for example, as an end in itself, what could Rosenzweig mean when he suggests that the philosopher can actually find the Absolute within his own personal individualized whole? Our first encounter with Rosenzweig’s own “concept of system” from his letter to R. Ehrenberg of December 1917 thus leaves us with many crucial questions unanswered. With these questions in mind, we now turn to seek out answers as we survey the crystallization of Rosenzweig’s concept of system during the period which begins with his correspondence with Rosenstock in 1916 and ends with the writing of the first words of the Star in 1918. Rosenzweig’s letters to Rosenstock and to Rudolf Ehrenberg of late 1917 have helped us determine Rosenzweig’s critique of the systems of German Idealism as a critique of the failure of German Idealism to grasp particularity as such within its Absolute systematic framework. We have learned, furthermore, that giving a positive account of the systematic perspective that Rosenzweig attains in these years, and which he apparently shares with Rosenstock and Weizsäcker, will demand that we follow Rosenzweig’s own development of a new articulation of the relation between individual and whole between 1916 and 1918. For Rosenzweig suggests that this new articulation alone makes possible a concept of system which grasps the identity and difference of the One and the All in a manner that at once transcends the limitations of German Idealism and yet fulfills the very task of system which the German Idealists first discovered.

i.2 System as Dialogue of Absolute Monologues Rosenzweig in fact first explores the idea that the individual has the “system of philosophy” within herself during his correspondence with Rosenstock from the

78

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

year before. On November 11, 1916, Rosenzweig attempts to explain to Rosenstock “how my method [Verfahren] presents itself to me.” He proceeds as follows: I believe there are in the life of every living thing [alles Lebendigen] moments, or rather only one moment, when it speaks the truth. One thus perhaps need not say anything about the living, but rather one must only wait for the moment when it expresses itself. The dialogue which these monologues form among each other … I consider the whole truth. (That they make a dialogue with each other is the great world-secret that is manifest, revealed, indeed the content of revelation [das offenbare, offenbarte, ja der Inhalt der Offenbarung]. … The monologues are in the most actual sense: self-confessions; and just these most private words [Stillstenkämmerleinworte] prove themselves to be the parliamentary speeches of the “great day” of world history …). … So – now you will know why I think in individuals (I prefer to say: in human beings) and not in branches. That each one of these human beings is the whole, this fundamental truth I have just rediscovered for myself in a surprising way from the side, that the whole, … the system of philosophy, is nowhere other than in them, insofar as they at once speak absolute monologue and nevertheless the dialogue.13

Rosenzweig’s reflections on the relationship between the individual and the whole in this letter anticipate by over a year the central features of the “concept of system” that he works out in his letter to R. Ehrenberg which we examined earlier. Here we already have before us the idea that the individual both stands within the ultimate whole and at the same time contains the whole, the “system of philosophy,” within itself. Moreover, Rosenzweig’s rhapsodic articulation of the relationship between these two wholes in the letter sheds light on the questions we have asked regarding that positive formulation of Rosenzweig’s new concept of system we encountered previously. Let us examine Rosenzweig’s statements carefully. According to Rosenzweig, every individual – this individual is designated as a “living thing” in the beginning of the passage, later as “individual,” and finally simply as “human being”14 – speaks the truth at one time in its life. The form Rosenzweig assigns to this speaking of the truth is that of the monologue, a form 13 14

BT 1, pp. 292–3. Rosenzweig’s slippage between these terms for the individual poses a significant difficulty for the interpreter. In fact, Rosenzweig repeats this kind of sliding between what he would later distinguish as “human being” and “world” again and again during these years. As late as the “Urzelle,” Rosenzweig notes that his “terminology is still quite unstable,” and regarding the notation B = B, which will stand exclusively for the human self in the Star, Rosenzweig writes, after having read over the text of the “Urzelle” himself, “From a certain point on, B = B means exclusively human beings: during the relatively very awkward development it still means also the translogical actuality, the transpersonal Godhead,” GS 3, p. 138, translated in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 70. The difficulty that is reflected in this slippage is twofold. On the one hand, according to Rosenzweig it is revelation and the response to revelation which first make the human being what she is, and therefore it is unclear what one should call her – and it is unclear how she is different from other entities in the world – before revelation. On the other hand, in the Star Rosenzweig will assert that it is the fate of every living thing to be the recipient of divine love at some time. Thus the distinction between human being and world, I might suggest, is a historical distinction, a

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

79

of speaking that is inherently self-enclosed and self-sufficient. Indeed, the speaker of a monologue has no interlocutor with whom she shares the stage; she depends on no other speaker to complete or complement what she has to say; rather the monologue forms a whole in itself. Rosenzweig highlights this self-sufficiency of the monologue at the end of the letter by designating the truth that the individual speaks as an “absolute monologue.” To claim that such a monologic expression of the truth is “absolute,” one might suggest, is to claim that the truth spoken by the individual does not depend on the relations in which it may stand to those who hear it, or to the whole of spoken truths, but rather, the “absolute monologue” is true in and of itself. It is true in itself, Rosenzweig implies, simply because it is no more than a “self-confession”: it is the moment in which the individual articulates that self which is uniquely her own, which can be articulated by no one else. Nonetheless, according to Rosenzweig this absolute yet uniquely individual truth spoken as an isolated monologue forms, at one and the same time, part of a dialogue. Nor is the entry into dialogue inconsequential for what has been identified as the independent truth-content of the monologues. On the contrary, in spite of the absoluteness of the independent truths spoken in monologue, only the dialogue among all monologues amounts to “the whole truth.” In this account of the relationship between the totality of all monologues and the dialogue they form, Rosenzweig thus highlights the necessity of grasping the particular beings that form the totality of All that is both as independent individual wholes, and at the same time as parts of, or as participants in, that ultimate whole. In being parts of this ultimate whole, in speaking parts of the dialogue that constitutes the whole truth, these particulars somehow do not lose their independent character of being individual wholes in themselves; but neither does their being wholes in themselves prevent them from forming part of the whole. Such a formulation of the relationship between individual and whole hints at the very two-sided model of system that Rosenzweig came to formulate in late 1917. Rosenzweig’s use of the term “absolute monologue,” furthermore, seems to offer us a clue as to how we are to understand his later claim, in his letter of December 1, 1917, that “the Absolute which philosophy cannot do without” is to be found within the philosopher herself. In that letter, we found that Rosenzweig denies to the philosopher the possibility of rising above her own perspective as a human individual to the standpoint of the Absolute, to the standpoint of that single unconditioned divine being whose primordial “setting up a world over against itself ” makes possible all subjectivity and substantiality. Here Rosenzweig proposes that in the individual’s monologic self-confession, the individual articulates a truth whose unconditionedness, completeness, and independence are actually comparable, on the individual scale, to the unconditionedness, completeness, and independence of the Absolute distinction that will be dissolved when all living things have received revelation, at the redemptive end of time.

80

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

upon which all individuals depend. The philosopher may not be able to attain the Absolute perspective, but she can grasp the absolute character of the truth of her own self-confession, and she can “wait” and listen for the moments when other individuals articulate their own absolute self-confessions. Does this individual yet whole, absolute articulation of truth describe that individual yet whole philosophical standpoint that makes Rosenzweig’s new concept of system tenable? When one recalls how Rosenzweig came to identify the philosopher herself as “the form of philosophy,” in his December 1917 letter to R. Ehrenberg, one is tempted to answer in the affirmative. But at the end of this 1916 letter to Rosenstock, we notice, Rosenzweig does not claim that it is the expression of absolute monologue alone which grants the individual the possibility of system within herself, but rather, the “whole,” the “system of philosophy,” is present in each individual, according to Rosenzweig, “insofar as they at once speak absolute monologue and nevertheless the dialogue.” Rosenzweig implies, therefore, that the individual human being is curiously not “the whole” insofar as she is an isolated whole speaking an absolute monologue. She is the whole, strangely enough, only insofar as she is both whole and part, insofar as she speaks both absolute monologue and part of the dialogue. Just as he did in his letter to Ehrenberg, Rosenzweig presents us here with two images of the human being – as particular within the whole, and as whole particular. But in this letter to Rosenstock, Rosenzweig explicitly defines the wholeness that amounts to system as a wholeness that grasps within itself the human being both as part of the ultimate whole and as whole in herself. If we now return to reexamine Rosenzweig’s letter to Ehrenberg of December 1917 in the light of what we have learned from this letter to Rosenstock of November 1916, we discern that it is the same individual who has the whole within itself and who at once stands within the ultimate whole. And we may assert Rosenzweig’s conviction to be that only because the individual is both part of the ultimate systematic whole and at once a whole in herself is it possible for her to unite both sides of her person in a systematic perspective that is “more” whole than either whole or part. It is unclear what we are to understand by this “whole” perspective that is somehow “more” whole than the whole individual articulated in absolute monologue. But Rosenzweig’s entire presentation of his new concept of system thus far does seem to depend on precisely such a “whole” perspective that joins the human being as whole and part. For if Rosenzweig did not allow for this kind of third position, we would have to ask how Rosenzweig himself could present both perspectives together, that is, how Rosenzweig could somehow see and present the human being both as a particular within the whole, on the one hand, and as a whole in herself on the other, as he does both in his letter to Rosenstock of November 1916 and in his letter to R. Ehrenberg of December 1917. Thus the perspective of the “whole human being” who grasps herself as both whole in herself and part of the ultimate whole, and who thereby hears the self-confessions of others as both whole monologues and parts of the dialogue, would seem to be Rosenzweig’s own

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

81

philosophical perspective. Yet the very suggestion that in order to grasp how the human being is both whole and part, one needs somehow to view both aspects of the human being from a higher, more whole perspective would appear highly problematic for Rosenzweig, for such a suggestion points to the same kind of dialectical sublation of particular perspectives whose culmination in an Absolute standpoint Rosenzweig seeks to avoid. How then, one may ask, are we to grasp such a third standpoint which at once grasps the identity of the human being as whole and the human being as part but nonetheless does not rise above the human being’s own perspective in a quixotic pursuit of divine knowledge? It cannot be coincidental, in this regard, that just as Rosenzweig seems to point to three different human standpoints in his letter to Rosenstock of November 11, 1916, he likewise points there to three different forms of truth. He begins by describing “the truth” [“die Wahrheit”] that he believes is spoken by all living beings at one time in their lives. This truth, we have come to understand, is the truth of absolute monologue, of the self-confession of the individual that forms a self-enclosed whole within itself. Rosenzweig then points to “the whole truth” [“die ganze Wahrheit”] that emerges only in the dialogue that takes place between all monologues. Beyond these two initial forms of truth, however, Rosenzweig’s letter makes mention of another truth. Rosenzweig notes his own surprise at his “rediscovery” of the “fundamental truth” [“diese Grundwahrheit”] that “the whole, … the system of philosophy, is nowhere other than in [the individual human beings], insofar as they at once speak absolute monologue and the dialogue.” Rosenzweig intimates, thereby, that beyond the truth of the individual as absolute, as whole in itself, and distinguished from the single whole truth formed by bringing these individual truths together, there stands the fundamental truth of Rosenzweig’s own standpoint, that standpoint which grasps the systematic truth of the “whole” individual insofar as it combines the absolute expression of individual truth and the partial expression of the whole truth. This standpoint alone, I have argued, is the standpoint of Rosenzweig’s systematic thinking. According to Rosenzweig, the fundamental truth that corresponds to Rosenzweig’s own perspective is a truth that he has “rediscovered.” A rediscovery implies, of course, an original discovery, and the source of this original discovery is spelled out at the beginning of the passage that we have examined here. The fact that the human being is both whole and part, Rosenzweig suggests there, the fact that the absolute monologues of individual human beings at once “form a dialogue with each other is the great world-secret … indeed the content of revelation.” Rosenzweig here defines the “content of revelation” in striking terms: revelation reveals the fact that the individual human being is both a whole in himself and a part of the ultimate whole, that truth itself is both radically particular for each individual being and at once the ultimate united expression of all.15 But if this is 15

Cf., Ulrich Bieberich, Wenn die Geschichte göttlich wäre: Rosenzweigs Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel, p. 68. Bieberich also explores several additional letters to Rosenstock in 1916 in which Rosenzweig discusses the subject of system, see pp. 59–74.

82

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the case, then we must conclude that the content of revelation is none other than the fundamental truth that truth is systematic. For systematic knowledge, we have noted time and again, is precisely the knowledge that unites the identity that is common to all that is (i.e., the dialogue) together with the unique difference of every particular being (absolute monologue); it is the knowledge of what is both as One (the whole truth) and as a totality of unique and independent particulars (“every living thing speaks the truth”), that is, as All. And Rosenzweig asserts here that it is revelation itself that teaches the unification, the togetherness of One and All; it is revelation that reveals the “whole, … the system of philosophy” which brings together the human being as part of the singular whole and as absolute individual. Revelation – and not the Absolute standpoint! – is the key to systematic knowledge of the One and All. We do not know as of yet what to make of Rosenzweig’s extraordinary suggestion about system and revelation. As the title of S. Mosès’s classic work on Rosenzweig is meant to imply, at first glance no two terms seem to be further from each other than system and revelation. For if the claim that truth must be grasped as system implies that truth can only be grasped by rigorously thinking through the interconnection of the identity and difference of all that is, revelation, whatever its specific form, certainly seems to imply a reception of knowledge or inspiration that is immediate, that requires no discursive elaboration. Mosès asserts that the “fundamental question around which all of Rosenzweig’s thought must be understood” is whether it is “possible to go beyond this duality of the System and the Revelation? Or again: is it possible to think them together, in a movement that succeeds in articulating each one on the other while preserving their differences?”16 While Mosès’s formulation of Rosenzweig’s philosophical project as an attempt to think system and revelation together is surely correct, what is remarkable about the letter of November 11, 1916 is that here Rosenzweig does not take as his starting point the duality, or the opposition of system and revelation, but rather he begins by positing their identity! Rosenzweig begins by asserting that the “content of revelation,” the “what” which revelation reveals to the human being, is the “fundamental truth” of the “system of philosophy” itself and thereby suggests that it is revelation which grants the human being the possibility of philosophizing from a systematic standpoint wherein she may understand herself at once as a whole individual and as part of the ultimate whole without rising beyond the limits of the human perspective. Exactly how revelation reveals system, how the notion of revelation makes it possible for Rosenzweig to carve out a philosophical standpoint that unites the human being’s whole individuality and her role as part of the world, will only begin to become clear for us when we turn to the “Urzelle” of the Star in the second half of this chapter. The “Urzelle” will claim that the unification of the 16

Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, p. 37.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

83

human being as whole and the human being as part can only be understood as the consequence of each’s prior relationship to the divine, to the Absolute. And the “Urzelle” will depict, furthermore, how the same experience of revelation which awakens the human being as a whole individual at once points her toward the future unification of the “One and All,” a “One and All” whose realization the whole individual has the choice to become “part” of, through acts of neighborly love. Our study of Rosenzweig’s early attempts to articulate the One and All from a human perspective has left many questions unanswered, but it has nevertheless delineated for us some basic features of his concept of system during the years 1916–1917. In place of an Absolute standpoint which reduces the multiplicity of the All to parts of the One ultimate whole, Rosenzweig posits an individual human systematic standpoint which recognizes both the wholeness of the individual and the way in which that individual nonetheless becomes part of the ultimate whole through its relations with others. Such a systematic standpoint is made possible – in a manner which we have yet to grasp fully – not through a rise to the Absolute, but rather through the acceptance of revelation, whose content is none other than the systematicity of all that is. As Rosenzweig engages ever more intently in the development of his systematic standpoint in the fall of 1917, he does not cease to define that systematic standpoint against the very German Idealists who first discovered system as the task of philosophy. But his reflections on system in the months leading up to the “Urzelle” appear to turn away from such metaphysical questions as those regarding the relations between the One and the All, or system and revelation, and turn toward basic structural and methodological questions related to system. It is on the basis of these questions of method and structure that Rosenzweig enters into what seems to have been a three-way exchange with Eugen Rosenstock and Viktor von Weizsäcker in the fall and winter of 1917–1918 devoted to the question of the possibility of scientific unity. In the section that follows, I aim to show that Rosenzweig’s discussion with Weizsäcker and Rosenstock regarding scientific unity played an integral role in enabling him to articulate his systematic standpoint as he did in the “Urzelle” to the Star of Redemption.

i.3 Rosenzweig, Rosenstock, Weizsäcker, and the “Coitus of Two Sciences” At first glance, it is far from self-evident what questions of scientific method have to do with those reflections on the unifying relations between human being as whole individual and human being as part of the ultimate whole which we have identified as central to Rosenzweig’s conception of system during this period. The intrinsic link between questions of system and questions of science only becomes clear when we recall the Kantian architectonic formulation of philosophy that first defined the task of system for German Idealism. Kant’s “Architectonic of Pure

84

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Reason” defined science as systematic knowledge, determining system to be “the unity of the manifold cognitions under one idea” “which first makes ordinary cognition into science,”17 and Kant thereby asserted that every individual science must have the same “One-and-All” structure, on the individual scale, which we have determined to be the basic structure of the ultimate whole of being grasped in the system of philosophy.18 As we have repeatedly noted throughout the last two chapters, Kant grounded the unity of system or science in the a priori idea of the end of that system or science as a whole, in the “unity of the end, to which all parts are related and in the idea of which they are also related to each other.”19 Insofar as Rosenzweig came to see this architectural structure of system or science as entailing a reduction of the particulars within system to mere “parts,” he came to reject architecture as a model not only for system in the highest sense, but for all science in general as well. Instead, Rosenzweig began to experiment in his letters with a scientific structure that would allow him to preserve the twofold perspective of individual entities while nevertheless pointing toward the possibility of unifying these two perspectives through relation. It is in the rejection of the architectural model for the unity of science, and in the advocacy of an alternative model built out of the connection between two independent scientific perspectives, that Rosenzweig shares a common intellectual quest with Rosenstock and Weizsäcker. It was Rosenstock who first expressed the conviction to Rosenzweig, during their correspondence of 1916, that science must be grasped not as an absolute selfgrounded unity of knowledge, but rather as the connection between two different scientific perspectives on the same entities. Rosenstock began his answer to a question Rosenzweig posed to him regarding the relationship between nature and revelation by claiming that “nature and revelation [are] the same material, the reverse exposure to light [Belichtung].”20 He implied thereby that in order to grasp that which is “exposed” in both nature and revelation, one had to adopt a scientific standpoint that combined two standpoints. These two standpoints, according to Rosenstock, were embodied in the two different methodologies of thought and speech, of understanding and language. Rosenstock proposed a scientific fusion of the understanding and language as an antidote to what he saw as the “senseless sharpening of the autonomy of thought” in philosophy, asserting that “such autonomous knowing … is ‘measureless’ … without a ‘give me (a place) where I can stand.’ ”21 Rosenstock’s Archimedean reference was meant to insinuate that

17 18

19 20 21

CPR, A832/B860. See CPR, A834/B862: “sciences … must not be explained and determined in accordance with the description given by their founder, but rather in accordance with the idea, grounded in reason itself, of the natural unity of the parts that have been brought together.” CPR, A832/B860. E. Rosenstock to F. Rosenzweig, October 28, 1916, BT 1, p. 276. Ibid. The Greek mathematician Archimedes is reported to have boasted, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth”; see Pappus of Alexandria, Mathematical Collection, Bk. VIII. Franks and

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

85

philosophy’s attempt to attain certainty by grounding thinking autonomously in itself had ironically left philosophy floating in the air, with no secure grounding in reality for what it purported to know. Just as the human being “walks best on two legs,”22 Rosenstock asserted, knowledge of the real identity of nature and revelation requires a dual grounding which it finds in the interconnection of thought and speech, “because thought and speech constitute a continuous mutual relation of giving and taking … since both are a unified gift to the human race.” In fact, according to Rosenstock, “the fact of science bears witness” not to the “autonomy of thought,” but rather, “only to a certain autonomy of the married pair, language and understanding.”23 In the fall of 1917, as Rosenzweig continued to reflect on the necessity of grounding system within a human standpoint, he himself began to consider the very twopoled structure of science about which Rosenstock had written to him the year before. As we have seen, Rosenzweig sought to formulate his systematic standpoint as quintessentially human in order to grasp the independent wholeness of the individual which Absolute Idealism had neglected, and this human standpoint demanded that the human being as whole individual and the human being as part of the ultimate whole be grasped somehow in their mutual identity and difference. It was in the course of this quest to grasp system through the unity of the human being’s twofold identity, it would appear, that Rosenzweig himself was drawn back to the idea of a two-poled notion of science. But Rosenzweig’s initial comments on the subject betray no broad metaphysical agenda; they are, instead, reflections on the systematic structure of science alone. “The double-poled nature of science goes so far,” Rosenzweig asserts categorically to Rosenstock, on September 2, 1917, “that every scientific stream springs out of a coitus of two sciences. … Of all the sciences, only philosophy has to do with itself … at least it must convince itself of this.”24 And on October 18, 1917, he reiterates his agreement with Rosenstock: “To your doctrine of science [Wissenschaftslehre] belongs the following old hat from me: all scientific originality (…) rests on the unification of two viewpoints, ways of seeing, directions of research, methods, into one work. … In science too there is no Parthenogenese [virgin birth].”25 Rosenzweig’s comments here to the effect that science can only produce knowledge insofar as it brings two sciences into some kind of intimate unification appear to play on a statement of Francis Bacon’s which Rosenzweig later quotes in the Star, wherein Bacon criticizes the “barren” idea of a final cause as being “like a

22 23 24 25

Morgan suggest that Rosenstock may be echoing Jacobi’s critique of philosophy in his Archimedian reference; see Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 38. BT 1, p. 278. BT 1, p. 276. Gritli-Briefe, p. 27. BT 1, p. 470.

86

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

virgin consecrated to God produc[ing] nothing.”26 Rosenzweig alludes to Bacon’s pithy comment here in order to suggest that no science, philosophy included, can produce or ground itself absolutely as the systems of German Idealism purport to do.27 Rather, Rosenzweig claims that the systematic unity of science emerges only from what he colorfully describes as the “coitus,” the intimate productive unity formed through the interconnection of two sciences. If Rosenstock had stressed the need to stand all knowledge upon “two legs,” Rosenzweig, it seems, is more interested here in articulating the kind of connection that is to go on between these legs such as to produce true systematic, or scientific, knowledge. Moreover, as the continuation of Rosenzweig’s letter of September 2, 1917, shows, Rosenzweig sees this idea of a coitus of two sciences not only as the key to the systematic form of knowledge, but also as a guarantee of the actuality of that knowledge. The coitus between two sciences, Rosenzweig suggests, actually “makes” or begets something actual. The first philosophers to point toward this fact, according to Rosenzweig, were Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Only “Schopenhauer [actually] made the saint, Nietzsche the Übermensch, as Shakespeare made Juliet, namely, not as self-portrait, but rather as monadic world-image.”28 In place of the self-portraits produced by that philosophy which claimed to ground itself in itself, Rosenzweig implies, these philosophers succeeded in securing the actuality of what they knew, in “making” what they philosophized into something actual. They did so, Rosenzweig suggests, because they were the first to begin to grasp the philosopher himself as a “monadic world-image,” and hence to grasp philosophy not as a single self-grounded structure, but rather as the unification or relation between the philosophizing human being and the world.29 Thus, just as Rosenstock had suggested a year earlier, Rosenzweig here sees in his two-perspective structure a guarantee for the actuality of science, a guarantee that is absent in the one-dimensional architectonic structure of a self-grounding Absolute philosophy. It appears that Rosenzweig also found confirmation for his budding idea of a science constructed from the connection between two sciences from his interactions with Victor von Weizsäcker in the fall of 1917. Weizsäcker appears to have reinitiated contact with Rosenzweig, his former classmate at Freiburg, in the summer of 1917, just after the publication of Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” in order to discuss the Idealist concept of system that Rosenzweig 26

27

28 29

Francis Bacon, “On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning,” The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, p. 473. See, Der Stern der Erlösung, p. 146/Star of Redemption, p. 132. See Rosenzweig to E. Rosenstock, September 18, 1917, Gritli-Briefe, p. 36: “‘1800’ still means the attempt to bring the ‘final cause’ back into good repute.” Gritli-Briefe, p. 27. See Rosenzweig’s designation of Schopenhauer’s “concept of philosophizing” two days later, on September 4, 1917, “as the ‘impression which the world makes on an individual spirit (sic!) and the idea through which the spirit reacts to that impression,’” Gritli-Briefe, p. 30, in which Rosenzweig highlights Schopenhauer’s view of philosophy as the relation between the world and the individual thinker instead of as thought thinking itself. Cf., Stern, p. 9/Star, p. 8.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

87

had outlined in the last section of this essay.30 In the wake of this renewed contact, Rosenzweig read two articles of Weizsäcker’s on the subject of system and scientific unity in the natural sciences during September–October 1917, and Rosenzweig’s excitement over these articles seems to have stimulated his own reflections on questions of scientific method and to have led him to declare, shortly thereafter, that Weizsäcker’s “concept of system is … mine and Rosenstock’s as well.”31 There are obstacles to determining with any degree of certainty what Rosenzweig understood Weizsäcker’s concept of system to be – the letters between Rosenzweig and Weizsäcker during this period are not extant, and while the “Paralipomena” include a page or so of Rosenzweig’s notes on Weizsäcker’s “The Critical and the Speculative Concept of Nature” (1916), these notes offer praise but not much by way of content. Nonetheless, judging from Weizsäcker’s articles themselves and from Rosenzweig’s notes, as well as from his written comments to other correspondents about Weizsäcker’s articles and letters to Rosenzweig, we can reconstruct a tentative account of the “concept of system” Rosenzweig believed to share with Weizsäcker. Rosenzweig’s sense that he shared a common systematic vision with Weizsäcker appears to have stemmed from two essential features of Weizsäcker’s thinking in these years: (1) Weizsäcker’s question regarding the possibility of attaining systematic unity in science without reducing the heterogeneity characteristic of nature into a mere “homogeneous, uniform” structure and (2) the form, if not the content, of the answer Weizsäcker gives to this question, wherein he eschews a singular, all-encompassing architectonic systematic structure for a two-pronged systematic meant to account for the constant movement of knowledge between universality and particularity.32 In both “The Critical and Speculative Concept of Nature” and “Empiricism and Philosophy” (1917), Weizsäcker takes up the question of system, claiming that “one can enter into the discussion of the concept of nature only on the ground of a

30

31

32

Rosenzweig first befriended Weizsäcker at Freiburg in 1906 when the two sat in on Johannes von Kries’s lectures on physiology. On their renewed contact in 1917, see, e.g., Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, June 19, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, p. 335, where Rosenzweig remarks regarding the last section of his “Oldest System-Program in German Idealism”: “It contains my own ‘system-program.’ … For his part, Weizsäcker came to me again just on the hints of this section.” It is impossible to know for certain from the extant letters which came first for Rosenzweig, i.e., his own thoughts on the structure of science or his reading of Weizsäcker. Judging from Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s initial shared skepticism that Weizsäcker was perhaps no more than the “cartel carrier” for their own impending attack on the scientific establishment, I am inclined to take Rosenzweig’s reading of Weizsäcker as a confirmation rather than as the primary source of his views on science. Once the paths of correspondence were opened between them, however, the lines of influence and enrichment clearly moved in both directions. For Rosenzweig’s and (primarily) Rosenstock’s initial skepticism regarding the merit of Weizsäcker’s thought, see, e.g., Rosenzweig to R. Ehrenberg, November 18, 1917 (“Urzelle”), Hans Ehrenberg Archiv, 3:17-II/B, pp. 1–2, and Rosenzweig to E. Rosenstock, beginning of January, 1918, Gritli-Briefe, p. 48. Viktor von Weizsäcker, “Kritischer und spekulativer Naturbegriff,” Gesammelte Schriften 2: Empirie und Philosophie: Herzarbeit/Naturbegriff, p. 248.

88

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

clarified concept of system.”33 Here Weizsäcker sets forth the task of determining a scientific concept of nature that recognizes both the “organic unity of science” and the fact that “science is not the overcoming, but rather the grounding of the manifold,” that recognizes, that is, that scientific knowledge must grasp both the unity and multiplicity, the One and All, of what is. In these essays, Weizsäcker criticizes the neo-Kantian school both for its failure to grasp the unity of all knowledge and for the failure of its mechanical concept of nature to grasp the heterogeneity of nature.34 And while Weizsäcker praises speculative philosophy for raising the problem of system in science so sharply, he at once shrinks back from that Absolute perspective which alone gave speculative Idealism the standpoint from which to grasp the identity and difference of the different spheres of science. Instead, Weizsäcker forges a path toward the systematic knowledge of nature that consists in a constant movement between unity and difference, between the universality of pure knowledge and the particularity, the heterogeneity, of nature. Weizsäcker’s “Critical and Speculative Concept of Nature” begins by positing natural science and the philosophy of nature as having differing domains of objects. Natural science, according to Weizsäcker, deals with “the individual, with what nature is in itself,” while the philosophy of nature deals with “what nature is over all in the whole of knowable things.”35 Over the course of his article, Weizsäcker suggests that the concept of nature can only be determined with certainty if it is grasped in “the organic manifold of relations to all that is not nature,” and it is this determination through all relations within the whole of scientific knowledge that Weizsäcker names system: “The task, to give fixedness and scientific clarity to [the concept of nature], cannot be found … in the restriction of its relations, in the clipping of its multiplicity, but rather only in the organization of the determinations, in the system of its relations. … System is what distinguishes scientific knowing from knowing in general. Systematic thinking and scientific thinking are one.”36 What seems to have caught Rosenzweig’s eye in Weizsäcker’s approach to the study of nature is not only Weizsäcker’s suggestion that contemporary natural science has lost touch with the systematic grounds of all science, but also the fact that Weizsäcker retrieves the notion of system from German Idealism for his 33 34

35 36

“Kritischer und spekulativer Naturbegriff,” p. 231. See, e.g., “Kritischer und spekulativer Naturbegriff,” p. 239: “Only this is just essential for Kantianism, that the step to a unification in one principle is not done.” “Kritischer und spekulativer Naturbegriff,” pp. 226. “Kritischer und spekulativer Naturbegriff,” pp. 228, 229. The unpublished musings Rosenzweig collected in his “Paralipomena” include a page of notes he appears to have taken while reading Weizsäcker’s essay. Citing Weizsäcker’s words (and including his own elaborations in parentheses), Rosenzweig is clearly pleased with the way Weizsäcker arrives at the claim that nature can only be understood in its systematic relations to all other concepts: “The critical task (what is nature) exhausts itself in the systematic task (of the system of concepts of nature) – very good!” “Paralipomena,” (Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 [manuscript in series II, subseries III:D, box 2, folders 39–40]), p. 4a.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

89

time without advocating a return to the Idealist form of system. Moreover, while insisting on the need to grasp nature within those relations that form the whole of scientific knowledge, Weizsäcker asserts that such scientific knowledge must be rooted in a movement between two systematic concepts of nature, the critical (i.e., Kantian) concept of nature which forms the foundation of the doctrine of natural science and the speculative (i.e., Absolute Idealist) concept of nature which forms the foundation of the researching side of science.37 According to Weizsäcker, only the “movement of science” between these poles, between doctrine and research, creates the true systematic concept of nature. Thus, Weizsäcker asserts that only “out of the systematic conditions of Kantianism on the one hand and speculative philosophy on the other, can one attempt to derive the two-sided [beiderseitigen] concept of nature.”38 Weizsäcker’s two-poled approach to the concept of system in “Naturbegriff ” already contains the methodological root of important aspects of his later thinking. Weizsäcker here proposes a model of thought that recognizes the radical particularity and heterogeneity of nature without abandoning the goal of the unity of systematic or scientific knowledge. He seeks the unity and completeness of scientific knowledge not in a rise beyond the opposition between thought and actuality, universality and particularity, doctrine and research, but rather in the process knowledge undergoes in tracing the movement between these poles.39 If this movement between these poles is introduced in “Critical and Speculative Concept of Nature,” it is developed in “Empiricism and Philosophy,” in which Weizsäcker introduces a notion of “explanation of nature,” intended to offer a “principle of connection” which unifies different orders or spheres within science without divesting these different orders of their own independence.40 And 37

38 39

40

The interaction between these two poles of science, according to Weizsäcker, is one in which every doctrinal determination of the concept of nature falls back into a “new riddle” through the questioning of research, in which doctrinal “knowing is the starting point … that goes up into question, [and then] … returns through finding back into knowing,” “Kritischer und spekulativer Naturbegriff,” pp. 244–45. Rosenzweig seems to point directly to this way in which questions emerge from the movement between doctrine and research in Weizsäcker’s “systematic” and identifies this questioning character with his own systematic, in Rosenzweig to R. Ehrenberg, December 1, 1917, BT 1, p. 485, where Rosenzweig speaks of the “question-mark of the ‘and’” being “thrown out in all directions.” See also the beginning of Rosenzweig’s letter to R. Ehrenberg, November 18, 1917 (the “Urzelle”), wherein Rosenzweig criticizes Werner Picht’s Kreuz und Krieg (Berlin: Furche Verlag, 1917), claiming that it lacks “the sting of forward-driving problems. The questions find aphoristic answers, not answers which are again questions; it is not ‘systematic.’ … Therewith I would be by Weizsaecker.” The beginning of the letter is not included in the published version in the Gesammelte Schriften, so I cite a copy of the original which Rosenzweig apparently sent to Hans Ehrenberg: F. Rosenzweig to Rudolf Ehrenberg, November 18, 1917, Hans Ehrenberg Archiv, 3:17-II/B, p. 1. “Kritischer und spekulativer Naturbegriff,” p. 226. Marking Weizsäcker’s two-poled approach in his notes, Rosenzweig writes, “‘Relation of the universal to the particular’ is the form,” “Paralipomena” (Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 [manuscript in series II, subseries III:D, box 2, folders 39–40]), p. 5a. Viktor von Weizsäcker, “Empirie und Philosophie,” Gesammelte Schriften 2: Empirie und Philosophie: Herzarbeit/Naturbegriff, pp. 256–7.

90

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Weizsäcker explores such ideas further in the “Antilogic” of 1923, in which he works out the movement between what he designates as “objective identity” and “named identity,” and in which he points to a new doctrine of judgment in which “every judgment is at once personification and abstraction, thus generates with one strike the universally-valid and the personal aspect.”41 I submit that it was as a result of reading Weizsäcker’s ideas of the system of nature as the movement between two different systematic structures that Rosenzweig came to believe he shared with Weizsäcker a common vision for system. Indeed, different as their content may have been, both Rosenstock’s 1916 claim that the unity of nature and revelation needed to be grasped through a twofold scientific approach combining language and understanding and Weizsäcker’s attempt to present the systematic concept of nature itself as a movement between doctrine and research offered parallels to Rosenzweig’s own attempt to attain a whole systematic standpoint that was not absolutely grounded in itself but rather grounded in the connection between two wholes: the whole within the individual herself and the ultimate whole in which the individual takes part. It is to this parallel, I believe, which Rosenzweig points when he claims that his concept of system is the same as Rosenstock’s and Weizsäcker’s in his letter of December 1, 1917, in which he presents the dual image of the individual as both whole in itself and standing in a web of relations with all other individuals. And it is likewise the conscious adoption of this shared notion of the relational unity of two whole sciences, or of two different standpoints within science, which Rosenzweig confesses when he claims, in the opening of his letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg of November 18, 1917, that his reader will find therein “the ‘systematic’ (in Weizsäcker’s sense).”42 41

42

Viktor von Weizsäcker, “Das Antilogische,” Gesammelte Schriften 2: Empirie und Philosophie: Herzarbeit/Naturbegriff, pp. 377, 393. “‘Urzelle’ des Stern der Erlösung,” GS 3, p. 126, translated into English in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 51. I have interpreted the connection between Weizsäcker’s and Rosenzweig’s concepts of system in such a way that stresses the two-pronged character of each’s systematic. I would like briefly to point to two other possible interpretations of this connection, and to justify my own reading against these others. First, as I have summarized in note 37, “systematic” may simply mean to identify the way in which every “answer” immediately becomes question again in the movement between doctrine and research, or, to phrase it in the terms of Rosenzweig’s letter of December 1, 1917, Rosenzweig may be pointing to the “question-mark of the ‘and’,” i.e., the way in which the relations among entities destabilize what we believe to be our firm knowledge of these entities and force us to question that “knowledge.” The answers we receive to these questions in turn lead to further questions, and in this movement of questioning one arrives at a system of relations. While it is clear that Rosenzweig sees the questioning character of the movement between the two poles of Weizsäcker’s systematic as essential, I do not believe that this character explains sufficiently Rosenzweig’s identification of his own systematic thinking with Weizsäcker’s, primarily because it does not do enough to distinguish Rosenzweig’s and Weizsäcker’s systematic from that of Hegel, who, after all, shows how the negativity of thinking itself transforms every assumed knowledge into a question through dialectic. I have emphasized the two-pronged systematic because in offering an alternative to the Absolute standpoint of German Idealism, this reading allows us to understand how Rosenzweig’s and Weizsäcker’s form of systematic questioning is different from that of Hegel.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

91

However, as we shall see in the coming section, Rosenzweig’s letter to R. Ehrenberg of November 18, 1917, at once makes clear the uniqueness of Rosenzweig’s systematic vision in contrast to Rosenstock’s and Weizsäcker’s work. According to Rosenzweig, this uniqueness lay in the way he sought to conceive of the unification of the two sides of the individual (i.e., as whole in itself and as part of the ultimate whole), and thereby the connection between all whole individuals in the world, neither through a rise to a concept that transcends and includes such particulars, nor through a movement back and forth between these, but rather as a unifying relation that is the result of each’s relation to the divine. Such appeals to revelation, to the human being’s dual relations to the divine, insofar as she is whole individual and part of the world, respectively, distinguish Rosenzweig’s own approach to the problem of system from Weizsäcker’s in particular. Rosenzweig hints at this difference in the opening of the very same letter to R. Ehrenberg of November 18, 1917, which at once notes his indebtedness to Weizsäcker’s systemconcept. Here Rosenzweig muses that his own view that “the fusion of research and doctrine is an act of love …, is procreation in the beautiful and suffering under the cross – this only the sinner knows, or at least wants to know. This doctrina ecstatica will not be to the taste of the Schwabian Freiherr [i.e., Weizsäcker].”43

43

The other possible connection, supported by Rosenzweig’s claim in his letter of December 1, 1917, wherein he suggests that Weizsäcker “is on the path to knowledge of subjectivity as the only objective framework of the system,” is that Rosenzweig points here to what Weizsacker would later develop as a holistic approach to medical anthropology. Such a reading is tempting and is explored in different ways in Reiner Wiehl’s “Experience in Rosenzweig’s New Thinking,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 42–4, 49–52, 60, and implied in Hartwig Wiedebach, “Apologie gegen sich selbst. Zur Antilogik der Person bei Viktor von Weizsäcker und Franz Rosenzweig,” Religious Apologetics – Philosophical Argumentation, pp. 531–50. The problem with this reading is that there is really no sign of such ideas in Weizsacker’s writings until the early 1920s, and the work in which he discusses the problem of system directly, and to which Rosenzweig refers in his letters (e.g., “Kritischer und spekulativer Naturbegriff,” of 1916), betrays little or no hint of this future development in his thinking. It is possible that Weizsäcker’s later work was in fact influenced by the way Rosenzweig himself interpreted Weizsacker’s earlier work, for Rosenzweig seems to see in certain passages from the “Naturbegriff ” a hint toward the twofoldness of the individual subject. See the similarity between “Naturbegriff,” p. 227, and BT 1, pp. 484–6. Indeed, Rosenzweig claims only that Weizsäcker is “on the path” to an individualized form of system, and it may very well be that Rosenzweig himself helps push Weizsäcker in this direction. This seems to be suggested by Rosenzweig himself at the end of his letter of December 1, 1917, BT 1, p. 486. F. Rosenzweig to R. Ehrenberg, November 18, 1917, Hans Ehrenberg Archiv, 3:17-II/B, p. 2. Thus, whereas Weizsäcker presents the unity of systematic knowledge as a movement between universal and particular, Rosenzweig finds such unity only in the relation between these poles that is itself a consequence and a fulfillment of each pole’s relation to God. Rosenzweig articulates this relational unity most succinctly in a comment upon his own “Gritlianum” which he wrote to Rosenstock on August 22, 1918. Responding to what he understood as Rosenstock’s attempt, in his Angewandte Seelenkunde, to subsume body and soul under a higher concept of spirit, Rosenzweig writes, “Are human being and world reconciled through an over-grasping concept? No, rather through love and in view of the father.” One should point out that both the “Urzelle” and the “Gritlianum” reflect what Rosenzweig himself explained to Rosenstock regarding the latter in this same letter, namely, that it was as attempt to see “whether I was convinced of your and Weizsäcker’s concept of nature,” Rosenzweig to Rosenstock, August 22, 1918, Gritli-Briefe, p. 126.

92

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

The essential features of Rosenzweig’s concept of system which we have collected through a survey of Rosenzweig’s letters from 1916 to 1917 crystallize together for Rosenzweig himself in this letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg, the letter that would come to be known as the “Urzelle” of the Star of Redemption. Here Rosenzweig sets forth his conviction that system itself demands philosophizing from a human, that is, non-Absolute philosophical perspective. Here he begins to spell out his claim that such a human standpoint must formulate the system of One and All as a system of relations, within which the human being as whole and the human being as part of the whole world are unified as a consequence of each’s independent relationship to the divine. As we shall see, furthermore, these thoughts on system crystallize, as Rosenzweig’s allusion to Weizsäcker’s sense of the systematic would seem to promise, in the very form of a “coitus” between two sciences which Rosenzweig came to formulate through his correspondence with Weizsäcker and Rosenstock. But in addition to uniting the different aspects of Rosenzweig’s system-concept that we have already encountered in his letters, the “Urzelle” points suggestively to a deeper understanding of what it means for system to be quintessentially human. In the section that follows, therefore, I intend to show both how the “Urzelle” gives a certain clarity and coherence to those ideas that we have visited throughout this chapter, and how it points beyond these ideas to foreshadow how the Star itself will redefine what it means for system to be the task of philosophy.

II. “A Twofold Relation to the Absolute”: Rosenzweig’s “Urzelle” In the beginning of the “Urzelle,” Rosenzweig warns his reader that what is to follow has “nothing new in it except my feeling that I now have a perspicuous interconnection of thoughts. … Thus only the ‘systematic’ (in Weizsäcker’s sense).”44 44

Franks and Morgan provide an excellent introductory essay to the “Urzelle” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 25–43, in which they focus especially on the ideas of “revelation” and “1800” in the “Urzelle,” and on the indebtedness of the “Urzelle” to Schelling’s later philosophy. Schelling’s influence on Rosenzweig – both directly and through H. Ehrenberg’s thought – is undeniably important for the concept of system articulated in both the “Urzelle” and the Star. But I believe Franks and Morgan emphasize the importance of this connection to Schelling too exclusively. They claim that according to Rosenzweig, “after Idealism, philosophy had to fulfill Schelling’s demand for systematicity insofar as it expressed a whole, thought by a living individual. Thus when, in the ‘Urzelle,’ Rosenzweig speaks of the feeling that he is achieving ‘the “systematic” in Weizsäcker’s sense,’ he is referring to a modified version of Schelling’s conception of systematicity” (p. 36). I find no evidence to suggest that Weizsäcker’s own conception of system was indebted specifically to Schelling, and while it certainly may be that Rosenzweig intends by Weizsäcker’s sense of “systematic” an individualized form of philosophizing, it is precisely in the individualized form of Rosenzweig’s own thinking that Rosenzweig seeks to distinguish his conception of philosophizing from Schelling’s. See, e.g., undated letter of 1916 to Rosenstock, BT 1, p. 318: “Schelling’s wanting to tell [Erzählenwollen] was meant differently, namely not as an individualization of the form of philosophizing. We recognize the system-problem of the Idealists (the form of philosophizing as the

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

93

Rosenzweig proceeds to explain this new “systematic” standpoint by reformulating, once again, his critique of the form of system achieved in German Idealism, and by trying to show the path that leads from German Idealism to his own new systematic standpoint. Rosenzweig asserts that with the culmination of the philosophical tradition in the systems of Idealism, philosophizing reason stands on its own feet, it is self-sufficient. All things [Alle Dinge] are grasped in it and in the end it grasps itself. … After it has thus taken up everything [alles] within itself and has proclaimed its exclusive existence [Alleinexistenz], the human being suddenly discovers that he, who has long been philosophically digested, is still there. … I, a completely common private subject, I fore- and sur-name, I dust and ashes, I am still there. And I philosophize, i.e., I have the audacity to philosoph-ize philosophy, the sovereign mistress of All [Allherrscherin]. Philosophy let it be said to me …: I fore- and surname have to be completely and generally silent, and then she … has let [the human being] become quite small before a few ideals, and then she has let the ideals crawl into the Absolute – and now suddenly I come along, as if nothing had happened to me and illuminate the whole … Individuum ineffabile triumphans.45

Rosenzweig’s depiction of the self-discovery of the individual human being as standing outside the confines of the All which Idealism claims to grasp in its systematic structure echoes many of the themes that we have investigated in this chapter. Philosophy here claims to grasp itself as the single “exclusive existence [Alleinexistenz]” which holds within itself “everything [alles],” or “all things [alle Dinge]”: that is, it claims to offer an account of itself as the One and All, and it does so by forcing all particular entities to “crawl into” the hierarchic structure of the Absolute. But according to Rosenzweig’s account, a funny thing happens to the philosophizing human being in whose thought philosophy grasps the One and All in this manner: the philosopher qua individual human being, who says “I” and has a first and last name, finds himself “still there”46 after the system has reached completion; he finds himself somehow not “philosophically digested” within this purported “All” of reason. Moreover, this individual human being, peon that he may be within the system of the Absolute, comes to realize that he is actually at once supremely powerful over against philosophy, the supposed “sovereign mistress of the All.” For philosophy is pursued and carried out by none other than individual human beings. The same individuals who must, as we have seen, negate their particular ends in order to form parts of the whole Hegelian system actually

45 46

real crux of philosophy), but it doesn’t rule the form of our own philosophizing as by them.” See also, Rosenzweig to R. Ehrenberg, May 28, 1917, BT 1, p. 410: “If he [i.e., Schelling] says in the Ages of the World that future philosophy is to be ‘telling’ [erzählend], so this is right also for the subjective (not just objective as he meant it).” Cf., Hans-Jürgen Görtz, Tod und Erfahrung, pp. 377–8. “Urzelle,” GS 3, pp. 126–7/Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 52–4. It is possible that Hölderlin’s Hyperion is Rosenzweig’s source for the designation of the human being who remains beyond the confines of philosophy as “still there” [ “Ich bin noch da”]. See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke III, p. 45.

94

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

“philosoph-ize philosophy”; they alone “illuminate the whole.” Hence Rosenzweig declares: “Individuum ineffabile triumphans.”47 The individual – precisely insofar as he remains “ineffable”, that is, inexpressible for philosophy – triumphs over the very Absolute upon which he depends, the Absolute whose particular manifestation philosophy declares him to be. The Absolute depends on him, as actual individual, to grasp it in thinking, just as he, in turn, must grasp himself through thinking as part of this very same Absolute. The one-dimensional architectonic structure of the systems of German Idealism, Rosenzweig implies, simply fails to grasp this reciprocal relationship of dependence between the Absolute and the individual, precisely because it obscures the difference between the individual human thinker and the Absolute. The philosopher who seeks to attain an Absolute standpoint from whose perspective he would grasp All that is as the stations through which the Absolute travels on its path to self-knowledge loses sight of the very independence of human individuality upon which philosophy itself depends.48 To give an accurate account of the One and All, Rosenzweig thereby suggests, one must take what we have come to recognize as the dual character of the individual within the All – as both part of the All and whole in itself – to its most radical conclusion, to show the manner in which the individual human being both is part of the All and at the same time somehow holds the All – which even depends upon him! – in himself. It is this recognition of the reciprocal relationship that holds between the individual and the All, a recognition made possible, I submit, solely through the renunciation of the Absolute standpoint of philosophizing for a quintessentially human philosophical standpoint, that leads Rosenzweig to posit his own system-concept over against that of German Idealism in the way he does in the “Urzelle.” He formulates it as follows: “The human being has a twofold relation to the Absolute, one where it has him, but a second where he has it.”49 In this determination of the human being’s “twofold relation to the Absolute” in the “Urzelle,” Rosenzweig joins, in a single concise formulation, the central features of the concept of system whose gradual crystallization in 1916 and 1917 we have 47

48

49

U. Bieberich points out that this is a citation of Goethe to Lavater, September 1780. Bieberich interprets Rosenzweig’s comment here incorrectly, I believe, suggesting that it indicates the way in which the individual (of philosophy) triumphs within German Idealism, a triumph which is then undermined by the real human being whom Rosenzweig introduces. See U. Bieberich, Wenn die Geschichte göttlich wäre: Rosenzweigs Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel, p. 69. See Rosenzweig’s statement later in the “Urzelle”: “The philosophizing one is dead without philosophy, although philosophy comes to life if it descends to him who is independent, condescends to him and so begins the progress of philosophizing, which concludes with the recognition of the absoluteness of philosophy and the existence-of-man-only-in-relation-to-it,” GS 3, p. 129/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 59. I believe Rosenzweig alludes here to a concept of philosophizing developed by Hans Ehrenberg in his “Lectures on Philosophizing and the Philosopher: Introduction to a lecture on the Philosophical System,” Hans Ehrenberg Archiv, 3:17-X.1, given in Heidelberg some time between 1910 and 1912. GS 3, p. 127/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 54.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

95

traced over the course of this chapter. Herein is expressed Rosenzweig’s opposition to German Idealism, “System is not architecture”: that is, the human being cannot be grasped simply as part of the All, as having simply one relation to the Absolute which manifests itself and knows itself in all individual entities. Herein is expressed the positive systematic standpoint which came to replace the Absolute standpoint of Idealism for Rosenzweig: the individual must be recognized both as part of the All and as a whole in himself. But if Rosenzweig’s December 1917 letter to R. Ehrenberg depicted two individuals, or two sides of the individual, one which has the Absolute within it and one which takes part in the ultimate whole, here Rosenzweig describes the same two sides of the individual as two relations between the individual and the Absolute. Rosenzweig’s claim that “the human being has a twofold relation to the Absolute” thereby brings to light the reciprocal relationship of dependence that holds between the Absolute which grounds and knows itself in all individual entities and the actual individual human being upon whom, strange as it sounds, the Absolute itself depends for its own systematic articulation. The “Urzelle” as a whole can be said to have the single purpose of demonstrating how the assertion that “the human being has a twofold relation to the Absolute” unfolds itself into a coherent and comprehensive account of the One and All.50 It does so in three stages: first by distinguishing the nature of the human being’s two relations to the Absolute, relations that the human being has as whole individual and as part of the world, respectively. It then depicts the process that takes place between these two sides of the human being as a consequence of their respective relations to the Absolute. This is a process that occurs over the course of time both within each individual human being and among all human beings in the world, which culminates in the redemptive moment in which God’s dual relations to human beings in the world are completely united, the moment in which “God is One and All.”51 Finally, the “Urzelle” also presents the single configuration that is formed through these relations taken as a whole, a “triangle of sciences”52 wherein two distinct sciences – “philosophy,” which gives an account of the human being as part of the whole world in relation to the divine, and “theology,” which gives an account of the whole human being in relation to the divine – are joined (i.e., “coitus”) to form a single all-encompassing “systematic” unity. Only this double-poled structure, Rosenzweig implies, makes possible a presentation of the One and All that does not reduce the wholeness of the individual to a mere part of the ultimate 50

51 52

Compare S. Mosès, System and Revelation, p. 38, “Can Revelation be thought within a system of Totality? This is the question that the Urzelle aims to answer”; and Franks and Morgan, Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 27: “The reader’s question must be: … how does he provide a philosophically systematic account that relates revelation to the situation that demands it and the world that follows from it?” By “the situation that demands it,” Franks and Morgan refer to Rosenzweig’s conception of his own moment in time, the era which follows the year “1800,” and they thereby address a vital aspect of the “Urzelle” for which I do not give sufficient account in these pages. GS 3, p. 136/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 66. GS 3, p. 137/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 70.

96

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

whole, that does not demand that the human being with “first and last name” be “completely and generally silent.” It is the success of this text in conveying the systematic fruitfulness of the notion of the human being’s “two relations to the Absolute,” I submit, which alone warrants its having been designated, among all of Rosenzweig’s early writings on philosophy and revelation, as the “Urzelle,” the original germ cell, of the Star of Redemption. Conversely, the systematic goal of this letter designated the “Urzelle” of the Star, its attempt to trail-blaze a new and sustainable path to the One and All, serves as an additional clue for us that it is the task of system that Rosenzweig seeks to work out in the Star itself, and, as we aim to show in the chapters that follow, that it is this task that encompasses and holds together the book as a whole. Its systematic intent notwithstanding, the “Urzelle,” we must recall, is nevertheless a letter, teeming with convolutions and inconsistencies, written to Rudolf Ehrenberg and, as Rosenzweig explicitly writes to Ehrenberg, “formulated only for you.”53 Making complete sense of the “Urzelle” on its own terms must remain beyond the purview of our discussion of Rosenzweig’s concept of system in this chapter. We limit ourselves in what follows to a survey of the way Rosenzweig determines the human being’s two relations to the Absolute and how he describes the process that ensues between them, that process which leads to the conclusion that “God is One and All.” We will follow this survey with an analysis of selected questions and themes which the “Urzelle” raises for us regarding the concept of system which it seeks to articulate.

ii.1 Nature, Revelation, and the Anamnesis of Freedom Soon after Rosenzweig announces the human being’s two relations to the Absolute in the “Urzelle,” he begins to give shape to these relations as follows: “The Absolute … stands between two relativities. … Everything that proceeds between the Absolute and the relative ‘before’ it is revelation, and everything between the Absolute and the relative ‘after’ it is nature, world, or whatever you want to call it.”54 According to Rosenzweig, the human being’s two relations to the Absolute must be understood here as extending to the human being from the Absolute in two directions, from the Absolute to what is “before” it, and from the Absolute to what is “after” it, together taking on the shape of a triangle whose base remains open, that is, /\. The relation between the Absolute and what is before it Rosenzweig defines as “revelation” proper, designating thereby the specific relation that holds between the Absolute and the human being insofar as he is an independent whole individual. The relation between the Absolute and what comes after it, on the other hand, Rosenzweig designates now as “nature, world”; it is that relationship which the human being has to the Absolute insofar as he is part of the world. 53 54

GS 3, p. 137/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 70. GS 3, pp. 128–9/Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 57–8.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

97

Rosenzweig takes note of the difficulty inherent to grasping the “whole” human being of revelation and the “part” human being of nature as at once identical to and different from each other – “certainly they are two … but how would this duality be so significant if … they were not also one. The human being of [i.e., grasped in] philosophy and the philosophizing human being are to be sure both ‘human beings’”55 – indeed, the “Urzelle” as a whole aims to demonstrate the process by which the unity of the human being as whole and as part is realized by grasping the two respective relations the human being has to the Absolute. Rosenzweig uses algebraic symbols to designate each of the three entities which enter the resultant triangular set of relations: he designates the Absolute as A = A, indicating in this equation that the Absolute knows itself as absolutely self-identical to itself, as wholly self-sufficient and unconditional.56 He designates the whole individual human being as “B = B,” indicating therein that while particular (“B” stands for Besondere), this individual is yet a whole, an identity in itself who knows itself as an “I,” and who requires no relations to others in order to be what it is.57 Rosenzweig designates the human being insofar as he is part of the world, finally, as “A = B,” indicating that as a contingent part of the world (“B”), the human being is wholly dependent upon, wholly determined by his relations (“ = ”) to the Absolute (“A”) and to all other contingent parts of the world that are likewise dependent upon the Absolute.58 In the symbolic notation of the “Urzelle,” the relation between the Absolute and the human being insofar as he is part of the world is thus denoted as the relation (“\” side of triangle) between A = A and A = B, while the relation between the Absolute and the human being insofar as he is a whole individual is denoted as the relation (“/” side of triangle) between A = A and B = B. The former relation, according to Rosenzweig, describes a “system” that “is the world in the form of the third person,”59 and this “system,”60 it seems, is meant to designate precisely the 55 56

57

58 59 60

GS 3, p. 129/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 8. Rosenzweig adopts the designation of the Absolute as A = A from German Idealism. See especially, F. W. J. Schelling, “Presentation of My System of Philosophy,” Sämmtliche Werke I/4: 120–21 (§15-§18), translated by Michael G. Vater, The Philosophical Forum v. XXXII, n. 4, winter 2001, pp. 353–5, e.g., p. 353: “unconditioned being can be posited only under the form of this proposition … A = A.” See also, J. G. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke I, pp. 92–101. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan provide background to the proposition A = A in notes 12 and 19 of their translation of the “Urzelle,” Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 52–3, 55. See note 14 regarding the instability of the meaning of B = B, of the individual for Rosenzweig in these years. See Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 52–3, p. 59, notes 12 and 25. GS 3, p. 130/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 60. I must note the fact that Rosenzweig uses the same term, i.e., “system” or “systematic,” to describe both the reductive systems – those systems which are not systems in the true sense of grasping One and All without reducing particulars to parts of a single edifice and the “true” system that he juxtaposes against them. For the way this same ambiguity arises in the introduction to the Star, see my extended discussion in Chapter 3. Confusing as this blurring of what would seem to be a vital distinction is, Rosenzweig is heir to a tradition of such blurring that extends back through German Idealism to Kant’s architectonic itself. For the same phenomenon in German Idealism, cf.,

98

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

architectural system that Rosenzweig will come to identify with German Idealism two weeks after the “Urzelle,” in his letter of December 1, 1917. In this “system,” every particular is known not as a whole in itself, but rather merely as a part of the ultimate whole, as an “It” within a whole world of anonymous “Its” which all depend upon and together manifest the Absolute. It is interesting to note here that Rosenzweig does not depict this architectural, third-person system in the “Urzelle” in order to reject it as false; rather, Rosenzweig affirms that the human being really does stand in this dependent relation to the Absolute; he really is grasped in part through the determination of his relations to all other particulars in the whole of the world. But this determination of the individual attained in the systems of German Idealism, according to the “Urzelle,” presents only part of the whole story of the One and the All, for it fails to grasp the wholeness of the individual human being (and fails to describe the process that ensues in the world once the human being is awakened to his wholeness). Thus Rosenzweig asserts that this “system” of the world “teaches human beings to know their brothers in forest and shrub, in bush and water, and, nevertheless, therein and therewith lets him feel immediately that nothing complete becomes of the human being.”61 That something complete does in fact become of the human being, that he has the “‘system’ within him,”62 is posited on the left side of the triangle ( B = B /A = A). Here the human being as whole self-enclosed individual, as B = B, stands in a unique relationship to the Absolute, a relationship that is independent of the one-sided, dependent relation in which the human being stands to the Absolute as part of the world. Indeed, according to Rosenzweig, this relationship is unique precisely in that it begins as no relation at all, for as B = B, as that whole individual whom we found speaking an “absolute monologue” in Rosenzweig’s letter to Rosenstock of November 1916, this human being is dependent on no outside relations in order to be what he is. Instead, in revelation, it is the divine which turns into relation with the “sleeping human,”63 or in the symbolic language of the “Urzelle,” “A becomes active against B = B”; “A asks after it.”64

61

62 63

64

CPR, A838/B866-A840/B868; J. G. Fichte, sämmtliche Werke I, pp. 429–35; G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 2: Jenaer Schriften, pp. 45–51; F. W. J. Schelling, “Über die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft,” Sämmtliche Werke I/9, pp. 209–14. See also, Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, e.g., p. 26: “System can signify several things – on the one hand, an inner jointure giving things their foundation and support, on the other hand, mere external manipulation, and finally in between something like a framework. This fact points out that this inner possibility of wavering between jointure and manipulation and framework always belongs to system, that every genuine system always remains threatened by the decline into what is spurious, that every spurious system can always give the appearance of being genuine.” GS 3, p. 132/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 62. I have altered the Franks-Morgan translation slightly. GS 3, p. 135/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 65. Cf., Rosenzweig’s description of revelation in “Atheistic Theology,” GS 3, p. 693, translated in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 19. GS 3, p. 129/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 59.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

99

The human being comes to understand her own place within the relationship between God and the natural world, according to Rosenzweig, through that philosophical thinking which traces back all contingent parts of the world to their Absolute ground, that traces back all A = Bs to their ground in A = A. As we have seen, Rosenzweig identifies the systems of German Idealism as the peak of this kind of thinking. We might then ask Rosenzweig, How, on the other hand, does the human being come to know herself as a whole individual who stands in a unique relation to the divine in which the divine calls after her? The key to making sense of Rosenzweig’s designation of the human being’s actual, whole individuality as that which cannot be grasped in the worldly relations of A = B and as that which must be grasped as having its own unique relation to the Absolute, seems to lie in the allusions to the Kantian concept of human freedom which repeat themselves throughout the “Urzelle.”65 Rosenzweig explicitly asserts that the “living anamnesis of the concept of freedom in Kant is the caravel upon which we can discover the new world of revelation … having embarked in the harbor of the old logical world,” and he claims that it is in the Kantian notion of “free personality,” in Kant’s “admission that freedom is ‘the wonder in the phenomenal world,’ ”66 that philosophy is closest to grasping the human being as whole, as B = B, who has his own unique relation to the Absolute. Rosenzweig alludes here to the Kantian conception of freedom, it appears, because just as he seeks to distinguish the whole human being from that aspect of the human being as part that is grasped in the system of the A = B world, so Kant determined human freedom as that essential aspect of the human being which cannot be grasped theoretically as an object in the world. The human being’s consciousness of her own freedom, according to Kant, is grounded not in her theoretical knowledge of objects wherein these objects appear and are grasped through intuition and understanding, but rather in the human being’s recognition of a “fact of reason,”67 namely, the “moral law” according to which she finds that she has the ability to rise above her own inclinations; to transcend the causal network of the sensible, phenomenal world; and to determine her own will in such a way as “it could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.”68 This fact of practical reason in which the human being is aware of herself not merely as subject to the causal laws of nature, but rather as both giving and obeying a universal law, according to 65

66 67 68

Bernhard Casper notes the importance of the Kantian notion of freedom for Rosenzweig in his Das Dialogische Denken, pp. 88–9. Casper interprets Rosenzweig’s reading out of Kant a conception of “freedom before freedom” as taking an interpretive stance “opposed to the regnant Neo-Kantianism” which grasped freedom as “the autonomy of rational legislation, which however as transcendental idea is given in no experience.” In so doing, Casper would seem to place Rosenzweig’s reading of Kant together with Heidegger’s famous challenge to neo-Kantianism, his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. GS 3, pp. 129–30/Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 59–60. Immanuel Kant, Werke V: 31. Ibid.

100

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Kant, is “identical with the consciousness of freedom of the will, whereby the will of a rational being that, as belonging to the sensible world cognizes itself as … necessarily subject to laws of causality, yet in the practical is also conscious of itself on another side, namely as a being in itself.”69 According to the Kantian conception of freedom, therefore, in the awareness of the fact of practical reason, the human being grasps her own free “being in itself,” that self which is all her own, independent of the causal laws that govern her place in the phenomenal world. In alluding to this conception of freedom, Rosenzweig suggests that the human being comes to know herself as whole through some kind of inner factual experience, through a brute fact of which she becomes “immediately conscious”70 in herself. Furthermore, even Rosenzweig’s subsequent translation of Kant’s fact of freedom into a theological fact of revelation finds its precedent in Kant’s “concept of freedom,” for it was none other than Kant who suggested that religion portrays the experience of the fact of freedom as the result of a call from the divine. Kant claimed, specifically, that the impossibility of determining, on theoretical grounds, how the human being can be both part of the causal connections of the world and at once a free “being in itself ” had led religions to depict human freedom as rooted in “the mystery of the call”71 from the divine to the human being. The religious notion of the divine call, according to Kant, enabled human beings to conceive of themselves “as existing free beings who are determined not through their dependence upon nature by virtue of their creation but through a purely moral necessitation possible according to laws of freedom, i.e., a call to citizenship in a divine state. … The call to this end is morally quite clear, while for speculation … [it] is an impenetrable mystery.”72 In the “Urzelle” ’s suggestion that Kant’s “concept of freedom” bridges the gap between the philosophical world and the theological notion of revelation, we thus find that Rosenzweig points to a fundamental affinity between what Kant identifies as the awareness of freedom and what Rosenzweig himself seeks to identify as a kind of divine call to the human being. Rosenzweig insinuates thereby that what the human being experiences as his own freedom is in fact at once the experience of a call from without; it is the experience of “A asking after” the human being as B = B. Said more precisely, the human being becomes aware of his own whole “being in itself ” only through his experience of a divine call; he becomes aware of his own freedom, his own ability to posit himself, only by being awakened by the Absolute that transcends the world. This is indeed how Rosenzweig describes the process by which the human being comes to recognize himself as B = B. While the human being is by nature a whole B = B, while he thereby has the potential to say “I,” he requires the call from God in order to awaken this 69 70 71 72

Immanuel Kant, Werke V: 42; cited from Critique of Practical Reason, p. 37. Immanuel Kant, Werke V: 29–30. Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone,” Werke VI: 142. Immanuel Kant, Werke VI: 142–3.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

101

wholeness within him: “His I is dull and dumb and awaits the saving word from the mouth of God.”73 Rosenzweig thereby suggests that the human being – the very same human being who exists and knows himself as A = B, as a part of the world – first arrives at a consciousness of his whole self, of his real nature as B = B, through his experience of being called by the Absolute; only thus does he come to realize that his third-person existence as part of the world is in fact “completed” by a first-person existence as whole human being. If Rosenzweig identifies “revelation” as that relation between the Absolute and the human being in which the human being “has” the Absolute, in which the individual human being can be understood as having received the Absolute as a “higher content,”74 then this is because it is through revelation that God awakens the human being to his own whole “being in itself.” We recall that Rosenzweig identified the self-confession of the individual living being, in his letter to Rosenstock of November 11, 1916, as the “truth” in the form of “absolute monologue,” and we understood from this characterization that the truth which the individual speaks about himself shares the same qualities of unconditional completeness and independence, on the individual scale, as are attributed to the Absolute with regard to the whole. We now see that according to Rosenzweig, the individual can be said to be whole, to speak an “absolute monologue,” in large part because the Absolute first addresses him in speech, first awakens in him his whole absolute-particular self. The “Urzelle” thus reiterates Rosenzweig’s claim that the human being comes to know himself as part of the whole world and as a whole individual in himself through his “twofold relation to the Absolute,” and it shows that the human being comes to know these relationships, respectively, through thinking the grounding of A = B in A = A, on the one hand, and experiencing the call which awakens his own free, actual B = B, on the other. After teaching us about the human being’s two relations to the Absolute thus, the “Urzelle” proceeds to investigate the process that ensues between “revelation” and “nature” or “the world,” between the whole human being who has experienced the call of the Absolute (B = B), on the one hand, and the human being as part of the world (B = A), on the other. In revelation, in the divine call to the human being that awakens his B = B, the Absolute awakens something like “selfhood,” a kind of individual self-identical wholeness, into the world. It thereby awakens something in the world that, despite its worldly nature, nevertheless shares the characteristic of “absoluteness,” of self-identical wholeness, with the Absolute itself. It is this very awakening of B = B, of absolute, self-identical wholeness on the individual level in the world, that, as we shall see, sets in motion a process of struggle between B = B’s and B = A’s, a process which transforms the world itself into a whole whose particular parts are themselves 73 74

GS 3, p. 131/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 61. GS 3, p. 693 /Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 19.

102

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

all individual wholes. It leads, that is, to the ultimate realization of the system of being, of the “One and All.” Before we proceed to examine how this realization of the system takes place in the “Urzelle,” I would like to remark on an interesting parallel that has emerged for us, in our exploration of Rosenzweig’s concept of system in this chapter, to our discussion of the Idealist concept of system in our last chapter. Insofar as Rosenzweig shows that the systematic unification of the two sides of the human being is to be attained only by grasping the two relations to the divine into which the human being enters as whole individual, on the one hand, and as part of the whole world, on the other, we find that grasping the human being as whole and part at once demands that we grasp the unifying relations that hold among God, world, and human self. This manner in which Rosenzweig’s articulation of the human being’s two relations to the Absolute in the “Urzelle” points to the systematic relations among God, world, and human self directs us back to one of the focal ideas of our previous chapter. We learned from the “Oldest System-Program” that the task of system entails not only grasping together the nature of All that is as both a single unity and a totality of particulars; it also demands grasping the identity and difference of the fundamental kinds of being: God, world, and human selves. We recall, furthermore, that German Idealism sought to articulate the identity and difference of these fundamental kinds of being by philosophizing from an Absolute, or divine perspective, which grasped world and self as moments on its own divine path to self-knowledge. Our current chapter has drawn attention to the way in which Rosenzweig’s own conception of system abandons the Absolute perspective in order to preserve the complex character of individuals or of human beings as both ends in themselves and parts of the ultimate whole. The “Urzelle” here offers confirmation of this claim, insofar as its idea of revelation leads Rosenzweig away from an Idealist positing of the unity of God, world, and human selves in the form of a single, absolute divine being which divides itself from itself in order to realize world and humanity. Instead, Rosenzweig here posits God, world, and human selves as independent entities whose “connections” or “relations” the human being experiences and which form a relational unity through these connections. In the section that follows, we will explore the process that ensues, according to the “Urzelle,” as a result of the divine call to the human being in the world, the struggle between B = B and B = A that points toward the possibility of their ultimate unification.

ii.2 Human Freedom in the System: Realizing God as the “One and All” in the “Urzelle” The struggle between human being as whole and human being as part, between B = B and B = A, begins, in fact, in the very moment of revelation itself. To understand how Rosenzweig conceives of this struggle, therefore, we must first highlight

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

103

one further characteristic of this moment of revelation. Revelation, we have seen, awakens that human being who knows herself as part of the world, as A = B, to an awareness of her whole self, to her identity as B = B, and this awareness allows her to speak her “I.” We have arrived at a preliminary understanding of the experience of revelation through the Kantian conception of freedom. But while pointing to the affinity between Kant’s fact of freedom and his own conception of revelation, Rosenzweig at once makes an important distinction between the two which we may formulate as follows: if Kant stresses the universality of the moral law, of the fact of practical reason, whose being recognized by the individual makes her aware of her own “being in itself,” Rosenzweig insists on the particularity of the experience of revelation.75 Or, in other words, for Kant, the human being comes to know her own free self in the moment that she comes to an inner consciousness of the autonomy which typifies all rational beings; for Rosenzweig, on the other hand, the experience of revelation is a wholly particular experience, which occurs to the human being at a particular moment and disrupts her existence as part of the world.76 Revelation, according to Rosenzweig, “occurs at the point, the rigid, deaf, immovable point, the stubborn I,” and it awakens the human being to “the whole of freedom, my dull, heavy irresponsible choice, my whole ‘that’s just how I am,’ without which that philosophers’ freedom is lame from birth.”77 By grasping the experience of freedom as the experience of a universal rational law, Rosenzweig implies, Kant loses sight of the inherent particularity of freedom, of the extent to which my freedom is my own and no one else’s; he loses sight, that is, of precisely that unique difference of each particular which Rosenzweig himself seeks to grasp and preserve through his new system-concept. According to Rosenzweig, the human being is thus awakened to her own particular freedom in an experience of a call from the Absolute that occurs at a particular point, an actual moment in life, that therefore confronts the human being not with a universal law but rather with her own actual “irresponsible choice” on whose particular basis alone the human being can “choose” to be autonomous, that is, to take up the calling of the “philosophers’ freedom.”78 75

76

77 78

On Christoph Schrempf ’s influence on Rosenzweig’s account of the universality of Kant’s moral law and the particularity of religious command, see the helpful note 51 in the Franks and Morgan, Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 71. See “Paralipomena,” GS 3, p. 120, for Rosenzweig’s own praise of Schrempf. Compare Paul Mendes-Flohr’s account of Rosenzweig’s criticism of the formalism of Kantian ethics in his “Rosenzweig and Kant: Two Views of Ritual and Religion,” Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity, pp. 293–5, e.g., p. 294: “Kant insisted on a priori formalism, for all content derived as it is from the sensible world of experience is contingent and determined, thus violating the conditio sine qua non of ethics, viz., freedom and universality. In contrast to Kant, Rosenzweig holds that there is a basis to accept content without endangering these conditions. This position is based on belief in revelation and the attendant trust in the world: the material world is God’s creation and His gentle hand guides both creation and our actions.” GS 3, p. 133/Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 63–4. In his Das Dialogische Denken, pp. 88–9, B. Casper interprets this distinction between man’s “irresponsible choice” and the “philosophers’ freedom” which that choice makes possible, as the gap

104

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

It is in the context of the actuality of the particular which Rosenzweig seeks to grasp in his notion of revelation that we first get a glimpse of the kind of struggle that ensues, according to Rosenzweig, between the human being as whole individual and the human being as part of the world. For Rosenzweig insists that the struggle between the human being’s two sides is not an intellectual or universal “conflict of duties,”79 but rather an actual existential struggle within the particular human being. The call from the Absolute that awakens the human being to her wholeness awakens her to her actual “irresponsible choice,” and this means, first and foremost, that she can choose to reject this call from the divine. In fact, even before the struggle between B = B and B = A in the world, the human being struggles against the divine call; moreover, it seems to be this struggle and this struggle alone, according to Rosenzweig, that first transforms the human being into a “whole.” Rosenzweig writes that the mission … drives the prophet into the conceptless world, into a world in which A = B has lost its validity and everything seems to him like B = B. His “nature,” which rebels against the divine commission … is his whole human being…; it is his wholeness, his secret will to system that sets itself as defense against the intrusion of the ordering word; the “system” in him … struggles for his self-preservation. 80

We find here that the call from the divine, exemplified by the mission of the prophet, drives the human being out of his A = B existence. He becomes a “whole human being”; the “system” within him is awakened, we see, because he must garner all his forces, summon his whole self, to combat such an intrusion by the Absolute. It is precisely in the course of summoning his whole self, however, that the human being is awakened to his “secret will to system”; it is through the process of defending himself thus against the call of the divine that the human being becomes aware of his dual nature, becomes aware of the dual relations to the Absolute which make him what he is. What does Rosenzweig’s mean by the “system,” by the “secret will to system” that the human being finds within himself? The context makes it difficult to answer this

79 80

between a proper reading of Kant (i.e., Rosenzweig’s own) and the neo-Kantian reading of Kant, whereas I am interpreting it as the gap between Rosenzweig and Kant himself. It would be more precise for me to describe the opposition between Rosenzweig and Kant here as one of emphasis, if one bears in mind that this difference in emphasis is highly significant to Rosenzweig’s mind. For while Kant emphasizes the universality of the moral law and Rosenzweig emphasizes the particularity of the call, Kant still maintains that the individual comes to know this imperative through his own “immediate consciousness” and Rosenzweig holds that over the course of time, all individuals are destined to receive the call. The path from Kant to Rosenzweig here most likely can be traced through Schelling’s notion of human freedom as both a highly individual and at once an eternal event. Cf., F. W. J. Schelling, “Die Weltalter,” Sämmtliche Werke VIII, p. 304, 308; and his “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom,” in Sämmtliche Werke VII, pp. 383–8. GS 3, p. 134/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 64. GS 3, p. 135/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 65.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

105

question conclusively, but Rosenzweig seems to imply one of two possible answers. Rosenzweig may mean by the “system” in the human being simply his wholeness, his nature as B = B, insofar as the human being would come to recognize himself thereby as an absolute particular. But by describing that which is revealed in revelation as the human being’s “secret will to system,” Rosenzweig seems to imply this system to be something beyond the “whole human being,” a system that is willed by the human being insofar as he comes to recognize himself as “whole,” but which this human being does not yet have within the boundaries of his whole self. It suggests, namely, that precisely in becoming aware of one’s own wholeness, one comes to recognize one’s “will” to take one’s place in the “system”; one recognizes, to use the language of Rosenzweig’s letter to R. Ehrenberg of December 1, 1917, one’s “drive and will to relations with all other individuals.”81 It would thereby be the capacity, the will of the whole human being, to turn to others in the kind of relation initiated by revelation that would ultimately form the true “system,” the true One and All. Such a will to the true “system” remains hidden; it remains a “secret” in the “third-person” system within which the human being grasps himself as a mere part of the world, but by awakening the human being to his whole particularity, to his nature as B = B, revelation makes this secret will to system manifest and thereby begins a process of relations that will ultimately replace the third-person system with the true system which realizes being as both a single whole and a totality of independent whole particulars. Rosenzweig’s claim that revelation awakens the human being to his “secret will to system” thus seems to point to the very kind of unity of human being as whole and human being as part, of B = B and B = A, which we understood to be the “system of philosophy” within the human being revealed as the “content of revelation” in Rosenzweig’s letter to Rosenstock of November 11, 1916. We learned, in our interpretation of this letter, that revelation teaches that the unified “whole” of the human being as both whole individual and part of the ultimate whole is only to be realized through the unity brought about in the relations between the human being as whole and the human being as part which result from their respective relations to the divine. We now learn how such a revelation of system takes place: revelation reveals system as the “great world-secret” insofar as it awakens the human being to his whole self, and to his will as whole self to take his place in the ultimate system of One and All. Revelation awakens the human being to his own will to system. Rosenzweig suggests, however, that precisely insofar as the wholeness, the freedom awakened in revelation, is the human being’s own; what he “chooses” to do in response to the divine call to system is up to him. According to Rosenzweig, the human being is called by God to turn in “neighborly love” toward his “brothers” in the world, to aid in the awakening of B = B’s within the B = A world, but Rosenzweig at once

81

BT 1, p. 484. See Section I.1, earlier in this chapter.

106

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

cites “Lucifer’s pride or Jonah’s flight”82 as examples of the individual’s freedom to reject the call. Despite the human being’s freedom to do the contrary, however, Rosenzweig’s account of the gradual development of the One and All assumes that the human being does – at least in some cases – heed the call of revelation. And the human being called by revelation does so, it seems, because his own transformation into B = B makes him see, for the first time, the B = B within his “brothers” in the world, as well. Hence Rosenzweig writes, “From B = B the bridge of thoughts never leads to other B = Bs. … Only that the word has gone out from One A = A to B = B, only that leads B = B out beyond itself, and only in this event that has occurred to it can it think another B = B. … It discovers the other, not from its own essence … but rather from the occurrence that has occurred to him.”83 In the human being’s turning outside himself to his brothers in the world, there ensues a process of transformation in the world through the struggle between B = B and A = B. And while it is the “comportment of B = B towards A = B [that] is an aggressive one,” while it is the transformation of B = A by B = B that “has the final victory,”84 the ultimate system of the One and the All formed through this process of struggle is no less dependent on the relations of the A = B world than on the wholeness of B = B. Only because the human being as B = B is at once also B = A, “only because the pious and life are both of one blood,” that is, only because the human being who receives revelation at once stands in the world of living things and is connected as part of the world to other living things in the world, Rosenzweig asserts, “only for that reason is revelation’s work upon the world possible.”85 At the same time, according to Rosenzweig, what results from the relations of “neighborly love” between whole human beings in the world is not a mere architectural system of parts that form a single edifice; it is no mere system of thought which forces that human being with first and last name “to crawl into” the Absolute. Over the course of time, “all B = A … become[s] B = B,”86 as all particulars are transformed from mere contingent parts of the world into absolute, whole individuals connected to one another through the relation of “neighborly love” initiated in revelation. In place of a systematic edifice of parts there arises a

82 83 84 85 86

GS 3, p. 134/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 65. GS 3, p. 132/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 63. GS 3, pp. 135, 137/Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 66, 70. GS 3, p. 135/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 66. Ibid. Note Rosenzweig uses the notation B = A instead of A = B here to describe the human being as part of the world. While in the Star Rosenzweig will distinguish between the two – A = B denoting the Idealist formula for the world, B = A the metalogical formula for the world – it is unclear here whether he intends a difference between the two. It seems to me that Rosenzweig understands by A = B and B = A the same thing in the “Urzelle,” although it is quite possible that he has already conceived of the distinction between the two and simply does not explain it in the letter. There is, at any rate, no ground for such a distinction in the triangular diagram or triadic structure of the “Urzelle.” I have, as a result, treated A = B and B = A interchangeably in my interpretation.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

107

systematic whole of whole individuals; in place of a system of thought, there arises the actual system of being. “At the end,” Rosenzweig asserts, the problem of “brothers in forests and grove, on the rock and in the water” – solved by pantheism in every moment easily and cheaply with feeling – also becomes actual, in “the end,” for revelation, and its solution, which is just as necessary for the sake of the All-hood that is actually carried-through [die wirklich durchgefürten Allheit], is promised per miraculum.87

Rosenzweig asserts here that the very problem of determining the common identity of all living beings, the manner in which living things are “brothers” in the world, is truly solved neither in the romantic “feeling” of pantheism88 nor in the philosophy grounded in it which declares “All” to be “One.” Rather, the identity of different beings in the world, the “system” promised in philosophy, according to Rosenzweig, is itself only realized through revelation “at the end” of the process of transformation carried out by B = Bs in the world. This process alone, initiated by “revelation,” leads to the “Allhood that is actually carried-through.” Indeed, Rosenzweig asserts here that the actual systematic completion of being, the actual One and All which philosophy has sought to articulate, will be realized only in “the end.” This systematic completion is merely promised to the recipient of revelation through the “miracle” of his own awakening to wholeness, and his subsequent turning to others in the world. The human being may therefore be awakened to her own “secret will to system” through the experience of revelation, but she cannot grasp the system of being in its full actuality in the here and now. Rosenzweig characterizes this way in which the human being both grasps and does not grasp system through revelation, by designating her station within the whole of being as neither beginning nor end, but rather the “middle” of all that is. “The organizing concept of this world is not the universal, neither the Arche nor the Telos, neither the natural nor the historical unity,” Rosenzweig explains, “but rather the particular, the event, not beginning or end, but rather middle of the world.”89 If revelation awakens the human being to her own true nature, we see here, it does so by revealing to her that she is neither the God who created all that is nor the unification of the One and All in God that will be at the redemptive end of time, neither “Arche nor Telos, neither natural nor historical unity,” but rather it is her nature as human being to stand in the middle of all that is. From this middle point, we may extrapolate, the human being can grasp herself as whole individual who stands in a unique relation to the Absolute, and she can envision 87 88

89

GS 3, p. 135/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 66. Rosenzweig’s account of the pantheistic feeling that we are all “brothers” in the All of nature appears to draw together two passages from Goethe’s Faust I: 3454–8 and 3227–8. Cf., Stern der Erlösung, p. 209/Star of Redemption, p. 188. GS 3, p. 133/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 63.

108

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the systematic unification of the One and All that will result from the relations of all whole human beings, but she cannot demonstrate the actuality of the system in the present moment. Remarkably, we must say that the actual system itself retains the character of being “hidden,” of being a “secret,” according to the “Urzelle,” until the redemptive end of time. To grasp the systematic nature of all that is, Rosenzweig thereby implies, one must grasp at one and the same time the way in which all that is is not yet a system, the way in which system is hidden within what is, the way in which the One and All stands within the process of its own revelation. To claim, as Rosenzweig has, that revelation reveals nothing less than the fundamental truth of system, that system is precisely the content of revelation, we now see, is thus to claim that system is at once that which stands within the process of its being revealed, that system remains suspended in the “middle” between hiddenness and revelation. Only “in the moment where B = B is at an end with this work, thus where all B = A has become B = B, and precisely because B = B has become ‘All’ [‘Alles’],” Rosenzweig asserts, only in this final moment “has it lost its peculiar essence of being something that is buried in itself and undeveloped. There is no longer any being over against God: God is One and All.”90 The actual system, we see, the completed system of B = B wherein all individuals are at once wholes in themselves and join in relation to form the single totality of All, retains “its peculiar essence” of being “buried in itself ” until the redemptive end of time when system will indeed be fully revealed and realized. We come to recognize, thereby, that in unfolding the human being’s “twofold relation to the Absolute” into a comprehensive account of the One and All, the “Urzelle” at once makes us aware of the limitations inherent to what we have designated as Rosenzweig’s quintessentially human concept of system. We have explored the manner in which Rosenzweig seeks to grasp the human being in a twofold relation to the Absolute precisely in order to overcome the problematic nature of the systems of German Idealism, wherein the particularity of the individual is reduced to a mere part of an architectural edifice. Rosenzweig eschews the standpoint of the Absolute attained in German Idealism, I have claimed, in order to realize in earnest the very task of system that German Idealism discovered. In rejecting such an Absolute standpoint, we now see, Rosenzweig rejects the possibility of knowing the All in the manner in which the German Idealists claimed to know it. As human being – and precisely in order to grasp the human being as both individual whole and part of the ultimate whole – the philosopher cannot generate All that is in thinking from out of an Absolute perspective; he cannot recall All that is as if he stood at the redemptive moment at the end of history. Rather, the human being grasps the All, to the extent to which he does grasp it, from his place in the middle of being.91 90 91

GS 3, p. 136/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 66. Eric Santner likewise presents Rosenzweig’s standpoint in the “Urzelle” as “being-in-the-midst-oflife,” which he contrasts to the standpoint of the “philosopher [who] seeks to occupy a place outside of life … from there he seeks to grasp what underlies that life in the form of a universal principle of

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

109

How are we to characterize the manner in which the human being nevertheless does, according to Rosenzweig, grasp the One and All within a system of philosophy? Can the philosopher know the All from out of his human standpoint in the middle? It is no exaggeration to say that these are the very questions that will guide us through the rest of this work, and they will arise, again and again, as we proceed to read the Star itself. The “Urzelle,” on its own, seems to offer different answers to these questions, some of which we have already encountered. The human being in the middle, Rosenzweig has asserted, is “promised” the One and All through the miracle of being awakened as a whole free individual who is called on to turn into relation with others. But this promise is no mere campaign pledge given by God in the hope that human beings will do God’s bidding. Rather, the human being has good reason to trust this promise: he does in fact grasp himself, in thought, as part of a world grounded in the Absolute. He experiences himself as whole individual awakened by the Absolute, and – if he heeds this call of God – he experiences the unification of human being as whole and as part, in himself and in the particulars with whom he enters into relation. This fusion of the human being as part of the world and as whole individual, known through thinking and experience, may not seem to amount to knowledge of the One and All. Yet, Rosenzweig suggests that it does; or, rather, he seems to suggest that such a fusion of thinking and experience amounts to some kind of promissory knowing of the One and All. Such a promissory knowing, we might suggest, matches the limited character of Rosenzweig’s system-concept toward which we have pointed throughout this chapter: the manner in which Rosenzweig’s human systematic standpoint seems to preserve the wholeness of the individual human being at the expense of the “whole” account of the ultimate One and All which Absolute Idealism claimed to provide. What we have hitherto designated as the “partial” account such a standpoint gives of the ultimate One and All, we may now identify with what Rosenzweig designates in the “Urzelle” as the “future” character of system. The human being grasps himself as whole, and he thereby grasps his own will to take part in the ultimate revelation of the actual system of One and All, but insofar as he stands in the middle of being, he grasps this ultimate system only as future and, therefore, only in part. It seems that Rosenzweig seeks to identify this kind of knowing promise that emerges in the fusion of thinking and experience with the very kind of systematic generation of the actual which he described in his letter of September 2, 1917, as a “coitus” of two sciences. Indeed, Rosenzweig effects such a “coitus” of two sciences at the end of the “Urzelle,” when he returns there to the figure of the triangle with which he began his account of the human being’s twofold relation to the Absolute. Rosenzweig now designates the “sciences” of the two relations between the Absolute and the human being, that is, of “revelation” and of “nature, the world,” as “theology” motion informing it and, indeed, the All,” The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, p. 14.

110

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

and “philosophy,” respectively. And Rosenzweig illustrates his “systematic” account of the One and All as a “triangle of sciences” in which philosophy (knowledge of the human being’s relation to the Absolute insofar as he is part of the world) and theology (knowledge of the human being’s relation to the Absolute insofar as he is an individual whole) are joined to generate the “systematic” view of God as the One and All. That Rosenzweig understands this unification of philosophy and theology within a triangle of sciences as a kind of “coitus of two sciences” emerges in the very italics he uses to formulate the surprising offspring that is made through such a coitus: “Thus theosophy – I myself am still astonished and resistant to this thought – is joined to theology and philosophy, concluding the triangle of the sciences.”92 Astonished as Rosenzweig is, we see, the unification of theology and philosophy results in a science that perforce must betray its origins, that must announce itself as the result of the coupling of theology and philosophy in its very name, which fuses the “theo” and the “sophy” of its parent sciences. Why is Rosenzweig “astonished and resistant” to the idea that the unification of the science of human being as whole and the science of human being as part of the world would give birth to theosophy? Why does Rosenzweig resist the conclusion that the ultimate systematic truth of the One and the All which he develops out of the human being’s “twofold relation to the Absolute” would seem to demand the title of a “system of theosophy”? The fanciful metaphysical speculation characteristic of theosophy would certainly seem to be foreign to the quintessentially human systematic standpoint that we have seen Rosenzweig adopt in the “Urzelle.” At the same time, one cannot help but find it remarkable that Rosenzweig’s human systematic standpoint unfolds the human being’s “twofold relation to the Absolute” not simply into the ultimate truth of the One and the All, but into a One and All which is asserted as a truth about God. For it is “God” who is realized at the end of the “Urzelle” as “One and All.” Rosenzweig rejects the Absolute standpoint that governs the systems of Idealism in order to grasp the inherent wholeness of the particular that had been lost in the systematic structure of Idealism, and yet, we find him driven to the conclusion here that his own two-poled human systematic standpoint itself culminates in knowledge of the Absolute. “Astonished and resistant” as Rosenzweig may be to the results of the “Urzelle,” he has in fact laid the groundwork for the ultimate systematic conclusion of the “Urzelle” from the letter’s beginning, and he has taken pains, from the beginning of the letter, to distinguish knowledge of the Absolute attained or attainable from a human perspective from what German Idealism presents as the Absolute’s knowledge of itself. Rosenzweig establishes such a distinction, in fact, by making striking use of Rosenstock’s Archimedian critique of philosophy. At the very beginning of the “Urzelle,” Rosenzweig accuses German Idealism of claiming that 92

GS 3, p. 137/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 70. I have set in boldface italic what is italic in the original.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

111

“philosophical reason stands on its own feet,” and we may recall that Rosenstock asserted that precisely this kind of self-grounding leaves philosophy without a “place to stand” in actuality. In the triangular configuration of “man’s twofold relation to the Absolute,” on the contrary, Rosenzweig claims that “the Absolute stands between two relativities,” that is, between the human being as whole, on the one hand, and the human being as part of the world, on the other. The juxtaposition of these two kinds of “standing,” of two kinds of grounding in the “Urzelle,” cannot be coincidental for Rosenzweig. Indeed, I would like to suggest that the two relations that stretch from God to the human being as whole, on the one hand, and to the human being as part of the world, on the other, grasped, respectively, in theology and philosophy, are not simply sides of the “triangle of sciences” presented in the “Urzelle.” They are in fact the “two legs” upon which the Absolute comes to stand in actuality. That is, Rosenzweig suggests that if the self-grounding of Absolute Idealism left knowledge of the Absolute floating in the air, Rosenzweig’s own human systematic standpoint actually grounds the Absolute in actuality. Through the human being’s two relations to the Absolute, Rosenzweig suggests, he not only comes to realize the unity of his own dual nature, but really comes to know the Absolute itself, and he comes to grasp the actuality of the Absolute in the world through the Absolute’s dual relation to human being and world, and through the process of unification of human being and world that culminates in the moment in which “God is the One and All.” But if the Absolute does not ground itself, if it in fact comes to “stand” only by virtue of its two relations to the human being, then we arrive at the peculiar conclusion that the Absolute actually depends on the human being for its actuality. Before we reject such a conclusion as blasphemous, we should recall that it was precisely the reciprocal dependence of the Absolute and the individual which Rosenzweig’s “twofold relation to the Absolute” was meant to imply. We understood this, initially, to point to the fact that it is the human being alone, among all beings, who “philosophizes philosophy,” and hence the Absolute is dependent upon the human being to realize it through thinking in the world. But the “Urzelle”’s depiction of the process that ensues as a result of revelation between the human being as whole and as part at once makes it clear that the Absolute depends on the human being in a far more critical sense, as well. In revelation, we have seen, the Absolute awakens that individual who is part of the world to an awareness of his wholeness. The result is a struggle, within the individual, and among individuals in the world, between “revelation” and “nature,” between the “whole human being” and the human being as part of the world. The end result of this process of struggle in the world is the redemptive moment in which “God is One and All,” but insofar as the struggles in the world that lead to this end are actual struggles, one must say, the outcome of every respective struggle within the human being and among human beings cannot be determined ahead of time. “Revelation pushes itself into the world as a wedge,” we have learned; it confronts “the whole of my freedom, my

112

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

dull, heavy, irresponsible choice.”93 We have seen, however, that in awakening my freedom, revelation at once awakens my ability to reject the calling of revelation itself. I can refuse the call – recall “Lucifer’s pride or Jonah’s flight” – I can resist the divine call that incites me to turn to others in the very relation of “neighborly love” that will ultimately lead to the unification of the One and All. As the recipient of revelation, that is, I have a choice. As a human being who stands in the “middle” of the realization of the system of the One and All, who grasps that system as it hovers between hiddenness and revelation, I have a choice. And because I have a choice, we might say, the Absolute depends on me. The ultimate systematic unification of all that is depends on me. The human being who stands in the middle faces a decision of whether to take up the divine call of revelation and thereby to take her place in the course of the realization of the divine One and All. The human being can reject the call – she can choose to remain within the third-person system, to know herself and all living beings around her as mere parts of the world. The human being can refuse to turn into relation with others – she can choose to remain closed up within her whole self. Or the human being can choose to take part in the revelation of God as the One and All in the world; she can choose to take up the task of making her own “secret will to system” manifest, by turning as a whole human being into relations with “all other individuals.” To know the system of One and All as a human being, we discover, is not simply to grasp the unity of the two sides of the human being, as individual whole and as part of the ultimate whole; it is not simply to grasp the unity of the two relations in which the human being stands to the Absolute; nor is it merely to construct the comprehensive unity of system out of the coitus of two sciences. To know the system of One and All as a human being is to know the One and All as a promise for the future, and to be faced with the choice of whether to take part in its realization. If I may be permitted to revive that notion which served as the guiding thread of our last chapter, we might say the “Urzelle” teaches us that to know the system of One and All as a human being is to know system as one’s task. System as task, however, now takes on a different meaning than Rosenzweig attributed to it in our last chapter. Indeed, in his transformation of the understanding of system from that knowledge of the One and All possible from the Absolute standpoint alone to the knowledge of the One and All possible only from a human standpoint, from a standpoint grounded in the human being’s “twofold relation to the Absolute,” Rosenzweig at once carries out a transformation of the meaning of system as the task of philosophy. In its discovery of system as the task of philosophy, we learned, German Idealism brought to light a task that had been hidden but present in the philosophical tradition from its inception in Thales’ dictum that “All is water.” We 93

GS 3, pp. 134, 133/Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 65, 63.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

113

understood system as task to denote the vocation of the philosopher, whereby the philosopher is called upon to unify truth and actuality, the One and All in knowledge. We identified system as task – in contrast to system as solution – to represent a human possibility that must be actualized, a promise or “program” that must be fulfilled. In the “Urzelle,” however, Rosenzweig points to system as task in a further sense, as well. For according to the “Urzelle,” the human being is called upon not only to unify the One and All in knowledge, but even to take his part in realizing the possibility of system in actuality. For insofar as the ultimate system of One and All is only known as a promise for the future, system remains a possibility to be actualized; indeed, the “actually carried-through Allhood,” we have seen, depends on the human being’s willing adoption of the call of revelation. It depends on the human being’s acceptance of his own “secret will to system,” upon his willingness to see the system that is hidden within what is, upon his taking up the task of realizing that system through his relations to others. It is important to stress that in the “Urzelle” ’s suggestion that system is not merely a human task to be realized in knowledge, but also a task to be realized in actuality itself, Rosenzweig does not simply replace the philosophical task of a system of knowledge with the revealed task of realizing system in the world. Knowing the All, as presented in the “Urzelle,” remains the task of philosophy, and Rosenzweig takes great pains – and suffers his own astonishment and resistance along the way – to present his account of the One and All as knowledge, as a “triangle of sciences.” Now, we have not arrived at a clear grasp of how this account is indeed knowledge; we have had to suffice with some vague notion of a promissory knowing, a systematic unity formed out of a unification of two sciences that at once knows the system of One and All as future. Nevertheless, Rosenzweig makes his intent here quite clear: he intends his “twofold relation to the Absolute” to unfold into the kind of systematic knowledge of the One and All which German Idealism discovered as the task of philosophy and yet failed to attain as a result of its grounding of that system in the self-knowing of the Absolute. The question we must ask, therefore, is what the relation is between system as task of philosophy and system as task in actuality. Does fulfilling one’s task within the realization of system in the world depend on knowing the One and All completely as the future ultimate goal to be realized? Or, alternatively, does knowing the One and All in a system of philosophy depend on the human being’s accepting that task to which he is called in revelation, on his recognition and realization of his own “secret will to system”? Do these two systematic tasks depend upon each other? Are they independent of each other? In the context of the “Urzelle,” we cannot yet give answers to these questions. They will accompany us as we proceed, in the coming chapter, to the Star itself. But the “Urzelle” does permit us to note a few important implications – to be tested and examined in the Star – which emerge from the juxtaposition of these two kinds of systematic tasks.

114

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

We take care, first of all, to highlight the difference between the philosophical task of system and the revealed task of system in actuality with regard to the completion of that task. We learned, from Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” that Rosenzweig understood the task of system as discovered by German Idealism to demand the completion of system: that is, we learned that Rosenzweig rejects the notion of system as a kind of Fichtean or neo-Kantian “infinite task.” Whereas Rosenzweig continues to intend, in the “systematic” of the “Urzelle,” real knowledge of the future completion of the One and All, it is quite clear that, insofar as he stands in the “middle” of the realization of system, the human being can at most fulfill “part” of the realization of the system of the One and All in the world. Indeed, it is precisely this split between the human being’s knowing and his ability to realize that knowledge that seems to characterize the nature of human being in the middle: the human being knows the One and All as future, he has a “will to system,” but he remains human and thereby remains, even as he turns as whole individual into relation with others, between the beginning and end, between the hiddenness and revealedness of the system of being. When we reflect on what Rosenzweig suggests to us, thereby, regarding the enduring hiddenness inherent to such a human systematic standpoint, we arrive at a noteworthy conclusion. We found that Rosenzweig comes to reject the Absolute standpoint of German Idealism not in order to reject system as the task of philosophy, but rather, precisely in order to fulfill the task of system that the German Idealists discovered. According to Rosenzweig, we recall, the Idealists subverted their own systematic task insofar as they posited the ultimate unity and totality of the system as dependent upon the renouncing by each particular within the system of its own particular end in order to serve as a part of the ultimate whole, in order to contribute as part to the ultimate end. In so doing, Rosenzweig claimed, the Idealists attained a “system” that was in fact no system, for instead of articulating being as One and All, as both singular whole and totality of independent particulars, this so-called system reduced the particular to a mere part of its architectural edifice. Rosenzweig advocates a quintessentially human standpoint in place of the Absolute standpoint of German Idealism, we found, precisely to preserve the uniqueness, the independence, even the absoluteness, of the particular within the system, and he does so by taking as his starting point the dual character of the human being as both whole in himself and part of the ultimate whole, as standing in two respective relations to the Absolute. But at the end of Rosenzweig’s systematic account in the “Urzelle,” in the moment when “God is One and All,” we must concede, Rosenzweig depicts a moment which looks little different from the systematic conclusions of the systems of Idealism. For while the human being who stands in the middle undergoes an actual struggle in the “Urzelle,” while he confronts the choice, the decision of whether or not to take his place in the realization of the divine One and All in the world, at the end, the fully realized system will have been constructed solely from those particulars who choose to renounce

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

115

their right to reject the divine call, who choose to take their places as “parts” of the ultimate whole. How then, we may ask, does Rosenzweig’s system-concept succeed where the Idealists’ does not; how does he preserve both unity and diversity within his system? Rosenzweig’s system-concept offers the possibility of preserving both unity and diversity, I would like to submit, precisely because it does not think the system from the end, because while it does posit such an end as the culmination of the One and All, it views that end from the middle, it views that end from a standpoint wherein the end is still hidden. Rosenzweig exemplifies the wholeness of the human being in the “Urzelle,” his absolute independence vis-à-vis all that is around him, in the human being’s freedom to choose whether or not to take his place within the realization of the system. Grasping the wholeness of the individual thus depends on grasping this choice; it depends on grasping the way in which the human being is in the middle, the way in which the ultimate system of being remains hidden, remains a “secret” for him. Indeed, we might say that it is precisely the hiddenness of the system, the enduring possibility that system will remain hidden in the world, that alone guarantees the possibility of grasping the human being as a whole individual, as an end in himself who is free to choose between system and no system. For once all is revealed, once the ultimate redemptive moment is reached wherein “God is One and All,” what will remain of the wholeness of particularity? We are thereby led to the remarkable conclusion that the possibility of knowing the system of One and All depends on nothing less than the very hiddenness of that system in the world. The human being is granted the possibility of revealing system in knowledge, only because that system is hidden in actuality, only because that system is not yet fully realized, only insofar as that system is still a promise to be fulfilled, a program to be realized. Only here, I would like to claim, do we arrive at Rosenzweig’s most serious and fundamental disagreement with German Idealism, a disagreement regarding the nature and possibility of system as the task of philosophy. In opposition to German Idealism, which claims that the possibility of system rests on the possibility of rising to the standpoint of the Absolute, from whose vantage point one can view all that is, from beginning to end, as the stages of the Absolute’s own path through self-alienation to self-knowledge, Rosenzweig here posits system as quintessentially human knowledge. Rosenzweig implies thereby the following: system, strange as it sounds, is not divine self-knowledge, for in such self-knowledge the divine ultimately knows itself as One. Rather, system is the form in which human beings grasp the totality of what is; system is the ultimate truth, but it is the ultimate truth grasped from the middle. Thus, by asserting the future character of the completion of the system of One and All, Rosenzweig does not merely put off until tomorrow the reduction of the particular to mere part which the Idealists carry out today. Rosenzweig implies, instead, that the unity of the system of One and All can only be known as future,

116

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

for only as future does it preserve the independence and wholeness of particularity within the ultimate unity it promises. System can be known only as future; it can be known only if system remains hidden in the present. In this character of system as future, as at once present and hidden to the human being in the middle, we seem to catch sight, once again, of the way in which Rosenzweig’s concept of a “system of philosophy” proves itself to be no less than the “content of revelation.” Revelation teaches system, we find, not simply insofar as it makes the human being aware of his dual relations to the Absolute, insofar as it makes him aware of his own dual nature as whole individual and part of the ultimate whole; revelation teaches system, more importantly, insofar as it awakens the human being to system as his own “secret will,” as that hidden future ultimate completion of being whose realization depends, at least in part, on his own, wholly particular decision. Thus to assert that revelation, and not the Absolute standpoint, is the key to systematic knowledge of the One and All means to claim that systematic knowledge is only possible for the human being while the struggle between revelation and nature persists in the world, while system hovers between hiddenness and revealedness, for only thus does the human being grasp system as at once a future truth and a task whose realization demands action in the present.

ii.3. Questions That Remain: From System-Concept to Star Our path through Rosenzweig’s reflections on system in his correspondence during 1916–1917 has led us far from the discovery of system in German Idealism as the knowledge of the One and the All that is possible from the Absolute standpoint alone. Over the course of his correspondence, we have seen, Rosenzweig arrives at the radically contrary conclusion that system is quintessentially human knowledge, that only from a human perspective can the philosopher grasp the unity and diversity of all that is without reducing the totality of what is to a singular edifice. Such a human systematic standpoint, we have seen, constructs the systematic unity of the One and the All by unfolding the unity of the human being’s “twofold relation to the Absolute” – one insofar as she is whole individual, and the other insofar as she is part of the world – in a “coitus” of philosophy and theology that yields a “triangle of sciences” in which “God” is known as “One and All.” We have identified the knowledge presented in this triangle, furthermore, as a kind of “future” knowing, as a promise, as a knowing that somehow grasps the ultimate unity of the One and All in such a way that preserves the hiddenness of that unity in the present, and that thereby preserves the independent wholeness of the individual within the system, upon whose will that system even depends. The fruitfulness of our investigation of Rosenzweig’s concept of system as developed in his letters of 1916–1917 should not, however, lead us to ignore the serious questions that remain unanswered in our study. Indeed, the account of the systematic realization of the “One and All” in the “Urzelle,” as the product of the

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

117

relations among God, world, and human selves, leaves critical systematic, epistemological, and methodological questions open for us. Over the course of this chapter, I have tried to point out those questions that receive partial or no answer from Rosenzweig’s letters. In concluding this chapter, I will highlight three of these questions in particular: 1) Try as we have, we cannot be satisfied with the explanation Rosenzweig gives us for how the human being knows the One and the All through his “systematic.” We have extrapolated from Rosenzweig’s account the notion that the ultimate systematic unity of the One and All must be grasped by the human being, who stands in the middle, as a future unity, as an ultimate identity of difference that is only promised, that remains a secret in the present. But we must ask what kind of knowledge this future knowing is; we must ask how Rosenzweig justifies designating this future promise as “science.” 2) The “Urzelle” does not present us with any coherent method according to which the gradual advance of revelation in the world toward the ultimate One and All can be gauged and thereby demonstrated with certainty. 3) Finally – and perhaps most importantly – it is unclear how we are to understand the unity of the systematic structure implied in the “Urzelle.” The “Urzelle” does culminate with the completion of the triangle, with the achievement of the One and All. But we do not understand exactly how God, world, and human selves come to be One over the course of the development of the system. On the one hand, this unity seems to be brought about as a result of the relations, initiated by God, between human being as whole and human being as part of the world. But Rosenzweig also seems to imply that God, world, and human selves are all elements within the divine from the beginning, that the development of the relations among God, world, and human selves are actually all stages in a “developmental monism”94 through which God himself becomes One and All. The extent to which both must be true, that is, that God, world, and the human self are each “wholes in themselves,” if you will, and at the same time parts of the ultimate One and All from the beginning, will only be understood over the course of our reading of the Star itself. The fact that such questions remain for us at the end of our path through this chapter should serve to remind us, yet again, of the necessarily transitional nature of the thoughts on system that Rosenzweig expresses in his correspondence 94

Franks and Morgan use this term to describe the way in which the identity of identity and difference is grasped in Schelling’s later thought and rightly suggest that such a model was influential for Rosenzweig. See Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 33. Rosenzweig himself suggests such a developmental monism, i.e., that God, world, and human being must all somehow be conceived as identical and different from the beginning, in his reflections on the nature of B = B which we have cited earlier, GS 3, p. 138/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 70.

118

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

between his writing of the “Oldest System-Program” and of the Star itself.95 Indeed, it is only proper that such questions remain. For as serious and as auspicious as Rosenzweig’s thoughts on system may be from the years between 1916 and 1918, such thoughts on system in no way amount to a fully worked out “system of philosophy.” Even the most precise “concept of system” still lacks what is most essential to a system of philosophy – its rigorous demonstration of the identity and difference of All that is. And for such a demonstration neither the form of a letter nor that of a fragmentary program suffices. A real system of philosophy can only be “bound,” as Rosenzweig wrote facetiously in the “Oldest System-Program,” “between the covers of a book.”96 It is not until August 22, 1918, that Rosenzweig announces to Margrit RosenstockHuessy the arrival of “the continuation of the ideas of the letter to Rudi from last November,” whose “triangle, which at that time held together the content of the Rudi-letter in an image with three corners and three connections, reveals itself as a six-rayed … Star of Redemption.”97 Rosenzweig seems to have written the Star as quickly and as feverishly as the wait leading up to that writing was long. Yet, a clear awareness of the systematic task he was fulfilling in his book seems to have accompanied his writing from its beginning through its end a scant six months later. On August 27, Rosenzweig first writes Gertrud Oppenheim what he refers to as an “unabashed pre-announcement of my system.”98 On August 30, he muses to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy that for the duration of the war, he “can not do

95

96 97

98

That questions remain for Rosenzweig regarding the unity of his systematic view even after writing the “Urzelle” is made explicit in a short but important dialogue he writes roughly two months after the “Urzelle,” “Von Einheit und Ewigkeit: Ein Gespräch zwischen Leib und Seele.” This dialogue, which Rosenzweig dedicated to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy and referred to as the “Gritlianum,” recounts a conversation between “body” and “soul,” stand-ins for the individual human being insofar as he is part of the world (B = A), and the individual human being insofar as he is whole individual (B = B), respectively. Although the body and the soul of the dialogue know themselves to be identical one to the other in some manner, the dialogue shows them to be perplexed regarding the elusive character of that unity. While Rosenzweig would later claim that his “Gritlianum” really “turned out ‘more dualistic’ than I thought at the time,” the dialogue ends with a “cry” expressing the unfulfilled longing for unity both body and soul feel. The text of the “Gritlianum” was first published – together with a helpful introduction – by Bernhard Casper as “Von Einheit und Ewigkeit: Ein Gespräch zwischen Leib und Seele: Ein unveröffentlichter Text Franz Rosenzweigs,” Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin, 74 (1986): pp. 65–77, and can also be found at the end of the Gritli-Briefe, pp. 826–31. OSP, pp. 7. Gritli-Briefe, p. 124. The evidence of the letters suggests that even Rosenzweig himself did not fully grasp how his earlier thoughts on system would crystallize into the form of the Star until the evening of August 21, 1918. Even the day before (!), on August 20, 1918, Rosenzweig bemoans the fact that the war has stolen from Rosenstock and him those productive years of their lives in which they might have hoped to have articulated what they have to say: “I doubt whether we, even if we are still there afterwards, will still have the strength to do our work at all. I mean: our real work. … We are already obsolete [veraltet] the moment when we first may open our mouths,” Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, Gritli-Briefe, p. 122 BT 1, p. 599.

“A T WOF OL D R E L AT ION TO T H E A B S OLU T E”

119

anything more than write my system,”99 and on September 4, he informs Rudolf Ehrenberg that he has “begun to write a book … my system, I must well say.”100 On October 10, he reflects on the strangely personal – we might say human – character of his system: “It is so strange, how personal everything becomes, they are everywhere my wholly private matters – and yet a system.”101 And on February 9, 1919, as he begins to write the final section of the Star he notes, “It is indeed a kind of system that has never been given before.”102 The general purpose of the first two chapters of this work has been to demonstrate that Rosenzweig’s designation of his own work as a “system of philosophy” is not meaningless or accidental; that Rosenzweig does not throw such philosophical terms around at random; that Rosenzweig had in fact deliberated over the nature and significance of system with the utmost seriousness in the years before his writing of the Star. In the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” we have seen, Rosenzweig came to a clear understanding of the nature of system as the task of philosophy, and of the specific manner in which the Idealists grounded system in the Absolute standpoint. In his letters of 1916–1917, we have seen, Rosenzweig documented his rejection of the Absolute Idealist form of system and articulated a new concept of system, a concept which posited system as quintessentially human knowledge. We now turn to The Star of Redemption itself in order to see how Rosenzweig develops this concept of system into a complete “system of philosophy,” into a demonstration of human knowledge of the One and All.

99 100 101 102

Gritli-Briefe, p. 136. BT 2, p. 603. Gritli-Briefe, p. 167. Gritli-Briefe, p. 234.

3

m Alls or Nothings: The Starting-Point of Rosenzweig’s System

I. Breaking Up the All for the Sake of the All The Star of Redemption is a book about the All, about knowing the All. Rosenzweig announces it as such in the title of the book’s introduction, “On the Possibility of Knowing the All,” and in the book’s first sentence: “All knowledge of the All begins in death, the fear of death.”1 The Star as a whole recounts the destruction and reconstruction of the All. It narrates for its reader a gripping philosophical drama in which the unity of that which philosophy has taken to be “the All” for 2,500 years first “breaks up” into pieces; in which a “new thinking” forges the path upon which these pieces gradually but deliberately “step into unambiguous, … actual relation with each other” (94/86); in which these relations are nevertheless shown to leave them ever at risk to break apart again, ever at risk to dissolve once and for all into “Nothing”; in which, finally, these “pieces of the All which fell apart from each other … are led back together again” (283/254) into an ever more intimate and vital interconnection, culminating in their redemptive reunification as the “true All, the All that does not spring into pieces as in … the Nothing, but rather the one All, the All and One” (428/385). In the first two chapters of this study, we have traced Rosenzweig’s evolving reflections on the philosophical task of system, spanning from his “Oldest SystemProgram of German Idealism” through the “Urzelle” of the Star. We have discovered that Rosenzweig understands system to be the philosophical articulation of the “One and All,” and that this task demands grasping together both the shared identity of All that is and the unique difference inherent to each particular being. We have learned, furthermore, that while Rosenzweig shares with German Idealism the conviction that it is the task of philosophy to become system, he at once comes to oppose the Idealist grounding of system in an Absolute standpoint. In its stead, Rosenzweig advocates the task of thinking system from a quintessentially human standpoint, from the perspective of the one who stands in the middle of the All and not at its end, of the one who stands in two relations to the Absolute.

1

Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, p. 3; The Star of Redemption, p. 3. Henceforth, page numbers will be cited from both versions, the German followed by the Hallo English translation, in the text itself in parentheses following each quote, e.g., (3/3).

120

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

121

Our aim in the remainder of this work is to make the case that when Rosenzweig designates the Star as a “system of philosophy,” he identifies in his book the fulfillment of that philosophical task which we have attempted to set forth in our first two chapters: the task of system as quintessentially human knowledge. To fulfill our aim, we will have to show how Rosenzweig demonstrates the systematic nature of All that is in the Star, and how he establishes that the possibility of knowing what is as All, as system, depends on a proper understanding of the vocation – and the limitations – of the human being who stands in the “middle” of the system of All being. This is no easy undertaking. But it is made plausible, at least, by the work we have done in our first two chapters. For we will readily recognize as we proceed that the “All” which undergoes destruction and reconstruction in the Star, and which Rosenzweig refers to at times as the “All and One,” at times as the “One and All,” but most often simply as “the All,” designates precisely the systematic identity and difference of All that is. And having traced the development of Rosenzweig’s own concept of system in the years leading up to the writing of the Star, we will recognize in the first sentence of the Star a concise, programmatic formulation of that new concept of system. Indeed, that “all knowledge of the All begins in death, the fear of death,” suggests that an Absolute standpoint that claims to overcome the limits of human finitude will not yield true knowledge of the All, but rather that only a proper recognition of the unique character of the individual mortal human being holds the promise for systematic knowledge. We may thus expect to find in the Star the fulfillment of the very philosophical task of system Rosenzweig conceived for himself in those years preceding its creation. Yet the Star is far more than simply the fulfillment of a program or the answer to a question Rosenzweig posed for himself before writing it. The Star itself is a “system of philosophy,” and as such it poses the question of the One and All – of how everything that is can and must be both a single unified totality and at once a vast multiplicity of unique particulars – in a comprehensive and original manner. Our most serious task here in the center of our work will thus be to probe the meaning and the weight of this question of system for Rosenzweig as evinced for us in the Star. We will ask what it means for being or reality to be systematic. We will ask why everything that is must take the form of “One and All.” And we will try to discern why Rosenzweig finds this systematic nature of the All to be so intimately intertwined with the particular vocation of the human being. Thus, in what follows we will not only explore Rosenzweig’s systematic construction of the All in the Star, we will also try to get a sense of the basic metaphysical insights and assumptions that guide and enable this systematic project. The intent of the first chapters of this work has been, in any case, to lay the groundwork for our understanding of the Star as Rosenzweig’s “system of philosophy.” Without such groundwork, I concede, it is all too easy to lose track of Rosenzweig’s systematic intentions over the course of reading the book,

122

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

notwithstanding Rosenzweig’s own explicit statements regarding this goal.2 What makes it so difficult to keep in mind that the subject of the Star is the All, that the goal of the Star is to articulate knowledge of the All, is that accompanying the Star’s quest for the All is the severest of critiques directed against what has been taken to be the All throughout the course of the history of philosophy, and against the means by which and the standpoint out of which philosophy has sought to grasp the All. To make matters more confusing, Rosenzweig does not always distinguish in name between the All he is tearing down and the All he is constructing. As we proceed in our analysis of the Star we will have to pay careful attention to Rosenzweig’s twofold treatment of the philosophical quest for system. We will have to ask how – and how well – Rosenzweig negotiates between giving an account of the path to the All and at once giving a critique of the philosophical tradition’s perennial attempt to grasp the All. Here too, however, our first two chapters have set out the parameters of an answer to this question. For they have underscored the way Rosenzweig seeks to fulfill the very systematic task of philosophy “discovered” by German Idealism, precisely by rejecting as inadequate the manner in which Idealism set out to fulfill this task. It would appear to be a lack of clarity regarding Rosenzweig’s extended preoccupation with the task of system, and regarding the way he understood this task, that has led most contemporary readers to miss the fact that Rosenzweig announces his systematic task at the beginning of the Star, and to miss the way he carries out precisely this task from the start of the book to its conclusion. This failure to grasp how Rosenzweig announces his systematic intentions at the beginning of the Star has, in turn, led to profound confusion among scholars regarding the relationship between the systematic and antisystematic locutions in Rosenzweig’s work. By and large, scholars have read the first introduction of the Star as an unequivocal attack on philosophy’s systematic quest to grasp the All. Hence Richard Cohen writes of how Rosenzweig “counterposes the fact of death and the fear of death” against the “totalization effected by philosophical comprehension.” Stéphane Mosès claims that “the experience of death, which uncovers to us our irreducible reality as subjects, challenges the totalitarian pretension of philosophy.” And Emmanuel Levinas has most influentially declared “man’s mortality” to be the ground of Rosenzweig’s “challenge to the totality. … Mortality is precisely the fact that everything cannot be settled, order cannot be restored. … In me, totality shatters.”3 As we shall see, these scholars do point faithfully to one side of the argument about the All that Rosenzweig intends to set forth in the introduction to the Star, that is, the critical argument against the path to the All taken by the philosophical tradition that culminated in German Idealism. But the problem with such 2 3

Cf., e.g., Stern/ Star, pp. 24/22, 28/26, 95–6/87, 161/145, 266/238, 283/254, 428/385, 435/391. Richard Cohen, Elevations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, p. 70; Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation, p. 51; Emmanuel Levinas, “Foreword” to Mosès, System and Revelation, p. 19.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

123

one-sided readings of the opening of the Star is that they give no adequate explanation for why the same “All” that is supposed to have been deposed in the book’s opening rears its head again and again as the book proceeds and even returns to its former state of glory at the book’s end.4 Nor can these readings account for the fact that Rosenzweig follows up what they present as an unequivocal critique of totality with a work that is every bit the totalizing and systematic construction that the Idealist systems are. By failing to recognize Rosenzweig’s self-declared systematic intentions in the Star, and the way his critique of all previous systems in fact serves these systematic intentions, scholars of Rosenzweig’s work have thus foundered upon what appear, consequently, to be two irreconcilable tendencies in Rosenzweig’s thinking, the systematic and the antisystematic. Scholars have been inclined to respond to this unseemly state of affairs in one or more of the following ways: 1) They have ignored the fact that the Star indeed does proceed from out of its introduction to reconstruct the systematic All.5 2) They have made unsanctioned distinctions within Rosenzweig’s work – that is, distinctions that Rosenzweig himself does not make – in order to justify the coexistence of these two seemingly irreconcilable claims for and against system. One may cite as the most prominent examples the distinction between system and totality, inspired, it would seem, by the Levinassian reading of Rosenzweig,6 and the distinction between system and the All.7 3) They have argued that the tendency to system in Rosenzweig’s thought amounts to an unwanted, stubborn vestige of the very philosophical tradition from which Rosenzweig was trying desperately to break free in the Star.8 4) They have conceded Rosenzweig’s 4

5 6

7

8

Michael Oppenheim does note this problem at the end of his “Death and Man’s Fear of Death in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” Judaism 27, 4 (1978), pp. 465–6, remarking upon the unity of the All at the end of the Star, “If this was not a good solution to the problem of death when it was first offered by philosophy, one wonders why Rosenzweig, at the end, gives us the same formula.” In response, Oppenheim suggests that this unity of the All comes only “as a mere hinting about ‘last things’ for those who want to see further, beyond the world and life itself,” which comes “only after” Rosenzweig “meet[s] the challenge of death … through plunging man back into the world in the deepest possible way.” See, e.g., R. Cohen’s Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas. See, e.g., S. Mosès, System and Revelation, p. 54: “Rosenzweig destroys the philosophical system of Totality in which the particularity of beings is wiped out only to reconstruct another system of an entirely different nature.” See, e.g., Moshe Schwarz, ‫[ ממיתוס להתגלות‬From Myth to Revelation], p. 11: “Schelling’s late work and the Star of Redemption display two paths in the conception of the concept of the philosophical ‘system,’ which comes to undermine the philosophy of the ‘All’, i.e., the classical philosophical ‘system’ grounded on the idea of the total attainment of reality.” See, e.g., J. Guttmann, The Philosophies of Judaism, p. 373: “the paradoxical attempt to clothe the content of experience in the form of a conceptual structure can be explained historically as due to the influence of German idealism, … from which he could not entirely free himself even after he proclaimed complete theoretical opposition to it”; R. Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, p. 34, who explains his own intentions to “present Rosenweig as heir to Hegelian speculation even as he announces a turn from the totalizing systems of Hegel and philosophy. Despite his rejection of Idealism’s attempt to grasp all reality in thought alone, Rosenzweig begins The Star of Redemption

124

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

systematic intentions but at once asserted that there is in fact no similarity between the Idealist systems and Alls and Rosenzweig’s system and All.9 5) They have suggested that the Star be understood as Rosenzweig’s attempt to reconcile a traditional philosophical quest for system with a standpoint or truth or factical reality that has its own ground beyond the purview of the system.10 These trends in Rosenzweig scholarship reflect sincere if, to my mind, inadequate attempts to account for the coexistence in the Star of both the construction and deconstruction of system, of what appears to be the irreconcilability of the quest for and the critique of “the All.” But such a coexistence is only truly problematic, only appears to be irreconcilable, if one fails to grasp the way Rosenzweig’s critique of philosophy’s traditional claims to systematicity explicitly serves to clear the ground for the “true” system of the All, much as Kant lays the groundwork for future metaphysics through a critique of all metaphysics before him.11 And yet, as we have already acknowledged, Rosenzweig himself cannot be held blameless for the confusion that has emerged surrounding his systematic and antisystematic pronouncements. In the introduction to the Star in particular, Rosenzweig expresses the systematic goal of his book in only a few, well-chosen statements, located at the

9

10

11

with one of the purest speculative constructions imaginable”; and S. Mosès, System and Revelation, p. 97, “Taken in its totality, the work presents itself as a system that somehow unfolds in front of the reader in the manner of the idealist system itself which Rosenzweig denounces ceaselessly. … And yet all the innovative aspects of the Star lie in the idea that existence could not be understood as the moment of a system, but rather that it is … irreducible to any totalizing thought.” One may cite Mosès once again as an example of this tendency, when he muses, “It is remarkable that the dialectic of the Star, even though clearly directed against idealism, finally leads to a new system of Totality. … But there is no real analogy between Rosenzweig’s system and the Idealist system. … Even if truth is defined as the All of the system, this system is nonetheless constantly outspanned by its own beyond,” System and Revelation, p. 267. Sharing this last tendency is Peter Eli Gordon, who asserts “The Star’s blatant hostility toward any philosophy that claims to know the ‘All’, ” but must later declare, with what seems to be an unintentional but telling play on words, that the All or totality [Allheit] attained at the end of the Star “is altogether unlike the timeless totality of philosophical idealism,” Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, pp. 181, 203–4, emphasis mine. In response to this tendency, one is inclined to retort that of course Rosenzweig’s systematic articulation of the All is different from the systems of Idealism; were it not so, Rosenzweig would have had little reason to write his own system of philosophy. Nevertheless it makes little sense to claim “there is no real analogy between Rosenzweig’s system and the Idealist system,” or that Rosenzweig’s All is “altogether unlike” the All of Idealism, for were this the case Rosenzweig would not have bothered to use precisely these terms – system and All – to define his own philosophical intentions in the Star. Such attempts at explaining the systematic and antisystematic locutions in Rosenzweig’s thought often take the form of “system and … X.” In such a category one may include, e.g., S. Mosès’s System and Revelation and Reiner Wiehl’s suggestion that Rosenzweig’s concept of “experience” seeks to bridge “system and subjectivity.” See R. Wiehl, “Experience in Rosenzweig’s New Thinking,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 42–5. See CPR, e.g., Bxxxv–xxxvi, “Criticism is the preparatory activity necessary for the advancement of metaphysics as a well-grounded science.” Cf., M. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, p. 27: “To be sure, the false form of system and the business of constructing systems must be rejected again and again, but only because system in the true sense is one, indeed the task of philosophy.”

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

125

introduction’s beginning and end, while he devotes countless rhetorical flurries to undermining that philosophical presentation of the All which has dominated the tradition. Rosenzweig warns against the “blue mist of [philosophy’s] thought of the All” (4/4), he ridicules philosophy’s “magnificent assumption of the thinkable All” (6/6), and he asserts that “the actuality of death makes the fundamental thought of philosophy, the thought of the one-and-universal knowledge of the All, into a lie, before it is even thought” (5/5). These are harsh words, and as we proceed we will have to clarify Rosenzweig’s hairline distinctions between the “All” of philosophy and his own “true All.” But in order to keep Rosenzweig’s critique in perspective here at the beginning of our discussion, it may be helpful to highlight how the beginning and the end of the Star’s introduction serve as a kind of programmatic frame within which Rosenzweig carries out that critique of the tradition meant to advance his own systematic task. Before we address the ramifications of Rosenzweig’s starting-point in the fear of death, we will thus take a preliminary glance at the first and last sentences of the introduction, to see how they function together to reveal Rosenzweig’s systematic intentions for the Star as a whole. As we shall see, the Star’s opening declaration, “All knowledge of the All begins in death, the fear of death,” leads Rosenzweig into a scathing critique of philosophy’s attempt to flee this true starting-point of knowledge of the All, a critique of philosophy’s attempt to construct, in place of the “true All,” an “All” that would justify the denial of death and of the human fear of it. This critique undermines the traditional philosophical claim to the “All” to such an extent, it turns out, that it precipitates the breakup of what philosophy has taken to be the “All” into three separate pieces – God, world, and human being. Looking back upon this breakup, the last lines of the Star’s introduction remind the reader, in hindsight, of the true purpose of the critical, deconstructive work of the introduction. Of the three pieces of the shattered All, Rosenzweig explains, we in fact know nothing. He thus declares, in these closing lines: “The Nothing of our knowledge is no single Nothing, but a three-fold Nothing. As such it contains within itself the promise of determinability. And for that reason we may hope … to find again in … this threefold Nothing of knowledge, the All which we had to break up” (24/22). We will be occupied shortly by Rosenzweig’s claims about the “Nothing” and by the reasons he gives for hoping we may in fact find the All once again after its breakup. Here, I wish merely to emphasize Rosenzweig’s unequivocal declaration that the critique of the All that fills the introduction is intended to serve his own systematic intentions in the book. We are told, in no uncertain terms, that the breakup of the All in the introduction is no one-sided “critique of totality,” no attempt to rescue the individual human being, who fears her own death, from the totalizing clutches of systematicity. Rather, the breakup of the All in the introduction to the Star is carried out for the sake of the All itself. It is this breakup that offers “promise” and “hope” to that thinker who seeks to move past the chimerical concept of the All that has dominated the philosophical tradition in order to attain

126

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

knowledge of the “true All.” The break-up of philosophy’s notion of the All in the introduction thus lays the groundwork for that systematic articulation of the All which spans the Star as a whole. After this preemptive glimpse of the end of the Star’s first introduction, we may now return to its beginning, in order to trace exactly how Rosenzweig lays the groundwork for his own “system of philosophy” through a critique of the philosophical tradition.

i.1 Fear of Death, Particularity, and the Argument over Nothing We should begin with the title of the book’s introduction, for here Rosenzweig first insinuates his twofold claim regarding knowledge of the All. In fact, the titles of the introductions to the three parts of the Star have the identical structure and function, so it is instructive to read them together. The title of the first, as we have noted, reads, “On the Possibility of Knowing the All,” accompanied by the epigraph in philosophos! (“Down with Philosophy!”). The title of the second reads, “On the Possibility of Experiencing the Miracle,” accompanied by the epigraph in theologos! (“Down with Theology!”). The title of the third and last part reads, “On the Possibility of Entreating the Kingdom,” accompanied by the epigraph in tyrannos! (“Down with Tyranny!”). Each of the three titles, together with its epigraph, reflects in a precise manner the central thesis of its respective introduction, part, or – so I wish to claim in the case of the first introduction – of the Star as a whole. Each introduction questions the possibility of a given task or experience – knowing the All, experiencing the miraculous, entreating the kingdom of God – and arrives at an affirmative answer to its question only through a critique of the conventional meaning of that task or experience, by showing that the meaning of that given task or experience has been misunderstood or distorted by the very party which Rosenzweig throws “down” in each introduction’s respective epigraph. Hence, in the introduction to the second part of the Star Rosenzweig reaches the conclusion that it is indeed possible to experience miracles, but only if one abandons the erroneous conception of miracles touted by post-Enlightenment theology (in theologos!) and recalls the true, original meaning of miracle.12 The introduction to the third part of the Star likewise contends that the kingdom of God in which the redemptive unification of the All will be realized can be hastened through “entreaty,” through prayer to God, but only if one abandons the way in which the fanatically religious “tyrants of the kingdom of heaven” (in tyrannos!) have hitherto sought to force the coming of the kingdom through prayer.13 The title of the first introduction functions in this same fashion, so I wish to claim, not 12 13

See my discussion of Rosenzweig’s conception of “miracle,” Chapter 4, Section II.5. See my discussion of prayer as a means of anticipating the redemptive unity of the All in the kingdom of God, Chapter 5, Section II.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

127

only for the introduction or first part of the book alone, but for the Star as a whole. It submits that the Star will demonstrate that it is possible to “know the All,” but only if one abandons the path to the All which philosophy has forever touted (in philosophos!). What path does lead to knowledge of the All? What must the philosopher do, upon what must she reflect, how must she comport herself in order to set herself aright down the path that will offer her “the possibility of knowing the All”? Rosenzweig begins to answer these questions in that first sentence of the book which we have already had occasion to cite: “All knowledge of the All begins in death, the fear of death.” The Star’s opening statement may be read as a direct challenge to the systems of German Idealism. It declares, that is, that systematic knowledge does not have its starting-point in a reflection on first principles, in an absolute act of freedom, in an intuition of the human being’s identity with the Absolute, or in thinking’s own dialectical self-grounding in an Absolute standpoint.14 Rather, Rosenzweig suggests there is something about the human being’s awareness of her own mortality, something about the feeling of fear she experiences before death, that opens for her the possibility of knowing the All. This is a dramatic, sweeping claim both in terms of the philosophical rewards it promises to the person who faces up to the fear of death, and for the way it rebuffs the whole history of philosophy for the offense of ignoring this eminently human starting-point for knowledge. We wish to understand from Rosenzweig’s reflections upon the fear of death in the opening pages of the Star why he designates death and the fear of death alone as the starting-point of knowledge of the All, and why he roots philosophy’s failure to attain true knowledge of the All in its denial of death and the human being’s fear of it. To this end, let us glance briefly at the way Rosenzweig describes this fear. Fear of death is firstly fear “of the earth” or “fear of the earthly”15 [“Ängste der Erde/Angst des Irdischen”], a fear in which “the creature’s limbs tremble for its thisworldly existence [sein Diesseits],” a fear in the grips of which “everything mortal lives,” and hence which “every new birth increases by a new ground, because it increases what is mortal.” Death confronts the human self, the human being’s “I,” with “unthinkable annihilation [unausdenkbare Vernichtung].” In that moment in which the human being envisions her own death – Rosenzweig gives the example of contemplating suicide – she “stands eye-to-eye with the Nothing” and senses her “terrifying poverty, loneliness and tornness from the whole world.” Most uniquely, 14

15

On the rise to the Absolute standpoint in German Idealism, see the first chapter of this work, Sections V–VI. In his Rosenzweig and Heidegger, pp. 144–50, Peter Gordon points out that Rosenzweig’s description of death in the opening pages of the Star draws copiously from Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Das Ideal und das Leben,” and Gordon offers a compelling interpretation of these first pages of the Star as a kind of inversion of the poem’s call to transcendence.

128

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Rosenzweig asserts, the human being experiences or senses [verspürt] in the fear of death “what he otherwise never senses: that his I would only be an It if it died” (all citations, pp. 3–4/3–4). If we examine Rosenzweig’s description of the fear of death with an eye to grasping how the fearful comportment toward death grants the human being the possibility of knowing the All, we notice, first of all, that Rosenzweig substantiates the pronouncement in the first sentence of the Star by pointing to the uniqueness of the experience of the fear of death. This experience reveals to the human being a truth about herself that is not otherwise disclosed to her, that she “otherwise never senses,” and it is reasonable to suspect that it is precisely this unique revelation which makes the fear of death and it alone the appropriate starting-point of knowledge of the All. In his description of the human being’s unique recognition that “his ‘I’ would only be an ‘It’ if it died,” I believe Rosenzweig points to three interconnected insights that will serve to guide him in his quest for knowledge of the All in the Star. The fear of death, first of all, makes the human being intimately aware of her own end in nothingness. The human being’s “I” is eliminated, annihilated, in death, and in place of this “I” there remains only an “It.” Rosenzweig stresses how the fear of death shows the human being the “unthinkable annihilation” [Vernichtung – that is, the making-into-Nothing, or nothing-ing] of her “I” and stands her “eye-to-eye with the Nothing.” In the fear of death the human being thus comes to recognize the extent to which her self or “I” is not at all securely self-grounded or absolute, the extent to which she is rather subject to the ravages of time and the generation and corruption of the earthly, the extent to which her own being is ever suspended in nothingness. Insofar as the human being is a finite being, these passages imply, she never frees herself from this boundedness to her nothing; she never raises herself out of her finitude to the standpoint of the “Absolute.” Closely connected to this unique awareness of the human being’s boundedness to nothing is a second insight granted uniquely in the fear of death, an insight into the human being’s irreducible individuality. For that which the human being fears in her fear of death is the “unthinkable annihilation” of her own “I” and no one else’s. It is her own “I” that “becomes an It” in her death. In sensing the loss of her own “I” in the fear of death, the human being thus experiences that she is and has her own self in a way that she is and has nothing else, and in a way that no one and nothing else has her. Fear of death makes manifest to the human being, that is, that her true “I” is not the “Absolute I,”16 but rather her own personal, mortal I, an I she loses in death. Hence Rosenzweig emphasizes that “every new birth increases the 16

Cf., Schelling’s On the I, Sämmtliche Werke, I: 198, 240, 242. Compare also, Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, where Schelling cites the fear of death as evidence that the human being’s I has its “ground in the absolute freedom of its being, a force which makes the I unable to be a thing,” arguing that were the human being’s true “I” really to be eliminated in death, we would not fear death: “I don’t really fear not-being, I don’t fear this so much as I fear my existence

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

129

fear of death by one new ground,” for this fear is grounded in the individuality of the human being, and it reveals that individuality in unique fashion.17 We find in Rosenzweig’s depiction of the experience of the fear of death, finally, a third insight that is fundamental to Rosenzweig’s systematic standpoint. According to Rosenzweig, we noted, fear of death is a quintessentially “earthly” fear, manifesting itself as “fears of the earth” or “fear of the earthly.” Rosenzweig seems to intend the genitive (the “of ”) in these descriptions both in a possessive and in an objective sense. That is, fear of death is a fear the human being experiences insofar as she herself is “earthly,” that is, part of the earth, and hence subject to generation and corruption, and it is also a fear of the very earth that stands over against the human being and strips her of her personal identity, of her “I,” in death. If this is the case, fear of death reveals to the human being both her own earthliness and dependence upon the earth and the way in which her personal identity is at once something other than the earth, something that is threatened by the earth itself. Indeed, Rosenzweig stresses the paradoxical manner in which the human being senses both her earthliness and her distance from the earth in the fear of death. Her “fear of the earthly” is at once her “terrifying poverty, loneliness, and tornness from the whole world.” In confronting and reflecting upon her own death, Rosenzweig thereby suggests, the human being becomes aware not only of her own ultimate particularity, not only of the way her self is intertwined with her own nothingness, but also of her own twofold nature. According to Rosenzweig, the human being is – as our last chapter has shown – at once “I” and “It,” both unique whole individual self and part of the world “of the third person.” And in the opening paragraphs of the Star Rosenzweig suggests that the fear of death which makes her uniquely aware of how her “ ‘I’ would be an ‘It’ if it died” is the source of the human being’s insight into this her own dual nature. Fear of death is the beginning of knowledge of the All, it seems, not only because it grants the human being insight into her own particularity, and into the nothingness at the root of her being, but also because it is the source of Rosenzweig’s insight that systematic knowledge must be grounded in an understanding of the human being’s two relations to the Absolute.

17

after not-being – I would gladly not exist, only I don’t want to feel my not-being. I just don’t want an existence that is no existence,” Sämmtliche Werke: I: 320. In his “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997): 39–81, Elliot R. Wolfson notes the affinity between Rosenzweig and Heidegger with respect to the irreducible individuality of the “I” each finds as made manifest in the fear of death. See also, Karl Löwith’s seminal essay, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig: A Postscript to Being and Time,” Nature, History, and Existentialism, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History, pp. 56–8, e.g., “That reality which makes it most manifest that I am ‘still there’ is for both [Rosenzweig and Heidegger] – death, as the nothingness of our existence, which is not diluted by them in any idealistic manner.”

130

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

According to Rosenzweig, the possibility of knowing the All depends on how one responds to these insights granted uniquely in the fear of death.18 It depends on whether one has the courage to “remain in the fear of death” (4/4), as Rosenzweig advocates, or whether one “denies these fears of the earthly” (3/3), as he claims philosophy does. But philosophy’s denial of the fear of death does not simply result in a lack of knowledge, according to Rosenzweig. On the contrary, this denial leads philosophy to construct its own “All-notion” in place of the “true All.” Thus, perhaps we should say that how one responds to the fear of death does not simply determine the “possibility of knowing the All,” but rather determines which “All” it is possible for one to grasp, the “true All” toward which Rosenzweig will gradually advance in the Star, or the “All-notion” which philosophy has constructed, according to Rosenzweig, in order to justify its denial of the fear of death. These different conceptions of the All do battle with each other from the very first pages of the Star. They designate, respectively, that complete systematic knowledge which grasps both the identity and difference of All that is, toward which the Star is directed and, opposed to it, what we might call the “reductive” system or All, which reduces the multiplicity of All that is to the One identity common to them, which fails to grasp the unique difference inherent to particular beings. Consistent as Rosenzweig may be regarding this distinction, it is no simple task to keep these Alls straight from one another. The task is made no easier by the fact that, as I have noted, Rosenzweig often fails to distinguish in name between the reductive All he wishes to break up and the All the knowledge of which he “hopes” to attain. Such a lack of clarity may be unavoidable when claims about the “true” system and reductive systems are at stake, when philosophers argue about whose “system” is truly a system and whose “All” is truly the All. Moreover, in our reflections on Thales’ statement about the All in our first chapter, we noted that the term “the All” is itself deeply ambiguous. As one definitive term characterizing all beings it can be understood as pointing exactly to the true goal of systematic knowledge, the One and All, that is, the identity of all that is together with the difference of each individual being. But precisely as this single term, “the All” also comes to name the reduction of all that is to a single unity, the very corruption of the notion of system against which both Rosenzweig and the Idealists sought to guard themselves. Rosenzweig plays with the ambiguity of the term “All” throughout the Star, and in doing so he 18

Yehoyada Amir understands Rosenzweig’s account of the human being’s fear of death, and concomitant sense that she must live on, to yield a sense that life emerges from a source “that is much more than the personal circle of life of each and every human being.” In this awareness of the “suprapersonal and absolute meaning of life,” Amir suggests Rosenzweig locates the “irrational startingpoint” of Rosenzweig’s “irrational philosophical system.” Despite the compelling and careful reading of the opening of the Star which Amir offers – and despite his own claims to the contrary – it is difficult to see exactly how a root experience of life as that which transcends the bounds of the individual would yield a system that is any less reductive of particularity than those against which Rosenzweig writes. See his ‫ עיונים במשנתו של פרנץ רוזנצוויג‬:‫[ דעת מאמינה‬Believing Knowledge: Studies in the Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig], pp. 39–49.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

131

draws attention to how close the true notion and the reductive notion of system really are, to how easy it is to fall off the path to true systematic knowledge by reducing the difference inherent to All beings to the single unity of “the All.” These considerations about Alls suggest that the first sentence of the Star may indeed be understood in a double sense. They suggest, that is, a further way in which the fear of death leads to “knowledge of the All,” if the “All” is now understood equivocally, that is, as naming not only the “true All” attained at the end of the Star, but also the reductive All touted by philosophy. For insofar as philosophy’s denial of the fear of death leads it to construct its All-notion, the reductive All too finds its beginnings in the fear of death. Fear of death may thus be considered the beginning of the paths to both “Alls.” It is the starting-point of Rosenzweig’s system insofar as he takes the fear of death seriously, insofar as he “remains in the fear of death.” But it is also the starting-point of the systems of Idealism, according to Rosenzweig, insofar as the denial of “the fears of the earthly” makes this reductive All both necessary and possible for philosophy.19 If we recognize in the term “the All” the possibility of both the true system and the reductive system, then we may note how the Star’s first sentence already points to the moment of division between the path of Idealism and Rosenzweig’s own path. Fear of death marks the starting-point of both Alls, of both forms of system. Whether the knowledge of the All that is made possible by this starting-point is that of the “true All” or the reductive All depends on whether one reacts to this fear with serious reflection or with denial.20 How does the denial of the fear of death lead philosophy to construct its reductive All? As we saw in our last chapter, Rosenzweig understands the failure of the systems of German Idealism to lie precisely in their reduction of particular beings to nothing more than parts of the “system.” For in the architectural “edifice” of the Idealist system, Rosenzweig claimed, particular beings are presented as mere “stones which exist for the sake of the edifice (and otherwise for no reason).”21 19

20

21

As I have noted, this second way of grasping the Star’s first sentence is most prevalent in contemporary scholarship. But cf., Else-Rahel Freund, Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence, p. 5: “Rosenzweig’s first experience of death, as encountered in the First World War, … led him to a conception of the realistic All.” Heinz-Jürgen Görtz also appears to understand this sentence in the twofold fashion I have suggested; cf., Görtz, Tod und Erfahrung, pp. 304, 385. I have tried to read Rosenzweig’s critique of philosophy’s denial of death in the light of the copious reflections on death in Hegel and Schelling, in an unpublished conference paper, “Rosenzweig on the Starting Point of Philosophy and the End of Man,” Thirteenth World Congress for Jewish Studies, 2001. At issue, I believe, is not the argument over whether or not Hegel and Schelling took death seriously, but rather, what death comes to teach: i.e., does it point the would-be philosopher to a recognition of his ultimate identity with the Absolute (Hegel, Schelling), or does it point to a recognition of fundamental finitude? See also H.-J. Görtz’s exhaustive study of the meaning of death for Rosenzweig and Hegel, in which Görtz locates the site of Hegel’s own “denial of the fear of the earthly” in his identification of death as that revelation of the untruth of appearance, which pushes the Phenomenology forward from natural consciousness toward the absolute spirit. in Tod und Erfahrung, especially pp. 382–6. BT 1, p. 484.

132

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Rosenzweig reiterates this critique of Idealism in the opening pages of the Star but now offers a quasi-psychological explanation for Idealism’s reductive All, grounding its construction in philosophy’s need to deny the fearfulness of death: An All would not die, and in the All nothing would die. Only the individual can die, and all that is mortal is solitary [einsam]. … “Idealism,” with its denial of all that separates the individual from the All is the tool with which philosophy works the stubborn material so long until it can no longer resist being wrapped in the fog of the One-andAll concept. If all were once spun into this fog [in diesen Nebel alles eingesponnen], indeed death would be devoured, if not in the eternal victory, still in the one-anduniversal [eine und allgemeine] night of the Nothing. And this is the last conclusion of this wisdom: death is – nothing. (4/4)

According to Rosenzweig, we see, philosophy pursues its grounding of individuals “in the All,” it identifies such individuals as mere parts of the architectonic structure of the system, in order to overcome the fearfulness of death. Since “only the individual can die,” Idealism seeks to deny “all that separates the individual from the All,” by denying the irreducible individuality of the individual revealed – so we have seen – in death. Only by thus denying particularity as such can Idealism justify the conclusion that death itself is “nothing.” At first glance, this psychological analysis of the philosophical tradition22 makes for a strangely ad hominem argument whose thrust as an argument against philosophy would seem to amount to no more than good old-fashioned mockery. One can, of course, always accuse philosophers of philosophizing simply because they are short or ugly or scared of the dark, but these kinds of claims do not address the only thing that matters in the philosophical context, that is, whether or not philosophers have spoken wisely of the truth. The failure of German Idealism to grasp particularity as such in their systems is surely the genuinely philosophical spur that makes Rosenzweig’s own systematic work necessary, but we may rightly ask what Rosenzweig adds to his claim by suggesting that this failure stems from the need to deny the fear of death. Furthermore, even if it is granted that the denial of the fear of death makes it impossible to grasp the “true All,” as Rosenzweig asserts, this denial can hardly be considered sufficient explanation for philosophical activity as such. And yet, I would submit, Rosenzweig intends this argument seriously. Or rather, clothed in Rosenzweig’s psychological diagnosis we find a serious philosophical argument regarding both what is missed by philosophy when it fails to grasp the insights granted in the fear of death and how what is missed leads philosophy to make unjustified presumptions regarding its own task. These consequent presumptions predispose philosophy, in Rosenzweig’s eyes, to fail in its attempt to 22

Cf., Yehoyada Amir’s suggestion that in his psychological critique of philosophy, Rosenzweig follows in Nietzsche’s footsteps, ‫[ דעת מאמינה‬Believing Knowledge], p. 43.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

133

grasp the identity and difference of All that is and to construct, in place of the “true All,” an All that reduces the multiplicity of being to One. We find the gist of this philosophical argument in Rosenzweig’s claim, cited previously, that in reducing the individual to mere part of the All, philosophy devours death in the “one-and-universal night of the Nothing,” reaching the conclusion that “death is – nothing.” What is noteworthy in this claim is the way it seems to parallel one of the central insights granted in the fear of death. Fear of death revealed to Rosenzweig how the individual’s being always stands in connection with her own “nothingness,” the way in which this boundedness to nothing is constitutive of the human being’s own finite being. Philosophy, too, according to Rosenzweig, links death and nothing, but in doing so it expresses a very different kind of “nothing,” or a different meaning of “nothing” than that which is revealed in the fear of death. By concluding that death is “nothing,” namely, philosophy dismisses death as that which is not – as that which is not real or not true, not serious or not frightening, not essential or not worthy of reflection. It discards death as nothing at all. She who stands “eye-to-eye with the Nothing” in death, on the other hand, she who confronts the “unthinkable nothing-ing [Vernichtung]” of death, hardly experiences Nothing as that which may be dismissed. Rather, the individual is threatened by Nothing in death. In the fear of death, one experiences Nothing as that in whose hands one’s fate has been placed. Thus, one might well suggest that in the fear of death nothingness is experienced as a very real “something.”23 This, at any rate, is what Rosenzweig asserts. To philosophy’s conclusion that “death is nothing,” Rosenzweig responds: “In truth this is no last conclusion, but rather a first beginning, and death is really not what it appears to be, not Nothing, but a merciless, irremovable Something.” (4–5/4) Rosenzweig’s response to Idealism’s conclusion about death is telling, here, in that Rosenzweig does not simply deny the philosophical claim that “death is nothing,” but rather he denies the nothing of death as conclusion. According to Rosenzweig, the fact that death is nothing – and the particular manner in which death is nothing – must be taken not as conclusion but rather as “first beginning,” as the source and object of serious questioning. Fear of death presents the starting-point for the path to knowledge of the true All to those who recognize, to use Rosenzweig’s playful but confusing language, “that the Nothing of death is a Something,” that “the Nothing is not Nothing, it is Something” (5/5). In the very experience which reveals to Rosenzweig the extent to which human being is bound with nothingness, we see, the reverse is likewise revealed: how nothingness itself is “something” that acts upon, or is tied up with man’s being. The nothingness bound to individual being and the “somethingness” of nothing would thus seem 23

Compare Luca Bertolini’s discussion of the nihil negativum and the nihil positivum in this context in his “Das Nichts und die Philosophie: Rosenzweig zwischen Idealismus und einer Hermeneutik der religiösen Erfahrung,” Franz Rosenzweigs “neues Denken,” pp. 112–14.

134

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

to be two sides of the same insight given in the fear of death. That is, the fear of death reveals what we should perhaps refer to as the interconnection of being and nothing, an interconnection manifest at the level of the particular self, insofar as it is experienced by each individual in the fear of her own death.24 In the conclusion that “death is nothing,” however, philosophy denies and hence deceives itself regarding both death and nothing. Philosophy fails to grasp that nothing which is revealed in death as “something,” as intertwined with or constitutive of human being, and hence it misses the way in which the nothing is quintessentially worthy of question, is the “first beginning” of philosophical reflection. Were philosophy to recognize the fear of death for what it is, Rosenzweig asserts, it would have to set out – and set out consciously [from a starting-point which grasps]: that the Nothing of death is a Something, that each new Nothing-of-death is a new, ever newly fearful Something. … And in place of the one and universal Nothing … which it alone wants to let precede one-and-universal knowledge, it would have to have the courage to listen to that cry and not shut its eyes before the gruesome actuality. The Nothing is not Nothing, it is Something. In the dark background of the world there stand as its inexhaustible presupposition a thousand deaths, instead of the one Nothing, which really would be Nothing, a thousand Nothings, which, just because they are many, are Something. The multiplicity of the Nothing which is presupposed by philosophy, the actuality of death not to be banished from the world … makes the fundamental notion of philosophy, the notion of one-and-universal knowledge of the All, into a lie, even before it is thought. (5/5)

The Nothing of death is a Something, according to this passage, not simply insofar as it poses a real mortal threat to the individual, but precisely because it is individual, because it is manifold: “Instead of the one Nothing, which really would be Nothing, a thousand Nothings, which, just because they are many, are Something.” Each death, and each fear of death, we have seen, belongs to, or is constitutive of, the respective individual self whom it threatens. Rosenzweig appears to understand each individual being, here, as the site of an interconnection between particular being and particular nothingness, an individualized interconnection revealed in death. But because philosophy closes its eyes to death and the fear of it, philosophy posits “one Nothing,” “the one-and-universal Nothing,” in place of the multiplicity of particular nothings revealed in the fear of death. It dismisses this manifold nothingness as “one-and-universal Nothing,” as that which Rosenzweig seems to understand along the lines of pure nonbeing, or total, empty nothingness. According to Rosenzweig, it is precisely this dismissal of nothings as nothing, made manifest in philosophy’s denial of the fear of death, which fates philosophy to fail in its quest to know the “true All,” and which sets philosophy upon 24

There are striking similarities between Rosenzweig’s account of the nothing in the opening of the Star and Heidegger’s 1929 “What Is Metaphysics?” Pathmarks, pp. 82–96. Gordon offers an adept comparison of the two in Rosenzweig and Heidegger, pp. 170–4.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

135

the path toward its own reductive All. Thus, we discover that the philosophical argument between Alls which Rosenzweig sets up in the Star’s introduction is rooted, in fact, in a fundamental argument over Nothing. To attain the “true All,” Rosenzweig suggests, one must begin with the true nothing; to grasp the identity and difference of All that is, one must begin by grasping the difference, the plurality inherent even to nothingness; one must grasp the particular interconnection of particular being and particular nothingness that is revealed to the human being uniquely through her fear of her own death. But while the fear of death suggests to Rosenzweig that the proper starting-point of knowledge of the “true All” lies in the particular interconnection of being and nothing, philosophy sets as the starting-point for its “one-and-universal knowledge of the All” “the oneand-universal Nothing.” “Because … in that philosophy does not let death count for Something,” Rosenzweig explains, “now all knowledge of the All has for its presupposition – nothing” (5/5). In this last statement, Rosenzweig directs his reader back once again to the first sentence of the Star. Indeed, the first pages of the Star are littered with such references to the beginning of the act of philosophizing, bidding the reader return time and again to compare Rosenzweig’s latest formulation with the declaration about the beginning of knowledge of the All with which the book opens. These references illuminate the basic contrast between Rosenzweig’s own starting-point and that of the philosophical tradition culminating in German Idealism. Rosenzweig “begins” the path toward knowledge of the All (“Vom Tode … hebt alles Erkennen des All an.” [3/3]) in the recognition of the unique insights given in the fear of death, a recognition that teaches one to acknowledge the nothingness of death itself as a particular “something.” Were philosophy likewise to recognize the fear of death, it too would begin or set out (“ausgehen” [5/5]) from the fact that the nothing is “something.” But philosophy denies both death and the particularity of nothing revealed in it as “one-and-universal Nothing” and thus believes that “all knowledge of the All has for its presupposition” – that is, begins in – “nothing” (“nun hat alles Erkennen des All zu seiner Voraussetzung – nichts” [5/5]). Thus if, as we have seen, both Rosenzweig and German Idealism share the same experience of the fear of death as the beginning of their respective systems, the break between them is evident immediately, according to Rosenzweig, in the way each would have to reformulate that experience given what it teaches about nothing. If Rosenzweig might reformulate the statement “All knowledge of the All begins in death, the fear of death” as “all knowledge of the All begins in (the recognition of) nothings that are somethings,” Idealism’s denial of the fear of death leads it to make a very different assertion, that is, “All knowledge of the All begins in (presupposes) nothing, the one-and-universal nothing.” In the following section, we will try to understand why Rosenzweig designates the “one-and-universal Nothing” as the starting-point, or as the presupposition of philosophy’s path to its All, and why Rosenzweig sees in this presupposition

136

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the root of philosophy’s failure to grasp particularity as such within its All. To do so, we will have to return to the very grounding of systematic knowledge in the Absolute standpoint, which our first chapter sought to depict.

i.2 The Particularity of Nothing and the Hope for the All: Rosenzweig’s Alternative to the Systematic Starting-Point of German Idealism The first chapter of this study explored how Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” recounts the Idealist advance toward the discovery of the task of system as a series of attempts to ground knowledge of the One and All in a firm, comprehensive philosophical standpoint. As a “counterpart to Spinoza’s” grounding of the All in the “absolute being” of the One Substance, and in the footsteps of Fichte’s grounding of system in the “absolute act” of the free subject, Schelling and Hegel posited the standpoint of Absolute Idealism as the original absolute identity of substance and subject, of being and act. In grounding the totality of all knowledge in this absolutely self-grounded original identity, the Idealists contended that their systematic constructions accounted for absolutely everything and hence presupposed nothing.25 Now it is Rosenzweig’s conviction that the systems of Idealism stand and fall with this claim to presuppose “nothing.” “If that aforementioned presupposition is valid and all knowing is directed to the All, is included in it but is at once all-powerful in it, then indeed,” according to Rosenzweig, the Hegelian “self-completion of knowing” “was truth” (6–7/6–7). Philosophy would thereby grasp in Hegel’s system what Hegel himself announced in it: knowledge of both itself and its object, the All as both subject and substance from out of a self-grounded absolute standpoint. Such a philosophical triumph, according to Rosenzweig, would have to be recognized as the “conclusion” of “knowledge of the All,” “because one must well designate as conclusion if this knowledge circumscribes [umgreifen] no longer only its object, the All” – that is, the All as Substance – “but also itself ” – that is, the All as subject – “completely [restlos], completely at least according to its own claims and its own-most manner” (6/6). 25

See, e.g., Schelling: On the I, Sämmtliche Werke, I, 193, “All is only in the I and for the I. In the I, philosophy has found its ‘hen kai pan,’ for which it has struggled up to now as the highest prize of victory. (Note 1: all existence rests on my I: My I is everything, everything which is is in it and related to it: I take my I away and everything which is, is nothing)”; Hegel, Werke 5. Wissenschaft der Logik, pp. 68–9: “The beginning must be an absolute, or, what here is equivalent, abstract beginning: it may thus presuppose nothing, must be mediated by nothing, nor have a ground; it should rather be itself the ground of the whole science.” Hegel at once notes that this immediate beginning has been mediated by the path through finite knowledge in the Phenomonology. But as a parallel to Rosenzweig’s critique, see Schelling’s later critique of Hegel, e.g., his “On the History of Modern Philosophy,” Sämmtliche Werke I/10, p. 144: “The Hegelian philosophy makes itself famous in being one which presupposes nothing, absolutely nothing. Only with respect to this last, so Hegel must, in that he sets up the Logic in that sublime sense as the first philosophical science, thereby make use of the common logical forms, without having justified them.”

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

137

But in his critique of the Idealist response to the fear of death, Rosenzweig now suggests that Idealism’s “aforementioned presupposition” is not in fact valid. When the Idealists claim to presuppose nothing by grounding philosophy in the Absolute standpoint, Rosenzweig suggests, they reveal the extent to which they presuppose that “nothingness” as such is merely “one Nothing,” merely the “one and universal Nothing.” They reveal their own disregard for the “multiplicity of the Nothing presupposed by philosophy” (5/5). But if it is the case that Idealism makes such a presupposition, then Idealism’s so-called absolute standpoint is not absolute at all – for it depends on the denial of the “nothing” as “something.” Its alleged selfgrounding starting-point rests on the assumption that the nothing out of which it constructs the All is only “one Nothing,” the “one and universal Nothing.”26 In his criticism of the Idealist view of Nothing, here, I believe Rosenzweig points to a deep-rooted quarrel he has with German Idealism over the structure of system, a quarrel which we began to examine in our second chapter, and which Rosenzweig himself will spell out over the whole course of the Star. The nature of this quarrel is hinted at in the fact that Rosenzweig designates the “ ‘sole’ presupposition” upon which Idealism rests with two diametrically opposed descriptions. This presupposition is designated, we have seen, as the presupposition that “nothing” is the “one and universal Nothing.” But Rosenzweig also designates this same presupposition of “one Nothing,” surprisingly, as “the magnificent presupposition of the thinkable All” (6/6). To make sense of the way in which these two seemingly opposed designations name the same presupposition, we must follow a somewhat complex line of criticism Rosenzweig directs at the German Idealist notion of “nothing.” This criticism not only attacks the Idealist claim to ground everything bar none in an original self-positing Absolute identity. Principally, it seeks to undermine the very manner in which both Hegel and the earlier Schelling grasp this original Absolute identity out of which the All unfolds in their systems. The Idealists describe this original identity itself as a kind of “one-and-universal Nothing”: as a point of pure “nonbeing,” “indifference,” or “indeterminateness,” as a kind of empty Absolute in which the distinctions present to us in consciousness are not yet manifest. The “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” we may recall, depicts the original emergence of the Absolute out of itself, through which it “sets up a world over against itself,” as “the single true and thinkable creation out of Nothing,” and in so doing, we noted, it announces its own overcoming of the Spinozistic claim 26

See Richard Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas, p. 71: “Rosenzweig’s claim is stronger yet: not only is death lacking to philosophy, as everyone would readily agree that innumerable facts and details – ‘particulars’ – have been and are always lacking to philosophy, without serious consequence, but, lacking death, philosophy lacks its own origin. Such a lack is then of the greatest possible consequence for philosophy, for it punctures philosophy’s greatest pretense, undermines what has always made for its very greatness, its alleged greatness – it destroys the very possibility of absoluteness.”

138

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

that “nothing comes from nothing.”27 Throughout his writings, Schelling similarly refers to the original “Absolute Identity” out of which All unfolds in his system as a point of “pure equivalence (indifference) that is nothing yet all [die nichts ist und doch alles],” as “a kind of orphic unity, in which all still lay hidden, that was to be developed out of it,” as “the absolute indifference” of the antitheses of experienced actuality which is “nothing else than just their non-being, and therefore has no predicates except lack of predicates, without its being a nothing or an un-thing [nichts anderes … als eben das Nichtseyn derselben, und das darum auch kein Prädicat hat als eben das Prädicatlosigkeit, ohne dass es desswegen ein Nichts oder ein Unding wäre].”28 Hegel, likewise, famously begins his systematic reflections out of the Absolute standpoint in the Science of Logic from the point of the “unity of Being and Nothing,” which “could be seen as the first, most pure, i.e., most abstract definition of the Absolute.”29 Here he reflects upon the way “Pure Being and Pure Nothing are the same,” for “pure Being” is “pure indeterminacy and emptiness” and “Nothing is … the same determinationlessness, and thus altogether the same as pure being is.”30 If we begin to ask why Rosenzweig now grounds the failure of the Idealist quest for system in the Idealist understanding of Nothing as “One and Universal Nothing,” we notice first that this “indeterminate” “indifferent” “nonbeing” of the original Absolute that marks the beginning of the Idealist systems stands in stark opposition to what Rosenzweig emphasizes as the particularity of that somethinglike nothing which confronts the human being in death, and we might well wonder whether it is not this very particularity of Rosenzweig’s nothing in contrast to the “universality” of the Idealist nothing which leads Rosenzweig to the conviction that his pursuit of system will succeed where the Idealist attempt failed. In fact, Rosenzweig makes such a claim explicitly in the closing lines of the Star’s first introduction. Here, we recall, Rosenzweig states that unlike the “single Nothing” of his predecessors, the “threefold” Nothing that has emerged for us through the breakup of the All into the three fundamental kinds of beings “contains within itself the promise of determinability [Bestimmbarkeit]. And for that reason we may 27

28

29 30

Cf., OSP, pp. 5, 10–13; F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Briefe, Werke, I: 310. And see Chapter 1, Sections III–VI. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, VIII: 236; Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, p. 123; “Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom,” Sämmtliche Werke VII: 406. These passages are taken from Schelling’s later works where he refers to his earlier position. I have cited them because they are the most colorful, but see also, e.g., “Presentation of My System of Philosophy,” Sämmtliche Werke I/4, pp. 125–6, translated by Michael G. Vater, The Philosophical Forum, XXXII, 4 (2001), p. 357. Schelling’s own account of the origin of being changes significantly after he introduces the distinction between “Ground” and “Existence” in Human Freedom, and one might make the case that such a change was a response to the same problematic involved in positing the origin in pure identity which Rosenzweig challenges in the Star. See Section II.3, “Excursus on Beginning in Difference,” at the end of this chapter. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 5. Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 74. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 5. Wissenschaft der Logik, pp. 82–3.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

139

hope … to find again in … this three-fold Nothing of knowledge, the All which we had to break up” (24/22). According to Rosenzweig, it seems, the particularity of the interconnection between being and nothing – which Rosenzweig will presently apply to God, world, and human being, respectively – offers the possibility of grasping that differentiation or determination which Idealism’s universal structure of thought, grounded in a universal concept of nothing, has failed to grasp. Indeed, the closing lines of the introduction of the Star amount to a direct challenge to the beginnings of the Hegelian system in the Science of Logic. For if the Logic begins the system with the Absolute as the “pure indeterminacy” [reine Unbestimmtheit] of Being/Nothing, it proceeds to show how this Absolute gradually becomes concrete, “returning to itself through self-determination [Selbstbestimmung] or particularization,” until as “Absolute Idea” it “contains all determinateness [alle Bestimmtheit] in itself.”31 In suggesting that the “determinability” [Bestimmbarkeit] of the All is promised solely to the one who begins from the threefold particularity of nothingness, Rosenzweig takes a stand squarely against the Hegelian movement whereby “all determinateness” emerges out of the indeterminacy of the Absolute, out of what Rosenzweig designates as a “one-and-universal Nothing.” I believe that this criticism of the way in which the systems of Idealism root All being in an original absolute “indifference” or “indeterminateness” akin to “pure Nonbeing” is best understood as an extension of Rosenzweig’s basic critique of the architectonic character of the systems of Idealism whose development we traced in our second chapter. As we recall, Kant designated system as that knowledge in which one grasps, from the beginning, “the idea of the whole,” “the unity of the end, to which all parts are related and in the idea of which they are also related to each other.”32 In our first chapter, we highlighted how Kant’s architectonic stipulation for system foreshadowed the One-All-One schematic structure of the later systems of German Idealism. For here Kant already asserts that systematic knowledge must trace the movement from a single idea that anticipates the whole, through its manifold particulars, to the unity of the system’s end, that is, a movement from identity to difference to identity, wherein the final unity has passed through, and been mediated by, the knowledge of the multiplicity and determinateness of the system’s particular parts. In our second chapter, however, we saw how Rosenzweig came to reject the Idealist form of system precisely on account of its architectonic character. Rosenzweig came to reject the possibility of grasping particularity as such in a totality of thought in which particulars are presented as mere parts of a whole whose unifying end is grasped from the beginning. Rosenzweig’s critique of the architectonic structure of Idealism is implicit in his critique of the Idealist conception of the “one and universal Nothing” in the 31 32

G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 6. Wissenschaft der Logik II, p. 549. CPR, A832/B860.

140

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

following manner: The systems of Idealism are circular, beginning and ending in absolute identity. That which distinguishes the original identity from the ultimate identity of the Idealist system – so our last quote from Hegel’s Science of Logic reminds us – is precisely the differentiation, the determination, the mediation through the manifold particularity of the All. Seen from the ultimate identity of the One and All at the end of the system, the original identity out of which the system unfolds appears to be undifferentiated, indeterminate, as vacuous as an empty Nothing. Indeed, it is precisely the indifferent, universal nothing-like character of the origin which, according to the Idealists, makes it possible for the All to unfold dialectically from it. Only as the absolute Nothing does the origin offer the possibility of giving birth to absolutely everything. Only that which is not-everything, as opposed to being a determinate nothing or negation (e.g., not-extended or notfree), holds the possibility within itself of unfolding into the very “everything” of which it is “not.” It was with this in mind that Schelling underscored how the point of original indifference, the primal ground of his system, was a nothing in which “all lay hidden.” In the Idealist account of the original identity of the All as a kind of nothingness we thus find that the Idealist “one-and-universal Nothing” which Rosenzweig opposes is not merely “nothing at all” in the superficial sense in which we first understood Rosenzweig’s critique. But neither is the Idealist nothing particular or determined as is Rosenzweig’s “nothing.” Rather, the opposition between Rosenzweig’s nothing and the Idealist nothing proves to be an opposition between a “nothing” that “is something” and a “nothing” that is at once already “all.” It is here, I believe, that we arrive at the heart of Rosenzweig’s criticism of the Idealist starting-point in the “one and universal Nothing.” The Idealists set out to know the All, to articulate the identity and difference of All that is, in their systems. But such a pursuit cannot hope to attain its goal, according to Rosenzweig, precisely because it assumes the identity of the All from the beginning. It presupposes “one Nothing” out of which the identity and difference of the All unfold, before it even begins its systematic advance to knowledge. But this presupposition means that the determinate manifold of particulars which are developed dialectically out of the One original undifferentiated Absolute Identity of Being/Nothing, “through self-determination and particularization,” are really always One from the start of the system to its end.33 Idealism’s presupposition of the “one-anduniversal Nothing,” Rosenzweig implies, betrays its partiality for identity over difference and thereby closes Idealism off tout court to the possibility of grasping difference. Knowledge of the All cannot be attained if one begins with the 33

Cf., Bernhard Casper, “Responsibility Rescued,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, p. 90: “In the system of idealistic thinking, everything emanates from the One and is also taken back into the One. The hen kai pan … of Hegel’s … becomes a problem for Rosenzwieg … because thinking in which the One creates itself as the All must eliminate the distinctive Self within its own distinctive origin, and that in effect eliminates responsibility.”

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

141

presupposition of a “one-and-universal Nothing” which is “yet all,” Rosenzweig implies, for one thereby assumes the attainment of the goal of one’s systematic quest from the beginning; one assumes from the start an identity of all different beings, a oneness of the All, while it is precisely whether or not, or in what manner, the All really is – can be spoken of in the singular – that is to be determined through the system.34 Rosenzweig thus suggests that it is the philosopher’s presupposition that she already has the “All” indeterminately as an identity in the “one and universal Nothing” with which she begins her systematic venture that fates her to miss the path to the true All and to construct in its stead a reductive All which posits particulars as mere “parts” of its architectonic structure. In the introduction to the Star, Rosenzweig implies that this presupposition of the identity of the All has plagued the philosophical tradition since its very inception in Thales’ pronouncement that “All is water”: “It is not self-evident that one can say ‘What is All?’ with the prospect of an unambiguous [eindeutige, i.e., one-meaning] predicate. One cannot ask ‘What is Many?’ For this one could only expect ambiguous [mehrdeutige] answers. But for the subject All there is already assumed one unambiguous predicate” (13/12). Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program” cited Thales’ dictum “All is water,” we recall, as evidence that the concept of system, while first discovered by German Idealism, had nevertheless been “hidden” in the tradition since its inception. We noted, however, that in hiding the true notion of system as knowledge of the One and All, Thales’ statement also held within itself the first distortion of that notion of system, for it reflected the danger of reducing the multiplicity of All that is to One substance, that is, water. In the introduction to the Star, we see, Rosenzweig finds the root of this philosophical distortion of the true nature of system in the very formulation of the question answered by Thales’ statement. For the question “What is All?” already assumes an answer that will take the form of a single, clearcut predicate (“All is …”), and it thereby presupposes the identity, the oneness of the All from the start. Our investigations of Rosenzweig’s critique of the Idealist concept of nothing, I would thus submit, reveal to us why Rosenzweig designates the “‘sole’ presupposition” upon which philosophy rests in two, seemingly opposite fashions, that is, as the presupposition of the “one and universal Nothing,” and at once as the “magnificent presupposition of the thinkable All.” For we now see that the presupposition of the “one and universal Nothing” already includes the assumption that the “All lay hidden” in this indeterminate Nothing, and hence that the thinker already has the All, implicitly, at the moment in which she attains the Absolute standpoint 34

See Daniel Guerriere, “With What Does Hegelian Science Begin,” Review of Metaphysics, 30 (March 1977), p. 467, where Guerriere points to the exact opposite problem: “A philosophy that begins with Emptiness remains there; abjuring the concrete, it becomes the endless self-involvement of thought.”

142

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

of the indifference of subject and object, thought and being. As we shall see, Rosenzweig returns to this basic claim against German Idealism throughout the Star. He repeatedly asserts that the Idealist overemphasis upon the original identity of the “All” at the expense of the differences between its manifold parts taints the Idealistic quest for systematic knowledge as “one-sided” or “one-dimensional.” “The Idealistic systems of 1800,” Rosenzweig writes, in the Star I 2, “most clearly that of Hegel, but according to their design, Fichte’s and Schelling’s as well, show a trait which we would have to describe as one-dimensionality. … The flow of force of the system-whole flows as a one and universal through all single figures.” In this systematic whole, “the always manifold appearance of being is absolutely dissolved in that unity of the Absolute” (56,116/52,104). Rosenzweig implies, furthermore, that this one-dimensionality typical of the Idealist systems is the product of the Idealist belief “to be able to develop the All of knowledge in an account of the ‘Origin’” (155/140), a development rooted, we have seen, in their latent identification of the “one and universal Nothing” with the “thinkable All.”35 In Rosenzweig’s identification of the presuppositions of the “one and universal Nothing” and the “thinkable All,” one must add here, Rosenzweig also points to what he deems to be the limitations of the universal structure of traditional philosophical thought. Part of Rosenzweig’s claim about the fear of death, we have seen, is that this fear reveals uniquely the way in which the individual self is and has herself as individual. By designating that reductive All of philosophy which fails to grasp this particularity of the individual specifically as the “one-and-universal All” rooted in a “one-and-universal Nothing,” Rosenzweig underscores his claim that the aspect of particularity revealed in the fear of death simply cannot be subsumed under the universal laws of thinking; cannot be grasped by attending, from the beginning, to “what is one and the same in all these items”; it cannot be grasped by “subsum[ing] the particular under … the universal.”36 The universal structure of thinking, we likewise suggest, is grounded in the very architectonic character of thought we have just identified, that is, in its preference for the identity of the All, for what is “common” to the multiplicity of particulars in actuality, which it betrays from the very outset of its operations. Indeed, the term “universal” itself is from the Greek “kathalon”, i.e., “according to the whole,” a meaning preserved in the German all-gemein – that is, “common to all.” The universal structure of thought which builds up the “one-and-universal knowledge of the All” out of the “one and universal Nothing,” we may infer, takes its bearings from the identity of “the 35

36

In an as of yet unpublished article, I have suggested that Rosenzweig’s argument with the Idealists over the question of the “origin” may be understood as an argument over how to interpret Kant’s suggestion that there may be a “common but to us unknown root” of all human knowledge. The article is set to appear as “Die ‘geheimnissvolle Wurzel’ von Rosenzweigs System der Philosophie,” Alpha-Bet: Jahrbuch des Franz-Rosenzweig-Zentrums, Herausgegeben von Alfred Bodenheimer und Jens Mattern (forthcoming). Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 100a, 7–8; Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werke V: 179.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

143

whole,” from what is “common to all.” It is itself a symptom of that unwarranted presupposition that in the “one Nothing” there already lies the “thinkable All.” In place of Idealism’s “one and universal Nothing” which is at once already “All,” we have seen, Rosenzweig posits the fear of death as the starting-point of knowledge of the All. The fear of death reveals to Rosenzweig the interconnection, within the individual self, between his particular nothing and his particular being. In highlighting this insight of the fear of death, and in using this insight to undermine the Idealist notion of Nothing, I would propose, Rosenzweig makes the following far-reaching claim: particular beings are not to be grasped as the products of the differentiation of an originally abstract or universal identity, designated as “Being” or “Nothing” or “Indifference.” “Nothing” and “All” are likewise not identical identities, differentiated solely by the mediation, by the determination gained through the movement of the system, but rather, Rosenzweig suggests, every particular being is the site of a struggle between a particular nothing and a particular being. Every particular being is and is not, each being is suspended in its own nothing, and, conversely, every particular nothing is at once “something” or possesses the possibility of giving birth to its particular “something” out of itself. But if every individual being is caught between nothing and being, is in the process of emerging from nothing and falling back into nothing, then the “All,” the system, cannot be said to “be” in any firm sense at all.37 According to Rosenzweig, we recall from the last chapter, the human being who stands in the middle of the system grasps the All as still in question, as still hidden, as still to be realized through the choices and actions of particular beings. In the Star, it is the fear of death that first gives the reader access to this future character of the All, and to the task bestowed upon the human being for its realization. Death symbolizes for the human being the threat of nothing, the possibility of nothing, upon the grounds of which alone a decision for the All can be made freely. For it is only in the face of this threat of nothingness that the human being recognizes himself as his own individual, as something other than a part or a manifestation of the self-identical All. In place of the Absolute standpoint which takes the beginning of the system as already containing, indeterminately, the ultimate whole of the All, Rosenzweig thus takes up his starting-point in the midst of being, with the particular nothing exposed in the human experience of the fear of death. He “remain[s] in the fear of death.” 37

Elliot R. Wolfson appears to understand the distinction I am drawing between the “All” of German Idealism and Rosenzweig’s “true All” in a similar vein. In his “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997): 39–81, he notes Rosenzweig’s attempt “to distinguish his own sense of unity as process from the substance orientation of the philosophical Idealism.” Rosenzweig’s All “is one,” Wolfson observes, “only to the degree that it becomes unified” (pp. 72–3). Wolfson proceeds to question whether such a “becoming towards unity” really allows one “to speak of ontological difference in any meaningful way” – a question to which our own work will return in the chapters that follow.

144

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

I propose that when one takes seriously both Rosenzweig’s positive claim that the fear of death reveals the particularity of the interconnection of being and nothing and his critique of the Idealist notions of All and Nothing, one arrives at a radical claim regarding the starting-point of system. Systematic knowledge of the One and All, according to our reading, begins not in identity, but in difference, not in universality but in particularity, not in the unity of All but in a multiplicity that cannot yet be designated as “the All.” Rosenzweig would thus imply that the starting-point out of which he begins his quest for the All offers the “promise of determinability,” and hence “hope” for regaining the “All,” precisely because it begins not with the nothing that is “yet everything,” not with an “indeterminateness” predetermined to “self-determine” itself into the totality of “all determinateness,” but rather with the particularity of the struggle between beings and their nothings. As the next section will show, Rosenzweig will proceed to make distinctions within this rather universal claim about particularity.38 He will suggest, that is, that while all particular beings are to be grasped as emerging originally from their respective nothings, there are in fact three different ways in which these particular beings do so, depending upon whether these particular beings are human selves, parts of the world, or God. It is thus to Rosenzweig’s breakup of philosophy’s All into these three fundamental kinds of being, in the Star’s introduction, that we must now turn.

i.3 The Particular Nothings of God, World, and Human Being By revealing how the philosophical tradition culminating in German Idealism fails to grasp the irreducible particularity of the individual self caught between being and nothing, the insights Rosenzweig draws from the fear of death precipitate a breakup of philosophy’s All into three. They set in motion a process of reflection that leads thought to recognize before itself no longer the single reductive “knowable All” of philosophy, but rather three kinds of beings, three “ ‘irrational’ 38

Rosenzweig takes up the particularity of the individual’s encounter with his own death as the beginning of knowledge of the All, we have seen, and he opposes this beginning to the architectonic, “universal” assumptions of the philosophical tradition. Rosenzweig’s periodic tirades against “universals,” although illustrative of his critique of the architectonic assumptions of German Idealism, are in themselves at times misleading. They imply that Rosenzweig seeks to rid philosophy of universality at the root. And yet, one realizes at once that Rosenzweig’s own claim about particularity is itself a universal claim. That is, Rosenzweig does not take his own fear of death as the starting-point for a discussion of his own self only; rather, he draws insights from the fear of death to all selves, indeed, to all particular beings. He implies, in other words, that it is universally the case that particular beings emerge originally from their respective particular nothings. Now, this universal claim remains a claim against the notion of the “one and universal nothing,” against the derivation of all particulars from a single universal source. But Rosenzweig does not seek to eliminate universal claims in order to grasp the particular as such, just as he does not seek to eliminate any talk of the All in order to grasp the particular.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

145

objects” of which “we know nothing” (21/19): the individual self whom Rosenzweig discovered directly in the fear of death, the world in which and over against which that self stands, and the God which transcends both. To highlight their position outside the boundaries of philosophy’s traditional scope, Rosenzweig designates these beings with the prefix meta: the metaphysical God, the metalogical world, and the metaethical human being. In the introduction to the Star, Rosenzweig offers two different accounts of how we arrive at these three “irrational objects” in the wake of the breakup of philosophy’s All, a historical and a philosophical account.39 But having traversed the path 39

Historically, Rosenzweig asserts that he speaks about God, world, and human being “in free connection to the universal consciousness of the current time” (21/19), a contemporary consciousness that has issued from the developments in the history of philosophy since Hegel. According to Rosenzweig, the “post-Hegelian revolution in philosophy,” led by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, has induced the very same kind of breakup of the All of Idealism within the history of philosophy which Rosenzweig himself carries out in the opening pages of the Star through his reflections on the fear of death. This revolution has brought about an awareness within contemporary philosophy of both the uniqueness of the human self and traditional philosophy’s failure to grasp that unique individual. Furthermore, this historical recognition of the “metaethical” human self made possible through Kierkegaard’s, Schopenhauer’s, and Nietzsche’s shared discovery of “the human being in the quintessential singularity of his own being, … fixed through first and last names,” has led to comparable contemporary reflections on both the metaphysical God and the metalogical world which Rosenzweig seeks to take up. His own presentation of the metaphysical God, he thus admits, has been mediated both by Nietzsche – “the first [philosopher] who saw God face to face, if only in order to deny him” (20–1/18–19) – and by the late Schelling (“God must have existence before all identity of being and thinking. … It is the late philosophy of Schelling, in whose course we move with such reflections” [19–20/18]). Rosenzweig’s notion of the metalogical world, finally, also takes its bearings from what Rosenzweig sees as formidable developments in contemporary thought, i.e., from the work of Viktor v. Weizsäcker on the philosophy of nature and that of Hans Ehrenberg on the relationship between reason and actuality. Thus, in his appeal to “universal consciousness,” Rosenzweig suggests that a certain historical necessity adheres to the “post-Hegelian revolution in philosophy.” The historical collapse of the Hegelian system, he implies, has led to an almost self-evident awareness that what one is left with after the breakup of this “All of philosophy” are the God, world, and human being Rosenzweig wishes to take up. Over the course of the first part of the Star, Rosenzweig offers a different version of this account of the elements grounded in the history of philosophy, suggesting that God, world, and human being are those objects which have been declared unknowable by ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, respectively. See, e.g., Stern, p. 67. Cf., Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World, p. 65, where Fackenheim reads these last two passages together and thereby designates the elements as “the positive results of the demonstrated failure of more than two millennia of Western metaphysics to reduce all things, respectively, to God, world, and man.” Rosenzweig’s philosophical argument, on the other hand, seeks to produce the recognition of God, world, and human being as three different kinds of beings that transcend the logical bounds of traditional philosophy, through a coherent series of reflections on the recognition that the “All of philosophy” fails to grasp the particularity of the mortal individual. If we take this argument seriously, then the elements of the Star may be said to be derived from the very experience of the fear of death with which the Star opens. But the series of reflections that leads Rosenzweig to these three kinds of beings does not produce these beings as the “rational objects” of a rational derivation. Rosenzweig offers here no parallel to the Idealist derivation of human being and world out of the self-differentiation of the Absolute. Rather, Rosenzweig provides a reflective account of how thought must come to recognize the presence of God, world, and human being as “‘irrational’ objects” which transcend thought, as beings which transcend the very philosophical All which had long been unified by thought.

146

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

of the development of Rosenzweig’s conception of system, in our first two chapters, we should not be surprised that Rosenzweig would take God, world, and the human self to be the three kinds of beings whose identity and difference are sought within a system of philosophy. Indeed, the account of the task of system in German Idealism which we took away from our first chapter’s study of Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program” showed how this task entailed the attainment of knowledge not only of the identity and difference of all beings as such, but also of the identity and difference of what the tradition of special metaphysics had determined to be the three fundamental kinds of particular beings: God, physical bodies (i.e., world), and souls (or selves). Rosenzweig marked the moment of the “discovery” of the task of system in German Idealism, we recall, as that moment in which Schelling grasped both the free subjectivity of the self and the necessary, objective being of the substantial world from out of the Absolute standpoint of God which grounded and transcended and encompassed them both. But as our last chapter proposed – and as our survey of the introduction of the Star has confirmed – Rosenzweig came to reject the possibility of grasping the inherent difference of particular beings as the product of the self-differentiation of the Absolute. This would surely imply that if God, human being, and world are to be grasped as such and in their interconnection, each must first be taken up independently of the others; it implies that no one of them be posited as the ground or origin or essence of the others. It is because Rosenzweig denies the implicit unity of the All at the beginning of his system, because he finds ground for this denial in the particularity of the nothing by which the human being is confronted in death, that he demands that the three kinds of being posited by the tradition of special metaphysics themselves be taken up individually, each in its own relation to its nothing. Rosenzweig thus shares with his predecessors in the philosophical tradition the intuition that God, world, and human selves are the three kinds of being which confront the human being when she begins to reflect.40 But Rosenzweig denies to philosophy the ability to grasp God, world, and human beings through the traditional, rational tools at its disposal, and he rejects its tendency to root two of these beings in the other one. Rosenzweig seems to have in mind his two-sided 40

Rosenzweig himself suggests such an intuitive or empirical access to the three elementary kinds of beings. In “Das neue Denken,” GS 3, p. 145/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 118, he writes, “We know most precisely, know by the intuitive knowledge of experience, what God, what human being, what world, taken for itself, is; if we did not know that, how could we talk about it, and, above all, how could we ‘reduce’ some two of these to their respective other or deny the respective other two reductive possibilities!” In a letter to Rudolf Stahl of December 7, 1925, moreover, Rosenzweig asserts that “both the number three and the names of the ‘substances’ are … purely empirical, merely picked up, found”; they are the products of what Rosenzweig describes (alluding to Goethe) as the “great-eyed seeing of the Ur-phenomena,” BT 2, pp. 1070–1. There are grounds to suggest that this “great-eyed seeing” of God, world, and human being occurs in the experience of the fear of death. However, had Rosenzweig intended to posit the fear of death as the source of our knowledge of the elements of the Star, he could certainly have made the presence of the three elements more unequivocal in his depiction of the fear of death at the beginning of the Star.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

147

relationship to the tradition of special metaphysics, in any case, when he sums up the breakup of philosophy’s All into God, world, and human being, with the following consideration: The All of thinking and being, the hitherto fundamentally simple content of philosophy, split up for us into three separate parts. … In a strict sense, we know nothing at all about these three parts – God World Human Being – even though we have already spoken about them in free connection to the universal consciousness of the current time. They are the nothings in which Kant the dialectician critiqued the objects of the three “rational sciences” of his time, rational theology, cosmology, and psychology. We don’t think to restore them here as objects of rational science, but rather, just the opposite, as “irrational” objects. (21/19)

God, world, and human being emerge for Rosenzweig out of the breakup of the All, but Rosenzweig stresses that despite their emergence, and despite our ability to speak about them in the conventional terms of the “universal consciousness of the current time,” we as of yet “know nothing at all” of them. They are, on the one hand, the very objects of special metaphysics; of rational theology, cosmology, and psychology; but they are these objects in the form in which Kant found and presented them, that is, as “nothings” for our knowledge. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had determined God, world, and the human soul to be “nothings” for human knowledge insofar as he deemed them to be transcendental ideas to which no sensible objects correspond, and insofar as he deemed their objectivization in the history of philosophy to be the result of the improper, transcendent use of reason itself. Rosenzweig, on the other hand, roots the “nothingness” of God, world, and human being for human knowledge in their transcendence to reason. Rosenzweig does not wish to “restore” God, world, and human being as “objects of rational science”; he is not interested in a return to a pre-Kantian dogmatism that would declare God, world, and the human soul to be rationally grounded and determinable. Rather, he wants to accept God, world, and human being as “‘irrational’ objects.” If Kant concludes from the “nothingness” of the transcendental ideas to their proper regulative use within the bounds of reason, Rosenzweig takes the “nothings” of God, world, and human being as starting-point for his reflections directed beyond reason’s immanent scope. The presence of God, world, and human being as “irrational objects,” as metaphysical, metalogical, metaethical, thus does not put an end to Rosenzweig’s thinking about them. We encounter these “nothings,” Rosenzweig suggests, as vague invitations to inquiry, as objects of which we must have some preliminary sense – for otherwise we could not inquire into their nature – but of which we nevertheless, as of yet, know nothing. Knowledge of God, world, and human being will only come through the advance of thinking from the nothings of these elements toward the All they will ultimately join together to form, an advance which spans the whole course of the system. What Rosenzweig seeks to posit at this early point is the presence of God, world, and human being

148

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

as problems for philosophy, as problems which the tradition of philosophy has recognized but has failed to solve, because the path to such a solution demands transcending the purview of traditional philosophical method. Such reflections on the position of God, world, and human being beyond the inherent realm of thinking lead Rosenzweig to the following consideration: the demand that thinking come to recognize that which is beyond its own inherent boundaries may be said to be the demand that thinking learn to recognize the “something” within those beings which it first takes to be “nothings.” If this is the case, however, then the “‘irrational’ objects” which remain over against the thinking human being after he has broken up the All of philosophy would appear to share the same “nothing-something” character which that human being experienced in his own self in the fear of death. In the fear of death, we recall, the human being came to recognize the way in which being and nothing are intertwined within his own individual self; he came to recognize the way his own particular being is rooted in nothingness and the way in which, conversely, that nothingness itself is experienced as a real “something.” We have already noted, furthermore, that by stressing the particularity of this interconnection between being and nothing, Rosenzweig implies that particular beings are not to be grasped as having emerged out of the self-differentiation of the “one and universal Nothing,” but rather as emerging originally each out of its own nothing. Having introduced God, world, and human being as the three elementary kinds of beings – as the three “elements” of reality – Rosenzweig makes explicit this inference from the self ’s experience of its nothing to the rootedness of each particular being in its own nothing. He now attributes this nothing-something character to all particular beings, to all “nothings” met in experience, whether they be divine, worldly, or personal. The existential experience of nothingness in death is thereby transformed into a rule guiding Rosenzweig’s epistemological approach to the three elemental nothings which confront him after his breakup of the All of philosophy: We seek the Always-Enduring, which does not first need thinking in order to be. That’s why we could not deny death, and that’s why we must take up Nothing, wherever and however it may meet us, and make it into the Always-Enduring starting-point of the Always-Enduring. “The” Nothing may not mean for us the disclosure of the essence of pure being as it did for the great heir to two millennia of the history of philosophy. Rather, wherever a being element of the All rests in itself [ein seiendes Element des All in sich selber ruht], indissoluble and always-enduring, for this Being [diesem Sein] it is valid to assume a nothing, its nothing. (22/20)

The discovery of the “being element[s] of the All resting in themselves” independently of thought, we find here, confronts Rosenzweig with the same truth about “nothing” which he discovered in the fear of death. Just as Rosenzweig “could not deny death” by letting it be “swallowed up” in the “one-and-universal Nothing,” just as Rosenzweig had to recognize in death the reality of the interconnection of

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

149

being and nothing in the particular self, so Rosenzweig posits for each of the elements its own original relationship to its nothing. Precisely insofar as each of the “being elements” of experience “rests in itself,” that is, insofar as it is not deducible from the unconditional nature of any other being, each must be conceived as rooted in and emerging not from “ ‘the’ Nothing,” but rather from “a nothing, its nothing.” It is just this particular nothing-something character of the elemental nothings, Rosenzweig suggests here, that is the “always-enduring” substrate which grounds the All. Rosenzweig’s positing of God, world, and human being as independent “being elements” outside thinking, elements which “do not first need thinking in order to be,” hence returns us to Rosenzweig’s basic argument with German Idealism over Nothing whose depths we probed in the wake of Rosenzweig’s interpretation of the fear of death. According to Rosenzweig, we found, how one grasps the Nothing, how one comports oneself to Nothing, is the key to discovering the true path to systematic knowledge. Idealism betrays its architectonic assumptions, we discovered, through its presupposition of the “one and universal Nothing,” through the manner in which Hegel, “the great heir” to the history of philosophy, grasps nothing as “ ‘the’ Nothing” which is at once “the essence of pure being.” Insofar as “ ‘the’ Nothing”/”pure Being” with which the Idealists began their systems already presupposes, already contains within itself, the unity of the All to be attained through the system, Rosenzweig suggested, the Idealist systems are fated to fail to grasp the difference, the determination, inherent to the manifold of particularity. From out of the experience of the fear of death, we have seen, Rosenzweig discovers the particularity of the individual self and its rootedness in its own nothing, and he now concludes that such a rootedness in the particular nothing holds for every “being element” given in experience, for God, world, and human selves. It is this “threefold Nothing” of God, world, and human self, Rosenzweig has claimed, that offers us the “the promise of determinability” and hence “the hope that we might discover in this threefold Nothing the All which we had to break up.” In the section that follows, we will attempt to discern what ground Rosenzweig offers his reader for believing that the particularity of the nothings of God, world, and human self actually grants this “promise of determinability” to his own systematic quest.

i.4 The Differential as Determinate Nothing: Setting Out on the Path to System between Nihilism and Idealism For the philosopher to attain knowledge of the All, to grasp both the identity and the difference of all that is, Rosenzweig has claimed, she must abandon philosophy’s presupposition of the identity of the All at the ground of its efforts. She must tear loose the pursuit of knowledge from the very philosophical tradition which has claimed to house it – in philosophos! – and learn to think those

150

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

different “being elements” that are independent of thought, that “rest in themselves” beyond thinking. Such thinking of what is beyond thought demands that one grasp the nothing-something character of these beings as such, that one learn to think how every being emerges not out of the “one and universal nothing,” but rather originally out of its own nothing. For only thus can the philosopher hope to grasp the particular being both in its own irreducible particularity and at once insofar as it serves as part of the ultimate whole of being. But how can the human being hope to think such difference as original, as not grounded in the universal? To what evidence can Rosenzweig point in order to persuade his reader that his starting-point in the particular nothing of the particular being warrants the hope that the All will be regained? After all, Rosenzweig may well claim that only a radical break from the architectonic tradition of philosophy leaves open the hope of attaining the systematic goals of that tradition, but if he does so, he must then convince his readers that thinking can extend beyond itself without reducing its objects to thought itself; he must show that knowledge is possible in a different manner than philosophy has always construed it. He must give us reason to believe that thinking can learn to recognize the emergence of “somethings” from what it encounters as “nothings.” Ultimately, the path upon which Rosenzweig will take his thinking in order to think what is not thought will lead through the theological “categories” of creation, revelation, and redemption that govern the tripartite movement of the Star as a whole. But here in the introduction to the Star, where the most we can do with regard to God, world, and human being is to speak about them as nothings, the ground has not yet been laid for such a turn to theological categories.41 Rosenzweig thus seeks a secure, scientific model through which he can exemplify the possibility of thinking the emergence of the something out of nothing, through which he can show that the “promise of determinability” he finds implicit in his “threefold Nothing” is indeed worthy of trust. He finds this model in mathematics. Mathematics, according to Rosenzweig, is “itself nothing other than the constant derivation of a something – and never more than one something, one some-thing – out of the Nothing, and never out of the empty universal Nothing, rather always out of ‘its’ nothing, out of the nothing of just this something” (22/20). 41

This is because understanding how creation, revelation, and redemption construct the All for Rosenzweig out of the threefold Nothing demands that the reader already acknowledge both what God, world, and human being are as Rosenzweig presents them, and the fact that these elements must come to step into relations with one another. Only after following Rosenzweig through twothirds of the Star will the reader learn, in retrospect, that the emergence of God, world, and human being out of their nothings was no less than the “inner self-creation, self-revelation, self-redemption of each single element God, world, human being, in itself,” a fact that “we at that time,” i.e., in the introduction and first part, “would have little been able to say, even if we had wanted to” (270/242). On the relation between the methods of part I and part II of the Star, see the “Excursus on Questions of Method” at the end of Chapter 4.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

151

Rosenzweig introduces mathematics here at the conclusion of his account of nothingness in the introduction to the Star as confirmation of his own claim that particular “somethings” are not to be grasped as derived out of the “empty universal Nothing,” but rather as having emerged out of their own respective “nothings.” According to Rosenzweig, it was Hermann Cohen who demonstrated the great consequence of this trait of mathematics for any philosophical thinking seeking to break away from the Idealist grounding of the All in the indeterminateness of a “one and universal nothing.”42 Cohen shows that mathematics “generates its elements not out of the empty nothing of the one and universal zero [nicht aus dem leeren Nichts der einen und allgemeinen Null], but rather out of the determinate nothing of the differential, each of which refers respectively to each sought after element” (23/20). Over against the “empty nothing of the one and universal zero,” we see here, Rosenzweig hails Cohen’s conception of the differential for the way it opens up the door to the notion of a “determinate nothing.”43 Cohen’s 1883 The Principle of the Infinitesimal Method and Its History had traced the history of the discovery of the “positive, creative meaning”44 of the differential for higher mathematics and mechanics and had asserted its ground-laying value for his own brand of critical idealism. Cohen’s book showed that whereas infinitely small differences had long been grasped, in the history of mathematics, as reducible to zero, as that “whose value consisted mainly in that [they] could be neglected,”45 the work of Newton and Leibniz in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries pointed to the dramatic fruitfulness for mathematics of considering the positive value of such infinitesimal differences. Leibniz demonstrated that although the addition of an 42

43

44

45

Two valuable accounts of Rosenzweig’s adaptation of Cohen’s logic of origins are Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, pp. 47–52, and Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, pp. 47–51, 169. For a comprehensive study of the place of Cohen in the Star, see P. Fiorato and H. Wiedebach, “Hermann Cohen im Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser, pp. 305–55. Rosenzweig refers to “das bestimmte Nichts” in this context as the parallel, within infinitesimal calculus, to that particular nothing he discovered in the fear of death. Later in the first part of the Star, however, Rosenzweig takes pains to distinguish the particular nothings out of which he begins not as “determined” but rather as nothings which “generate determination.” Thus he claims “we know only the individual (for this reason however not the determined [bestimmte], but rather the determination-generating [bestimmungerzeugende]) Nothing of the individual problem” (27/25). Rosenzweig is no doubt trying to walk a line between pure nothingness and his notion of a particular or individual nothing, and it will indeed turn out that the manifold particulars within the system only become “completely determined” as “the whole of all determined, the All” (263/236), i.e., as the unity of the system’s end. In the current introductory section, however, where Rosenzweig’s foremost intent is to draw out the distinction between the “one and universal Nothing” of Idealism and his own, I have followed Rosenzweig’s own perhaps ambiguous terminology and refer to the particular nothing toward which he points as “determined” or “determinate.” For a fine alternative account of Rosenzweig’s conception of “nothing,” see Luca Bertolino, “ ‘Schöpfung aus Nichts’ in Franz Rosenzweigs Stern der Erlösung,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13, 3 (2006): 247–64. Hermann Cohen, Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte. Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik, p. 34. Ibid., p. 30.

152

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

infinitely small difference approaching zero to any given quantity would effectively add nothing to that given quantity, still the relation of any given infinitely small differences to each other could nevertheless be shown to be an actual finite number. Leibniz declared, “It is useful to consider quantities infinitely small such that when their ratio is sought, they may not be considered zero, but which are rejected as often as they occur with quantities incomparably greater.”46 Such a ratio of two infinitely small differences – that is, a derivative – could be used, for example, to measure the slope of a curve at any given point. Or the area under a curve could be attained by computing the sum of the areas of the almost infinite number of rectangles that lie under the curve whose widths were infinitely small approaching zero, that is, by calculating the integral of the curve. Such examples demonstrated the way in which infinitesimal differences approaching zero, whose independent value relative to any given quantity would have to be designated as nothing, could nevertheless produce finite quantifiable results. The infinitesimal value of the differential, Leibniz thus marked, is to be grasped “not as the simple and absolute nothing, but as the respective nothing … i.e., as the disappearing into nothing and yet the retaining of the character of that which disappears. We grasp such … infinite quantities … as producing ordinary quantities.”47 The infinitesimal, we see, came to designate a kind of “relative nothing” that is to be distinguished from the “simple and absolute nothing”; indeed, just this, its ambivalent ontological status, allowed it to produce “ordinary quantities.” It thus offered strong evidence for Rosenzweig’s claim that it was not the indeterminate “one-and-universal nothing” that could serve as the single ground out of which the All of the system would emerge, but rather it was the particular nothing which offered “the promise of determinability,” for the differential “created its elements not out of the empty nothing of the one and universal zero, but out of the determinate nothing of the differential.” “The differential,” Rosenzweig explains, “combines within itself the qualities of the nothing and the something. It is a nothing which points to a something, its something, and at the same time it is a something that still slumbers in the lap of the nothing” (23/20). Cohen’s work on the infinitesimal was significant for Rosenzweig not simply for the way it brought the achievements of the infinitesimal for mathematics and physics to light, but rather because Cohen sought to highlight the value of the infinitesimal as “an organon of thinking” (23/20). According to Cohen, just as

46

47

Leibniz to Wallis, March 30, 1699, in Mathematische Schriften vol. IV, p. 63, translated in Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 384. Leibniz to Grandi, September 6, 1713, Mathematische Schriften vol. IV, p. 218, cited by Cohen in Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode, p. 76. Berkeley poked fun at the purported nothing-something qualities of the differential: “What are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?” The Analyst, section 35, cited from De Motu and The Analyst, p. 199.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

153

the infinitesimal, “relative nothing” of the differential generates the finite particular value of the slope of a curve at a given point and hence marks the means by which that finite value can be known, so too critical thinking can only arrive at the knowledge of any given something through the use of what Kant had designated an infinite judgment. The infinite judgment, according to Cohen, marks the first step toward the determination of any given something, in which the faculty of judgment first excludes from “the infinite sphere of the possible”48 within which the yet-undetermined something is situated, a specific quality that it is not. While pointing toward the determination of the something, this infinite judgment in essence does nothing to determine this something from out of the infinite sphere of the possible, for as Kant had noted, “even with this exception this space still remains infinite, and more parts could be taken away from it without the concept … growing in the least and being affirmatively determined.”49 It is a judgment, we might say, which does no more than stake out the “nothing” out of which that something will be determined. Hence Cohen’s Logic of Pure Cognition asserts that “the judgment presents the origin of the something on the detour of the Nothing”; through “the detour of the infinite judgment,” “the so-called Nothing … becomes an operational means through which to bring the something, which stands in question at any given time … to determination.” Such a nothing is to be grasped as “no absolute Nothing, but rather only a relative Nothing, directed to a determined path of discovery.”50 Cohen’s “scientific great act of [the] logic of origin,” Rosenzweig thus reiterates, “teaches us to recognize the origin of the something in the nothing” (23/21). It does so, we note, by exhibiting the determinative potential of the particular nothing. In sharp opposition to the indeterminate nothing of German Idealism, Cohen’s Logic takes its bearings from the “determinate nothing” of the infinite judgment, from the “relative nothing directed to a determined path of discovery,” which hence “brings the something … to determination.”51 The case of the differential thus comes to grant credence to Rosenzweig’s claim that the very particular character of the nothings of God, world, and human being ensures the “promise” of their “determinability.”52 Rosenzweig’s own detour through the Cohenian path of differential nothings leads him to the very ending of the Star’s introduction, whose promise of 48 49 50

51 52

CPR, A72/B97. CPR, A73/B98. Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, pp. 69, 74–5, 87. Cf., Martin Kavka’s chapter on “Meontology in Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,” in his Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, pp. 94–106, for a helpful reading of Cohen’s account of the infinitesimal and its philosophical background. Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, pp. 87, 74. Cf., Reiner Wiehl, “Logik und Metalogik bei Cohen und Rosenzweig,” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig, p. 633: “This is what Rosenzweig believes to be able to read with Cohen – philosophically – into the principle of infinitesimal calculation: that the Nothing does not refer to the Absolute-universal of the concept, but rather to a thousand-upon-thousand-fold particular of reality.”

154

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

determinability and hope of regaining the All have guided us through our own analysis of the text. We present the introduction’s ending here, in full: It is highly important that our thinking, after the All was at one time submitted to it as its one and universal object, does not see itself now hurled back to a one and universal state of ignorance. The Nothing of our knowledge is no single Nothing, but a threefold one. As such it contains within itself the promise of determinability. And for that reason we may hope, just as did Faust, to find again in this nothing, this three-fold nothing of knowledge, the All that we had to break up. ‘Sink then! I could also say: arise!’ ” (24/22)

The ending to the introduction to the Star, we have often noted in these pages, returns the reader to the programmatic declaration with which the Star begins. If the introduction’s title announces its intention to reflect “on the possibility of knowing the All,” if its first sentence declares that “all knowledge of the All begins in death, the fear of death,” the introduction’s end reminds the reader, who has followed Rosenzweig’s sharp critique of the reductive All of philosophy, of the systematic task that critique is meant to serve. Over the course of the introduction, we have seen, Rosenzweig has broken up “the All of philosophy.” But Rosenzweig now impresses upon his reader that it is “highly important that our thinking,” having thus lost the “All” that was “formerly submitted to it as its one and universal object,” not thereby fall into despair over knowledge itself in a “one and universal state of ignorance.” Rosenzweig seeks to ensure that the necessary breakup of the All not lead his readers to mistrust all they thought they knew, that it not lead them into total skepticism or nihilism. The breakup of the All, we have repeatedly claimed, has not been carried out in order to undermine philosophy’s systematic task but, rather, in order to make that systematic task possible once again. The pursuit of knowledge has been torn loose from the very philosophical tradition which claimed to house it – in philosophos! – and we now “hope” that this goal may be attained in earnest. The way Rosenzweig situates the starting-point of his system in between the polar claims of Idealism and nihilism in this last passage brings his systematic standpoint into sharp focus. The beginning of “knowledge of the All” in the fear of death, we have seen, posits the recognition of what I have called the “nothingsomething” character of particular beings as the key to a knowledge of the identity and difference of All that is which does not reduce particularity to identity, which does not assume the unity of the All from the start. But we may suggest that there are several possible ways of responding to this nothing-something character of beings with which Rosenzweig claims we are confronted. The experience of the instability of beings, of their wavering between nothing and something, may lead one to declare all beings to be nothing: that is, one may opt for nihilism. In this case, the very exposure to the nothingness in which every being is suspended would lead one to despair of all knowledge, would “hurl one back to a one and

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

155

universal state of ignorance.” Alternatively, one may take the path of Idealism, positing one kind of being – substance, the “I,” or the Absolute – to be the single originary ground out of which all is generated. In such a case, the nothingness revealed in the fear of death would be tamed by its transformation into the “one and universal Nothing” which already contains, within itself, the secure unity of the All from the beginning. Or one may take up the nothing-something character of all beings as one’s irrevocable starting-point for reflection, as the startingpoint out of which one traces through thinking the original path that each being takes out of its own nothing. This is the path that Rosenzweig proposes. We might suggest, then, that the Idealist, the nihilist, and Rosenzweig himself all root their basic philosophical outlooks in the same experience or intuition of reality. The first declares that reality to be the All. The second declares it to be Nothing. Rosenzweig suggests that only by recognizing the way in which the something is at once present but hidden in the nothing does one set out on the path that leads to systematic knowledge of the All. Taking such a fragile starting-point as it is – without declaring all experience to be either the All or Nothing from the very outset – is a difficult undertaking. As we proceed, we shall have to examine how Rosenzweig’s starting-point in the nothings of God, world, and human being leads him toward his systematic goal. Standing here, as we do, at the end of the introduction, Rosenzweig only offers us the hope that we may find the true All. But as we learned in our reading of the “Urzelle,” it is precisely this future character of the unity of the All – the fact that it remains a goal for which we “hope” – that offers us the “promise of determinability,” the possibility of grasping particularity as such, and not simply as manifestation of an All that is there from the beginning. Throughout the whole of the Star, we shall see, it is the recognition of the ever-present threat of falling back into nothingness facing all beings that preserves this future character of the All. We who seek knowledge of the All must come to recognize the meaning of this threat and thereby recognize our place and our vocation “in the middle” between the multiplicity of nothings and the ultimate unity of the All. To do so, our existential experience of the rootedness of the self in its nothing must transform itself into a fast logical and methodological rule for knowledge. Rosenzweig’s reflections on the differential, and on the presence of God, world, and human being as “nothings” for knowledge, have given us a hint of how this may occur. The section that follows will show this transformation completed.53 53

I wish to note here that while Rosenzweig criticizes the assumption of the identity of thought and being that he claims has reigned over the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Hegel, Rosenzweig’s own transformation of the nothing-something character of being discovered in death into a form of method, itself must be recognized as resting on the assumption of a harmony between thinking and being or, more precisely, between Rosenzweig’s path of thought to knowledge and his own (intuitive) experience of being as such, without which his argument, or at least our interpretation of his argument, remains untenable. Rosenzweig seems to presuppose, namely, the following

156

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

In the allusion to Goethe’s Faust in the closing line of the introduction, however, Rosenzweig offers a final reiteration of his goals for the book that is worthy of our attention, a last reminder, for his readers, not to be distracted by Rosenzweig’s own critique of Idealism from the systematic task of the Star. The passage Rosenzweig quotes, “Sink then! I could also say: arise!” appears at the beginning of the second part of Faust, when Faust has been asked to conjure up “Helen and Paris,” “man and woman in their true ideal” (6185) for the emperor. To do so, Mephistopheles informs him, Faust must travel alone down “into the void” to reach the realm of the “mothers,” where Mephistopheles directs him to steal a tripod which will enable him to call forth “hero and heroine out of the night,” making him “the first to dare to undertake that act” (6297–8). To Mephistopheles’ directions Faust declares, “You send me into the void, / so that I may increase art and power there. … We want to fathom it, / In your Nothing, I hope to find the All” (In deinem Nichts hoff ’ ich das All zu finden). It is upon Faust’s descent into the void that Mephistopheles resounds, “Sink then! I could also say: arise!”54 Rosenzweig’s allusion to Faust at the end of the Star’s introduction serves a distinct purpose in communicating his intentions to his reader. Faust descends into the void, in the quoted passage, with the “hope” of finding “the All” within “your Nothing,” with the hope of obtaining there that “tripod” which would enable him

54

two essential points: 1) that the human experience of his own suspension in nothingness in the fear of death reveals to him something true about his own being (e.g., that he is a nothing-something), and 2) that he may attribute this same nothing-something character discovered about his own self in the fear of death to God, world, and human self, insofar as he encounters these “being elements” as somethings, as “irrational objects,” of which he knows nothing. This last assumption, in particular, involves quite a leap. Rosenzweig would seem to have collapsed here the very distinction between knowing and being which he seeks to preserve until the system’s end. For he equates knowing nothing about that which one recognizes (through intuition) as something with the existential experience of being a something suspended in nothingness given in the fear of death and allows the coincidence of these two kinds of nothing-somethings to guide him in his first steps toward knowledge of these elements. Just as “we could not deny death” and the way it reveals to us the particular, nothing-something character of our selves that transcends the universal structure of thought, we recall, so Rosenzweig declares that “wherever a being element of the All rests in itself, indissoluble and always-enduring, it is valid to assume a nothing for its being.” He asserts, thereby, that since we encounter God, world, and human beings as somethings that are at once nothings (i.e., nothings for our knowledge), we can draw on our own, quite different experience of nothingness in the fear of death, in order to discover what these elements really are. It is here, perhaps, that what Rosenzweig often refers to as the “hypothetical” status of the elements is meant to account for Rosenzweig’s leap. That is, Rosenzweig develops his method for tracing how each particular being generates itself out of its nothing according to the insights he draws from the coincidence between man’s recognition of his own particular nothing-somethingness in death and the nothing-something status of God, world, and human being for knowledge. But he alerts his reader to the fact that this coincidence and the method it yields remain hypothetical until that point in which they demonstrate success in generating the ultimate knowledge of the One and All. From the perspective of the end of the book, then, the hypothetical and the real may collapse together. But from the standpoint of the beginning of the book, the status of the elements remains hypothetical, and hence the harmony between thought and the human being’s intuition of being in the fear of death remains open to question. Goethe, Faust, Part II, 6273.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

157

to generate the being of “Helen and Paris,” “hero and heroine out of the night,” a feat whose fulfillment would make Faust “the first” to accomplish such a feat. Rosenzweig’s literary allusion thus comes to underscore the intentions of the Star as Rosenzweig clarifies them at the beginning and the end of the Star’s first introduction: out of the tripod of the “threefold Nothing,” we hope to find the path to knowledge of the All, a path whose first step must be to show how God, world, and human being each emerges out of its own respective nothing.

II. Factuality as Method: The Self-Generation of the Elements out of Their Nothings ii.1 God, World, Human Being: The Elements as Systematic Unities In the introduction to the Star, Rosenzweig suggests that the proper starting-point for knowledge of the All lies in the recognition of the way each particular being hovers in its own nothing, a recognition granted both in the human being’s experience of nothingness in the fear of death, and in the way she encounters God, world, and the human being as somethings of which she knows, properly speaking, nothing. We have seen how Rosenzweig avoids the twin pitfalls of Idealism and nihilism – of either declaring all that is to be a singular “one and universal All” originating out of a single absolute identity or of declaring all being to be nothing – by allowing each being to show how it emerges from its own nothing, by asserting that “wherever a being element of the All rests in itself, indissoluble and always-enduring, for this being it is valid to assume a nothing, its nothing.” The key to grasping the systematic All of what is from the human standpoint, we shall see, will be demonstrating how all that we encounter in reality is suspended between its own particular nothing and the ultimate All, how all beings stand within the process that leads from manifold nothingness to the All. We – Rosenzweig’s readers – find ourselves in the middle of this course of the All. But in order to grasp this middle properly, we must trace the course from nothings to All from the beginning and determine how beings first emerge from their nothings. Only after so doing will we be in a position to ask why these beings are driven forward to form the All and what our task is as human beings within this drive to the All. In the three books of the first part of the Star, Rosenzweig takes his first step toward knowledge of the All by “assuming a nothing, its nothing” for each of the elementary kinds of being: God, world, and human being. Hence the first book begins, “Of God we know nothing. But this not-knowing is not-knowing of God. As such it is the beginning of our knowledge of Him” (25/23). The second book declares, likewise, “Of the world we know nothing. And here too the Nothing is a Nothing of our knowledge and a determined, singular Nothing of our knowledge. Here too it is the springboard from out of which the spring into the something of knowledge … should be done” (45/42). And the third book

158

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

asserts, “of the human being too we know nothing. And this Nothing too is only a beginning” (67/63). How is such a threefold emergence from nothing to be grasped? What makes it possible for divine, worldly, and personal beings to step out of their respective nothings? In the introduction to the Star, we have seen, Rosenzweig offers the differential as a mathematical model exemplifying how the determinate or particular nothing is to be grasped as both nothing and something, as a nothing which may be thought of as the root of its something. The same differential also suggests to Rosenzweig that there are two ways in which this rootedness of the something in the particular nothing can be conceived, and hence two ways in which the emergence of the something from the nothing can be conceived. The differential, according to Rosenzweig, is a nothing which points to a something, its something, and at the same time it is a something which still slumbers in the lap of the Nothing. It is on the one hand quantity, as it lapses into the quantity-less, and then again, as the “infinitesimal,” it has all the qualities of finite quantity on loan with the sole exception of – finite quantity itself. So it draws its actuality-grounding force out of the violent negation, with which it breaks from the lap of the Nothing, on the one hand, and then just as much still out of the calm affirmation of all that borders on the Nothing, to which it itself as infinitesimal still remains bound. (23/20–1)

Depending upon how one looks at the determinate nothing of the differential, Rosenzweig suggests here, it appears to offer two different ways of conceiving of the nothing and something that are intertwined in it, two possibilities for articulating how the something lies hidden in it, and how that something can be thought of as emerging from it. Viewed as the limit of a minute quantity or difference as it approaches zero, as “quantity, as it lapses into the quantity-less,” the differential might be said to be, at each and every moment, a last possible not-zero, a negation of nothing. Viewed as an “infinitesimal quantity,” on the other hand, the differential IS not-nothing; it is an affirmation of that same minute quantity that is not nothing. Rosenzweig thus concludes that “two paths open up from Nothing to Something, the path of the affirmation of that which is not nothing, and the path of the negation of the Nothing” (23/21). Rosenzweig describes the emergence of the something from the nothing here as a movement, as a “path from Nothing to Something,” but insofar as the differential itself describes a particular nothing that is at once something, this emergence may also be conceived as occurring within the particular nothing itself. That is, we may think of the “two paths” Rosenzweig describes from nothing to something, as two ways in which the particular nothing itself becomes its something. However we describe this development, these two ways of conceiving the rootedness of the something in the nothing through the differential guide Rosenzweig in his attempt to trace – in thought – the emergence of God, world, and human

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

159

being out of their respective nothings. In fact, the coming into being of each element originally from its nothing can only be grasped, according to Rosenzweig, if that emergence is seen both as a negation of the element’s nothing and as the affirmation of the something (or not-nothing) of that element. If the determinate nothing of the differential shows two ways in which the something of that nothing is implicit within it, this something takes form only when these two ways join. Each element attains its form, to use Rosenzweig’s formal language, as the “And” of “Yes” and “No.”55 Now, the same dual paths of affirmation and negation (“Yes”, “No”) and the same unification of these dual paths (“And”) mark the original coming into being of each element out of its determinate nothing. Moreover, for reasons we shall soon explain, corresponding to the affirmative and negative poles within each element are two polar attributes whose unification likewise grants the given element its singular form: the attribute of “substantiality” or “being,” on the one hand, and “action,” on the other. That is to say, the affirmation of what is notNothing within each element (“Yes”) always corresponds to a certain quality of “substantiality” or “being” attributed to that element, while the negation of Nothing within each element (“No”) always corresponds to an “active” quality attributed to the element. Significant as these similarities of structure across the elements are, however, the first part of the Star makes clear that what is affirmed or negated within each given element – the particular shade of “substantiality” and “action,” respectively – and hence that which is unified within each element is different. Thus within the metaphysical God, the affirmation of that which is not-nothing – the pole of “substantiality” within God – emerges as God’s “unmoved infinite Being” (30/28), while it is “God’s freedom,” his divine “act,” that is “born out of the original negation of the Nothing” (31–2/29). Out of the nothing of the metalogical world, that which is affirmed as not-nothing – worldly “substantiality” – is the infinitely applicable presence of “logos” that holds the particulars of the world together as aggregate (for “the being of the world is only everywhere and always … in thinking” [46/43]). And within this world, the manifold particulars themselves are the product of the continuous active negation of the nothing, insofar as “each New is a new negation of the Nothing, something never-been, a beginning for itself, … ‘something new under the sun’” (48/45). Finally, in the metaethical human being,

55

Although he does not say so explicitly, Rosenzweig may conceive of his “And” too according to the model of the differential. The differential was said to “create” something out of nothing, we recall, because while any given differential quantity with a limit approaching zero is essentially nothing, the ratio between any two such differentials can nevertheless be designated as a finite quantity, as a something. The “And” which first distinguishes the figure of any given element from its own determinate nothing for Rosenzweig may be likened here to the ratio between two differentials: it is the unifying relation between two infinitesimal differences, i.e., between the two ways of conceiving the determinate nothing as the root of the something.

160

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the affirmation of the not-nothing affirms the human being’s “character,” a form of substantial being which highlights just the human being’s “particularity as enduring essence,” irreducible to the universal, and rooted in the “transitory” (70/65). The negation of the nothing of the human being yields, finally, “the finitude of human freedom,” that is, “free will” (71–2/66–7). Each of the “being elements” thus emerges from its nothing through the dual path of affirmation of that which is not its nothing and negation of its nothing, but each emerges with its own distinct characteristics. In each case, moreover, it is only in the “And” of the two paths of “Yes” and “No,” in the unification of substantial being and action, that each element attains a certain stability vis-à-vis its own nothingness, a point wherein it is “self-satisfied,” “closed in itself,” “complete” (42, 54, 52/38, 50,49). 56 Only the fusion of the power of divine freedom and the fateful necessity of divine being forms “the vitality of God” (34/31) out of God’s nothing. Only the reciprocal, bidirectional union of the particularity of worldly phenomena and the essential universality of worldly logos generates the “cosmos rich in forms” (54/50) from out of the world’s nothing. Only the unification of human character and the defiance of human will yields the figure of the human “self ” out of the human being’s own nothing. Rosenzweig designates the resulting elemental figures of God, world, and self in the Star’s first part through algebraic notation, just as he had in the “Urzelle”: as A = A (self-grounded absolute), B = A (aggregate manifold of particulars), and B = B (self-grounded particular), respectively.57 Moreover, he identifies these elements with a particular historical consciousness: the metaphysical God, the metalogical world, and the metaethical self are, according to Rosenzweig, identifiable with the mythical gods, the plastic world, and the tragic heroes of ancient Greece. The original emergence of the elements from their nothings traced in thought in the first part of the Star represents some of the most difficult reading in the 56

57

I take the “nothings” of God, world, and human being, as well as the “Yes” “And” “No” structure through which these elements generate themselves out of their nothings ontologically and not only epistemologically. It seems to me that Rosenzweig wavers back and forth between these two (i.e., between viewing the “nothing” of God as God’s nothing and viewing it as the “nothing” of our knowledge of God). My reading demands that I take Rosenzweig ontologically as well as epistemologically, though, and Rosenzweig himself certainly points toward such a reading. See, e.g., Rosenzweig’s description of the elements as “either mere stopping-points on our – the knowingones – way from the nothings of our knowing to the something of knowing or, if then, as we must well admit, to the nothing of our knowledge there corresponds an ‘actual nothing,’ secret forces beyond all actuality that is visible to us, dark powers, which are at work in the inside of God, world, and human being, before God, world, and human being – become revealed” (97/88). Fackenheim negotiates between the ontological and epistemological status of the “nothings” of God, world, and human being by claiming that they are “ontologically ‘occult powers’ which are not but, as it were, strive to be. And to this ontological status corresponds, epistemologically, a ‘knowledge’ that remains ignorance until the striving-to-be has revealed itself as being,” To Mend the World, p. 68. For a thorough epistemological reading of the elements, see Gibbs’s “The Logic of Limitations,” Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, especially, p. 52. See Chapter 2, Section II.1.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

161

whole of the book, and an appropriately thorough explanation of these sections must remain beyond the scope of our study. I have given the preceding brief summary, nonetheless, because the method by which the elements emerge out of their respective nothings plays a decisive role in the systematic articulation of the All in the Star. The fear of death realizes itself as the starting-point of knowledge of the All, we claimed, the moment it is transformed from an existential insight regarding the nothingness within which each being is suspended, into a method governing the construction of the philosophical system. In what follows, we will probe what I wish to call Rosenzweig’s factual method, according to which his system advances from the threefold nothing toward the unity of the All. As we shall see, Rosenzweig suggests his method be understood as offering an alternative to and an improvement upon the dialectical method of German Idealism. A brief sketch of both the shared systematic purpose of dialectic and Rosenzweig’s method, and of the differences Rosenzweig himself highlights between the two, may thus be helpful at this point. The shared goal of dialectic and of Rosenzweig’s own method is to demonstrate the necessity of the systematic nature of the All, to demonstrate the way in which all that is can only be what it is insofar as it takes the form of system. To grasp all that is as system, we recall, demands grasping both that ultimate identity that is common to all that is together with the unique difference of every particular being. This demands, as we saw in the second chapter of this study, that each being be grasped as, and insofar as, it is both itself and other than itself, both its own independent, particular self and at once merely a manifestation or part of the ultimate whole. Hegel’s system pursued the goal of grasping the necessity of the identity of identity and difference, of the way each manifestation is both itself and other than itself, through dialectical method, a method grounded in “the logical precept [Satz] that the negative is just as much positive.”58 Dialectical method shows how any given concept, when analyzed carefully enough, reveals itself to contradict itself, to contain its own negation, its own antithesis. This antithesis, in turn, is also shown to negate itself, to contain its opposite, that is, the first given concept, the thesis. Hegel shows, finally, that when the self-negating movements of these twin, opposed concepts are viewed together, they point in unison to a higher “affirmative” concept, a synthesis that is affirmed within both and at once sublates them both. Such a concept “is higher and richer than its predecessor, for it is richer by the negation or opposite of the latter, therefore contains it, but is also more than it, and is the unity of itself and its opposite.”59 Negation, or the negation of negation, shows itself to be, at once, affirmation.60 This dialectical method of negation allows Hegel to trace, step by step, the way in which each being is and is not itself 58 59 60

G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 5. Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 49. Ibid. Cf. Michael Forster, “Hegel’s Dialectical Method,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, pp. 130–70.

162

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

and, on the highest level of the system, the way in which the Absolute original “indeterminate” identity of the All generates the multiplicity of finite, determinate beings through its own self-negation. And it allows Hegel to show how the human being can at once transcend her own determinate particular standpoint through thought in order to return out of the state of difference to the unity of the Absolute standpoint itself. Now, Rosenzweig is critical of the dialectical method. He questions the success of that method in demonstrating the necessity of the identity of identity and difference of All that is. I believe Rosenzweig’s criticism should be understood, moreover, as an extension of that same critique of the architectonic character of German Idealist systems to which we have returned so frequently in these pages. In the Star II 3, Rosenzweig recalls the “Yes,” “No,” and “And” and contrasts these components of his own method with dialectic as follows: The And is not original, as we well already recall from the role it played for the three elements of the pre-world, respectively. It contains no something in it, it is not like Yes and No directly to the Nothing, but rather it is the sign of the process which lets the final figure grow between those which have come into being in the Yes and No. It is thus something wholly different than the idealistic “synthesis.” … In the course of the idealistic movement [synthesis] turned ultimately into the restoration of the thesis, thus really into the creative principle of dialectic; the antithesis turns into the mere mediation between the construction and the restoration of the thesis, and in this constant regaining of the thesis, the movement of knowledge proceeds to ever deeper knowledge. … This view of synthesis thus includes wholly essentially making antithesis into mediation; antithesis becomes only the transition from the thesis to synthesis, it is itself not original. The relationship becomes immediately clear if one thinks say of Hegel’s view of the dogma of the trinity, where the essential thing for him is to know God as spirit, and where the God-man only means the How of this equation between God and spirit. Or also in the highest three-measure of his encyclopedia, where nature is only the bridge between logic and spirit and all emphasis lies on the linking-up of these two. (255–6/229–30)

Rosenzweig censures dialectic in this passage for what he deems its reduction of “antithesis into mediation.” In German Idealism, according to Rosenzweig, synthesis does not succeed in uniting what is different, but rather, synthesis creatively effects nothing more than the “restoration of the thesis,” while “antithesis becomes only the transition from thesis to synthesis.” Rosenzweig thereby suggests that difference is not in fact grasped or taken up as such through dialectical mediation. The leap from the indeterminacy of the Absolute to the level of the determinate, of the finite, is not achieved through “determinate negation.” Nature is grasped, not in its manifold particularity and determinateness, but only as “bridge between logic and spirit.” Christ is taken up not as individual determinate incarnation of God, but merely as the “how of the equation between God and Spirit.” In the dialectical method intended to demonstrate the systematic nature of the One and All,

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

163

we see, Rosenzweig identifies the very same architectonic tendency of Idealism, according to which the ultimate All is grasped as no more than the “restoration” of the All that was hidden in the system’s original identity.61 The “Yes” “And” “No” structure of the elements in the Star represents Rosenzweig’s attempt to surpass the systematic limitations of dialectic, to demonstrate the systematic nature of the All without reducing difference to identity, or “antithesis to mediation.” And Rosenzweig suggests his method offers promise of success precisely because it takes both “Yes” and “No” as equally original, as both standing “directly to the Nothing.” Unlike the Idealist synthesis which actively reestablishes the thesis from out of its self-negation in the antithesis, Rosenzweig claims, the “And” is simply the “sign of the process” whereby the equally original “Yes” and “No” unite to take on distinct form as that which is not that nothing out of which both emerge.62 Both the manner in which Rosenzweig develops the respective identities of God, world, and human being out of the fusion of their respective two sides and his opposition of this structure to the architectonic structure of the systems of Idealism are familiar to us from our second chapter. There we saw how Rosenzweig’s correspondence with Rosenstock and Weizsäcker prompted him to oppose to the architectonic structure of science, whereby the idea of the whole was posited from the beginning, before its parts, the proposition that the systematic unity of science must be conceived as generated out of the “coitus” of two sciences. Instead of deriving difference from an original unity, that is, Rosenzweig posited the generation of unity out of difference. In the first part of the Star, I propose, Rosenzweig reveals this earlier claim regarding the structure of science to be a consequence of a more fundamental way of conceiving the generation of all beings.63 61

62

63

See Friedrich W. Schmidt, Zum Begriff der Negativität bei Schelling und Hegel, p. 1: “Were Hegel really to have taken the pain, the patience and the work of the negative seriously, so the self-mediation through the other and alienation there-through could not have been reduced to the structure of reflection, and under this premise be carried over to the other means of mediation.” Although there is no question that Luca Bertolini is correct in noting the way Rosenzweig’s “Yes,” “No,” and “And” draw on Schelling’s account of the potencies of God in the Weltalter, Rosenzweig’s insistence that the “And” does not stand directly over against the nothing, that it marks only the process by which “Yes” and “No” unite, marks an important distinction from the “unity of the Yes and No” in the Weltalter. For Schelling, the “Yes,” “No,” and “the unity of Yes and of No” (Sämmtliche Werke VIII: 218) each stand as an independent potency within the necessity of God, and, once all three are formed, there is an eternal cycle of development from the first to the last and then back to the first. Thus Schelling writes, “having arrived at its peak,” i.e., in the unity of Yes and No, “the movement returns back of itself to its beginning. Because each of the three has equal right to be the being.” Divine nature, according to Schelling, is thus “a life eternally circling-in-itself, a kind of circle, since the lowest always courses into the highest and the highest again into the lowest” Sämmtliche Werke VIII: 228, 229. But compare Luca Bertolini, “‘Schöpfung aus Nichts’ in Rosenzweigs Stern der Erlösung,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13, 3 (2006): 253–6. See Reiner Wiehl, “Logik und Metalogik bei Cohen und Rosenzweig,” p. 639, where Wiehl notes the emphasis in Rosenzweig’s methodological generation of the elements on “the difference in the originality of that which is respectively set into sameness [Gleichung].”

164

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Rosenzweig’s method of generation through the unifying relation of difference governs the advance of the whole Star, and we have suggested that this method is best characterized as a “factual method.” Rosenzweig himself links this method to his concept of “factuality” not in order to designate a kind of empiricism or reliance on brute facts, but rather because he identifies in the very German term for fact – Tatsache – a clue regarding the structure of all beings.64 Hence he writes, in a passage from the Star II 3: All that still depends immediately on the beginning is not yet factual in the full sense; because the beginning out of which it sprang can ever again still absorb it back into itself. This counts for the substance [Sache] that came into being as the Yes of the NotNothing as for the Act [Tat] that came into being as the No of the Nothing. … Not the substance [Sache], not the act [Tat], only the fact [Tatsache] is secure from falling back into the Nothing. (269–70/242)

Rosenzweig emphasizes in this passage that neither “No” nor “Yes,” neither act nor substantial being [Sache], alone is capable of “being” in any secure sense. The generation of “facts” out of nothing occurs solely in the relation between substantial being and act, Yes and No. Rosenzweig suggests that without either side of the relation there would “be” nothing – Yes without No, No without Yes, is still “bound to the beginning” and as a result cannot secure itself in its being over against its nothing. In this passage, furthermore, Rosenzweig derives his conception of factuality from the very etymology of the word Tatsache. The word itself tells us, Rosenzweig claims, that facts are to be understood not simply as givens or as brute facts, but rather as the unifications of act and being, as the “Ands” of Nos and Yeses. We may identify in factuality Rosenzweig’s systematic method because it is the repeated process of unification of Nos and Yeses, of Taten and Sachen, into Tatsachen that demonstrates how All that is must be systematic in the Star. It is the factual method that demonstrates that All beings can only be – instead of “being” nothing – insofar as they are constructed out of the identity of difference. In the first part of the Star, we have seen, Rosenzweig already highlights the process through which the elements generate themselves out of their nothings in the unifying relation of “Yes” “And” “No.”65 Each element generates itself, that is, as a kind of miniature system, as a miniature One and All.66 But as we proceed through our reading of the Star we will discover that factuality transcends the limits of the elemental world of the first part. Not only are the elements themselves constructed 64

65

66

See my “ ‘Erst die Tatsache ist sicher vor dem Rückfall ins Nichts’: Rosenzweig’s Concept of Factuality,” Franz Rosenzweigs “neues Denken,” pp. 359–70. See Stern, p. 270, “this … factualizing power [diese tatsächlichende Macht] of the And is well-known to us from the meaning it had in the first part for the completing of the ‘elements.’ ” This multiplicity of One-and-Alls will cause Rosenzweig difficulty in the “Transition” to the second part of the book. See later in this chapter, Section II.2.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

165

out of the unification of act and substantial being, but the relations between the elements that form the actuality we experience are likewise – in every case – unifications of Taten und Sachen, Nos and Yeses. Every advance in the system is made through such relations of factuality, and as we shall see, the ultimate future factuality of redemption, in which the unity of the All is realized, is no less than the final unifying relation between the Yes of creation and the No of revelation, the last unifying relation which collects together the manifold factual relations that mark out the advance of the book. Only the coming chapters will demonstrate how this factual advance to the ultimate redemptive unity of the All takes place. But Rosenzweig makes the significance of his factual method as a demonstration for the systematicity of being dramatically clear already in the Star’s first part. He does so in his discussion of those accounts of God, world, and human being throughout history which do not grasp these elements as the product of the unifying relation between Yes and No. If the mythical gods, the plastic world, and the tragic selves of ancient Greece embody the very elemental God, world, and human being which Rosenzweig has constructed, the fate of the Chinese and Indian figures of God, world, and human being makes manifest to the reader what is at stake in the success and failure to grasp these elements in systematic fashion. “China” and “India” represent for Rosenzweig two examples of what happens when God, world, and human being are grasped one-sidedly, and not systematically, that is, not as identities formed out of difference.67 If Rosenzweig’s elemental God took shape in the “And” of “Yes” and “No,” in the unification of the power of divine freedom and the necessity of divine being, for example, the God of “India,” according to Rosenzweig, is conceived solely through the “Yes,” as “the pure silence of essence,” and the God of “China” is conceived solely through the “No,” as “all-encompassing power” (38/35). In each case, Rosenzweig claims, divinity cannot hold itself secure out of its nothing, but rather, the former God conceived solely as affirmation or being and the latter God conceived solely as negation or power both collapse back toward their respective particular nothingness. Insofar as the Indian divinity is grasped solely through affirmation of the not-Nothing, and not as the unity of affirmation and negation, for example, Rosenzweig shows this affirmation (Yes) to be incapable 67

I do not wish to ignore here the quite obvious fact that Rosenzweig’s account of what he deems the “Chinese” and “Indian” worldviews does not do justice to either the self-understanding of these cultures or the cultural diversity held together under these names. Insofar as he seeks to present in his system the identity and the difference of all such worldviews, Rosenzweig has the responsibility to grasp each worldview in its own difference, and his failure to do so, at times, certainly raises questions about the possibility of doing justice to all particular perspectives within a unified system. In what follows, we are concerned with showing what arguments Rosenzweig has to make about “China” and “India” in order to forward his own systematic task in the Star: to wit, “China” and “India” represent one-sided foils for his own factual construction of the elements, foils whose failings grant credence to Rosenzweig’s claim that beings can only be what they are insofar as the generate themselves systematically.

166

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

of preserving its difference from the very negation of Nothing (i.e., No) which marked its counterpole within the elemental God. Rosenzweig explains: The essence-ful-ness of the Brahman was expressed by its followers … with the untiring repeated syllable of affirmation. … But insofar as they, at the same time, knew this one unramified essence as the absorber of all multiplicity, of the self of all things, there already appeared behind the unramified one Yes a new determination of essence, the same as the Yes, according to its sense, but hinting at the infinite multiplicity bound up within it: “No, no.” Thus Yes became known as the negation of the Nothing. The infinite, numberless “not thus, not thus” was inserted for the one infinite Thus. The essence of the divinity was the negated Nothing. And from here there was only one last jump backwards. (39/36)

Because the Brahman divinity does not possess the inner differentiation which Rosenzweig’s elemental God has, this passage suggests, “Yes” and “No,” the affirmation of that which is not nothing and the negation of Nothing, collapse together. The essence of the divine is conceived now solely as “negated Nothing,” not as an infinite affirmation of divine being which yields the elemental God only through its unifying relation with the determinate negation of the free act of the divine. The Indian divinity thereby loses all attributes of action and hovers, as “the pure silence of essence which passes through all,” “in the neither-nor of nothing and not-nothing.” The Indian attempt to grasp God solely through the affirmation of that which is not-Nothing, Rosenzweig concludes, cannot sustain itself. It results in a God which cannot truly be distinguished from Nothing, in a God whose essence is the “last evaporation of all essence,” a “nothing,” behind which “lies merely the pure Nothing” (39/36). Nor does the Chinese attempt to generate God solely out of the determinate negation of God’s Nothing fare any better. If the Brahman was posited solely as “infinite Yes,” Rosenzweig asserts, the Chinese divinity expresses itself “as a No against each, renewed at each moment.” As the Indian standpoint collapsed all differentiation within “the silent sea of the Brahman,” so “China” conceived of its divinity through the concept of the highest power, which is distinguished from Nothing only insofar as it relates itself to act and effect, whose relation itself, though, is only that of – doing Nothing. The Tao is this solely actless Effective One, this God, who holds himself “still as a mouse” so that the world can rotate around him. It is wholly unessential … it is that which, by virtue of its being “nothing,” makes the something useable, the itselfmotionless mover of the moveable. (40/37)

Precisely because the Tao is grasped solely as power, as the active negation of the nothing, Rosenzweig suggests here, it has no essence of its own. It therefore takes the amorphous form of a power that is powerful in each thing only by being the “nothing” of each thing, like the “motionless mover of the movable,” or – to

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

167

cite another example which Rosenzweig gives – like the “hollow space in a vessel.” Such a conception of the divine fails once more, Rosenzweig suggests, to hold the “something” of God firmly out of its nothing. Rosenzweig draws corresponding lessons regarding the need to grasp the being of each element as the unity of difference, in his portrayal of the Chinese and Indian views of world and human being. Grasping the world solely through the affirmation of “the essence of the world,” “India” gradually slips, through “the doctrine of the Buddha,” to the point where “finally the whole world … including its gods and including its essence, is sublated into the Nothing, [or to] … the point just before the limit of the Nothing” (63/58). The Chinese grasp of the world solely through determination, through particularity, where “the fullness of the world is filled to overflow,” leads Lao-Tzu to teach “the overcoming of the thingly fullness of occurrence through the actless entry into the nameless Ur-ground of the … named occurrence,” showing Rosenzweig that “the world disappears just as well if one turns one’s back on it as if one immerses oneself in it” (64–5/59–60). Likewise, both the Indian one-sided view of the human being through the affirmation of character and the Chinese view of the human being as characterless will lead that human being “into the Nothing,” for “as twofold as is the complete denial of God and the negation of the world, just so is the complete dissolution of the self, in Buddha’s overcoming of the self and in Lao-Tzu’s self-concealment” (80, 82/74, 75). I wish to suggest that Rosenzweig’s accounts of the Chinese and Indian Gods, worlds, and human beings are most fruitfully thought of as evidence for the systematic claim given through Rosenzweig’s factual method, to wit, that only those conceptions of the elements that recognize in them the systematic unification of difference, of Yes and No, preserve them from falling back into their own respective nothings. God, world, and human being can only be what they are insofar as they are identities of difference, while those gods, worlds, and selves which do not secure their beings systematically, through factual method, are ultimately indistinguishable from nothings. Rosenzweig stresses that only “the living gods do not let themselves be denied, the figured world does not let itself be negated, the defiant self does not let itself be dissolved. The forces of negation and annihilation have force only over … the halves, which have not yet grown together to unity of form” (82/75). Rosenzweig’s analyses of the Chinese and Indian schemas of God, world, and human being thus serve an essential role in the advance of the Star toward its systematic ends, by showing that nonsystematic accounts of the elements cannot be sustained. Indeed, what is at stake in Rosenzweig’s account of the elements as “Yes” “And” “No” is no less than the difference between advancing toward the All and falling back into nothingness. Moreover, it is important to point out that in the Star, “China” and “India” represent only the first of a long line of cultural, religious, and philosophical failures to grasp the identity of identity and difference

168

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

demanded by each successive stage of the system. In fact, one may well claim that the entire history of culture which Rosenzweig tells in the Star, spanning from antiquity to his own time, is nothing more than the story of the successes and failures of human beings attempting to grasp different aspects of the All as identities of difference. As the Star advances from the determinate nothings of its first part toward knowledge of the All, we are repeatedly confronted by worldviews whose single false moves send them tumbling back to the nothings with which the Star begins. At each stage in the system, it is only that knowledge which secures its objects systematically, that is, as identities of difference, which is safe from the fate of falling back into nothingness. For the thinker who seeks to advance to the systematic knowledge promised at the end of the Star, we find, every choice truly is between All or nothing. This tension between nothingness and the All spans the whole of the Star. The drama of the book rests on just this fact – which we have had many occasions to cite – that the unity of the All is not assumed from the beginning, that it hangs in the balance, and that only the most careful of methods will succeed in avoiding the pitfalls threatening the would-be systematic knower on all sides. Indeed, one often has the feeling when reading the Star that this hanging in the balance, this standing in the middle, is not only the situation for knowledge, but for the would-be All itself. For whether reality is All or nothing is not truly clear until the system’s end shows the All to possess the certainty of its being over against nothingness. And as the “Urzelle” showed us in our last chapter, even in knowing the future unification of the All as certain, the realization of this unification of the All depends, nonetheless, on the free choices of human beings. As our study of the Star advances, we shall see that human freedom, for Rosenzweig, is intimately intertwined with the threat of nothingness, with the possibility of nothingness, revealed in the fear of death. The future All may be conceived as the identity of difference which does not reduce difference to identity, only because any given particular human being has the freedom to choose to take up her vocation within the systematic advance toward the redemptive unity of the All, or to choose not to – to choose the path of nothingness. To the extent that this is the case, the series of failures to grasp beings systematically set forth in the Star, the series of falls into nothingness, may be seen as the necessary presuppositions of the human being’s free choice for the All. The freedom of the individual within the All is exemplified, that is, in the ever-present possibility of falling off the path to the All back into nothingness.68 If we now ask, in the wake of the dry elemental constructions of the first part of the Star, why God, world, and human being must emerge from their nothings systematically, or why Rosenzweig devotes so much attention to these constructions, 68

I see an intriguing connection here between Rosenzweig’s suggested “decision” between taking up one’s place within the All, and – as it were – choosing nothing, and Schelling’s conception of freedom as the capacity for good and evil. Compare Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations over the Essence of Human Freedom, in Sämmtliche Werke VII: 333–416.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

169

we receive a strange sort of answer: God, world, and human being are identities of difference, they are the unifying relations between their respective Yeses and Nos, Rosenzweig suggests, because otherwise they would be indistinguishable from nothings. On the grand scale of the whole Star we shall find a parallel claim – beings as such must be the One and All that will ultimately realize itself in the system, for the same peculiar reason. In showing time and again that those worldviews which fail to grasp the systematic nature of what is ultimately collapse back into nothingness, Rosenzweig implies that were being not systematic, it would not be at all, but would “be” nothing. Such metaphysically weighted implications, it seems to me, show us that Rosenzweig’s “system of philosophy” does not simply seek to articulate the systematic structure of all that is, but rather raises the fundamental question, implicitly, of why what is must be grasped as All, as system, in the first place. It answers this question by demonstrating that if being were not system, it would be indistinguishable from nothingness. To the old question of metaphysics, why there is being and not nothing, Rosenzweig thus offers a single answer spanning the whole of the Star: system.

ii.2 Elemental Stability and Instability: The Need for Relation and the Threat of Falling Back into Nothing The aim of the first part of the Star, we have found, is to show how the three particular elemental beings, God, world, and human being, generate themselves out of their own particular nothings. Rosenzweig’s factual method for tracing each independent self-generation in thought, we have seen, traces each original development out of a particular nothing as the “And” of the “Yes” and “No,” as the identity of difference that first allows each element to take on secure form over against its own nothing. At the opening of the “Transition” chapter at the end of the Star’s first part, Rosenzweig takes stock of the elements that have come into being before our minds’ eyes. God, world, and human being have indeed generated themselves out of their nothings. But in the opening lines of the “Transition,” Rosenzweig already suggests that this purely generated elemental world is not as idyllic as it seems. That it is not so is suggested to Rosenzweig, first of all, the moment he takes pause from his philosophical construction and considers God, world, and human being as we experience them in actuality. Comparing his constructions to this actuality, he reflects on the path he has taken thus far: The mythical God, the plastic world, the tragic human being – we hold the parts in our hand. We have truly broken up the All. The deeper we climbed down … in order to catch the something immediately at its origin out of the Nothing, the more the unity of the All broke up for us. The piece-work of knowledge, which now surrounds us, appears strangely foreign to us. They are the elements of our world, but we don’t know

170

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

them thus. … We are acquainted with a living movement, a circuit in which these elements swim; now they are torn out of the current. … Set loose, pulled out into mere elements of an arithmetical construction of the course, we don’t recognize them. And how should we have recognized them? Only the curve of the course can bring the secret of the elements into the visible. Only the curve leads out of the mere Hypothetical of the elements into the categorical of clear [anschaulichen] actuality. (91/83)

This opening paragraph of the “Transition” suddenly brings into question the advances we have made, from the nothing to the something of each element, in the first part of the Star. After breaking up the All of philosophy in the introduction, Rosenzweig suggested that it was only the particular, determinable nothings of God, world, and human being which offered us hope that we might attain knowledge of the “true All.” Our path from these particular nothings toward that end has led us to grasp God, world, and human being, in thought, as independent identities constructed out of difference. And yet, Rosenzweig now claims, while his method has made possible a systematic conception of these elements through which they can be distinguished from the nothings out of which they generated themselves, this method has not in fact produced God, world, and human being in the manner in which we actually encounter and believe in them. The first part may indeed have demonstrated how all beings emerge from their nothings, but while it may be true that God, world, and human being represent the three fundamental kinds of being we encounter in actuality, we do not experience these beings in actuality in the elemental form in which they stand before us. To use the late Schellingian distinction often applied to Rosenzweig’s work, the systematically sound move from nothing to something in the first part may be said to tell us why God, world, and human being are what they are, but it does not demonstrate why God, world, and human being are how they are, or the way they are, in the actuality we experience.69 “We do not recognize” God, world, and human being, in the elemental form in which they now stand before us, “torn out of the current” in which we are acquainted with them, “set loose” “into mere elements of an arithmetical construction.” Our knowledge thus far lacks the movement, the flow, of the everyday. That is to say, when we compare our elements, generated out of their nothings, to the actuality which we see and believe in, we seem to have gained little reward for all our effort: these elements themselves appear to be little more than the nothings out of which they generated themselves. Experience may thus be said to interrupt Rosenzweig’s philosophical discourse at the end of the first part of the Star, reminding us that with the elemental constructions before us we remain yet far from our goal. But Rosenzweig’s “Transition” 69

Cf., F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, pp. 98–100. For a powerful reading of Schelling’s late philosophy, see Axel Hutter, Geschichtliche Vernunft: Die Weiterführung der Kantischen Vernunftkritik in der Spätphilosophie Schellings.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

171

does not merely seek to display the gap between the elements and actuality; nor does it seek merely to impose upon our elements demands that arise from our experience of actuality. On the contrary, I wish to claim that the primary aim of the “Transition” is to show how and why the elements themselves, for entirely internal reasons, have to turn out of their elemental unity into relation with each other. It will indeed turn out that the reciprocal relations into which the elements must and do turn will create the actuality in which we experience them. And it may be the case that our glance at the actuality of experience makes us look twice at the elements whose secure being the path of the first part of the book appeared to achieve. But the need to advance from the elemental state of the first part of the Star is not imposed upon the elements by our experience of actuality. Thus, Rosenzweig asks rhetorically, three scant pages before the end of the Star’s first part: How should the elements come into the current [of actuality]? May we lead them to the current from the outside? Never! – then the current itself would be an element and the three elements would not be them. No, the course of the flowing movement must take its origins from out of the elements themselves, and out of the elements alone. … The elements themselves must hide within themselves the force out of which movement rises, and within themselves the ground of their order, in which they enter the stream. (96/87)

The move forward into the second part of the Star, Rosenzweig states here, is demanded by the elements themselves. The “Transition” chapter comes to demonstrate, in fact, that the elements we have seen generate themselves out of their nothings to attain secure being remain, nevertheless, insecure in this very security, that they remain suspended in nothing despite their factual emergence from nothing. Moreover, the “Transition” chapter acts as a transition precisely because it hints at what will only become manifest in the second part of the Star: that this need revealed on the part of the elements leads them to join in mutual relations which create the actuality we experience, an actuality which will itself be shown to be a mere middle point on the systematic course to the unification of these elements in the redemptive One and All. How then do the elemental identities of God, world, and human being – so secure over against their respective nothings when contrasted with the divinities, worlds, and human beings of “China” and “India” – reveal themselves to be at once insecure in their being, at risk once again to fall back into nothingness? Looking over the elements side by side, Rosenzweig writes: Before you ask, the three elements may appear to lie next to each other in calm fixedness, each in a blind-to-the-outside One-and-All feeling of its own existence. In this respect they are all three the same as each other. God too, the world too, not only human being, are each a lonely self, which, staring into itself, knows of nothing outside. Human being and world, not only God, live in the inner vitality of their own

172

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

nature, without need for a being outside them. Human being and God too, not merely the world, are figures closed in themselves and inspired with their own spirits. Thus all boundaries and distinctions seem to disappear. (92/84)

When we examine each of the elements alongside the others, Rosenzweig submits, the “boundaries and distinctions” between them, those differences which allowed the same Yes-And-No structure to yield three distinct kinds of being, now “seem to disappear.” Each element now appears to share the very qualities Rosenzweig had initially posited as unique to only one of them. The elements gradually become indistinguishable from one another. In their juxtaposition, the distinct elemental God, world, and human being now disappear before our eyes into nothing. Our three elements confront us, moreover, with a further difficulty. The very systematic self-generation of each element as identity of difference, Rosenzweig explains, grants each independent element the same kind of “One-and-All feeling of its own existence.” Each is isolated, closed in itself. Each has created itself originally out of its own particular nothing. As a result, each element has a consciousness of itself as the systematic whole of what is, as the One and All. Now, our whole systematic advance through the Star seeks knowledge of the One and All. But as Rosenzweig notes with some dismay, “there are yet three monisms, three conscious of being One and All. … Three wholes would well be possible, three Alls is unthinkable” (92/84). The situation in which we find ourselves here is especially alarming given the very claim against German Idealism which led Rosenzweig to begin his path to the All in the particularity of nothingness revealed through the fear of death. Rosenzweig “promised” us that a beginning in the “threefold Nothing” of God, world, and human being offered us hope of attaining the goal of systematic knowledge which he claimed was unattainable on the presupposition of the “single,” “one and universal Nothing.” We followed Rosenzweig as he let each “being element” generate itself not out of the same “One and universal Nothing,” but rather out of each’s own particular nothing. But instead of leading us to our goal, instead of leading us to knowledge of the One and All, Rosenzweig has led us to three elements, each of which claims it is the One and All! Nor do the troubles of the elements stop here. On the contrary, as soon as the “Transition” alerts us to the indistinctness and to the irreconcilable claims that plague the elements in their juxtaposition, it at once dawns on us that a certain insecurity was in fact noticeable within the self-construction of each element in and of itself. We recall how the “And” of the “Yes” and “No” designated that point in which the figure of each element secured itself against the fall back into nothingness. Unlike the one-sided gods, world, and human beings of “China” and “India”, which remained subject to “the forces of negation and annihilation,” we saw, “the living gods do not let themselves be denied, the figured world does not let itself be negated, the defiant self does not let itself be dissolved,” for these elements have

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

173

“grown together to unity of form” (82/75). At the very end of each book of the first part of the Star, however, Rosenzweig insinuates that there lurks, even in these securely formed elements, the seed of instability, the root of the need each element has to turn outside itself despite its apparent inner completion. Thus Rosenzweig observes that “a restlessness already came over the mythically-directed theology of antiquity which pressed for a stepping out beyond the self-satisfied sphere of myth,” “but it is characteristic of the force of the mythical intuition that the attempts thus directed always aimed for the drawing in of human being and world into the sphere of the godly, … thus, … in the end they had only the divine” (42/38–9). Likewise, “something unresolved remains in the metalogical world view as it did before in the metaphysical concept of God,” insofar as the “sophists’ concept of humanity” pointed toward a conception of the human being that grasps her uniqueness vis-àvis the world, without really succeeding in distinguishing that human being from her role in the world. Thus, asked whether it has an “outside,” the world “must well answer the question in the affirmative. But it must add that it knows nothing of this outside and – worse – wants nothing from it” (62, 66/57, 61). While the self too, finally, “knows nothing outside itself, is quintessentially lonesome,” and hence “can only be silent,” it at once longs for “immortality,” an immortality that it would attain only on the condition that it “renounce” “just this speechlessness,” “to become out of the lonesome self a speaking soul.” And yet, within the confines of the self, “how this should happen, how the tongue of the self should be freed, the ear opened, … this cannot be anticipated at all” (88–9, 87/82, 80). In each element, therefore, we find a certain breach in the security of the closed figure that was formed through the unifying relation between the different paths each took out of its respective nothing. Such a breach suggests, surprisingly, that the systematic form each element has attained as the identity of difference is not a secure identity. And if this is the case, then the elements do not in fact have the security over against the fall back into nothingness which this factual unity of difference was supposed to provide.70 In place of three independent, systematically constructed elements – secure and distinct over against their nothings – we suddenly find before us instability, indifferentiability, irreconcilable claims to being One and All. Rosenzweig finds himself hovering between the very same All or nothing alternatives which confronted him in the Star’s introduction. There, we recall, we suggested the Idealist, the nihilist, and Rosenzweig himself, all encounter the same reality, a reality that hovers between systematic being and nothingness. The Idealist, we suggested, ignores or denies nothingness and declares the reality of experience already to be All, while the nihilist despairs of being and knowledge altogether. At the very end of the first 70

See Chapter 4, Section I.1, “Elemental Promises in Need of Fulfillment,” for a complete account of how the limitations evident in the elemental constructions of God, world, and human being, in the first part of the Star, point to their need for fulfillment through the relations that will ensue among the elements in the second part of the Star.

174

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

part of the Star, each element claims to be the All, and each element at once seems to topple back into its nothing. But just as Rosenzweig traversed between the polar positions of Idealism and nihilism by recognizing that the particular nothingsomething character of being revealed in the fear of death offers the starting-point of the path to the All, that the very instability of being experienced in the fear of death holds the key to attaining human knowledge of the All, so here too he finds a middle path between the elemental claims to Allhood and their dissolution into nothingness. Indeed, precisely the difficulties that confront us – the instability of the being of the elements over against their nothings, the multiplicity of the Alls which confront us – will presently drive the system forward, between the immediate threat of nothingness and the claims to All, toward certain knowledge of the true All. The path to this certainty of knowledge, the path toward the security of beings vis-à-vis their nothings which we thought we possessed in the isolated elements themselves, Rosenzweig now tells us, leads through relation: What we found up to now was sheer being, sheer “factuality”; something great over against the pure uncertainty of doubt: the factuality of the Godly, human, worldly; something small for the demand of belief. The mere factuality of being cannot satisfy belief. … It demands unambiguous certainty [eindeutiger Gewissheit]. … It is relation, which as actuality mediates between the facts of being, which first grounds unambiguous number, unambiguous order. … The three elements of the All can first be known, each one in its inner power and structure, in its number and order, if they step into … unambiguous, actual relation with each other. (94/85–6)

To attain “unambiguous certainty” in our knowledge of the elements, to discover how these elements themselves attain the security of their being over against their nothings, we must advance in our account of God, world, and human being. As we have seen, our Yes-And-No, Tat-und-Sache, construction of these elements granted us the factuality of each element as a firm stand against the despair of nihilism, against the “pure uncertainty of doubt.” But the “Transition” has shown us that this step is not sufficient. The very “belief ” with which we began – that the instability of beings offers us the key to knowing them – demands more if it is to prove warranted; it demands an “unambiguous certainty” which only the completion of the system will bring. The relations among the elements, Rosenzweig now informs us, will lead us toward this completion. It is “relation” which “first grounds unambiguous number, unambiguous order”; it is relation that will first grant God, world, and human being the “unambiguous certainty” of their being, in the ultimate One and All they will join together to form. In entering into relation with one another, God, world, and human being must reconcile their respective claims to be the One and All. Indeed, the very “unthinkability” of “three Alls,” we have seen, is one of the considerations that lead Rosenzweig to conclude that “the question of relationships must be asked” (92/84). We may suggest at this point that if the key to reconciling the three claims to be

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

175

One and All lies in relations, then any relations that ensue among the elements must at once do justice to each’s consciousness of itself as the One and All. In other words, what Rosenzweig will have to show as he traces the relations among God, world, and human being that lead to their unification in the “true All” is how each element is indeed One and All, in itself, and at once only “part” of the ultimate One and All. He will have to show, that is, the way in which God, world, and human being unite in an identity – the One and All – that at once preserves their differences. I have suggested that it is the instability of the elements in themselves, the way the very figure they have attained in their Yes-And-No emergence, remains at risk to fall back into their respective nothings, that is the “force out of which the movement” toward relations among them arises. The elements must turn outside themselves, as it were, because they do not have the tools, each within itself, to secure themselves over against their nothings any further than they have through the factual “Yes” “And” “No.” For each element to be what it is – and not to fall back into nothing – we discover, it must enter into relation with its others. To be what they have already shown themselves to be, paradoxically, God, world, and human being must open up out of their closed elemental identities in order to enter into the course of actuality. Rosenzweig writes: If we want order, clarity, unambiguousness – to bring actuality into that ecstatic dance of the possible, then we must fuse those subterranean broken-up elements back together, we must bring them out of their opposing exclusiveness into a clear flowing connection and, instead of “sinking” into the night of the positive, where each Something would like to assume the giant form of the All, again “arise” upwards. We can only be carried upwards, however, and back into an All of actuality, by the one current of world-time, which leads those apparently still elements with itself in a rolling movement, and which in this movement from world-morning over world-midday to world-evening leads the elements of the All, crashing over each other in the darkness of the Something, back together again in the one world-day of the Lord. (95–6/87)

Unambiguously certain knowledge of God, world, and human being will be attained, Rosenzweig reiterates here, only when we have brought them “out of their opposing exclusiveness into a clear flowing connection,” whereby “the elements of the All” are led “back together again.” The end of the first part of the Star thus bids good-bye to that Faustian realm of nothings in which each element “would like to assume the giant form of the All.” Rosenzweig has not found in these nothings “the All” he had “hoped to find.” But he “arises” out of the realm of nothings with that “tripod” in hand which will allow him to form the “All of actuality,” the “true All,” which he seeks. For the first time in the Star, Rosenzweig suggests in this last passage that the relational path to the All of actuality is a path that leads the elements through time. It is “the one stream of world-time” which leads the “elements of the All …

176

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

back together again in the one world-day of the Lord.” Rosenzweig does not yet delineate what this entrance into the stream of world-time entails. But we may adumbrate that it will be by way of this temporal course that Rosenzweig lays the groundwork for determining the human being’s place “in the middle” of the system. The present-time revelatory relation in which the human being experiences the call from God, we shall see, awakens her autonomous individuality to her vocation within the All in the middle of the course of its realization, between the past beginning of that course in the first relation between God and the world, and the future end of that course in the unity of the One and All, to be attained through the redemptive relations between human beings and the world. If we reflect back now, one last time, upon the status of the elements which have taken shape through the labor of the Star’s first part, in order to offer a first conjecture regarding the form they will take on as they enter into mutual relations, the following consideration presents itself. The first part of the Star demonstrates, at one and the same time, how the elements attain secure being over against their particular nothings through their individual factual unifications of difference, and how this secure point over against the nothing is at once not in fact secure, how the elements remain, nonetheless, nothings. These elements have, of course, gained factuality; they have gained a degree of systematicity which their original particular nothings did not possess. Each of these elements is, as Rosenzweig will later describe it, “a nothing full of character,” a “nothing at a higher level” (175/157). But as we have seen, these elements remain suspended in their own nothingness, and this very need of the elements, the very fact that even in their being they are at once nothing, is that which pushes the system forward. For the elements now to serve as starting-points for the advance into the relations that will form the All, the attained position of each element over against its nothing must be recognized squarely as at once nothing, and thereby the elemental results attained in the first part once again become beginning.71 We might then suggest that Rosenzweig presents in his elements the specific way in which the nothings of God, world, and human being must already be, such that the relations among them generate the actuality we experience and the future redemptive All. Or we can speak more mysteriously – with Rosenzweig – of the elemental God, world, and human being as “secret forces beyond all our visible actuality, dark powers, which are at work in the inside of God, world, human being, even before God, world, human being – are revealed” (96–7/88). The abstruse quality of the philosophical constructions of the elements in the first part of the Star once led Rosenzweig to advise those readers who despaired 71

Here the advance from nothing to being adheres to Schelling’s dictum in the Weltalter: “Everything that has being of a humbler rank relates itself, when contrasted with being of a higher rank, as that which does not have being. The same A that, in contrast with another, is that which has being, can appear in contrast with an A of an even higher order as that which does not have being,” Sämmtliche Werke VIII: 221.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

177

of making sense of it to “hurry” through it with “no tarrying!”72 And there is no doubt that these abstract constructions often leave the reader wondering what has happened to the poor human being who fears death whom Rosenzweig presented, in the Star’s introduction, as a rebuttal to the long tradition of philosophical abstraction from concrete actuality. Our examination of this part of the Star has sought to affirm that the rigorous method through which Rosenzweig constructs God, world, and human being out of their nothings in thought is at no point divorced from Rosenzweig’s fundamental intuition into the particular nothing-something character of beings. We have claimed that it is precisely this insight into the particularity of the human being’s own nothingness that directs Rosenzweig to take the particular nothings of God, world, and human being as the starting-point enabling human knowledge of the All. By way of anticipation, moreover, we may suggest here that the very fear of death embodying the human being’s middle position within the All, which gave Rosenzweig the clue for how to construct the elements, will now receive its own justification in return from these very same elements. In the chapter that follows we will discover, that is, that the human being finds herself in this middle position between nothing and All, made concrete through fear of death, because God, world, and human being have originally emerged from their particular nothings into being but have been unable to sustain their being over against their nothings without entering into those relations with each other that will form the All. The human being’s decision between nothing and All, her decision for or against system, may thus be understood as a decision for or against joining into those relations that will realize the unity of All. It is thus at once a decision for or against the very being of the elements which can only be sustained through the future unification of the All.

III. Excursus on Beginning in Difference Before turning in the next chapter to the second part of the Star, I would like to address Rosenzweig’s methodological starting-point one last time with a more critical eye. Our examination of Rosenzweig’s method has allowed us to juxtapose the path it lays out from difference to unity, over against the self-differentiation of an original unity posited by German Idealism. Much of our last two chapters has attempted to make just this opposition tangible. We may, in a sense, isolate this aspect of Rosenzweig’s argument with the Idealists over system in terms of the following alternative: either the totality of the One and All is the product of the self-differentiation of an original identity, which then returns out of that state of differentiation to form a mediated unity, or the totality of the One and All is to be conceived as the product of the unifying relations which bring a primordial state of difference into a fixed state of unity. Rosenzweig himself, we have seen, takes 72

“The New Thinking,” GS 3, p.142/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 114.

178

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

this latter position, arguing that conceiving of the original beginning as a pure state of identity precludes the possibility of grasping difference.73 In our attempt to make Rosenzweig’s case against German Idealism tenable, however, we have largely ignored the fact that the alternative Rosenzweig offers to beginning in a primordial unity is also problematic. If, according to Rosenzweig, one does not arrive at true difference from a starting-point in unity, it should be no less the case that a beginning in difference yields no true unity. Indeed, we will recall that Kant himself depicted system architectonically, as grounded in the idea of its whole that precedes its parts, precisely because he wished to distinguish systematic unity from a mere aggregate of particulars. Without such a prior blueprint of the whole in mind from the start, we noted in our first chapter, one would never know how or when or in what form any manifold of particulars would join to form a whole. Moreover, the move in German Idealism to ground any system of knowledge in an original identity of all difference occurred in large part as a way of explaining the Kantian theoretical starting-point in difference – the difference between subject and object, understanding and intuition – within the context of his own view of systematicity. Hence, in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, Schelling claimed that the synthetic judgments of Kant’s first critique were only possible on the assumption of a prior unity between those elements together in the synthesis. Synthesis comes about only through the conflict of multiplicity against the original unity. Because without conflict no synthesis is necessary at all; where there is no multiplicity, there is quintessential unity; but if multiplicity were original, so there would once again be no synthesis. We can only grasp synthesis simply through an original unity in opposition to multiplicity. 74

It was Schelling’s early consideration of the impossibility of arriving at unity through the synthesis of a manifold without the assumption of a prior, original identity of all that led him to formulate the problem of system in the form of the question we will recognize from our discussion of the “Oldest System-Program,” that is, “How could the Absolute step out of itself and set up a world over against itself?”75 When we recognize the considerations that led German Idealism to posit its “one and universal Nothing” as the ground and origin of its All, then the argument between Rosenzweig and the Idealists appears much more evenhanded than we first portrayed it. Or rather, Rosenzweig and the Idealists seem to take up two 73

74 75

To buttress his claim, Rosenzweig might have quoted Schelling’s own Ages of the World, in which he asserts, “Were the first nature in harmony with itself, it would remain; it would be a constant One and would never become two, an eternal immobility without progress,” Sämmtliche Werke, VII: 219. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke I: 294. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke I: 310.

A L L S OR N OT H I N G S

179

opposing, but equally problematic positions regarding the origin of the system. For now both the Idealists and Rosenzweig are faced with the same dilemma: if the system begins in unity, it cannot account for difference; if it begins in difference, it cannot attain unity. The only position that would seem to remain plausible in this situation would be conceiving of the origin of the system itself as somehow in a state of both identity and difference. To do so one would have to have the identity of the origin already in difference in such a way that the original identity does not cancel out original difference, and one would have to have original difference in such a way as does not dissolve the original identity.76 In the Star, it seems to me, Rosenzweig shows himself to be aware of the problem with which his starting-point in difference is faced, and it strikes me that he tries to solve this problem by locating the future identity of the system within the difference of his starting-point. Rosenzweig begins from the independently original, differential nothings of God, world, and human being. At the redemptive end of the system, God, world, and human being will unite to form the unity of the “true All.” But one of these elements is not like the others. It is God – not world or human being – who will be the subject of the One and All within which all three elements unite. God is not yet the All, however, at the beginning of the system; nor, for that matter, is God the All at any point within the system before its redemptive completion. But the God who will be the unity of the system is there from the beginning, as one particular being alongside world and human being. Or, once again, the All is not posited at the beginning of the system, as Rosenzweig claims it is in German Idealism, implicitly, in the form of the “one and universal Nothing.” But the subject of the future All is posited at the beginning of the system. God is posited as not-yet God, and insofar as God is not-yet God, there is room “beside” God for the world and human being. It is in this sense, I suggest, that Rosenzweig posits identity within difference at the beginning of the system and thereby responds to the dilemma involved in grounding the system in either unity or difference. But if we may tentatively accept Rosenzweig’s solution to the problem of the beginning of the system on the level of the relations among the elements of the Star, the situation within each element appears somewhat more problematic. For here, as we have seen, Rosenzweig is quite adamant that the “And” in which the “Yes” and “No” of each element join in unifying relation is not original as are the “Yes” and “No” but rather only represents the “sign of the process” whereby “Yes” and “No” unite into elemental figure. The unity of the Tatsache is only attained, I have shown, in the unification of Tat and Sache. The only path that remains open, 76

In his later writings, Schelling himself seeks to walk such a middle path. Cf., Weltalter, in Sämmtliche Werke VIII: 228–44. See also, H. Rickert, System der Philosophie, erster Teil: Allgemeine Grundlegung der Philosophie, pp. 57–9.

180

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

it would seem, is to conceive of the “Yes” and “No” within each element themselves, from the outset, as both identical to and different from one another even before they attain their unity in the “And.” This may be tenable insofar as both the negation of the Nothing and the affirmation of the not-Nothing are implicit in the same determinate Nothing of each element, and they then designate the same emergence of something from the same nothing. They both chart their path equally “from nothing to something.” The negation of Nothing or saying “No” to the Nothing, and the affirming of the not-Nothing or saying “Yes” to that no-to-the-Nothing are, at an important level, the same. And yet, they are at once, Rosenzweig stresses, “as different from each other, as opposed to each other as – yes and no” (26/24). When Rosenzweig emphasizes the noncreative character of his “And,” the way it serves merely as “the sign of the process, which lets the final figure grow between those which have come into being in the Yes and No,” one might then suggest, he is highlighting the fact that the “And” effects nothing between “Yes” and “No” which is not already implicit in these paths themselves. “Yes” and “No” are already identical and different of themselves. If they were not, one could well claim, if each did not have the ground of the possibility of its identity with its opposite within itself, then “Yes” and “No” would not simply grow together in the “And” without the force of a creative synthesis. The “And” would then designate not only the identity of difference in marking the “process” whereby Yes and No unite to take on elemental figure, but, rather, the way in which each figure emerges only in the identity of what already is identical and different. Such an argument is surely tempting as an answer to the dilemma we have posed regarding the origin of the system. But if this is Rosenzweig’s intention, his position ends up precipitously close to the very German Idealistic beginning in a self-differentiation out of identity which he battles against in the Star.

4

m “The Genuine Notion of Revelation”: Relations, Reversals, and the Human Being in the Middle of the System

O

ut of the humble recognition of human finitude, The Star of Redemption boldly promises knowledge of the All. It is a bold promise indeed, one which Rosenzweig justifies, as we have seen, precisely on account of the Star’s humble beginnings. In the fear of death that marks my awareness that I am not the Absolute, Rosenzweig has shown us, I experience the fundamental instability of my particular being; I experience my own hovering between my particular nothingness and my being. The philosopher who takes on the task of system “discovered” by German Idealism while rejecting the Absolute standpoint of German Idealism, who thus approaches the task of system as quintessentially human knowledge attainable from the standpoint of the human being in the middle of the All, thereby comes to recognize that particular beings are not to be grasped as manifestations of a single Absolute substance which generates itself out of an equally “one-and-universal Nothing.” Particular beings are not derivations of an original unity, but rather every particular generates itself out of its own particular nothing. By taking seriously the experience of particular nothingness made manifest in the fear of death, Rosenzweig aims to secure within his own system a grasp of that difference which he claims has been so frequently reduced to identity in the systems of German Idealism. In the beginning there was difference, not identity, Rosenzweig suggests, and this beginning in difference is what gives Rosenzweig “hope” he will attain the “true All.” As our third chapter sought to show, the Star’s path to the All begins by “assuming a nothing, its nothing” for every “being element of the All,” that is, for the three different kinds of particular beings encountered in experience: God, world, and human beings. We followed Rosenzweig’s account of how each of these elemental beings generates itself factually out of its own nothing. Only in forming a “fact” (Tatsache), in the unification of Tat and Sache, in the And of Yes and No, we discovered, could each element hold itself out from that particular nothing which was its ground. In this chapter, we will trace Rosenzweig’s explanation of how the unifying relations to be established among the factual elements of the Star lead them to realize the “true All,” a systematic totality in which all beings may be grasped both in their particularity and as the single cohesive unity they join to form. There will be no more delay: if our last chapter studied Rosenzweig’s promise that a beginning in 181

182

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

particularity would allow him to realize an All that does not reduce difference to identity, this chapter takes on the daunting task of presenting Rosenzweig’s fulfillment of his promise, of demonstrating how – and in what sense – the relations between the elements realize the “true All.” The “Transition” section at the end of the first part of the Star has already made the case that the factually constructed elements, God, world, and human being, are in need of reciprocal relations. Here Rosenzweig showed us that while the factuality of the elements grants them a hold on being far more secure than the one-sided constructs of God, world, and human being with which Rosenzweig compares them, such factuality is at once still insecure, it still leaves God, world, and human being at risk to fall back into their respective nothings. Paradoxical as it may sound, at the end of the first part of the Star, the three independent, factual elements – secure over against their own nothings – are shown to be, at one and the same time, three unstable elements lacking actuality, indistinguishable in any fundamental sense from one another, sporting competing, irreconcilable claims to be the One and All. It was this very instability of the factuality of the elements at the end of the first part of the Star, the very multiplicity of claims to be “the All” voiced by the elements, I suggested, which was the ground, within the elements themselves, for those reciprocal relations among them which will presently drive the system forward into the actual. God, world, and human being may begin in difference. The fact that we do not experience them in such utter isolation from one another in actuality, the fact that we experience in ourselves a mix of worldliness and selfhood, Rosenzweig suggests, is due to their inability to sustain themselves as different without entering into relations that lead them to form the All. God, world, and human being will only secure their respective determinate being, they will only generate the actuality we experience, and they will only reconcile their claims to be “the All” if they turn into relations with one another. Only through relations will the “mere factuality” of the elemental beings be transformed into a factuality that is both actual and secure. To be in truth and in actuality what they have already shown themselves to be elementally, God, world, and self must open up out of their closed elemental identities and enter into reciprocal relations. The first goal of this chapter is to show how God, world, and human being secure their own respective factual being and realize their own respective identities by entering into those relations that will form the All by the end of the second part of the Star. Rosenzweig’s account of how the elements fulfill themselves through such relations as particulars serves a vital systematic purpose in the Star: it allows Rosenzweig to argue that the All realized through the Star does not reduce the particulars of actuality to a single Absolute being. Unlike the systems of Idealism, in which “the flow of force of the system-whole flows as a one and universal through all single figures,” (56/52) in which “the always manifold appearance of being is absolutely dissolved in that unity of the absolute” (116/104), Rosenzweig

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

183

can claim, there is no “force of the system-whole,” no “unity of the absolute” that flows through all particulars in his system or that realizes itself through them. The particulars in Rosenzweig’s system realize themselves in the formation of the All. How their interrelations at once culminate in a collective identity, in a single “true All” which articulates identity and difference in the most supreme sense – this is a question we will have to answer. This chapter has a further assignment to fulfill, as well. In tracing the paths of relation through which the elements join to form the All, we will have to show how these relations make manifest for the reader the unique position and vocation of the human being in the middle of the All. We recall how the “Urzelle” documented Rosenzweig’s arrival at a conception of system in which the realization of the One and All was grasped as dependent upon the decisions and actions of human beings. Such a concomitant articulation of the necessity of the drive to system and human freedom within the system was possible, Rosenzweig hinted in the “Urzelle,” insofar as the unity of the All was conceived as a redemptive future which human beings were called upon to fulfill. In this chapter, we will try to explain further how the reality of freedom within the system can be reconciled with our claim that God, world, and human beings must enter into reciprocal relations in order to realize themselves. We will discover that the human being stands in the middle of the system with the vocation she has because the elemental God, world, and self originally emerge from their particular nothings into being but are unable to sustain their being over against their nothings without entering into those relations with each other that will form the All. At the same time, however, in the middle of the system in which we stand, the relations which the elements demand for the sake of their own being have not yet reached their completion in the All, and the elements thus remain at risk to fall back into nothingness. In being called upon to fulfill the redemptive completion of the system, we will thus find, the human being must decide – on behalf of the elements – between All and nothing. Now, the idea that the human being stands between All and nothing is not new to us. It was foreshadowed, rather, in the very fear of death with which the Star began. When we arrive at our discussion of the position and vocation of the human being in the middle of the All, we will thus have completed a circle of sorts. Fear of death will have proven itself to be the beginning of knowledge of the All insofar as it permits us to grasp our place within the All. But fear of death not only points back to the ground of particulars in their respective nothings; it points forward to the task human beings are called on to fulfill within the All as well. Only that which can fall into nothing – that which is not grounded in an original Absolute being – has the freedom and power to create system. Fear of death makes us aware of this risk of a fall into nothing, but it thereby also serves to foreshadow our freedom to choose the All and thereby guarantees the actuality and efficacy of particular beings within the system that is to be attained.

184

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Before we arrive back at the human being in the middle of the All, however, we must first show how the relations among the elements allow them to fulfill their respective identities on their collective path to the All. We have claimed that the “Transition” section at the end of the first part of the Star suggests that God, world, and human being will only attain the certainty of their being by entering into relations with each other. The “Transition” section suggests that this is the case, but being the transitional section that it is, it in no way demonstrates how God, world, and human being attain the certainty of their respective beings through reciprocal relations. To the contrary: given the reductive dangers inherent to systematic thinking of which Rosenzweig has made us well aware over the course of the first part of the Star, there seems little reason to believe that relations which culminate in the formation of an All would grant God, world, and human beings certain, unambiguous being as particulars. It is true that the factuality attained by the individual elements in the first part of the Star has turned out to be unstable, in need of security. And it is true that the elements have nowhere to turn for aid but to each other. But why would a turn into relations with others help secure the elements qua elements at all? Should not the formation of an All out of relations among particulars result in the same loss of particularity in the All, the same reduction of diversity to unity, which Rosenzweig accuses German Idealism of committing? In their turning into relations, are not the elements thereby led, even surreptitiously, to give up their individual identities in order to form the All? This would certainly appear to be the case when we consider how the elements attained factual figure over the course of the first part of the Star. As elemental “facts,” God, world, and human being were closed up within themselves, closed off from one another. Moreover, the very factuality each had achieved, the very hold on being each attained over against the particular nothing out of which it emerged, depended on its ability to remain “closed in itself ” (52/38); depended on the fact that unlike their one-sided foils, the elements had “grown together to unity of form” (82/75). Were the elements to enter into relations with one another, they would have to open up out of this closed state to face one another. But in doing so, they would have to break up the very factuality which alone permitted them to hold themselves out of their nothings! How can the elements realize their individual identities through relations when such relations demand that they give up the factual identities they have attained thus far? Rosenzweig himself raises this question halfway through the second part of the Star. When we view God, for example, from the standpoint of the relations into which God enters with the world and human beings, Rosenzweig asks, do we not then lose, from out of our hands, what we believed already to hold: the elemental “factuality” of God? … But did we then really possess it? Was it not broken a hundred times over through the unshaken omnipotence [Allmacht] of the “Perhaps”? … Ultimately, a factuality that lets all questions about its “How” be denied is not especially certain of itself. One may suppose that revelation, in that it claims not

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

185

to be able to know the elemental factuality of God and dismisses this God as “hidden,” would strive not for this [elemental factuality], but rather for a grounded factuality appropriate to it; [and that it would strive for such grounded factuality] not in the elements, but rather in the course of the one actuality itself, which would rise out over all “Perhaps” into the height of quintessential security. (176/158)

When God steps into relation with the other elements, God may appear to lose the elemental factuality through which God took on form over against God’s particular nothing. But the elemental factuality lost thereby, Rosenzweig reminds us, was unstable to begin with. It was a factuality branded by possibility, not actuality: a factuality “broken” by the “perhaps.” Rosenzweig suggests here that the elemental God lacks self-certainty: as elemental fact, isolated from others, God cannot be said to be certain of himself. By turning out of himself into relation with others, Rosenzweig implies, the elemental God in fact turns toward the secure realization of that factuality which God has realized only insecurely up until now. Turning away from elemental factuality, we are directed in its stead toward a “grounded factuality” reaching the “height of quintessential security,” which “revelation” strives to realize “in the course of the one actuality itself.” According to this passage, it is “revelation” which points to the realization of such a “grounded factuality.” Rosenzweig’s conception of revelation will, likewise, hold the key to answering the questions we now face. “Revelation” will articulate, namely, how the factual elements secure their own determinate being, paradoxically, by breaking apart and entering into reciprocal relations, how the elements actually find self-fulfillment when they open up from out of their closed, stable, but at once unstable selves and enter into relations with what is outside them. In order to offer a preliminary account of how Rosenzweig will use the notion of “revelation” to show how the elements find self-fulfillment by turning away from themselves and into relations with their others, I want to highlight two interrelated aspects of Rosenzweig’s conception of revelation. Revelation, in the broad sense, names for Rosenzweig the opening up of God, world, and human being to each other in relation. As we shall see, the human being experiences such opening up into relation most vividly in the relation with God which bears the name of revelation in the narrow sense. But for Rosenzweig, the relation of creation between God and the world and the relation of redemption between the human being and the world are no less revelatory. The “genuine notion of revelation,” according to Rosenzweig, is the “going-out-of-self, belonging-to-each-other and coming-toeach-other of the three ‘factual’ elements of the All” (127/115). The idea of revelation which Rosenzweig articulates here presupposes that there are three elements which have constructed themselves factually and which thus cannot be conceived as deriving from a common source. But while each element is its own factual self, the “genuine notion of revelation” suggests that God, world, and human being do not remain in isolation from one another. Each at once belongs to its others, each at once holds an aspect of its others within its own domain, and each comes to

186

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

recognize that an aspect of its self rests in the domain of its others. To realize the very self that it is, the notion of revelation thus suggests, each element must seek out the completion of its own self in its relation with its others. It must “go out of itself ” and “come to its others” in order to realize itself.1 How does revelation represent this possibility of finding oneself by going away from oneself, of self-realization through self-alienation? In the closing pages of the “Transition” section at the end of the first part of the Star, Rosenzweig alludes to the way in which the plain sense of “revelation,” or Offenbarung, as a making manifest or apparent (offenbar) or as an opening up (öffnen, offen), holds within itself a double, seemingly self-contradictory meaning. On the one hand, when someone reveals himself to another, or when something is revealed or made manifest to someone, for example, when Clark Kent reveals to Lois Lane that he is Superman or when you tell me something manifestly true, the one who is revealed, that which is made manifest to another, may be said to show itself as what it is. In its appearance before another, one might say, what is revealed or manifest is true to itself. On the other hand, the act of revealing involves a transformation, even a transposition of opposites. Revelation is the “self-opening of something closed [das Sichauftun eines Verschlossenen]” (179/161), Rosenzweig writes; it brings to light what was dark, discloses to another what was secret or hidden to him previously. Rosenzweig highlights this curious feature of revelation at the end of the “Transition” when he designates the turning of the elements to one another as their “birth into the revealed,” which is “a turning, a reversal (eine Wendung, eine Umkehr). … Because becoming-revealed is the reversal (Umkehr) of becoming. Only becoming is secret. Becoming-revealed however is – revealed” (Das Werden nur ist geheim. Das Offenbarwerden aber ist – offenbar) (97/88–9). The quality of revelation to which Rosenzweig alludes here is thus twofold: revelation allows beings to appear to one another as what they are, but it does so only by transforming them – at least in some sense – into their opposites. I have asked how the elements may be imagined to attain the security of their individual beings over against their respective nothings through reciprocal relations, when to enter into such relations demands giving up the factuality they have thus far attained, when it demands opening up what they have closed together within themselves. In the concept of revelation Rosenzweig hints at here, we find the beginnings of an answer. For if the idea of revelation teaches us something true about the nature of 1

Highlighting Rosenzweig’s definition of the “genuine notion of revelation,” Else-Rahel Freund comments eloquently upon the way in which the elements become themselves, i.e., “arrive at being,” through their reciprocal relationships: “Inasmuch as all three elements act upon each other in deeds and experience these deeds from each other, they all arrive at being in the same manner. God, world, and man, arranged as completely equal, obtain the freedom which transcends their conceptualization and which helps them to procure reality. Each of the three experiences the action of the other. As a result, the equilibrium between active and passive is established in each individual element as well as in their reciprocal relationships. Being signifies a correlation of acting and experiencing in which both members occupy the same rank,” Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence, p. 116.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

187

things – and it will be Rosenzweig’s task in Part II of the Star to demonstrate that it does – then by opening up out of their respective closed elemental factuality into relation with one another, God, world, and human being will not lose themselves, but rather, by thus reversing themselves from closed to open, they will first reveal themselves as what they are. If we now think together the two aspects of revelation we have noted – revelation as the “going-out-of-self, belonging-to-each-other and coming-to-each-other of the three ‘factual’ elements of the All,” and revelation as realization through reversal – then we may suggest that the idea of revelation implies that beings realize what they are in themselves only by turning inside out, by opening themselves up to seek out the complement they need in order to be themselves through relations with their others. Rosenzweig is at his most helpful, it seems to me, when he explains the conversion the elements undergo through the reversal in terms of promise and fulfillment. The elements’ reversal into relation fulfills a state of being which is promised in the factuality of the elements as such. “Nothing more changes from promise to fulfillment,” Rosenzweig asserts. “The content of the promise and the phases of fulfillment are one; only that which is finished turns into beginning” (124/112). On the one hand, this passage suggests, the elements themselves already are what they must reverse into relation in order to be. The elements hold the promise of being – a promise which their one-sided, unfactual foils do not possess – and as promise the elements are indeed already complete; they already hold within themselves everything that they will realize in the course of their relations. But at the same time, a promise without its fulfillment, a potential that is not realized, amounts to nothing. Viewed from the standpoint of the fulfillment, the completed promise looks like a starting-point. And this is why, even after having traced the factual process through which the elements generate themselves out of their respective particular nothings, Rosenzweig designates the elements themselves as nothings – “higher-level” nothings – when presenting them from the perspective of the course of relations into which they enter. The elemental God may have generated God’s self out of God’s particular nothing factually, but in God’s need for relation this same factual God appears once again as “nothing, a nothing at a higher level, nothing only with reference to that which sprang out of it” (175/157). The elemental world may have “already come into being out of ‘nothing’ as figure.” But once the world’s need for that relation with God Rosenzweig designates as “creation” has been exposed, Rosenzweig poses the rhetorical question “Should the figured world itself once more become nothing, in order to represent the “nothing” out of which the world is to be created? So it is” (132/119).2 2

Rosenzweig’s notion of “levels” of nothings, according to which the God and world which attained elemental factuality are nevertheless “nothings” vis-à-vis the relations into which they will now enter, recalls Schelling’s similar conception of relative nothings in the Ages of the World. Cf. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke VIII: 221–2.

188

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

In presenting the elements as promise or potential, Rosenzweig represents for his readers the way in which the elements are both complete in themselves and at once in need of reversals into relation in order to attain fulfillment. Now, if a promise represents how the factual elements are at once still “nothings” without their fulfillment, a promise that is fulfilled, a potential fully realized, is everything. And thus the path of reversal the elements will take into reciprocal relations will, in this additional sense, now reforge the course from nothings to All. Our task, in the section that follows, will be to illustrate how the reversals inherent to the concept of revelation explain the elements’ ability to secure their own respective identities by paradoxically giving up what they have been qua elements, in turning out of themselves and seeking their fulfillment through relations with each other.3 We seek to demonstrate how the reversals into reciprocal relations which the elements undergo enable the realization of an All which neither reduces diversity to unity nor unity to diversity, which secures the individual identities of God, world, and human beings even as it unites them into the “true All.” Only after a thorough study of Rosenzweig’s methodological application of the “genuine notion of revelation” in the reversals will we be in a position to show, finally, that it is through such reversals into relations that one can explain the systematic position and vocation of the human being who stands in the middle between All and nothing. And only then will we be in a position to examine how Rosenzweig depicts the experience of the human being who stands in the middle of the course of these relations that form the All.

I. Reversals into Relations, or, How God, World, and Human Being Realize Themselves in Realizing the All i.1 Elemental Promises in Need of Fulfillment Our preliminary encounter with Rosenzweig’s “genuine notion of revelation” has suggested that by reversing into reciprocal relations, the elemental God, world, and human being will not in fact lose themselves; rather, through these very reversals into relations, the elements will realize their potential; they will fulfill the promise 3

Rosenzweig’s account of the elements as realizing their own selves through relation with their others can be fruitfully compared and contrasted with Hegel’s account of “recognition” [Anerkennung] as the medium through which individual selves realize themselves through their reciprocal recognition of and by other selves. See, e.g., Werke 3. Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 145: “Self-consciousness is in and for itself, in that and insofar as it is in and for itself for an other; that is to say, it is only as recognized [als ein Anerkanntes].” We will take brief note of what one might consider Rosenzweig’s adaptation and transformation of Hegel’s notion of recognition when we arrive at Rosenzweig’s discussion of the “I” as the plane upon which God, world, and human being are able both to realize themselves, respectively, and to realize a collective unity at the same time. But a thorough study of this subject will have to await future research.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

189

they hold. In the state in which we last left them, we will recall, the elements were in need of such fulfillment. In their very factuality, we found, they were still insecure or uncertain in their being, and they had yet to attain the determination necessary to distinguish themselves from their others. On the other hand, each of the three elements, insofar as it was completely factual in itself and closed off to its others, grasped itself as the One and All. God in His unconditional being and infinite power, the world as totality of particulars, the human being as self-grounded particular being, each had a claim to be One and All. The path of relation through which each element will realize the fulfillment of its promise, we will find, will grant it the security of its particular being which it seeks, a “grounded factuality.” In doing so, moreover, the course of relations will at once justify each element’s claim to be the One and All in a certain sense. Not only God, we shall find, but the world, and the self too – again, in a certain sense – can be said to become the One and All on the path of relations. Such an ultimate fulfillment of each element’s promise will be achieved, we shall find, at the moment when the elements finally attain the “grounded factuality” which they lack as elements. But in order to attain such secure factuality, in order to fulfill its potential, each element must step into relations with its others. All three of the relations among the elements sketched out in the second part of the Star fall under the sign of the “genuine notion of revelation” and may be grasped thereby as interconnected steps whereby what is hidden or promised within the elements is gradually revealed and thereby fulfilled through relations. At the same time, within this broadly designated idea of revelation, Rosenzweig labels the three specific relations as follows: the relation between God and the world is creation; the relation between God and the human self is revelation, in the narrow sense; and the relation between the human self and the world – the culmination of the series of relations – is redemption. As we shall see, each successive relation between the elements fulfills some promise that is held within each of the two elements which join in it. Every relation realizes some aspect of the elements which remained incomplete within the factuality of the element itself. The elements may thus be said to press toward their reversals into each given relation in order to find their fulfillment there. But once the series of relations begins with creation, it is not only the elemental needs which drive the system forward toward its culmination in the All. Each relation itself is not only the fulfillment of what is promised in the elements. Once it occurs, the relation itself becomes a promise that must be fulfilled in subsequent relations, culminating in the relation of redemption which realizes the All. With each passing relation, we will thus find, the drive toward the completion of the system intensifies. If creation, for example, begins as the relatively modest fulfillment of promises held within the elemental God and the elemental world, redemption – as the culmination of both the fulfillment of the needs of the elements and the series of relations – is demanded as fulfillment not only for the elemental human being

190

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

and world which join together in it, but also for that which was promised in creation and revelation, indeed for all those aspects of God, world, and human being which remain incomplete before redemption comes. Our reading of the “Transition” section at the end of the first part of the Star suggested that because each element is still unstable in its being even having attained elemental factuality, God, world, and human being remain at risk of falling back into the particular nothings out of which they generated themselves. One must concede, however, that it is somewhat imprecise to speak of the “being” of God, world, and human being and the instability of that “being” in the Star. This is because Rosenzweig is intent on positing no universal “being” which manifests itself in God, world, and human being – at least until the redemptive completion of the system. As elements, God, world, and self “are” each in its own way, such that it might be more precise to say that God “gods,” the world “worlds,” and the self “selfs,” rather than to say that God, world, the self “is.”4 I raise this point because while it may be true that the elemental God, world, and human being share a common insecurity of their being, and while the “Transition” speaks of those claims and limitations which the elements share, that which fulfills each element on the path of relations is different. For God to realize God’s self as God in the absolute sense, God needs a different fulfillment from relations with the world and the human being than either the world or the human being needs from God and from each other. In order best to understand how the relations of creation, revelation, and redemption grant fulfillment to God, world, and human being, respectively, we will thus have to pinpoint, before we proceed, what exactly Rosenzweig believes each element lacks, or needs, in its elemental state, in order to be itself with stability and self-certainty. Now, to suggest that the world and the human self are incomplete, insecure, without their relations to God and to each other might not meet with any immediate objections. But how can we understand Rosenzweig’s suggestion that God, too, in isolation from the world and human beings, is unstable, uncertain of himself? The elemental God generated himself out of the factual unification of unconditional, infinite being and free power. What could be lacking in such an infinite, unconditional God? What could God need from the world, from the human being? Strange as the suggestion of limitations within the elemental God may sound, Rosenzweig in fact already hints at such limitations in his discussion of the 4

While there is no doubt that Rosenzweig shares with Heidegger a certain sensitivity to different ways of being, it strikes me as misleading to claim with Peter Gordon that the independent ontological status of God, world, and human being, respectively, in the Star resembles what Heidegger calls “ontological difference.” For Heidegger, as Gordon himself explains, ontological difference designates not the different ways in which different beings may be said to “be”, but rather the difference between beings and what Heidegger often refers to as “the Being of beings.” Compare Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, pp. 173–4.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

191

elemental God in the first part of the Star. There Rosenzweig compares the elemental God – factually complete, unconditional, free, and yet isolated from God’s others – to the gods of ancient Greece. Such gods, Rosenzweig asserts, “live amongst themselves” (37/34). They “interfere in the world of the living, but they don’t control it” (36/34). Isolated from the world and from the human being as are the gods of Greece, the elemental God, Rosenzweig thus suggests, is a God “without ruling” over the world. “God here is without world; or if one would like to characterize the representation in reverse … then this world of living gods remaining among themselves would be – a world without gods” (37/34). Such passages suggest that the fact that there is a world outside God which God – in his infinite power – does not rule over, the fact that there are human beings in that world who do not recognize God’s unconditional being, amounts to a limitation to God himself. In spite of the unconditional being and freedom the elemental God holds within himself, Rosenzweig thus suggests, God remains unrealized in elemental isolation. God cannot realize himself completely. He cannot fulfill what his elemental state promises, without realizing his infinite power outside himself, and without having his unconditional being recognized by his others. As we shall see, God will realize the former need in his creative relation to the world, and he will realize the latter in his revelatory relation with the human being. Only through these two reversals into relations, Rosenzweig will show, will God fulfill his promise and realize himself as the unconditioned, free God that he is. In doing so, we shall find, God will take his unique place within the “true All” and at once realize himself as the One and All in his own particular fashion.5 As element, the world had attained figure in the factual unification of the “fullness of particularity” and the “order of the universal” (49/45). The elemental world was, simply put, “the whole of its parts” (56/51–2). It was not the “one and universal All” of Idealism, but rather “‘an’ All” (51/47); not “the all-filling world of Idealism” (56/51), but rather “the wholly-filled world of the metalogical standpoint” (57/52). According to Rosenzweig, the world presents itself as a totality of interconnected particulars, nowhere exhibiting its unifying ground, but ordered and interconnected all the same. And Rosenzweig had allowed just this ordered whole of particulars to generate itself factually out of its nothing as the elemental world. Just as he did in his account of the elemental God, however, Rosenzweig betrays the limitations of this “self-contained” factual world in hints he scatters through his depiction of the elemental world. These limitations appear to come from two directions. The world is to be “the whole of its parts,” but as we have noted, the unity of this whole is nowhere manifest. “A unified origin can, and even must be assumed” for the universal logos which orders the connections between the particulars of the world, Rosenzweig writes, but such a unified origin “cannot be proven.” Indeed, 5

Recall likewise the way in which the “Urzelle” depicts God’s relations to the world and to the human being as “legs” upon which God attains security, i.e., “a place to stand.” See Chapter 2, Section II.2.

192

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the very unity that would ground the world as a whole “lies not in the world” (46/43). Furthermore, the world appears to be limited by the very character of the particulars that are connected in it, too. These particulars have being, Rosenzweig suggests, only insofar as “each [is] a one against all others, each [is] separated from all others, ‘particular,’ a ‘not-other’” (49/45). Such a designation implies that the particulars of the world – in contrast to the self-grounded human self – only have their being in the whole they join to form. These particulars are determined solely through negation: each particular is what it is only insofar as it is “not” its others. Insofar as each particular of the world can thereby be said to lack what Rosenzweig will refer to as its “being-of-one’s-own [Eigensein]” (69, 268/64, 241), we may suggest that these particulars are not as particulars. But a totality of particulars as the elemental world promises to be can hardly claim to be what it is unless its particulars attain their grounded being as particulars. We thus find that the elemental world, despite the factual completeness it attained as a unified totality of particulars, remains incomplete, unfulfilled both with regard to its unity and with regard to the status of its particulars. As we shall see, the world will find the unity it seeks through its reversal into relation with the divine creator. And the world’s particulars will attain “being-of-one’s-own” through the redemptive relation into which they will enter with human beings. Only through these two reversals into relation will the world come to fulfill the promise it holds within its elemental state and realize its potential as a totality of particulars. When the world comes to attain a unified grounding for its totality and a particular self-grounding for its particulars, we shall find, it will at once have taken its place within the “true All.” At the same time the world will have realized itself as the One and All in its own particular fashion. The elemental human being, finally, attained its own figure as the “self [that] is quintessentially closed in itself ” and at once “finite” (73, 71/68, 66), through the factual unification of its “character,” that is, its “being in the particular” (69/64) and the defiant pride of free will. In that it is thus closed in itself, in that it has its being in its own particularity, it is self-grounded in a way that the particulars of the elemental world are not. As such, the elemental self could claim to be “single and nevertheless All” (69/64). But even in the wholeness of the elemental self ’s particularity it betrays its own needs, and these needs, once again, point toward fulfillment in two different directions. As a first hint toward the self ’s unfulfilled status, we may point to the peculiar form which human freedom takes on within the elemental self. This peculiarity comes to light when Rosenzweig contrasts such human freedom with the freedom of the divine. “Human freedom is finite, but … unconditional,” Rosenzweig claims. “Thus it is not, like that of God, freedom to act, but rather freedom to will; not free power, but rather free will. Ability is, in contrast to divine freedom, already denied in its origin, but its willing is as unconditional, as borderless as the ability of God” (71–2/66).

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

193

Rosenzweig suggests here that unlike divine freedom, which expressed itself as “infinite power” because it was united with the unconditional being of the elemental God, human freedom is unconditional and finite all at once. It does not express “free power, but rather free will.” The human being can will unconditionally, but her freedom is inherently limited in the realization of this will. One might suggest that the coupling of unconditionality and finitude in the freedom of the human self makes for an uneasy marriage.6 To will unconditionally, but to remain wholly limited with respect to the realization of what is willed, marks an internal conflict within the elemental self which it cannot resolve closed up within itself. This inner conflict will only find its resolution, we shall find, when the self opens up that unconditional but finite freedom in relation to its others. The elemental self exhibited a further limitation from another direction, as well. As “closed in itself,” the elemental self is cut off from the very world it inhabits. In that “the self knows nothing outside of itself, it is quintessentially solitary,” and thus like the heroes of Attic tragedy “it is silent” (84/77). “This lack of all bridges and connections, this being turned only inward of the self,” according to Rosenzweig, “is what pours out that peculiar darkness over the divine and worldly in which the tragic hero moves. He doesn’t understand what befalls him, and he is conscious of his not being able to understand” (85/78). Because the self is closed within itself, this passage suggests, even though it is self-grounded it is incomplete. Without connections to others, the self ’s surroundings remain draped in darkness, and as a result the self cannot even understand her own self completely. In order to attain full understanding of itself and at once the security of its own being, the self demands “bridges and connections” to others. Just as the elemental God seemed to demand recognition from his others in order to realize his unconditional being, so the human being here appears to need the recognition of others in the world to fulfill the “being in the particular” of her selfhood. Our survey of Rosenzweig’s scattered hints regarding the limitations of the elemental self have once again left us with clues as to what the self must seek out through relation in order to realize her potential, to fulfill what she is, as of yet, only as promise. As we shall see, the human self will come to reconcile the unconditionality and the finitude of her freedom only in her relation to God in revelation. And the self will attain recognition for her “being in the particular” through the “bridges and connections” she will establish through neighborly love on the path to redemption. When the human being has thereby realized its freedom and particular being through her reversals into relations with God and the world, we 6

Cf., Nathan Rotenstreich, “Rosenzweig’s Notion of Metaethics,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 76–7: “According to Rosenzweig, the finiteness of human freedom is inherent in freedom itself because that freedom is freedom of volition and not – like the freedom of God – freedom of action. … There is a rift in his existence. His freedom as the freedom of will may be boundless, but the execution of that freedom is limited.”

194

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

shall find, the self will take her place in “the true All.” And the self will thereby realize itself at once as the One and All, in its own peculiar fashion. As we turn now to examine how the reversals into relations lead God, world, and human being to fulfill their elemental promise, a general comment on Rosenzweig’s claims in this context may be in order. There is no doubt that the limitations in the elements to which Rosenzweig points in the first part of the Star, as well as the manner in which they overcome them through relations that form the All, in the second part of the Star, often appear contrived – as if Rosenzweig gave to the elements just those qualities and limitations which would demand the kind of fulfillment they attain through the reversals into relation. But as we turn now to the reversals, I would submit that this method is not simply a chance for Rosenzweig to show off his skills of dialectical sophistry. Rosenzweig means to suggest, simply, that while every individual being has a potential all its own, it can only realize this potential in relation to its others.7 Thus to abstract from the actuality in which beings stand in relation to one another, and to conceive of each being’s potential as individual, is by definition to conceive of that individual as limited. For in any individual being held in isolation, there will always be internal conflicts that cannot be reconciled, and possibilities that cannot be realized without relations. One might thus suggest that Rosenzweig is simply trying to pinpoint what it is in each individual kind of being – God, world, human being – that remains limited within that being as isolated element, that remains limited prior to the reciprocal relations in which it finds fulfillment.

i.2 Reversals into Creation Let us turn now to examine exactly how Rosenzweig documents the respective fulfillments of God, world, and human being through their interrelation. Our task, we must recall, is to show that the elements realize their potential by way of reversals into these relations. Only if the reversals which the elements must undergo in order to enter into relations with their others lead the elements toward the fulfillment of their respective particular being can the elements be understood as moving toward their respective “grounded factuality” even as they break up the factuality they have possessed as elements. From the very moment he introduces the reversals, we have seen, Rosenzweig insists that even though the elements undergo a complete transformation in the move from promise to fulfillment, an identity nevertheless holds between the elemental God, world, and human being and their respective reversed relational 7

Cf., Ellen T. Charry, “The View of God in ‘The Star of Redemption,’ ” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig II, p. 597: “Development from isolation to relationship is the quintessential act of self-fulfi llment for every existent in creation including God. Mutual empowerment is the currency of self-fulfillment. … His world admits of no self-actualization that is not dialogical. Coming to be one’s fullest self is only in and through recognizing one’s need for the other.”

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

195

forms. Indeed, the reversal introduces a differentiation through which alone the elements can realize themselves as what they are: Nothing more changes from promise to fulfillment, the content of the promise and the phases of fulfillment are one. Only that which is finished has turned itself into [sich verkehren] beginning. With this, however, the parts which complete the finished one in terms of content are turned into predictions of the event which emerges out of it, to become beginning again. This turning [Verkehrung] can express itself … only as an exchange of the two first Ur-words. What merged as Yes steps out as No, and what merged as No, steps out as Yes. (124/112–13)

Rosenzweig proposes here that in order for the “genuine notion of revelation” to be traced philosophically, those components which joined in each factual element must now break open and reverse themselves. Each element generated itself factually out of its own nothing, we recall, as the unity of act and substantiality (Tat and Sache), as the “And” of “No” and “Yes.” In their reversals into reciprocal relations, we will find, what merged into each given element as “No,” as an active force, will reverse itself as the element opens up for relations into a “Yes,” as substantial being, and that which merged into the element as “Yes,” as substantial being, will reverse itself into a “No,” an active force.8 We will examine how the elements undergo such reversals taking each of the relations among the elements in turn. In each case, we will look first at the reversals undergone by the elements, and only after doing so will we try to show how these reversals in fact make possible the very fulfillment of the potential which the factual elements hold within themselves.9 8

9

For an illuminating alternative to the way I explain the change which these poles of each element undergo in the reversal, see S. Mosès, System and Revelation, pp. 77–8. While I am inclined to agree with Luca Bertolini that Rosenzweig’s notion of Umkehrung is influenced by or even drawn from Schelling – see note 32 – I hesitate to draw the firm conclusion Bertolini draws when he claims that “one can scarcely doubt that Schelling’s Weltalter represents the central source for this Umkehr of the Yes into No and of the No into Yes,” in “Das Nichts und die Philosophie: Rosenzweig zwischen Idealismus und einer Hermeneutik der religiösen Erfahrung,” Franz Rosenzweigs “neues Denken” p. 121. This is because in the Weltalter, the Umkehrung describes the relationship between the “Yes” and “No” potencies within the divine nature, and not the relation between the poles of God’s preworldly nature and those of God’s revealed being. See F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke VIII: 227. But see the “Excursus on Questions of Method,” at the end of this chapter, where I consider the possibility that the “reversals” are in fact part of the factual method that governs the elemental realm, as well. Just as Rosenzweig used what he called the religions of “China” and “India” as foils for the factual generation of the elements he traced in the first part of the Star, so he presents Islam, in the second part of the Star, as a foil for the account of the reversals into relations among the elements meant to demonstrate how they fulfill themselves as particulars through the relations that realize the All. According to Rosenzweig, Islam does indeed grasp God, world, and human being in their elemental factuality, but Rosenzweig claims that Islam seeks to bring these elements into relations with one another without the elements having undergone the requisite reversals. As a result, he suggests, the Islamic worldview fails to explain how God, world, and human being realize themselves, or fulfill their elemental promise, through relations with their others. According to Rosenzweig, “it could not have occurred” to Muhammad “that God World Human Being only transform from out of finished figures into the sources of power of revelation through inner reversal. … They didn’t turn from veiled prophecies into manifesting revelations; their closed eyes did not open brightly, but rather

196

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

In creation, God and the world reverse into relation with each other. God’s reversal takes place when “divine power, which came out of divine freedom, thus [God’s] Ur-No, now emerges anew no longer as No, but rather as Yes” (125/113). Within the elemental God, we will recall, divine freedom in the form of divine power was the “No,” the act (Tat) which united with the essential necessity of divine being (“Yes,” Sache) to attain factuality. In the reversal into the relation of creation, this divine power reverses itself: having merged into the factual, elemental God as “No,” it now emerges from the elemental God into relation with the world as its opposite, as “Yes.” As “Yes,” Rosenzweig reasons, God’s free power can no longer be “‘act’, wrestling itself loose in the convulsion of self-negation” (125/113); it no longer takes the position of the Tat in the Tatsache of God. Instead, divine power as “Yes” reveals itself, according to Rosenzweig, as the very reverse of such negating action, that is, as “calm infinite ‘attribute’, essentially set-out into the enduring” (125/113). Through the reversal, God’s free power is “no longer individual act … but rather essence. God the creator is essentially powerful” (125/113). Only through this reversal, only as a power that does not issue from a free act but is rather an affirming essence, according to Rosenzweig, does God provide the world with its “ground and origin” (147/133) in the relation of creation. As the reverse of divine freedom, the God of creation “sets free an enduring necessity out of itself into the outside … this is thus the world-affirmation of the creator” (131/118), ground of “the predetermined lawfulness of the world” (106/95). This world is “created” – turned from out of the relative nothingness of its elemental state into revealed actuality – through its relation with God. It must also reverse itself upon entering into this relation. Within the elemental world, it was the worldly essence of logos, that universal order prevailing “always and everywhere” (47/44) (“Yes,” Sache), which joined factually with the plenitude of worldly particulars (“No,” Tat). In creation, the world reverses itself and the universality of logos is transformed from “Yes” to “No,” whereby what was universal and essential in the elemental world becomes the “inessential essence” (133/120) of existence. “Existence means,” Rosenzweig tells us, “the universal that is full of particular, and is not always and everywhere, but rather – therein infected by the particular – must continually become anew in order to preserve itself ” (134/120–1). Within the elemental world, the worldly essence of logos possessed “universal validity” by virtue of its universal applicability: logos was “applicable everywhere and always” (47/44). As the very reverse of this universal applicability, existence they maintained their mute, inwardly-turned glance, even when they directed it outwardly towards each other. What was Yes, remained Yes here; what was No, No” (129–30/117). Rosenzweig’s account of Islam has been analyzed and sharply criticized in recent years. See, e.g., Gil Anidjar, “Rosenzweig’s War,” The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, pp. 87–98; Gesine Palmer’s introduction and Yossef Schwartz’s afterword to Franz Rosenzweig, “Innerlich bleibt die Welt eine”: Ausgewählte Texte zum Islam, pp. 9–32, 113–47; and Matthias Lehmann, “Franz Rosenzweigs Kritik des Islams im ‘Stern der Erlösung,’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 1 (1993–94): 340–61.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

197

is not at once “everywhere and always” but rather must continually become anew at every moment. It must, as it were, say “No” to nonexistence at every particular moment in order to preserve itself. Now, in the elemental world, we may recall, the logos that was universally valid still lacked “the ability to demonstrate the unity of its origin” (46/43). After the reversal of the essential logos into existence, such a lack on the part of the world becomes even more acute. As ephemeral existence, namely, the world reveals itself to be in need of being: “Being, unconditional and universal being is what is missing for existence, and after which it longs … in order to achieve standing [Bestand] and truth” (134/121). But the world now finds the unconditional being that it seeks, it finds the essential ground for its existence, in the very Creator God toward which it has opened. “Existence demands, in its constant momentariness, the constantly renewed becoming-created. And as such it is then seized by the power of the creator” (134/121). In creation, we thus find, the elemental God and world enter into relation with each other by way of reversal. God’s active freedom reverses itself into essential power and thereby God, in the guise of the creator, can provide the essential ground for worldly existence – a worldly existence which itself has reversed out of the essence of the elemental world. Through their respective reversals into mutual relation, Rosenzweig thus suggests, the God and world which we have known until now as elements unite to realize the created world; they yield a world of particulars which now find their unified ground in the “essential power” of the divine creator. When we turn to an account of human experience in the middle of the All, we shall consider more carefully how the human being experiences this relation of creation we have just recounted as a fundamental aspect of her existence. She is a participant in this relation of creation, not as a self proper, but yet insofar as she is part of the world. Rosenzweig claims that as part of the world, the human being experiences her own worldliness neither as if she were wholly isolated from the divine unifying ground of the world – as the world was known to us in its elemental, potential form – nor as if she were a particular manifestation of a pantheistic God. As part of the world, according to Rosenzweig, the human being experiences a rootedness in the unity of creation that both grounds and at once transcends the world itself, and she experiences her own multifaceted relations to other parts of the world as a thing among things. For this is what the world becomes through creation, according to Rosenzweig, a unified multiplicity of things: The world consists of things. Despite the unity of its objectivity, it is no single object, but rather a multiplicity of objects, that is, things. The thing possesses no stability [Standfestigkeit] as long as it stands alone. It is certain of its singularity, its individuality, only in the multiplicity of things. … And the thing as determinate has no essence of its own, it is not in itself, it is only in its relations. … Its essentiality, its universality is set behind – not in – its determinateness. (148/133)

198

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Now, our claim has been that by reversing into relations the elements not only generate the actual which we experience, but rather God, world, and self take steps, through their interrelations, toward their own respective self-realizations. Indeed, we have suggested that the key to showing how the elements generate the “true All” through their reciprocal relations is to show that in reversing into relations, in transforming the forces which combined factually within them from “No” to “Yes” or “Yes” to “No,” the elements do not give up their identities. On the contrary, the reversals first allow them to realize their potential, to fulfill their promise in relations. Let us see how this first fulfillment of promise occurs in the context of creation. God’s power, which had taken form out of the divine freedom which actively tore itself loose from God’s particular nothing, reversed into the affirming, essential ground of the existing world. At first glance, nothing seems further from the active, negating state in which God’s free power manifested itself inside the elemental God than this calm, affirming essence which the divine creator provides for the world. But precisely here, I wish to suggest, the reversal God undergoes does not lead God to lose his elemental identity, but rather through this reversal, the promise of divine free power fulfills itself. Rosenzweig expressly asserts that the “secret … of divine freedom … was the closed prophecy which came to revealed fulfillment in the essential power of the creator” (128/116). How might the essential power of God, in the role of ground and creator of the existing world, be understood as the fulfillment of that freedom out of which it has reversed? Within the elemental God, divine freedom possessed “power [that] is inexhaustible” (32/30), but it exerts this power only upon itself. Within the elemental God, Rosenzweig writes, “we still may not think of any other object outside the infinity of that everlasting essence” (32/30) of God, upon which this free power can act. Closed in upon itself in this manner, Rosenzweig seems to suggest, divine freedom remains unrealized. Indeed, our survey of the limitations inherent to the elemental God in the first part of the Star yielded the same suggestion. The elemental God was a God “without ruling” over others, whose power did not extend to the world beyond God. In order to realize the inexhaustibility of divine power, such passages suggest, it is not enough for God to hold his freedom in this state of self-enclosed potentiality. Divine freedom realizes its power not when it holds that power within itself as potential, but rather, when that power becomes absolute ground and necessity for all that is “outside” the elemental God. Divine freedom realizes itself as absolute power when it becomes the ground of the necessity of the All – because this is what divine freedom becomes when God turns into relation with the world in creation: the secure ground, the fixed starting-point of that series of relations out of which the “true All” will ultimately emerge. Only in the grounding of the identity and difference of All that is does the “inexhaustible” power of divine freedom realize itself. The path of reversal into relation, we may thus suggest, does not lead the elemental God to lose himself. On the contrary,

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

199

only by reversing the infinity of his free power into essential necessity, and only by stepping into relation – in this form – with the world, does God fulfill his need to realize his power outside himself. Only through this reversal into relation does God first begin to become, in actuality, that which God only held the promise to be as element. What was promised in the power of divine freedom has fulfilled itself through its reversal into the essential necessity of the creator. The elemental God may thus be said first to advance toward his own complete self-realization through his reversal into the relation of creation, in which God comes to serve as the unifying ground of worldly existence. Such a relation, we have claimed (and will yet reflect on in greater detail), generates the actuality of worldliness which human beings experience in awakening to their own birthgiven place in the world as things among things. To take on this form of existing things, we recall, the elemental world too had to undergo a reversal. Indeed, while the elemental world’s logos was said to be universally valid, “always and everywhere,” having merged into the elemental world as “Yes,” as substantial Sache, existence, on the other hand, breaks out actively in the moment, as Tat, as “No,” inextricably tied thereby to the particular. In this decisive respect, Rosenzweig has shown, existence is the very reverse of the worldly essence of logos. Upon further reflection, however, this reversal of universal logos into existence shows itself to be no simple abandonment of its character as essence. As existing world, we have noted, the world betrays more acutely a lack which we found characterized its elemental state. Logos within the elemental world could not “prove the unity of its origin,” and it knew not where to look to discover that origin. “Beyond that manifold being of logos,” Rosenzweig recalls, “we sought a ‘somewhere,’ a simple being of truth, without being able to find such a ‘somewhere’ in the metalogical world” (134/121). We have noted how this lack of origins came to manifest itself as a lack of “unconditional being” when worldly logos reversed itself into existence. Once worldly logos has reversed into existence, however, it becomes clear where the world must turn to secure the unity of its essence in a unified “ground and origin.” Rosenzweig explains: The metalogical world-picture, unsatisfied in itself despite its plastic selfcontainedness, longed for that which would make it whole [Ergänzung, i.e., complement]. We already knew, in the case of the logos residing in the world … that it needed a One … beyond itself, yes, beyond the world, therewith it could claim to be logos in truth. We still found this was completely valid for the existence of the creature that came out of that logos. … But this time, the “beyond” where we were to look for the unity was no mere “somewhere” for us, but rather pointed us in a clearer direction. That sense-of-the-world [Weltsinn], which had become all-too “sensible,” had to have its ground and origin in a “super-sensible.” As “existence” it opened itself to the effect of such a super-sensible ground. The idea of creation led them together therewith, in that here the form of causality [ Verursachtheit] was stamped on existence. (147/132–3)

200

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

In its elemental state, this passage reiterates, the world was at once complete and incomplete, “self-contained” and yet “unsatisfied,” and in need of a “One beyond itself,” a unified ground, to make it whole. As logos that lacked – or could not demonstrate – the unity of its origin, the logos that was the elemental worldly essence could not yet “claim to be logos in truth.” In order to become “logos in truth,” in order to reveal itself as what it as-of-yet only promised to be, therefore, worldly logos had to reverse itself, thereby entering into relation with the divine creator. In the reversed form of existence, Rosenzweig claims, that logos which had been the “sense-of-the-world [Weltsinn]” becomes “sensible” [sinnlich]. And while the isolated logos of the elemental world could only suggest its unity lay “somewhere,” Rosenzweig claims that the very sensible, concrete form in which worldly order now manifests itself in existence points beyond all sensible to the supersensible as its unifying ground. Worldly logos is thus shown to realize its potential, to fulfill itself as what it promised to be in the elemental world, only when it reverses into existence and finds its “origin and ground” in God the creator. The reversal which the world undergoes in order to step out of itself toward God, we may conclude, does not lead it away from itself into a state of self-alienation. The relation into which the elemental world steps does not result in the world’s sacrifice of its own identity for the sake of the greater whole formed through such a relation. Instead, we find, the world takes a vital step toward its own self-realization through this reversal into the relation of creation. That lack of unity which plagued the elemental world, which prevented the world from being the very totality of particulars it promised to be, is overcome in creation. Moreover, Rosenzweig suggests that it is only through such a relation of creation that the world is able to attain the unity it needs in order to be itself without losing its worldly character at the same time. For were the unity of the totality of worldly particulars grasped as immanent to the world itself, were the particulars of the world conceived as manifestations or consequences of the being of this unifying ground, then the particulars of the world would collapse into this unity. Creation gives the elemental world “what it was missing, the fixed point out of which its multiplicity closes together and orders itself into a unity.” But at the same time, Rosenzweig insists, the idea of creation “verif[ies]” the world’s “elemental character” as a whole of particulars, “because it finds the firm point outside its borders and doesn’t let the creator flow together with the world. It posits no connection between the creator and the world except that the creator has created and that the world pressed itself as creature towards being-created” (149–150/135).10

10

Emil Fackenheim notes that “a ‘transcendent’ God (who creates by a whim extraneous to his Essence) would rival the Epicurean gods – pagan gods! – in ‘apathy’: He would be indifferent to the world. A God ‘overflowing’ into the world would be ‘immanent’ in it, thus robbing it of its independence. In contrast to both, the ‘far’ God forever moving toward ‘nearness’ creates an independent world and affirms it in its otherness,” To Mend the World, p. 75.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

201

The goal of these last pages has been to show that within the context of the relation of creation established between God and the world, the reversals which God and world undergo do not lead the elements away from themselves. The elements do not abandon their individual identities in order to join into those relations that will generate the All; on the contrary, reversing into relation with their others first allows these elements to realize the potential of their being, to fulfill what was only promised in their elemental state. As evidence for this claim, we have now seen how the elemental God’s freedom and the elemental world’s essence realize themselves in the very reversals into the essential ground of creation and creaturely existence which certainly appeared, at first glance, to mean the respective self-denials of the elemental God and world.

i.3 The Factuality of Creation The descent we have taken into the technical details of these reversals courts a few dangers which I would like to make explicit at this point. The story we have retold about how divine freedom becomes creative essence, and worldly essence becomes existence, runs the risk of making Rosenzweig’s account of creation appear as a wholly speculative process remote from the actuality of the world we experience. I have risked this impression, nevertheless, because it is only in the often abstruse details of the reversals that Rosenzweig demonstrates how the elements realize their own respective identities while generating the All. But as I shall detail when we arrive at our discussion of the experience of the human being in the middle of the All, Rosenzweig will insist that the very actuality of worldly existence which we experience emerges out of these same reversals of God and the world into the relation of creation. And it is the fact that we can both think the generation of the elements, as Rosenzweig has shown in the first part of the Star, and at once experience the relations between them which Rosenzweig will present as a surprising kind of evidence for our ability to know the All from our position in the middle of the system. My account of creation as the fulfillment of what was promised in the elemental God and world must be qualified in a further sense. As I asserted in the introductory remarks to this section, creation – and revelation and redemption, subsequently – should not be seen solely as the completion of processes begun in the elements, solely as the realization of a prior potential. For at the same time as creation fulfills the promise held within divine freedom and worldly logos, the bond between God and world creates something new, something that was not there before. Creation is the beginning – so much so, we have seen, that everything that the elemental God and world underwent on their path to factuality amounts to “nothing” relative to it. We shall find that in addition to realizing what was promised within the elements, therefore, each relation documented in the second part of the Star creates

202

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

something new, something that is to be found in neither of the elements fulfilled through it: a step toward the All. Creation does not simply fulfill what was promised in divine freedom or worldly essence. It does this, but it also yields something utterly new, something that is to be found in neither the elemental God nor the elemental world: a web of particulars grounded in the absolute. The elemental God was grasped as absolute; the world contained a web of particulars linked by logos but nowhere reaching a unity. In their relation, God and world reveal an absolute grounding of the multiplicity of particulars in the world. These particulars are not themselves self-grounded. They have determination, as of yet, solely in their relations to one another and in their common relations to their “origin and ground.” But with creation, a first step toward the realization of the “true All” has nevertheless been taken: a step that both realizes what was promised in the elements and at once possesses concrete actuality in its own right. Rosenzweig highlights the originality and the concrete permanence which creation realizes as the first step in the path of relations that will lead to the formation of the All, by stamping creation itself as a fact, intending thereby the strict meaning of “factuality” he had attributed to the elements themselves. In their respective reversals into the relation of creation, God’s elementally active (Tat, “No”) freedom became the substantive (Sache, “Yes”) ground of the lawfulness of the world, and the elemental world’s substantive universal essence (Sache, “Yes”) of logos became an existence brimming with activity (Tat, “No”). In their relation, we have seen, God and world create a multiplicity of things grounded in the absolute. They create them – I now propose – as facts, as Tatsachen which result from the unifying relation between the being of the divine creator (Sache, “Yes”) and the active existence of the world (Tat, “No”). Every thing in the created world is a fact, that is, because it has the same Yes-And-No structure which permitted the elements to hold themselves factually out of their particular nothings. And we may deduce from the meaning of factuality in the case of the elements themselves that factuality here too bestows a certain fixity of being upon what has been created. Creation is a step toward the realization of the All, I suggest, insofar as it secures a hold on reality over against the very threefold nothingness out of which the elements have emerged. In the Star, we will discover, every advance toward the systematic unification of the All is made through such factual relations, through the advancing unifications of Taten und Sachen, of Nos and Yeses. In each of the relations among the elements, the elements join to form what is new in the same manner in which each element generated itself out of its nothing in the first part of the Star: factually. Just as each element could only hold itself out of its particular nothing in its factual unification of Tat and Sache, of Yes-And-No, so too the elements join factually in their interrelation, generating an original step toward the All and away from the nothingness which still threatened God, world, and self as elements. As it fulfills promises held within the elemental God and world, creation takes on concrete actuality as such a fact. But even in this factuality, creation at once

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

203

points beyond itself. Even as fulfillment of elemental promises, creation at once holds promises of its own. “Creation,” according to Rosenzweig, “is the promise which is only confirmed in the miraculous sign of revelation” (149/134). Indeed, creation is so much in need of its own fulfillment in revelation and redemption that when Rosenzweig reflects on the relation between God and world in isolation from its complements, he suggests that creation actually appears to destabilize these elements just as much as it secures them. In creation, God may fulfill the promise of divine freedom as essential ground of the world, but to do so God had to break up the factuality he had attained as element and fulfill only one side of his elemental self. God’s freedom found fulfillment in creation; his elemental substantial being was left behind. Thus while creation may generate a fact out of the unifying relation between God and the world, it seems to do so at the expense of the factuality of the elemental God and world. God and world themselves split apart through the reversals; they must give up the factuality they had attained, break up their respective “Yes-And-No” figure. As a result, taken in isolation, creation courts the same kind of fall back into nothingness that threatened the elements as they attained factual figure in the first part of the Star. We shall find that this threat of nothingness to which God is subject, having entered only one relation and thus having fulfilled only one side of his factuality, serves as a further force driving creation forward to revelation and, subsequently, to redemption. Rosenzweig points to the new threat which God courts in creation when he notes that even as God begins to reveal himself through creation, this relation still leaves God at risk to “fall back into the night of the secret” (179/161). As creator and only the creator, according to Rosenzweig, “God threatened to lose himself again behind the infinity of creation. He appeared to become mere ‘origin’ of creation and therewith yet again the hidden God which he had just ceased to be through creation” (179/160). A God who is only the creator, Rosenzweig suggests, has reality only as the single point of origin out of which the existing world issues, and is at once hidden by the very existing world that he grounds. In our worldly existence, we may suggest, we do not experience God qua creator directly in either ourselves or in the things surrounding us. God the creator stands beyond the world as its first cause, and not within it as its driving force. This is why, Rosenzweig suggests, were one to try to deduce the existence of God from “the world-picture and the demand for the creator arrived at in it … one would rightfully ask the question, who, then, God is?” “In order to answer this question” about God’s being, Rosenzweig asserts, “the creator Himself must be … pointed out in His wholeness. The creator is also the revealer” (149/134). As creator, Rosenzweig asserts here, God may well rule the world, but he is not yet recognized in it. Having emerged only in part from his elemental state, God may realize his power as the essential ground of the existing world, but God’s elemental being is as-of-yet still hidden, still hovering in the nothingness of the elemental. Only in his revelatory relation with human beings will God attain the

204

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

recognition of his unconditional being which he demands in order to fulfill his potential. As we proceed to an account of revelation, we thus seek out the fulfillment not only of those aspects of the elemental God and elemental human being which reverse into relation therein; we seek the fulfillment of what was promised but remained unrealized in creation as well. “In order to win back the ‘factuality’ of God, which threatened to be lost in its hiddenness,” Rosenzweig writes, “we demand here … the securing of the revelation happening in creation from all falling back into the night of the secret.” “That completion of this divine self-revelation which merely arose in the acts of creation” (179/160–1) must begin.

i.4 Reversals into Revelation In revelation, God and the human self reverse into relation with one another. Just as the freedom (“No,” Tat) of the elemental God reversed itself into a “Yes,” into essential ground in creation, so in revelation, it is the “Yes,” the Sache, of the elemental God which now reverses itself. God’s unconditional being, which had manifested itself as the necessity of fate in the elemental God, will now reverse into a “No,” into an active force: “Now the fate-bound being must reveal itself in a corresponding reversal as an occurrence sprung from the moment.” God’s “eternal essence awakens anew to each moment as ever young, ever first – love” (178/159, 160). In revelation, we find, the “eternal essence” of the elemental God, the fateful necessity of divine being, is transformed into an opposite of sorts, into that love which occurs suddenly, without prior determination, “sprung from the moment.” If the divine love which Rosenzweig claims is experienced by human beings in revelation is to be grasped as true love – and not reduced to a mere abstract attribute like “mercy” or “compassion” – then Rosenzweig suggests God’s love must be grasped as the very opposite of fateful necessity. God experiences love, Rosenzweig implies, in the same spontaneous, unexpected manner in which we do. In revelation, God loves the individual human being. But the elemental self we knew in the first part of the Star must also undergo a reversal in becoming God’s beloved. The “defiant pride of free will” (“No,” Tat) had joined the essential character of the human being (“Yes,” Sache) in the factual self-generation of the elemental human self out of its particular nothing. Revelation brings about the reversal of “the pride of defiance” from its state of negating activity within the elemental self into an affirmative way of being. “What kind of pride is this,” Rosenzweig asks, “which thus appears to contradict the pride of defiance. … Such simple being pride [einfach seiender Stoltz], in which the human being is silent and lets himself be carried, is now indeed the pure opposite of the always newly surging-up defiance. It is humility” (187/167–8). Human freedom, which we found to be both unconditional and finite, at once, had taken shape as defiance within the elemental self. In the turn into relation with

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

205

God, this defiance now becomes its opposite; it becomes humility. Indeed, what could be more opposed to the pride of defiance than the humility of that person who does not assert himself, but rather submits respectfully to others? It is in this state of humility, according to Rosenzweig, that the human being receives divine love in revelation. And if the love of the divine is active and spontaneous (Tat, “No”), according to Rosenzweig, the love of the humble human soul exudes “calm duration” [ruhige Dauer] (188/169). But for all its passivity in its initial reception of divine love, the human being is transformed through revelation. God’s loving call to the human being singles him out, makes him aware of himself as an “I,” as a person with his own name, capable of love and speech, decision and action in the world. Rosenzweig thus sums up revelation as “the coming of age of the mute self into speaking soul occurring under the love of God” (221/198). We may well recall Rosenzweig’s assertion, from our study of the “Urzelle,” that the human being awakens to his own “I” as a result of a call from the divine, and not through an act of pure self-positing. When we turn to a closer analysis of the human experience of revelation from his standpoint in the middle of the All, we shall have the opportunity to examine how Rosenzweig understands the human being’s awakening to “I”-hood as conditioned by the loving command of God. But it is essential to note, even at this point, that the process of reversals into relation which Rosenzweig describes in his account of revelation is a process which Rosenzweig understands as enabling the actuality we experience, as grounding an experience fundamental to human existence. The human’s awakening to his own I-hood is neither the experience of an isolated human being, divorced from all others, nor an experience of God as the Absolute self within us, nor a mere extension of our worldly existence. Instead, Rosenzweig’s account suggests, we awaken to our “I-hood” through the revelatory relation in which our selves are summoned by God. My claim has been that in reversing into reciprocal relations, as God and self do in revelation, the elements do not give up their identities but rather realize them. As we did in the case of creation, let us now turn to see how the fulfillment of promise through reversal occurs within the context of revelation. It was with some surprise that we pointed out that in elemental form God had not yet realized himself as God in the truest sense. This elemental God had taken factual shape as the unification of infinite free power and unconditional being. What could possibly limit such a God? Yet, we found hints in Rosenzweig’s account of the elemental God to the effect that even in his factuality, this God was limited. We pointed to the fact that as one isolated element among others, the elemental God’s power was limited by the lack of a realization of that power beyond the realm of the divine. We found that the unconditional nature of God’s being was at once limited by the fact that the world was “without gods,” by the fact that God received no recognition of his being outside himself. In creation, the promise of infinite power which the elemental God held within himself found fulfillment as

206

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the essential “ground and origin” of the existing world. Might God first realize the unconditional nature of his being through recognition in revelation? At first glance, nothing seems further from what occurs to God in the act of revelation. For in revelation, God’s unconditional being, the necessity of divine fate, reverses itself into divine love. Rather than find himself recognized, confirmed, through revelation, God would thus appear to lose his being, which becomes its very opposite. Yet my claim has been that the elements fulfill their potential precisely through such reversals. Let us see how this occurs to divine being in revelation. Divine love was that unexpected force which seized God in the very moment of God’s turning toward the human being. As such it was active, self-negating, the very opposite of the constant unconditional being out of which it reversed itself. This forceful, moment-bound act of divine love joined with the calm affirmation of the human love of God, a love which we found to be a way of being rather than a kind of action, one embodied, according to Rosenzweig, in the humility of the faithful. Rosenzweig is careful to point out, however, that the passivity of the humble should not be mistaken for powerlessness or selflessness. The human being receives divine love differently than, say, the things that make up the world might receive such love. Insofar as the humble recipient of divine love emerged out of the free, quintessentially singular elemental self, insofar as his humility is thereby grounded in the “defiant pride” of that elemental self, Rosenzweig claims, the human being beloved of God has “the force of holding firm.” According to Rosenzweig, “the force of holding firm which the beloved soul proves against the love with which it is loved, this force of faithfulness comes to it out of the defiance of the self that has entered into it” (190/171). Now, because the faithfulness with which the humble human being receives the love of God is rooted in the inner freedom of the elemental self, Rosenzweig suggests, this faithfulness is not only acted upon in revelation. The faithfulness of the humble individual has an effect on the God to whom the soul is faithful, an effect Rosenzweig depicts in striking terms: And so there is also a force which goes out of the beloved, no force of constantly new impulses, but rather the still shining of a great Yes, in which the all-time self-denying love of the lover finds that which it could not find in itself: affirmation and duration. The true faith of the beloved affirms the love of the lover bound in the moment and also solidifies it into something enduring. This is the loving-back: the faith of the beloved in the lover. The faith of the soul bears witness in its faithfulness to the love of God and gives it enduring being. If you bear witness to me, then I am God, and otherwise not – thus the master of the Kabbalah lets the God of love speak. (190–1/171)

In the faithfulness with which the beloved human being responds to God’s love, according to this passage, the divine lover receives an “affirmation and duration” which God did not have in the momentary presence with which he himself loved. But this “affirmation” of the faithful soul is no mere affirmation of love. In affirming

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

207

divine love and granting it enduring being, Rosenzweig suggests, the human being grants stability and endurance to the very being of God. Thus Rosenzweig cites the striking midrash from the Pesikta de Rav Kahana on Isaiah 43:10, “You are my witnesses”: “If you bear witness to me, then I am God, and otherwise not”; that is, God is God if and insofar as God is affirmed through the testimony of the faithful. But if God finds no such testimony to his being beyond his elemental self, if he is not recognized as God by his others, his unconditioned being remains unrealized. He is not the God which he has the potential to be. We recall how the unconditional being of the elemental God was at once limited within the confines of the isolated element, for it was unable to find recognition of its unconditionality outside the realm of the divine. Through the reversal of divine being into the love of revelation, we now find, the promise held within the elemental being of God finds its fulfillment. Or rather, in the human response to the divine love of revelation, we find the locus wherein God’s being will or will not be confirmed11 – a point to which we will return when we come to reflect on the vocation of the human being in the middle of the system. But Rosenzweig insists that “all confession of faith has only this one content: He whom I have known as lover in the experience of my being-beloved – he is. The God of my love is truly God” (202/182). The human being who is faithful, this passage suggests, is distinguished from other human beings in that she recognizes her awakening to I-hood, her being cherished as the quintessentially singular person that she is, as an experience of God. She neither denies the experience as fantasy nor interprets her I-hood as entirely of her own making, nor attributes the experience to a source within the world. According to Rosenzweig, it is only in “the testimony of the believing soul,” in this recognition of God on the part of the human I, that “God achieves His tasteable and visible actuality this side of His hiddenness. … In that the soul confesses before God’s countenance and therewith confesses God’s being and bears witness, God too, the revealed God, first achieves being: ‘if you confess me, so I am’” (202–3/182). Only through the human reciprocation of God’s love, Rosenzweig thus asserts, does God attain that firm hold in actuality, that security over against the fall back 11

See Rosenzweig’s treatment of this same midrash in “Atheistic Theology,” GS 3, p. 696/Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 23–4: “It is no coincidence that that famous key phrase of the master of the Kabbalah: ‘God speaks: if you do not bear witness to me, then I am not’ is pronounced precisely as a Word of God …; God Himself, not human presumption, makes Himself dependent upon the testimony of man.” On Rosenzweig’s treatment of this midrash, Moshe Idel writes, “Rosenzweig proposes an alternative to atheistic theology: the close relation or even dependency of the divine on the human is expressed or rather revealed by God himself,” “Franz Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, p. 163. Elliot R. Wolfson reads the very vocation of the human being that emerges here vis-à-vis God’s own being – reminiscent as it is of a central kabbalistic theme – back into Rosenzweig’s attribution of this midrash to the “master of the Kabbala”: “The midrashic passage expresses in nascent form one of the major principles in the kabbalistic tradition: God becomes who he is through the actions of human beings,” “Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997), p. 77.

208

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

into nothingness, which plagued him in both the elemental realm of paganism and as the equally hidden creator. Remarkably, Rosenzweig asserts that God “first achieves being” – by which I understand the realization of the unconditional being only promised within God’s elemental realm – not as a direct effect of God’s own actions, not as a direct consequence of divine necessity, but as a result of the human confession of God’s actual being.12 As we proceed, we will have to reflect on the significance of this surprising power the human being seems to have in determining the fate of the very God who created her and called her to I-hood. Here, we wish simply to highlight the way in which Rosenzweig’s account has demonstrated, once again, how the elements find their fulfillment only through their reversal into relation. The unconditional being of the elemental God proved to be limited and thereby not yet truly itself: it is a promise fulfilled only when God’s being reverses itself into the divine love of the human soul, and when that human soul affirms God’s being in return. Once again, we discover, God secures his own identity as God only by reversing out of himself and entering into relations with other beings. The human being also entered into the loving relation of revelation through reversal. Once again I would like to show that by reversing from out of her elemental state, this human being does not lose herself or give up her identity, but, to the contrary, fulfills the potential which the elemental human being possessed. In the elemental human being, it was freedom expressing itself as defiant pride which reversed itself into the faithful humility of the beloved of God. This freedom of the human being took a rather peculiar form, we may recall, within the elemental self: it was at once finite and unconditioned. And we suggested that the coupling of unconditionality and finitude in the freedom of the human self amounts to an internal conflict. The question we need to ask, then, is how the potential of this unconditional but finite freedom might realize itself in such a way that such finitude and unconditionality are reconciled without denying either aspect of this freedom. We have seen how God could only realize the infinite power of divine freedom by becoming the creator, the essential ground and origin of the created world. What kind of essential grounding might the human being enact which would realize the unconditionality of her freedom within the limits of her finitude? Have we not already discovered the answer to our question? The human being’s free will, which expressed itself in elemental state as “defiant pride,” reverses itself into humility, into the faithfulness of the human being who reciprocates the love she receives from God in the relation of revelation between them. In revelation, God seeks out the recognition of his being beyond the divine realm; he needs confirmation of his being by one who is not God. Do we not find in the human 12

Recall the suggestion of the “Urzelle” that the divine only attains a “place to stand” through the faithful acts of human beings in the world, Chapter 2, Section II.2. Cf., S. Mosès, System and Revelation, p. 105: “This affirmation of God by man defines faith. The latter thus does not consist in believing that God exists but in making him exist.”

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

209

being’s surprising ability to affirm or not to affirm God’s being the very realization of the unconditional but finite freedom we seek? For it is only insofar as the human being is particular, finite, different from God, on the one hand, and yet a singular self, “unconditional” in her freedom, at the same time, that the human being has the astounding power to confirm or not to confirm God’s own being beyond God’s elemental realm.13 It is worth noting, in this regard, that the human being can only realize her independent power vis-à-vis God after the free will which had expressed itself as “defiant pride” within the elemental self reverses into humility. That is to say, the human being can realize her freedom only when she recognizes her finitude, when she transforms her defiant self-enclosedness into an acceptance of her place within the course of the All. This accepting of finitude represented in humility is not to be understood, we have seen, as a renunciation of selfhood. Indeed, although it is the utter opposite of defiance, true humility is itself, according to Rosenzweig, “a kind of pride” (187/168). It might well be claimed that a humble person often exudes more self-confidence than one who is arrogant, outwardly proud, or defiant. Humility expresses a being at peace: the humble person does not need to do or say anything to prove her worth. Rosenzweig thus notes that “humility alone is such a pride which is secure before all upsurges, and does not need any expressions” (187/168). It is in the very recognition of finitude, that is, of not being God, which accompanies the humble, faithful human being’s acknowledgment of God, one might thus suggest, that the human being is able to fulfill the remarkable potential wrapped up in her unconditioned but finite freedom: the power to affirm the being of the revealed God. Rosenzweig designates “this stillness of the soul in its faithfulness, which arose out of the night of defiance” as the “great secret of faith” (191/171). The “secret” which the faithful know that others do not know, he thereby suggests, is that in their faith they do not renounce their freedom; they do not give up their pride, but rather, they realize such freedom and pride in their confession of faith,14 and in that faith alone.15 13

14

15

As I noted in a footnote in the last chapter, there seem to be important similarities here between Rosenzweig’s conception of the human being’s role in confirming God through revelation and Schelling’s conception of the human being’s relation to God in his Philosophical Investigations of the Essence of Human Freedom, in Werke VII: 333–416. Eric Santner likewise notes the parallel between Rosenzweig and Schelling with regard to the connection each draws between freedom and divine love. See his Psychotheology of Everyday Life, p. 90. Cf., Eliezer Schweid, “Theology of Return,” in 20-‫[ תולדות ההגות היהודית במאה ה‬History of Jewish Thought in the Twentieth Century], p. 357. This particular case of the elemental human being’s reversal into relation with God offers an added window into Rosenzweig’s understanding of the promise-fulfillment structure of the reversals, and the way such reversals into relation make possible a depiction of the identity of the elements as that identity which can only maintain itself – indeed secures itself – through difference. In a letter to Margrit Rosenstock dated October 3, 1918, Gritli-Briefe, p. 159, Rosenzweig writes, “Today I found the equation [Gleichung], or rather the un-equation [Ungleichung] defiance = faithfulness

210

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Thus, the defiant expression of free will in the elemental self has become faithful humility in its reversal into relation with divine love. But this reversal, once again, does not lead the self into complete self-alienation. Free will fulfills itself in humble faith in God, according to Rosenzweig; indeed, the fact that the human being has the power to confirm God’s being through this reversal is nothing less than the “great secret of faith.”

i.5 Excursus on the “I” as Medium of Identity within the All If revelation thus shows itself as the fulfillment of what lay promised, and as of yet unrealized within the elemental God and elemental self, we must once again insist that revelation is not only the fulfillment of what came before it; it is not only the end of a process. Revelation – as creation before it – at once creates something new in actuality; it makes a new contribution to the advance to the All begun in creation. Out of the relation between God and self, there emerged a singular speaking “I,” beloved of God, and capable of recognizing and thereby securing the being of God in the world. This speaking “I,” equipped with a personal name, is something new which revelation introduces into the world: The I or the You, seen thus in its objectivity, is quintessentially individual, not individual through the mediation of some multiplicity; it is no “the” because it is an “a”; but rather an individual without species. In the place of the article, here steps the immediate determinateness of the personal name. … In the personal name, a breach has been set into the firm wall of thinghood. That which has a personal name can no longer be thing … it is incapable of going completely into the species to which it belongs; it is its own species. (207–8/186–7)

If the relation between God and world resulted in the creation of an existing world of interrelated things, of particulars which represent their species, the relation between God and the human self here results in the awakening of the human “I” as “quintessential individual,” as “an individual without species.” This human “I” has the remarkable capacity, we have seen, to affirm God, to secure divine being [Trotz = Treue] wholly on my own way. It came suddenly as the conclusion to a long train of thought.” Rosenzweig’s account here of how he hit upon the way in which defiance and faithfulness are at once identical and different – i.e., form an equation “or rather un-equation” – points to just the manner in which the elemental self ’s freedom attains its fulfillment through the reversal of defiance into faithfulness, in which form the human being is called upon to affirm the Being of God. Rosenzweig’s comment thereby adds credence to our claim that Rosenzweig intends to show through the reversals as a whole how the elements only realize their identities through reversals into relation, through the path of the “un-equation.” Elsewhere, Rosenzweig even surmises that in the case of defiance and faithfulness there might be etymological evidence that this apparent pair of opposites are in fact at the same time identical. See Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, January 7, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, p. 215: “The Kluges Etymological Dictionary has arrived … and is very nice; I already read a lot in it. He draws no connection from “Trotz” to “Treue”; the word appears only in Middle-German, not already in Old-German.”

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

211

by recognizing the God who has awakened this “I” in love, as God. In the center of the discussion of revelation in II 2 of the Star, Rosenzweig depicts this process of the divine awakening of the human “I” and the human being’s recognition of God in return, as an “I-You” dialogue between God and human being. While we cannot attend to all the details of this multifaceted dialogue, there are moments within this dialogue which shed great light on the precise manner in which the relations of the isolated elements may be said to lead to unity – a manner whose significance will become fully clear only when we arrive at Rosenzweig’s account of the “true All,” the ultimate unity of difference, achieved through redemption. In Rosenzweig’s dialogic account of the revelatory relation between God and the human being the following moments must be noted: 1) God himself does not become an “I” until the moment that God seeks out his other in the human being, by asking “where” the capacity to be such a “You” is within the human being. According to Rosenzweig, the divine “I discovers itself in the moment when it claims the existence of the You through the question after the where of the You” (195/175). 2) The human being himself is only awakened as “I,” however, when God calls him by name (“Abraham, Abraham”), to which the human being responds, “Here I am,” articulating, for the first time, the “I” within him, the “I” capable of recognizing God in return (196/176). 3) The dialogue of love, command, and confession that ensues then culminates in the human I’s recognition of the divine “I” who awoke him out of love: “The God of my love is truly God” (202/182). What is to be noted in these three moments is that God only attains the recognition which secures his being in the relation of revelation after both God and the human being have been transformed in common fashion. As elements, each having generated itself out of its own particular nothing, God and human being are to be grasped as wholly different one from the other. The relation of revelation can bridge that difference after both God and the human being have become “I”s. It is this attainment of “I-hood” on the part of both God and human being that creates the ground for mutual recognition, leading these fundamentally different elements to a plane upon which they are equals of a sort. As “I”s, however, God and human being are only equals of a sort – one cannot claim that the “I” of God and the “I” of the human being in revelation, nor certainly the “I-hood” which the particulars of the world will attain in redemption, are identical in any pure sense. The identity attained between the different elements on the plane of the “I” thus remains – at least until the end of the system – an identity within difference.16 16

Here, an illuminating contrast to Hegel’s conception of recognition becomes apparent. What makes the process of recognition move, in Hegel’s account, is that the self finds itself in its other and must work out how it can maintain its own selfhood while recognizing its other as both a self in its own

212

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

On the other hand, the equality realized through relation as epitomized in this common rise to “I-hood” should not be underestimated.17 God is only able to be recognized as God by his others insofar as God awakens an I-hood in them that is equal, at least significantly, to God himself. To this extent, we will have to say that in awakening the human being as “I” and thereby receiving recognition in return, God realizes something equivalent to divinity in that which is not divine. The path of attaining recognition, we shall find – both here in the case of God and in redemption, in which the human self will seek out recognition in the world – may be understood as the path upon which God, or the self, awakens its equal (another “I”) in an other, which then has the capacity to recognize it. Once again, the significance of this account Rosenzweig gives of recognition will become fully clear only when we arrive at the “true All,” the ultimate unity of difference, achieved through redemption.

i.6 The Factuality of Revelation and the Limits of Factuality Prior to Redemption By way of anticipation, we may already suggest that it will be the unification of the quality of quintessential individuality which characterizes the human recipient of revelation with the quality of comprehensive interrelation which characterized the web of particulars created in creation which will ultimately yield a redemptive world in which particulars are both wholes in themselves and yet parts of the ultimate All. But already here, in revelation, a new “fact” has been born into actuality. For just as we designated the created world of things as a fact because this world took actual shape as the newly formed unification of the affirmative,

17

right and at once as other; e.g., “There is for self-consciousness another self-consciousness. It has come out of itself. This has a double meaning: firstly, it has lost itself because it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has therewith sublated the other, because it sees not the other as being, but rather itself in the other.” In contrast, Rosenzweig’s elements begin as different from one another and must become the same in a certain respect in order to recognize each other as different. As we shall show, each element realizes itself as itself (i.e., as God, as world, as human being) by becoming “I,” but one cannot say that the “I” of God and the “I” of the self and the “I” of the world are identical in any pure sense. This is identity in difference. In a future study, I plan to explore the link between this character of the “I” – as that which all beings can likewise be while at once maintaining their difference – and Rosenzweig’s speech-thinking, which is supposed to allow for the possibility of articulating the difference of actuality in a manner superior to traditional rational thought. I believe Rosenzweig hints toward just this link between the “I” and speech-thinking when he introduces the I-You dialogue between God and the human soul, by asking, “What is now in this sense ‘not otherwise,’ thus at once ‘other’ and ‘not other’ than everything? As ‘everything’ thus as ‘the All.’ Only ‘Thinking’ which is identical with the ‘Being’ of the All and each individual object, thus both the same as it and its opposite, ‘Thinking’ – the I.” The “thinking” which Rosenzweig suggests can be identified with “being” on account of the “I” here, I would claim, is not traditional thought, but rather Rosenzweig’s own speech-thinking, i.e., “the question and answer play of thinking” which emerges in “the whole actual becoming-spoken of language … from actual word to actual word” (194/174).

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

213

essential grounding (Sache, “Yes,”) of the creator and the active existence of the world (Tat, “No,”), so too we may claim that the affirmation of God’s being in the speech of the singular human “I” is a fact because it is born out of the unification of Tat and Sache, out of the “And” of “Yes” and “No.” In revelation, God’s elemental “infinite essence” (“Yes,” Sache) reversed into God’s spontaneous act of love (“No,” Tat), and the human being’s elemental defiance (“No,” Tat) reversed into humility (“Yes,” Sache). The speaking, personal I and the being of God affirmed through human finitude which emerge out of these reversals, I claim, are facts – they have a fixed permanence in actuality – because they are Tatsachen which result from the unifying relation between God’s act of love (“No,” Tat) and the faithful individual’s humble way of being (“Yes,” Sache), because they share the same Yes-And-No structure which the elements themselves possessed. In thus contributing a new fact to the actual course of the All, revelation also serves as an important step toward securing that factuality which was left so unstable in the first relation among the elements. In creation, we recall, God was at risk of “falling into the night of the secret.” As creator, God’s being amounted to a single point of origin in which the existing world was grounded. He thus remained hidden behind the existing things of the world, and lost even the “elementary ‘factuality’ of God” – insecure as it may have been – which God possessed as an element. “In order to win back the ‘factuality’ of God which threatened to be lost in its hiddenness,” we found, God required a force to hold God “firm in the visible” (179/160). In search of that force, God opened up a second time into relation, complementing his own one-time past creation with that moment-bound love of the human self. And he attained the very confirmation of being which he sought, we discovered, in the humble faithfulness of the human being whom he woke to I-hood in revelation. It is “in the testimony of the believing soul” that “God achieves his tasteable and visible actuality … this side of its hiddenness” (202–3/182). As we suggested earlier, therefore, revelation not only fulfills the promises we found bound up in the elements which join in it. Revelation also fulfills – or begins to fulfill – what remained yet promise in creation. In thus serving as a kind of fulfillment of what was left unrealized, unstable, and hidden in creation, revelation must be seen as marking a vital step in securing the factuality of the elements over against their fall back into their nothings. “In the length of time,” Rosenzweig writes, revelation frees [löst] things of their only-createdness and at once redeems [erlöst] creation from the enduring fear hanging over it of sinking back into its origin out of the Nothing on the one hand, and of divine hiddenness on the other. … The creator could still step back behind creation. … But the revealer in his all-time present can hold him firm each moment in what is bright, revealed, unhidden. … God is now present, present as the moment, as each moment, and therewith begins to become what he was still not truly as creator, and what even now he only begins to become: “factual” as the gods of the pagans. (180/162)

214

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Rosenzweig suggested, we recall, that revelation would point toward a “grounded factuality” which would secure the being of the elements over against their respective nothings, and thereby replace the elemental factuality of the first part of the Star, which left the elements without “self-certainty.” God begins to become “factual” in revelation, and we may suggest that God does so because with revelation now standing aside creation, both of the poles which united within the elemental God have stepped into actuality. In creation, only the Sache of God as essential ground of the world had reversed out of the elemental Tat of infinite power. In revelation, the Tat of revelatory love emerges through the reversal out of the Sache of God’s elemental being. In their unity, creation and revelation would form the ultimate grounded factuality, the ultimate Tatsache of God. But in revelation, God only begins to become factual: God’s Tat and his Sache, his “Yes” and his “No,” have been revealed, but the “And” that will unite them once again into factual figure must await redemption. Revelation too, we discover, is not only the fulfillment of promise; it too amounts to a promise that will only be fulfilled in redemption. By claiming that revelation secures the created world from falling back into its Nothing “in the length of time,” Rosenzweig points to the indirect effect revelation will have on the created world through redemption, as well. As we shall soon see, the human being who is beloved of God responds to the divine love of revelation by turning toward the world in redemptive love. By highlighting the indirect redemptive effect revelation will have upon creation, here, Rosenzweig anticipates the ultimate securing of factuality which redemption will realize. Redemption itself, according to this passage, will redeem “creation from the enduring fear hanging over it of sinking back into its origin out of the Nothing.” That is to say, redemption is to be understood as the ultimate freeing of beings from the threat of falling back into their nothings. In such a future redemption, we will at once arrive at the realization of the “true All.” As we now turn forward from revelation to redemption, we do so with far greater expectation for fulfillment than we had with the relations we have surveyed thus far. In the last relation among the elements, I have already suggested, we will not only find the realization of what is left to fulfill within the elemental human being and the elemental world which join in it. Redemption must not only fulfill the elemental world and human being; it must fulfill all that has remained promise, all that has remained unfulfilled in creation and revelation as well: it must fulfill the All. It should not surprise us at this point that the human being and the world are driven toward mutual relation, in part, simply because each has already broken up the factuality it possessed as element and is thus opened up into relation on only one of its sides. Just as God became even more unstable, more at risk to “sink back into the night of the secret,” after having turned in one direction outward, than he had been as factual element, so Rosenzweig shows that the human being

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

215

and the world too, before redemption, find themselves hovering over their nothings. Thus, while the self was indeed awakened by the call of divine love in revelation, Rosenzweig suggests, “she was awoken only by the One and for the One” (229–30/206): As namely God, as long as he appeared only as creator, really was more figure-less than he was before in paganism, and was always in danger of sinking back into the night of a hidden God, so now the soul, as long as she is merely beloved soul, is likewise still invisible and without figure, more without figure than the self once was. … The soul is indeed opened to glance and word, but only to God. On all other sides, she is just as closed as the self was before, and in addition, she has lost that visibility and audibility, that having figure … which the self possessed. In the bliss of its being beloved of God, the merely submitting self is dead for the world, for everything outside of God. (230/206)

Having broken up its elemental factuality upon entering into relation with God, Rosenzweig suggests, the human being loses even the fragile, isolated “figure” which it possessed as elemental self. The human being who is beloved of God and only beloved of God is “dead” – is nothing – to everything outside God. Thus, Rosenzweig notes, just “as the mere creator is always in danger of sinking back into the hidden, so this mere bliss of the soul sunk in the look of God’s love, is in danger of sinking back into the closed” (230/206). Nor is the created world secure having opened up to God alone. Opened into relation on only one of its sides, Rosenzweig claims, “the creature [i.e., the created world] is not at all already figure, which could hold its own over against the cosmos [i.e., the elemental world]. It is similar for the mere creature … as before for the soul beloved of God and the God who was powerful in creation: it is in danger of passing away” (245/219). Rosenzweig explains this danger of passing away to which the world is subject as a lack of essence of the world.18 As we shall come to understand when we examine the world’s reversal in redemption, the created world is bound into relation with a God who, as creator, grants the world its essential grounding only as its point of origin. But creation does not ground the particulars of the world as particulars. Through the world’s final relation with human beings, we may anticipate, the particulars of the world will attain a particular self-groundedness to complement their grounding in the unity of creation. Only in the redemptive “kingdom” that will result from this relation will “the world be as visible figure as was the plastic [elemental] world, the cosmos of paganism.” But before such fulfillment comes, the world is not yet factual, and thus, according to Rosenzweig, it can still “sink away into the Nothing” (245, 247/219, 221). 18

Stern, pp. 246–7/Star, p. 221.

216

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

i.7 Reversals into Redemption To see how the human being and world secure their respective factualities, indeed, to see how all promises left unfulfilled through the course of relations thus far press toward their ultimate fulfillment in the “true All,” let us turn to the final set of reversals into relation which Rosenzweig documents in the second part of the Star, the reversals which the human being and world undergo when they enter into the relation of redemption. Within the elemental self, it was the quintessentially individual “enduring being” of human character (Yes, Sache) – “particularity as enduring essence” (70–1/65) – which had joined factually with defiant free will. The elemental self ’s free will, we learned, found its fulfillment through its reversal into the humble faithfulness of the soul beloved of God. What occurs to its elemental complement in redemption? This “enduring being of character” within the self will now reverse itself “from out of a once and for all ‘affirmed’ into a self-negation of its origins, of the closed self, wrestling-itself-forth anew at all times. But what kind of character is this, which is extinguished in each moment and each moment breaks forth afresh?” (237/212). From a character which fixed the identity of the human being “once and for all,” the human being’s character reverses itself into a transformative force which extinguishes itself and creates itself anew in every moment through “self-negation,” through a negation of the very fixed, “once and for all” character out of which it emerges. Just as the fixed necessity of God’s unconditional being reverses itself, in revelation, into a spontaneous divine love, so the fixity of human character reverses itself into a human love of neighbor which is also awakened in the moment. Love of neighbor is itself an act (Tat), but it differs from purposive action, according to Rosenzweig, precisely in the way it erupts, unexpectedly, in the moment. Love seizes us – as it seizes God in revelation – unexpectedly, and it is all the more powerful in its effects, Rosenzweig suggests, because it seizes us in this way. The human being’s neighborly love is directed toward individuals insofar as they are representatives of and participants in the world. But to enter into this relation, the particulars of the world too must undergo a reversal. In the elemental world, the world’s plenitude of particulars, each “a new negation of the Nothing” (48/45) (Tat, “No”), had united factually with worldly logos. In creation, we saw, this worldly essence reversed itself into worldly existence and found its very fulfillment as logos in the unified essential grounding which the creator provided for the particulars of existence. What occurs in redemption to the multiplicity of particulars which had joined with logos within the elemental world? These particulars were depicted as “groundless and directionless” as particulars, together forming a collective, a “whole of its parts,” in which each is determined solely through its place in the whole, solely insofar as it is not all its others. Now these

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

217

particulars seek to reverse themselves into something affirmative, something grounded and stable: Now the fullness, the individual must emerge. … Is there individuality in the world, which is not just in the delimitation over against other individuality and thus already on that account fundamentally transitory, because it doesn’t have the ground of its figure in itself …? Is there individuality which limits itself, determines its size and figure out of itself and can only be checked by others, not determined by them? There is such individuality in the midst of the world, scattered and not everywhere and strictly separated, but it is there, and its first beginnings are as old as creation itself – its name is: life. (247–8/222)

In its reversal into relation with the neighborly love of the human being, the world’s wealth of ephemeral, ungrounded particulars are to emerge with a kind of constancy, each with “the ground of its figure in itself.” From a collective of individuals in which each is defined solely through its relation to all others, the individuals of the world are to emerge out of this reversal self-determined. Pointing to the notion of the living organism as a “self-organizing being,”19 Rosenzweig designates this quality of having a “figure of one’s own” as life. And “while that fullness sprang out under the sign of the No, thus was transitory in itself, the living demands, as it now emerged under the sign of the Yes, eternity. It wants to persist in its figure” (249/223). Now, according to Rosenzweig, the living wants to persist in its figure, but left to its own devices, it lacks the ability to do so: “Life indeed wants to endure, but it wages a struggle with unsure outcome” (250/225). But in turning into relation with the human being, worldly life now attains the permanence it seeks. Just as divine love awakens the human self to become beloved faithful soul, an “I” with personal name, in revelation, so the neighborly love of the human being “makes the world into an ensouled [beseelten] world” (267/240). And it is precisely by being infused with soul that the life of the world gains its permanence. Rosenzweig writes, “Only when and where the ensouling [beseelenden] breath of love to the neighbor drifts over the members of this growing living being, only there does it achieve for its life what life itself could not give it: ensouling [Beseelung], eternity” (268/240). Over the course of time, neighborly love “ultimately reaches everything” (243/218) in the world, investing the particulars which make up the totality of the world each with its own self-grounded, permanent whole being, granting each of the world’s particulars “soul-filled being-of-one’s-own [seelenhaften Eigensein]” (268/240). As the relation between human being and world, redemption thus yields the unification of the singular free I-hood of the soul together with the totality of the particulars of the world. Through neighborly love, all particulars in the world attain “being of one’s own”; they become souls, whole individuals, even as they remain parts of the whole of the world. When this totality of all individual, self-grounded beings is united in neighborly love and in common recognition of God, we shall find, the “true All” will be realized. 19

Cf., e.g., Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werke V: 372.

218

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Neighborly love “ultimately reaches everything” – but as I have often noted, this realization of the “true All” has not yet reached its conclusion. We will yet devote considerable attention to the future character of the ultimate realization of the All in Rosenzweig’s account. We will have to determine, in this regard, both the manner in which the human being, in the middle of the All, experiences this futurity of redemption through anticipation, and the way in which her actions accelerate the arrival of that future. But I should stress, even at this point, that it is essential to Rosenzweig’s claim that the redemption that is thereby anticipated is conceived neither as a kind of return of human beings to a state of nature, nor as a human ascent beyond the limitations of the natural world, nor as a divine act upon the world: the redemption which human beings long for and pray for, according to Rosenzweig, is a relation between human beings and the world carried out under the auspices of God. Here we turn to explain how the last set of Rosenzweig’s reversals once again makes it possible for the elements to fulfill their potential through relation. We must show how, by becoming other than themselves as human lover and living member of the world, the elemental character of the human being and the elemental diversity of particulars of the world realize themselves.20 As I have already suggested, Rosenzweig’s account of the fulfillment of potential through relation in the case of redemption is made more complicated, and perhaps more compelling, by the fact that the relational fulfillment that the elemental human character and elemental worldly plenitude find in redemption is also the fulfillment of what remains unfulfilled through creation and revelation. That is to say, both the elemental world and the created world will realize themselves in the same form through redemption, both the elemental self and the faithful soul will realize themselves in the same form through redemption, and indeed, the elemental God, the God of creation and of revelation, will find ultimate realization, too, through redemption. The sheer number of different directions out of which the as-of-yet unfulfilled press toward the same realization in redemption serves as a kind of quantitative proof of the validity of Rosenzweig’s account of the realization of the All. But the different ways in which redemption fulfills all that goes before it in the system also leads Rosenzweig to bounce around among such avenues of fulfillment without warning in his account of redemption. I shall nonetheless try to deal with each fulfillment in turn. Human character had reversed from a one-time permanent stamping of human individuality with “being in the particular” into a loving force which dies and is renewed in every moment. We seek the way in which human character fulfills itself as what it is through this polar transformation. The beginnings of an explanation 20

Cf., Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, p. 204: “Redemption solidifies the relationship between the primal elements, especially those that unite man to the world, and so helps ‘realize’ what man and world actually are.”

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

219

suggest themselves when we recall the limitations Rosenzweig attributed to the elemental self. Closed in upon itself, we recall, the elemental human being was missing “all bridges and connections” to others, and this lack of connections, according to Rosenzweig, resulted in a lack of self-understanding of the self, a situation the ancients depicted in the image of the tragic hero: “He doesn’t understand what befalls him, and he is conscious of his not being able to understand” (85/78). Rosenzweig thereby implied that even in the elemental self ’s complete factuality, it was in need of connections with others in order to realize itself to completion. When Rosenzweig describes the change the self undergoes as it reverses its character into love of neighbor, he once again uses a model from the theater to explain his intentions. If the elemental self was embodied in the tragic hero lacking “all bridges and connection,” Rosenzweig suggests, the turn into relations which marks the human being who opens up in love to others is captured in the dialogue of modern theater. “In that the human being opens himself into a whole human being,” Rosenzweig asserts, “he now immediately becomes visible and audible. Yes, he can now force his becoming-seen and becoming-heard. He is no longer stiff marble statue as the tragic hero of antiquity. No, he speaks” (233/209). Because the hero of modern theater is a whole human being who speaks, he has the power to awaken others to recognize him for who he is. Even “the viewer,” according to Rosenzweig, “can do nothing else. He must recognize [erkennen] the hero – whom he sees willing and effecting – as alive. … The human being on the stage forces the human being in the audience into the feeling of being a fellow speaker with him” (233/209). Rosenzweig’s illustration of the redemptive human being through the model of the modern stage suggests that in opening up toward the individuals of the world in love, in reversing from the “being character” of the elemental self into a love capable of seizing and awakening other individuals to their own “I”s, the human being fulfills the need he had as element for “bridges and connections” to others. Through these connections, furthermore, the human being attains recognition from other individuals in the world. He speaks and forces his being heard. And those who hear him must acknowledge his living being and enter into discourse with him. This glimpse of how the elemental self finds fulfillment for its promise and overcomes its elemental limitations at once suggests an instructive parallel between what we observe now in the case of the human being in redemption and the fulfillment of the “unconditional being” of God which we surveyed in revelation. We found there, to our surprise, that in order for God to fulfill his unconditional being, he needed to be recognized as such by all those who were not properly God. Unconditional as it may have been within the elemental God, divine being was not recognized as present in the elemental world, and God had to awaken the potential for the unconditional in the human being through love, had to open the closed self into faithful soul, in order to receive the faithful recognition of his own divine being in return. The elemental human being’s need for “bridges and connections,”

220

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

and the way in which his “being in the particular” is reversed into a love of others just as God’s unconditional being reverses into divine love in revelation, suggests, once again, that what the self seeks in the reversal of his character into love in relation with the world is the recognition of his own “being in the particular.” In that the human being’s love for his neighbor in the world transforms that neighbor into “an I – a soul” like the human lover, into “a You like You” (267/240), I claim, the human being awakens an equal in his other, that is, the world, in order that there be an other outside him capable of recognizing, and thereby confirming, his own being. “The soul demands a branched-out life as the object of its ensouling,” according to Rosenzweig. “[The soul] exert its freedom upon it and ensouls it in all its individual members, inseminating this earth of living form with the seed of name, soul-filled being-of-one’s-own, immortality” (268/240). Rosenzweig highlights the soul’s demand for a “branched-out life,” in order to spread “name” and “soul-filled being-of-one’s-own” through “all its individual members,” I am suggesting, because the soul needs his own particular being to be confirmed by all other particulars in the world. In turning to his neighbor in love, therefore, the human being would be reenacting in his relation to his neighbor in the world the very loving awakening of the soul which God enacts in revelation and which leads the human being to confirm divine being in faith. If this conjecture is correct, then the elemental self fulfills its promise, is able to be itself as self, only when its “being in the particular” is recognized by others – others whom the self awakens to their own speaking selfhood through love. The realization of the selfhood of the self would then occur, once again, only through its reversal into relation. We find confirmation for such a conjecture in Rosenzweig’s explicit claim that the beloved soul of revelation seeks out its fulfillment in the same recognition from others which we have suggested the elemental self seeks. At the close of his discussion of revelation, Rosenzweig claims that in the very security which the faithful soul feels in being loved by God, in the very power she feels in her capacity to affirm God’s being through her own love in return, she senses, all at once, something missing. “At the peak of love, is there not some last thing that still separates them?” Rosenzweig asks. Does life not need more than … calling-by-name? Does it not need actuality? And out of the blissful overflowing heart of the beloved a sob climbs and forms itself into words, words which, stammering, point to something unfulfilled, something incapable of being fulfilled in the immediate revelation of love: “Oh that you were like a brother to me.” It is not enough that the beloved [i.e., God] calls his bride by the name of sister in the flickering half-light of allusion. The name must be truth, heard in the bright light of the street, not whispered in the beloved’s ear in the dimness of intimate solitude of two, no, before the eyes of the masses fully counted – “who would grant” this! (227/203)

In the very moment of revelatory love which fulfills the defiant freedom of the elemental self through its reversal into a faithfulness capable of holding firm God’s

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

221

being, we find, the soul remains unfulfilled. In what sense does revelation leave something unfulfilled? According to this passage, the very power of loving speech through which God calls the self by name and awakens her to her own “being in the particular” is not enough to make the faithful soul a whole human being in actuality. In awakening the human being to her “I,” I have claimed, God awakens within the human being a kind of unconditionality in finitude, an I-hood in that which is not divine. Opening up an “I-You” dialogue with the human being, God recognizes the human being – so vastly different from the divine – as an equal of sorts, as his “sister,” and God has his being confirmed, in return, by this different but equal human being. But Rosenzweig now suggests that the human being remains unfulfilled as an I, unrealized as God’s “sibling,” until the human being’s relation of equality with God is recognized “in the bright light of the street,” “before the eyes of the masses fully-counted.” The soul still longs for “an eternalization of love … which no longer grows in the I and You, but rather longs to be grounded in the view of all the world” (228/204). But Rosenzweig now asserts that the fulfillment which the soul seeks cannot be provided directly by God: The kingdom of brotherliness after which the soul longs … this bond of a beyondthe-natural, wholly personally-felt and yet wholly worldly existing community, can no longer be founded for her by the love of the lover. … Should this longing be fulfilled, the beloved soul would have to step beyond the magic circle of belovedness, forget the lover and open her own mouth, no longer to answer, but rather to her own word. (228/204)

In order for the soul to receive the recognition of “all the world” which it seeks so that its identity as self can attain full realization, Rosenzweig suggests here, the soul demands a “kingdom of brotherliness,” that is to say, a whole community of selves, different from each other and yet equal as speaking souls. Such a kingdom, according to Rosenzweig, would unite into one community the personal, “beyond-the-natural” [über-naturliche] self, experienced and awakened in revelation, together with the “worldly existing” particulars of creation. But such a community is not built directly by God, Rosenzweig asserts. The soul can hope to attain the fulfillment it seeks only when she “opens her mouth, no longer to answer” and confirm the being of God, “but rather to her own word,” to the word of love with which the soul turns to her neighbor in redemption. The “being in the particular” of the self which thus receives recognition and confirmation through the realization of the redemptive community of One and All, we may conclude, not only fulfills what was left promised in the character of the elemental human being. Through the awakening of a community of loving, speaking souls in the world, the “being,” the Sache, of the humble faithfulness of the soul attains its confirmation through recognition. The self who presses toward redemption is thus both the elemental self, whose character remains unfulfilled, confused, without “bridges and connections” to others, and the faithful soul, who longs to be called by name no longer in secret, but in “view of all the world.”

222

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

This world must likewise find the ultimate fulfillment for its elemental and creaturely promises in redemption. We recall how the world reversed itself from a plenitude of ephemeral particulars into a growing collection of living beings, each striving to determine and delimit its own figure, each striving for permanence. And here too, one last time, I wish to suggest that through this reversal, the elemental world’s quality as a totality of particulars is fulfilled and not abandoned. An argument to this effect is not far off. The active, negating pole of the elemental world was a totality of particulars, particulars which were themselves ephemeral, which lacked their own individual identities and which were to be identified only in the collective which they joined to form, only in the way in which each particular was “a ‘not-other’” of all its others. But that which does not have its own self-grounded identity in itself, that which does not have a “figure-of-one’s own,” one might suggest, cannot preserve its own distinctness from all others. Indeed, in our survey of the limitations inherent to the elements of the first part of the Star, we already discovered that the world, as totality of particulars, appeared to lack both the unity it would need in order to be a true totality, and the respective self-grounding of each of its particulars which it would need in order for its particulars to be, properly speaking, as particulars. In the essential power of the divine creator, we found, the world attained the fulfillment of the unity which it needed. In order for the totality of particulars that make up the elemental world to realize themselves as particular beings, these particulars would have to attain the very self-delimiting, self-determining figure toward which their reversal into the living beings of the redeemed world presses. The particulars of the elemental world only become particulars as such, they only fulfill their promise to be what they are, when they reverse into growing life and are as such met by the love which the human being extends to them, one by one. For as we have seen, “only when and where the ensouling breath of love to the neighbor drifts over the members of this growing living being, only there does it achieve for its life what life itself could not give it: ensouling, eternity.” Only in the “name, the soul-filled being-of-one’s-own” (268/240) which neighborly love has the power to awaken in it does the elemental world finally fulfill its potential, does it finally become the very world it has ever promised to be. The world longs for its ultimate fulfillment as a totality of self-grounded particulars in redemption from the standpoint of its creaturely existence as well. The world of creation, we recall, consisted of “things.” But it is characteristic of the “thing” that it “possesses no stability as long as it stands alone. It is certain of its singularity, its individuality, only in the multiplicity of things,” Rosenzweig suggested. “The thing has as determinate no essence of its own, it is not in itself, it is only in its relations. The essence that it has is not in it. … Its essentiality is set behind – not in – its determinateness” (148/133). Rosenzweig’s account of the thingly character of existing particulars suggests that the kind of essential grounding which God as creator gives the world may be enough to unite the world into

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

223

a unified whole – but it does not provide the particulars of the world each with its own essence. For the essence of the created world is always “behind it” and thereby is not truly its own; this is why, we suggested, the created world remains at risk to “sink away into Nothing” (247/221) until redemption. Insofar as it exists and only exists, every given thing “is not in itself.” For the created world to realize what it promises to be as a whole of existing particulars, Rosenzweig asserts, “for it therewith to become figure, kingdom, and not mere bound-to-the-moment appearing existence, it must receive essence, it must receive duration [Dauerhaftigkeit] for its momentariness, for its existence” (247/221). The created world of existence thus demands the same grounding of its particulars as particulars, the same “duration for its momentariness,” which the elemental world’s totality of particulars demands. And as the elemental world, the creaturely world finds its fulfillment, it realizes its essence, through its own awakening to the “soul-filled being-of-one’s own” which it attains in redemption. Thus, when the human being loves her neighbor in the world, and thereby awakens souls in the living world capable of recognizing her soulful being; and when the particulars of the world achieve through this love the secure self-groundedness as particulars that they seek, it is not only the elemental self and the elemental world which attain their ultimate fulfillment. The created world, the faithful soul – those very partial fulfillments which the elemental world and the elemental self attained, respectively, in creation and revelation – they too, having become promise once again, find their fulfillment in redemption. In redemption, the created world and the faithful soul unite to form the “ensouled world,” a “ramified life wholly fulfilled with soul” (269/241). In presenting this fusion of the singular, personally named faithful human being capable of securing the being of God together with the interconnected totality of worldly life, Rosenzweig presents for the reader the final stage of development toward the ultimate One and All. For the result of this fusion is none other than a totality of particulars who are both self-grounded and parts of the whole, and who are reciprocally united in love with one other. It is significant, however, that Rosenzweig contends that the interpenetration of soul and world, of revelation and creation, attains its peak not in the human being’s calling his neighbor in the world by name, that is to say, not simply in the soul’s reenactment of God’s loving call to the soul in revelation. The interpenetration of soul and world reaches its height, rather, only when the loving soul and living neighbor are united in a common call to – in the common recognition of – the very God each knew, in different ways, in revelation and creation. Rosenzweig depicts this ultimate redemptive harmony of soul and world in the collective recognition of God in the following vivid passage: The voice of the soul redeemed to harmony with all the world, and the voice of the world redeemed to common sensibility and song with the soul: how can these double-voices

224

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

sound-together into one? How could the separated find themselves, except in the unity of that before whom they sing, whom they praise, whom they thank? What binds the one voice of the summoning one with all the world? He is different from all the world: two kinds of subjects, two kinds of nominative. And what he has and sees is also different from that which the whole world has and sees: two kinds of objects, two kinds of accusative. Only He, whom he thanks, who is no object for him and thus bound to him, but rather “beyond” both him and all that can become object for him, only this is the same, whom the whole world thanks. Standing over against the beyond-all dative, the voices of this-side find their separate hearts. The dative is that which binds, which grasps-together. He to whom something is given, as thanks is given here, does not become thereby property of that which is given to him. He remains beyond the giver, and because He remains beyond the individual giver, so He can be the point, where all givers can unite themselves. The dative as this truly binding-one can be the truly freeing [lösende] for all not-truly, not-essentially bound, the redeeming one [das Er-lösende] – thank God. (259–60/232–3)

In the soul’s turning in love to his neighbor in the world, we have claimed, the self-turned-soul awakens the soul, the “I,” within this particular member of the world. But just as God’s turning in love to the self summoned an “I” who was God’s equal as “I” while being wholly different, so here too, the “soul” of the self and the “soul” of the living member of the world remain different in the equality love gives to them. The ultimate unification of the “All” they form occurs, therefore, not in each’s recognition of the other, but rather in the recognition of the God to whom they both give thanks. God is infinitely beyond world and soul. But the living particular members of the world, now having become souls for themselves, recognize God as their creator, and the individual selves who were awakened to their I-hood through divine love recognize God as their lover. Because God has both entered into relation with world and soul and at once remains beyond them, Rosenzweig suggests, he serves as “the point where all … can unite.” It is in this redemptive moment in which all particular souls in the world have joined through love in common recognition of the unconditional being of God, Rosenzweig asserts, that the “true All,” toward which the whole of the Star leads the reader, is first realized. In this All, God, world, and the human being, created things and beloved “I”s, are united. Thus Rosenzweig declares, “The redemption of the soul through the things, of the things through the soul happens in the duet of both, breathing in unison. … In redemption, the great And completes the arch of the All” (255/229). We will yet return to the manner in which the “And” of redemption secures the factuality of Rosenzweig’s system with the finality which the elements have sought since emerging from their nothings. Beloved soul and created thing find their fulfillment through their relations to each other in redemption. And in the “duet” they speak together recognizing God’s being, the “All” Rosenzweig could only “hope” to find when he set out, at the Star’s beginning, from the particular

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

225

nothings of God, world, and human being, is finally identified. Identified – not realized: for as we have repeatedly reminded ourselves, redemption, and the ultimate realization of the All it brings, remains future. If we recall our “excursus” on recognition and I-hood in our discussion of revelation, we may note here, finally, that the “All” which is attained in this moment of collective recognition of God by all individual selves in the world is a totality of “I”s. Just as we saw God become “I” in the moment God turned into relation with the human being in revelation; just as the human being awakens to her own “I” as a result of this divine call, so the act of neighborly love among human beings in the world is captured in the moment when the human lover discovers in her neighbor “a You like You, an I – soul” (267/240). In the moment of redemption, the fundamentally different elements of God, world, and human being have all arrived at a plane upon which they can be said to share a common identity, a plane upon which God, world, and human being is each “an I,” and upon which each is recognized by its others for being the I that it is. In the “true All” we identify in redemption, God, world, and human being are united in common reciprocal recognition as “I”s.21

i.8 Realizing the All: Redemption and the Futurity of Factuality With this identification of the All that has taken shape out of the reversals of the elemental God, world, and human being into reciprocal relation, we have reached the goal we set for ourselves in this section. The instability of the factuality through which the elemental God, world, and human being had attained figure over against their particular nothings led those elements into relations with one another. And yet, as we discovered, turning out of their elemental state into relation required that the elements give up the relatively secure, relatively unstable factuality they had attained as elements. It meant opening up what they had closed together, breaking up the figure they had attained over against their particular nothings. In short, in order to step into relations, we found, the elements had to undergo reversals. I set out to show that in turning out of themselves into those relations with their others which ultimately realize the All, the elements secure their individual identities even as the components that joined to form them reverse themselves into their opposites. Indeed, I proposed that Rosenzweig’s treatment of the reversals suggests that the elements can only realize their respective identities, can only fulfill the promise they hold as elements, through these reversals into relation with their others. Over the course of this section, we have thus interpreted Rosenzweig’s account of the reversals as demonstrating how God, world, and the human being 21

Martin Kavka notes the Hegelian tenor of Rosenzweig’s account of the reciprocal recognition that holds among God, soul, and neighbor. See his Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, pp. 149–53.

226

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

overcome their own elemental limitations and are first enabled to be what they are through the reversals into relation they undergo in creation, revelation, and redemption. My claim has been that Rosenzweig goes to such lengths to demonstrate that the elements first realize their promise as the God, world, and human being that they are through their reversals into those relations that realize the All, because it is only if the elements can be shown to realize their own respective being and not surrender it in the formation of the All that Rosenzweig can claim the All he attains over the course of the Star is the “true All,” the All which articulates both the collective unity and the most ultimate diversity which the system aims to achieve. If the path of reversals which the elements have to undergo in order to enter into reciprocal relations were solely a move of self-alienation of the elements, if the elements had to surrender their individual identities in order to find the security of their being as parts of the All, then Rosenzweig could not claim that the web of relations into which the elements enter realize the One and All in the true sense: Rosenzweig’s All would amount to the same reduction of particularity to unity which he accuses the German Idealists of perpetrating. Now, as isolated factual elements, each closed within itself, we recall, God, world, and the human being each made a claim to be the One and All. Each possessed, according to Rosenzweig, a “One-and-All feeling of its existence”; all “three were conscious of being One and All” (91,92/84). In turning out of themselves into relation, however, God, world, and human being each had to renounce its exclusive claim to be One and All. Not only did the elements thereby have to recognize the presence, the being, of their others; more significantly, each element had to recognize that it needed to enter into relations with these others in order to realize its own being. This was the gist of the very “genuine notion of revelation” which Rosenzweig posited as the answer to the instability plaguing the elements at the end of the first part of the Star: the “going-out-of-self, belonging-to-each-other and coming-to-each-other of the three ‘factual’ elements of the All” (127/115). Insofar as each “belongs” to the other, we found, each must seek out that aspect of its own being which can only be realized in and through relation to the other. Having thereby followed the path of relations the elements traversed after renouncing their respective claims to be the One and All, we have seen how these elements join to form “the All,” and I suggested that in the process of entering into the relations that form the All the elements fulfill their own respective identities. Remarkably, as we now begin to examine the nature of the “All” the elements have attained, we realize that in fulfilling to completion the promise each held within itself as element, God, world, and human being may at once each claim to be in reality the very “One and All” it claimed to be as element. In its very “being in the particular,” the elemental self presented itself as “single and nevertheless All” (69/64). In the All realized in redemption we found nothing less than the complete realization of all particulars as selves. As a totality of particulars, the elemental

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

227

world claimed to be “‘an’ All” (51/47). In the All realized in redemption we found nothing less than the supreme totality of all particulars, each grounded both in itself and in the unity of the created world, and all turned in common recognition of God. In the infinity of divine power and the unconditionality of divine being, God too was “conscious of being One and All”(92/84). And in the All realized in redemption, we found the very unconditional being and freedom that characterized God now realized in all particulars beyond God, particulars who at once recognized God both in themselves and beyond them. In a certain sense, then, we may say that God, world, and human being each is the One and All which is realized through redemption. But we can say so only in a certain sense. For if the All is to be not simply an aggregate of all particular beings, but rather a true unity, God, world, and human being cannot all be the One and All. And in truth, we have already seen that in the redemption of the world through the soul and the soul through the world, the distinctions that held firm through the course of the whole path to the All fall away. In the moment of redemption, the difference between self and world dissolves – they are one: the “ensouled world.” In that moment, according to Rosenzweig, the very reduction of selfhood to worldliness or worldliness to selfhood which philosophy has long proposed – erroneous at all moments leading up to that point – will in fact be true. Moreover, in God’s awakening of the elemental self ’s potential for the free affirmation of divine being, and in the subsequent awakening of self-grounded particularity and soulhood within the particulars of the world, God attains the realization of the unconditionality of his being which remained mere potential in the elemental God. We have noted how God is only able to be recognized as God by his others insofar as God awakens an I-hood that is at least significantly equal to God. And we have pointed out how the neighborly love of redemption awakens the “I”s that lie dormant within the world, as well. Seen from the standpoint of redemption, the process whereby God attains recognition from all particulars who are not God is thus at once, in an important sense, the realization of a plane upon which all can unite with and become equal to the divine. We might say that in the moment of redemption, God’s being is no longer confined to the elemental divine realm. In the moment of redemption, it would then be correct to say, God is the very totality of self-grounded particulars which make up the All. Rosenzweig declares: In the redemption of the world through the human being and of the human being in the world, God redeems Himself. Human being and world disappear in redemption. God, however, completes Himself. God first becomes in redemption that which the recklessness of human thinking sought everywhere and claimed everywhere, and yet found nowhere, because it was still nowhere to be found, because it was not yet: All and One. The All of the philosophers, which we had consciously broken into pieces, here, in the blinding midnight sun of the completed redemption is finally, yes truly final-ly [end-lich], grown together into One. (266/238)

228

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

In the “All” first realized in redemption, we see, the human being and the world do not simply realize their respective identities. They do so – as our account of the reversals has shown – but in the very moment they realize themselves, Rosenzweig suggests here, they at once “disappear” in the God who is – in that moment – the All they unite to form. In the course of the reversals into relations that realize the All, we have seen, particular beings only realize themselves through their unifying relations with others. At the culminating moment of this process, one might suggest, particular beings may be conceived both as completely individualized – each an “I” – and at once as completely intertwined, collectively unified, through their relations with all others. In this moment of redemption, then, the very unifying relations that make it possible for each particular to realize itself in the All at once make it possible to view the All as the unity these relations realize. In redemption, the unity and the diversity of the All are both realized to completion, and if this is the case, then in this final moment of redemption – and in this moment alone! – the “All” that takes shape can be conceived, with equal legitimacy, as a manifold diversity of particular beings that have arrived at unity, or alternatively, as a unity realized through the manifold diversity of particular beings. To see this unity of the All as it is glimpsed in this latter view of the ultimate moment culminating the course of the All, Rosenzweig suggests, is to see what God will become in redemption.22 In redemption, he thus suggests, the very pantheistic error of reducing all things to God, which philosophy has carried out, according to Rosenzweig, just as recklessly as it reduced selfhood and worldliness to each other, here too becomes true. Rosenzweig had already reached this conclusion in the “Urzelle,” we might recall, in which he writes, “in the end” – that is, in redemption – “the problem of ‘brothers in forests and grove, on the rock and in the water’ – solved by pantheism in every moment easily and cheaply with feeling – becomes actual.”23 It is God who completes himself in this ultimate brotherhood of all. God fulfills his elemental promise absolutely through the reciprocal redeeming which the world and the human being perform for each other. God realizes his own being in all through such soulful awakening of all particulars in the world in love which results in the collective recognition of and sharing in God’s own divinity.24 22

23 24

It remains an open question, to my mind, whether Rosenzweig intends this last moment of the course of reversals into relations, in which the All formed attains its ultimate redemptive and divine unity, to be conceivable in the discursive terms of the course of relations itself. On the one hand, Rosenzweig gestures toward such an account, especially when he depicts how the relations between selves and world “bind them ever more firmly into each other” until the point they are “redeemed” – unbound [er-löst] – through one another by God (255/228). On the other hand, as we shall see in the next chapter, Rosenzweig suggests that if the systematic unification of particular beings can be known through the discursive method of the reversals into relations, the unity of the system can only be grasped in its immediacy through an act of vision or intuition. GS 3, p. 132/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 62. Within time, then, it is correct to say, as does Alexander Altmann, that for Rosenzweig “God is not identical with the world but stands in relation to it,” “Rosenzweig on History,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, p. 137. But this is only correct, I submit, before the ultimate redemption when God

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

229

Only in this final moment of redemption, in which Rosenzweig identifies God as the subject who is the All, does the system which began in the particularity of nothingness attain its final unity. The whole Star, we have claimed, has led up to this crowning moment in which the All has “grown together into One.” Only in God’s ultimate fulfillment in redemption does there materialize the “All and One,” the “All of the philosophers,” which “human thinking sought everywhere and claimed everywhere.” At this apparent culmination of Rosenzweig’s systematic achievement, however, we are beset by a question which threatens to undermine the very validity of the “true All” Rosenzweig has taken such care to articulate. If world and human being collapse into one another in redemption, if then all worldliness and selfhood lose their respective differences and are taken up into God’s own fully realized being as the “All and One,” has Rosenzweig not committed the very error of reducing all particulars to the unity of the system which he set out to avoid – at all costs – in the Star? Does not the redemptive unity of Rosenzweig’s system preclude the possibility of the Star’s attaining the “true All,” an All which would articulate both the unity and the diversity of all that is without reducing one to the other? Does not Rosenzweig arrive, in truth, at “the All of the philosophers” – at the reductive All – rather than the true All, through his account of the relations among the elements which culminates in redemption? In fact, Rosenzweig’s specific criticism of “human thinking” in the preceding passage reminds us that we have already received Rosenzweig’s answer to our question. We have long ago noted that Rosenzweig does not criticize philosophy for its quest for the All as such; his is not a critique of totality per se. Rosenzweig criticizes philosophy for claiming the actuality of the All before that All is actual. Human thinking is “reckless” not because it tries to know the All, but because in its quest to do so it does not recognize that the All it seeks to know is not-yet. The All and One which God is to become in redemption is not yet the All and One. It is this seemingly small difference between a present All and a future All, Rosenzweig had already asserted in the “Urzelle,” which distinguishes the true system from the reductive systems of philosophy. Only insofar as the philosopher recognizes her position in the middle of the course of the realization of the system and not at its end, only insofar as she recognizes the realization of the All as still future, my interpretation of the “Urzelle” proposed, can she grasp all that is both will be the All which all beings strive to realize. Thus, I find unconvincing Altmann’s attempt to distinguish Rosenzweig’s conception of God in redemption from that of the late Schelling – according to whom, “God will be indeed all in all, and pantheism will be true” – by claiming that, according to Rosenzweig, God “will be the One above all, not the One in all.” For if, as Altmann proceeds to assert, “the final day beyond history belongs to God alone,” it is not at all clear how there would remain any “All” (besides God) above which God could be the One. One should compare in this context Rosenzweig’s statement in the “Urzelle,” noted previously, to the effect that in redemption “the problem of ‘brothers in forests and grove, on the rock and in the water’ – solved by pantheism in every moment easily and cheaply with feeling – becomes actual.”

230

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

in its diversity and its unity. For were the human being to think the All from the standpoint of the redemptive end of the system, were she to philosophize from the Absolute standpoint, from the standpoint of the God who will be the One and All at the end, I argued, she would grasp only the unity of the divine in whom the All grows into One.25 The unity of the system of One and All can only be known as future, Rosenzweig thereby suggested, for only as future does it preserve the independence and wholeness of particularity within the ultimate unity it promises.26 Rosenzweig’s insistence upon the futurity of the redemptive unity of the system led us to suggest that Rosenzweig introduces a notion of system as quintessentially human knowledge, as the form in which human beings grasp the totality of what is from the middle of that totality, rather than from its end. In the following section, we will turn to a more focused examination of the position and vocation of the human being in the middle of the All, in the middle of the very web of relations among the elements which we have documented in this section of our study. Before we do so, however, we must attend to the ramifications the futurity of redemption poses for the path of the elements to the All we have traversed thus far. The elements turned outside themselves, we have long claimed, in order to secure their respective being, and they thereby surrendered the “mere factuality” they had as elements in order to seek out a “grounded factuality” through revelation. Each element was itself already a fact, a Tatsache, we will recall, insofar as it constructed itself out of its particular nothing as the “And” of “Yes” and “No,” as the unification of Tat and Sache. It was only insofar as the elemental God, world, and human 25

26

Generally speaking, I think my understanding of Rosenzweig’s portrait of the unification of the All as future, and of Rosenzweig’s systematic standpoint as quintessentially human (i.e., as positioned in the middle of the system), shares much in common with Peter Eli Gordon’s account of Rosenzweig’s view of redemption as “redemption-in-the-world.” But I disagree with Gordon’s claim that the All at which Rosenzweig arrives articulates a “temporal holism.” Gordon asserts that the “new totality” arrived at in the Star “is altogether unlike the timeless totality of philosophical idealism,” insofar as “this new totality never cancels out the worldly and temporal qualities of man and world. While redemption brings man and world into a relationship with God, they are not fused with God such that they lose their distinctive characteristics,” Rosenzweig and Heidegger, p. 203. While it is true that, seen from the middle, the future unity of the All still permits a concomitant grasp of particulars as such, this future unity is still conceived by Rosenzweig as a moment of total unity. It is unclear, otherwise, how one is to read Rosenzweig’s claim that “human being and world disappear in redemption. God, however, completes Himself,” and other statements like it in the Star. Insofar as I take the unity of Rosenzweig’s system to be knowable only as future, I think my view of Rosenzweig’s system can serve as an important example of the “messianic epistemology” Robert Gibbs has shown governs important strands of German-Jewish thought. The crucial and at once fruitful difference between our views, it seems to me, is that Gibbs understands the completion of knowledge itself to be deferred into the future for Rosenzweig, whereas I understand Rosenzweig as claiming that the unity of the All which is future can yet be known as future in the present. See R. Gibbs, “Lines, Circles, Points: Messianic Epistemology in Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin,” Toward the Millennium, p. 363: “In their works we see the claim advanced that truth lies in the messianic future, and thus knowledge will be consummated in a future beyond our present. … In place of a view that holds that what is true is known in a present moment or that the originary past provides the truth, messianic epistemology holds out a hope for a future which can govern all knowledge.”

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

231

being were facts that they did not fall back into their respective nothings. The elements turned out of themselves into reciprocal relations, nonetheless, because the factuality they did possess was unstable. Over the course of our account of the elements’ reversals into relation, we have often noted that every relation among the elements not only fulfills the promises which the elements held, but also marks a step toward the ultimately secure factualization which the elements turned out of themselves into relation in order to attain. These steps themselves generated facts: the totality of things produced in creation was a fact formed out of the union of divine essential power (“Yes,” Sache) and the active existence of the world (“No,” Tat). The faithful soul awakening to I-hood and exerting her freedom in the confirmation of God’s being in revelation was factual because it was awakened through the union of divine love (“No,” Tat) and the humble way of being of the faithful (“Yes,” Sache). Redemption too is likewise a fact insofar as it is formed through the union of human love of neighbor (“No,” Tat) and worldly life (“Yes,” Sache). To call the products of creation, revelation, and redemption “facts,” we have claimed, is to suggest that each relation produces a new, higher level of real fixity, of security vis-à-vis the fall back into nothingness, than existed before. On the other hand, none of the factual steps toward the ultimately secure factuality which occurs in redemption is absolutely secure: just as the factuality of the elements allowed the elements to hold themselves out of their particular nothings, on the one hand, but was at once unstable, in need of securing, on the other hand, so each fact which emerges over the course of relations among the elements leaves the system more secure, more factual, than it was before but at once leaves all beings not-yet factual in the ultimate sense. Only in redemption, Rosenzweig asserts, will the elements attain the ultimate security, the ultimate factuality, which they seek. Only in the future redemption, that is to say, will the elements finally be absolutely secure over against the threat of falling back into their respective nothings. Rosenzweig notes the futurity of the ultimate attainment of factuality which the elements seek in their march to the All, in a striking passage which we had occasion to cite in our account of elemental factuality in the last chapter: All that still immediately depends on its beginning, is not yet factual in the full sense; because the beginning, out of which it originates, can always still absorb it back into itself again. This counts for the substance [Sache] that came into being as the Yes of the not-Nothing, as for the act [Tat] that came into being as the No of the Nothing. True duration [Dauerhaftigkeit] is always endurance [Dauer] into the future and to the future. Not what always was is durable [dauerhaft]: the world always was. Also, not what is renewed at all-times: experience is renewed at all times. Only what eternally comes: the kingdom. Not the substance [Sache], not the act [Tat], only the fact [Tatsache] is secure from the fall back into the Nothing. (269–70/242).

Rosenzweig reiterates here the structure of factuality which we have traced from the beginning of the Star. Neither “act” nor “substantiality” in isolation can sustain

232

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

itself over against nothingness; neither alone can be differentiated from nothingness. Only in their union of Tat and Sache, of “No-And-Yes”; only insofar as they are facts can particular beings and the relations among them be said to “be” and not be nothing. But this passage now suggests that the ultimate factualization, and hence the ultimate securing of being over against nothingness, has yet to come. The future redemption, the “kingdom,” as the ultimate “And” which will “complete the arch of the All,” unites the loving act of the soul and the living being of the world. In doing so, Rosenzweig has claimed, redemption also unites creation (“what always was”) and revelation (“renewed at all times”). But according to Rosenzweig, it is only in the unification of this final set of poles that factuality “in the full sense” is attained. It is only in the future redemption, that is to say, that all beings will be “secure from the fall back into Nothing.” Until this ultimate attainment of factuality, the particular nothings out of which the elements originated can still “absorb” them back again. Rosenzweig’s determination of factuality as future, in this passage, thus demands that we qualify radically the very factuality which we have attributed to elements and relations in their advance from particular nothings to the All. For while we have seen that everything and every event in actuality may be deemed a fact in a certain sense, it is no less true for Rosenzweig that nothing in actuality is truly a fact; nothing is factual in the “full sense.” Rosenzweig designates the “fact,” here, as something quintessentially future; he suggests that the only true, ultimately secure fact is the kingdom, the redemptive completion of the system in which God redeems himself through the unifying relation between the human being’s loving act and the world’s living being. In the middle of the system in which we stand, acts and beings, Taten und Sachen, still await each other and as such still stand at risk of falling back into Nothingness. When Rosenzweig tells us “all which still depends on its beginning is not yet factual in the full sense,” that only the future “fact” of the kingdom is secure, he thus implies that the so-called facts we experience are not yet secure as facts. Neither elemental facts, nor the facts of the created world, nor the fact of the affirmed Being of God, nor the facts of speaking selves, nor the fact of neighborly love is truly a fact yet; they still stand at risk of falling back into the Nothing. Thus we might say that the factuality of any given fact within the Star depends upon the future completion of the ultimate factual process of redemption of which it is a part. Now, when we recognize the factuality toward which the elements advance through relations as future, we are at once directed to clarify the kind of necessity we are to attribute to this elemental advance toward the All. I would like to qualify this “necessity” as follows: Rosenzweig’s account of the elements’ reversal into reciprocal relations which realize the All demonstrates what God, world, and human beings have to do in order to realize their potential, in order to fulfill the promise they hold within themselves as elements. But this is not to say that the elements have to reverse into relations. They do not have to realize their potential.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

233

This means, however, that while Rosenzweig can demonstrate why God, world, and human beings must join to form the All in order to realize their respective identities, he does not thereby demonstrate the necessity of the All – at least not in any conventional sense. The All is not yet actual, and its necessity cannot be derived from any principle that precedes it. Its realization still depends upon relations between acts and beings which have not yet occurred. For so long as these relations remain future, moreover, it is no more correct to say that the All is than to say that All is nothing. In the present, the All which will be in redemption may still fall back into nothingness. Now, as we have suggested, this enduring threat of nothingness serves a crucial role in allowing Rosenzweig to claim that the Star as system articulates the “true All” and not an All that reduces all particularity within the unity of its whole. Were the ultimate unification of the All already past, or were its realization necessary, a foregone conclusion, then one could no longer distinguish between the individual beings which join in the system and the ultimate unity they form. All beings would already be essentially the One All which they form through the system. In Rosenzweig’s account, therefore, the very particularity of the particulars in the system depends on the futurity of the completion of the system. The “being of one’s own” which the individual selves and living particulars in the world strive to attain in the system depends, paradoxically, on the very threat of nothingness from which they seek to redeem themselves. Said differently, our freedom, our ability to determine ourselves as individual beings, depends on the fact that we hover between the particular nothingness out of which we have emerged and the All toward which we are called. Our freedom is conditioned by the fact that we are participants in a web of relations among beings who likewise stand between their particular nothings and the All in which they would secure their respective being, beings for whom the attainment of this security depends on all others at once realizing themselves as individuals. I have the freedom to realize myself as a “whole human being,” and to confirm God’s being and love my neighbor in the process, thereby taking my place in the All. Or, I may fail or choose not to realize myself, and such a choice would not only leave me subject to the “fall back into the Nothing,” but impede the respective realizations of God and world, and hence impede the realization of the redemptive All. In the first part of the Star, we recall, Rosenzweig demonstrated the necessity of the factual construction of the elemental God, world, and human being by contrasting such constructions with those conceptions of God, world, and human being which do not construct the elements factually and which, consequently, cannot ultimately distinguish their gods, world, and human beings from nothings. In order to demonstrate the reality of human freedom within the All, Rosenzweig likewise presents his readers with examples of those human types who fail to realize themselves as “whole human beings,” who thereby take the path of “nothingness” rather than the path to the All. The human being may flee the call

234

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

of revelation: the “Urzelle,” we recall, cites “Lucifer’s pride or Jonah’s flight,”27 and in the Star Rosenzweig accuses “Idealism” of not being “of a mind to listen and to answer that voice which resounds in the human being apparently without ground, but thereby all the more actually” (161/145). We have already met the “closed human being” and the “mystic,” who close into their self-become-I-hood or into the loving relation with God and refuse to recognize the world as “created,” and as in need of human love. And Rosenzweig likewise points to the way in which the “sinner” and the “fanatic” “delay the coming of the kingdom” (306/275), by failing to love their respective neighbors in the world. These examples serve to demonstrate concretely the freedom the human being has within the All which is grasped in the Star as future. Faced with the decision between All and nothing, human beings may choose the latter. Rather than recognizing themselves as “responsible middlepoint[s]” of the All “around which everything [alles] turns” (461/414), they may “sink back into the closed” (230/206), and the loving action with which they are called on to turn toward the world thereby “would lose itself in the void [ins Leere]” (321/289). Thus the very futurity of the completion of the All which allows Rosenzweig to claim his system accounts for both unity and diversity places responsibility for this completion in the hands of human beings.28 The Star, which begins with the question of the “possibility of knowing the All,” here arrives at a conception of the All itself as possibility. By conceiving of the All as future, that is to say – and here we return to a claim made in our reading of the “Urzelle” – Rosenzweig presents system once again as task, as the program human beings are called upon to carry out. But if we suggest that Rosenzweig means to present the All as possibility, this possibility is to be thought no less conventionally than is the necessity attributed to the All. For while it is indeed the case that so long as God, world, and human being remain at risk to fall back into their respective nothings, the All cannot be said to be with certainty, and while the human being does maintain her own freedom with respect to the All she is called upon to take her place in, the future All is not thereby reduced to a mere fleeting matter of chance. While Rosenzweig would seem to have to concede the possibility that all human beings – indeed, that God and all those particulars in the world, as well – could choose nothing, or simply fall back into nothingness rather than realize the All, the methodological consistency of the reversals into relation among the elements that point toward redemption assumes at once that in the course of time the All will be realized. You or I might 27 28

GS 3, p. 134/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 65. If Bernhard Casper is correct in claiming that the question Rosenzweig poses in the Star is “how is the totality of reality thinkable in such a manner that responsibility in its irreducible factuality is rescued and even becomes the center of what is to be penetrated and exposed by philosophical thinking,” “Responsibility Rescued,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, p. 91, then this futurity of the completion of the All might be seen as the key to Rosenzweig’s answer to this question.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

235

fail to take up our place within the All, but there will be others who will take up the call. Moreover, as the course of reversals into relations advances from creation to redemption, we have seen, the number of directions from which all particular beings and relations push toward their realization in redemption multiplies geometrically. Rosenzweig speaks of the “necessary and nevertheless … incalculable growth of the kingdom” (252/226). He thereby implies that the futurity of the All may be claimed to hold the necessity of the system together with freedom within the system. The All is not-yet, and its realization is incalculable insofar as it is subject to the free choices of those particulars who join to form it. But it is no less true to say that the All IS not-yet; it IS as future, hidden as promise within our presentday actuality in the middle of the system. If the “recklessness of human thinking” has sought and claimed the All to be everywhere, and yet found it nowhere, the primary goal of the Star is to show the reader where the One and All truly is. And the Star meets this goal by demonstrating the All to be not-yet, and to be knowable only as not-yet. The systematic character of all things, the way in which they form the One and All, we have claimed, can only be known from the middle of the system, where particularity is actual and unity is future.29 In asserting “the possibility of knowing the All” as not-yet, in seeking to demonstrate the possibility of systematic knowledge from the standpoint of the middle of the system, however, Rosenzweig does not merely tell the story of the relations among the elements that form the All through the discursive account of the reversals which we have followed. Rosenzweig proceeds to show the reader how her experience of actuality is stamped by her position in the midst of those very relations that lead toward the unification of the All. He shows his readers how they, as fellow middle points of the All, can find the path to such knowledge of the All within which they stand through the thought and experience to which they have access. The reversals, to which we have devoted so much attention over the course of this chapter, play an important role in laying out the path upon which Rosenzweig leads his readers. This is because, we shall find, Rosenzweig understands the reversals as accounting not only for the relations among the elements, but for experienced actuality as well. In the following section, we shall have to take seriously Rosenzweig’s claim that what we have come to think through the reversals are relations among the elements which we experience, standing as we do in the middle of the All. Rosenzweig understands the relationship in which our thought stands to our experience as offering unique evidence to the reader that confirms the very discursive account of the elements’ path to the All which we have traversed thus far in the chapter, and this relationship between thought and

29

Cf., Kenneth Hart Green, “The Notion of Truth in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” Judaism 7, 3 (1987), p. 309: “Final truth is ‘messianic’, or lies in the future for man; man’s being is in the middle, and he can only await and anticipate the final truth, which is God’s fully revealed Being as One and All.”

236

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

experience does much to determine the path upon which Rosenzweig leads his readers toward knowledge of the All. The following section will show how the human experience of actuality is grounded in the very same reversals into reciprocal relation the elements undergo on their way to realizing the All. This account of experience will also reveal epistemological consequences which could not be drawn from the story of the elements’ reversals itself. The path upon which Rosenzweig leads his readers toward knowledge of the All reaches a turning point, we shall find, in the recognition of what Rosenzweig sees as the “miraculous” relationship that holds between our ability to think the generation of the elements out of their nothings and our experience of the relations among the elements in the middle of the All.

II. Experiencing System from the Middle ii.1 The Human Being as the Height of Factuality: Reversals, Relations, and Experienced Actuality If God, world, and human beings reverse themselves into relations in order to attain the “grounded factuality” they lack as individual elements, our account of those relations culminated in the realization that the factuality which they seek will be attained only in the future redemptive unification of the All. The possibility of falling back into nothingness, which threatens all beings until this future completion of the All, at once ensures the freedom of those individual beings within the system. The realization of the All depends, we have found, on these individuals’ choosing All over nothing. The ultimate fact of redemption, we might say, depends on the acts of human beings. Even as the Star directs its readers toward the future moment in which the realization of the All will be completed, therefore, its focus at once gravitates back to the middle of the system, at which point human beings exist and love, decide and act, and from whose standpoint alone, Rosenzweig has suggested, they can claim to know the All that is not-yet. “All knowledge of the All begins in death, the fear of death,” one may now propose, not simply insofar as the particularity of our own personal nothingness revealed in the fear of death leads us to take seriously the way in which all particulars may be grasped as rooted, originally, in their own respective particular nothings. Fear of death may be grasped as the beginning of knowledge of “the true All” because it is only in the awareness of our own suspension over our respective nothings that we come to recognize the responsibility we bear within the course that stretches from out of the particularity of nothing to the redemptive unity of the All. Fear of death points to the freedom we possess as particulars, to our remarkable capacity, as finite beings, to secure the very being of God and to awaken the “I”s of the world. Only insofar as we recognize the risk of falling back into nothingness wrapped up in the fear of death do we grasp the

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

237

All properly as not-yet, and only thus can we come to recognize our freedom and responsibility within the All as actual. The human being is the “responsible middlepoint” (461/414) of the All, and thus, even though the factuality of the system, “in the full sense,” may be future, Rosenzweig declares that as human being, one “finds oneself as the height of factuality.”30 The human being does so, one might suggest, insofar as the human being is the site of every one of the factual relations among the factual elements God, world, and self which we have surveyed. Indeed, what distinguishes the human being from all other beings, in Rosenzweig’s account, is that all these trails that extend out of the particularity of nothings center themselves around the human being on their way to the All. For in being born as part of the world, the human being experiences the factual relation between God and world that is creation; as free self who awakens to her own free and faithful I, she experiences the factual relation between God and human being that is revelation; as loving soul and beloved neighbor, she experiences the factual relation between human being and world that is redemption. The human being experiences herself as the “height of factuality,” furthermore, because as creature in the world and beloved I of God she experiences in her own being both the “Yes” of creation and the “No” of revelation, and at once the force of need with which both seek their fulfillment in the unifying “And” of redemption. Having thus observed the elements generate themselves out of their particular nothings, and having traversed with them the course of reversals into relations they must undergo in order to attain the security of their respective being, we find in the middle of all these relations the very two-sided human being, determined by “two relations to the Absolute,” to whom Rosenzweig introduced us, as the summation of that conception of system which crystallized for him in the “Urzelle.”31 Our last section presented the reversals as serving an indispensable function in demonstrating how the elements fulfill their respective being only by becoming their opposites on the way into those relations with their others that form the All. But the reversals serve an additional methodological function in the Star, as well. Rosenzweig claimed, we recall, that the factual generation of the elemental God, world, and self can be thought according to the pure mathematical model of the infinitesimal. But we were only able to “think” the relations among these purely constructed elements that create the actuality we experience in that we learned to think according to the reversals that govern such relations. In reversing our way of 30 31

Gritli-Briefe, p. 236. It would be valuable to explore how Rosenzweig’s account of the human being’s “two relations to the Absolute” in the “Urzelle” becomes what amounts to a subcase of factuality in the Star. That is to say, what we discovered in Chapter 2 to be Rosenzweig’s view of the twofold character of human beings, on the one hand, and the essence of science (as coitus of two sciences), on the other, may both be claimed as manifestations of the truth of factuality through which alone being is distinguished from nothing.

238

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

thinking from out of a realm of “pure thought,” that is, the realm of the elements, to that of the relations among the elements, Rosenzweig now suggests, we have discovered a way to think that empirical actuality which is not inherently amenable to thought. Rather than assume that we can think actuality without further ado, Rosenzweig here suggests that thought must undergo a reversal in order to be able to articulate the actuality we experience. The reversals may thus be understood as serving parallel ontological and epistemological functions in the Star: the elements reverse themselves into relations in order to fulfill their potential, but this course of fulfillment creates the actuality we experience – rather than a pure theoretical construct – because these selfsame reversals transform the elements which are inherently thinkable into empirical actualities.32 As a result, when we learn to think according to the path of reversals which the elements have taken into relation with one another, we learn at once to conceive in thought what we experience in actuality. The fact that our experience of actuality can be understood as the product of the “reversals” of elements which we can think, or as the “fulfillment” of what was “promised” within these thinkable elements, has important epistemological consequences within the Star. Before we examine these consequences, however, we must outline briefly how the reversals into relation that lead the elements to form the All really do account for human experience. In analyzing the technical complexities of the reversals, we have tried to bear in mind that Rosenzweig’s account of the advance of the elements into those relations that form the future All is not merely an abstract demonstration of the identity and difference of all beings. Rather, the reversals at once seek to explain why human beings experience their actuality in the manner in which they do. In experiencing ourselves as existing parts of the world, as individual free personal selves, as called upon to act in the world, Rosenzweig suggests, we experience system. We experience the different moments of identity and difference that mark the advance of the elements through relation toward their mutual fulfillment in the All. Rosenzweig’s account of the relations among the elements in the second part of the Star offers an account 32

In recognizing the reversals as necessary in order for the pure elements to generate the actual, Rosenzweig may well be said to adopt Schelling’s methodological stipulations. Scholars have often compared the relationship between the first and second parts of the Star to the relationship between negative and positive philosophy in Schelling’s late work, a comparison Rosenzweig himself suggests in “The New Thinking.” In his later work – in his History of Modern Philosophy and his Philosophy of Revelation in particular – one of Schelling’s standard lines in criticizing Hegelian dialectic is to claim that Hegelian negation fails to account for the leap from the realm of thought to that of empirical actuality. Schelling points to the way in which Hegel uses the same kind of negation to account both for differences between determinations of thought and for the difference between thought as a whole and actuality (e.g., between logic and nature), even though the latter is clearly a difference of a very different kind than the former. According to Schelling, such a difference as that between thought and actuality could only be thought if one recognized the utter reversal (Umkehrung) thought must undergo in order to present actuality. See, e.g., Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42, p. 132, and Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, Werke I/10, 572.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

239

of this experience of system that both draws on the “Urzelle”’s account of the “two relations to the Absolute” in which the human being stands at the middle of the All and at once roots this account in a groundbreaking analysis of the human experience of temporality.33 In what follows, I do not attempt to give an exhaustive account of the portrait of experience Rosenzweig offers in the Star. Instead, I will simply highlight two of the most basic characteristics of this portrait. I wish to note, as I have claimed, that Rosenzweig’s account of the relations among the elements which generate the All is at once meant to be understood as an account of human experience. And I wish to point to the ways in which this account shows how human beings experience moments of system in a manner indelibly stamped by their position in the middle of the system. In what follows, we will attend to these goals in brief reviews of Rosenzweig’s temporal analyses of creation, revelation, and redemption.

ii.2 “Already-Being-There”: Experiencing Creation from the Middle In creation, we recall, God and world reversed themselves into relation, yielding a totality of interrelated particulars – existing things in the world – that were grounded in the unity of the creator. In our account of the reversals, we noted Rosenzweig’s suggestion that the conception of creation as the relation between God and world is true to the way in which we experience our worldly existence.34 Rosenzweig is intent on showing that our experience of creation is marked, moreover, by our position in the middle of the course of the All. As human beings in the middle of the system, we awaken to our “creature-consciousness” in a world whose existence has the character of “already-being-there [Schon-da-sein].” The moment we are aware of our existence, we find ourselves existing among other beings and related to them in myriad ways, but we recognize that we did not put ourselves in this place among beings. Our creatureliness is not something we ourselves create, but rather our creation is our entrance into a worldly totality that is already there.35 In “the concept of creation,” in “the idea of being from the beginning included in the notion of being-created ‘in the beginning,’” according to Rosenzweig, “we learn that the world is there before everything. Simply there” (146/131–2). This quality of “already-being-there” which brands creation, one might suggest, is the 33

34 35

Peter Gordon touches on some of the parallels between Rosenzweig’s and Heidegger’s treatment of the issue of temporality in his Rosenzweig and Heidegger, pp. 224–8. But the complexity of the relation between Rosenzweig’s account of the temporality of human existence in the Star and the second division of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time devoted to “Dasein and Temporality” calls out for an independent in-depth study. A reading of Heidegger has certainly shaped my depiction of the temporal experience of the human being in the middle of the All – but what follows is certainly no substitute for a thorough comparison. See Section I.2. Compare Heidegger’s notions of “In-der-Welt-sein” and “Schon-sein-in,” in Being and Time, e.g., Division One, Chapter II.

240

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

form in which we experience the unique kind of essential grounding which the world attains in creation. The essence of the created world, we will recall, lies not in the world itself but belongs to it only by virtue of its reversal into relation with God the creator. The world’s “essentiality” thus remains “behind not in its determinateness” (148/133), a trait we experience as the “there before everything” quality of the created world of which we are a part. Rosenzweig suggests this quality of “already being there” stamps our experience of createdness in two basic ways. First of all, insofar as creation positions us within a world that is “already there,” we experience our own createdness as our link to what is quintessentially past. Second, because we are aware of ourselves as the objects of creation rather than its subject, “creature-consciousness is something thoroughly objective” (133/120). Insofar as human beings are parts of the world, Rosenzweig suggests, they share the quality of thingliness, of objectivity, of being rooted “in the beginning,” which all other worldly existents possess. Now, our experience of creation as existence within a world that is “alreadythere” reflects the fact that we stand neither at the beginning nor at the end of the systematic realization of the All, but rather in the middle of the All. Rosenzweig contrasts this view of the human being as middle of the system to the early German Idealist presentation of the self as first principle and beginning of the system. According to Rosenzweig, “the ‘I’, the ‘subject’, the ‘transcendental apperception,’ ‘Spirit,’ ‘Idea,’ – all these are names which the self takes on” in German Idealism, “after it decided to take over the position of the generator. … It can now ‘generate’ the world. It generates it out of itself … as not-I” (152/137). To present creation as the human being’s entrance into a totality which he did not create, which is already there, suggests, to the contrary, that the human being experiences this beginning from the middle, from whose standpoint this beginning is primordially past.

ii.3 The Call to I-Hood and the Call to System: Experiencing Revelation from the Middle In revelation, we recall, God and the human being reverse themselves into a relation of love through which the individual human being is awakened to her own quintessential I-hood, and in which she realizes the unconditional freedom she has as particular self in the affirmation of the unconditional being of God. In our reading of the “Urzelle,” we pointed to the manner in which Rosenzweig’s conception of the “I” differs from that of some of his Idealist predecessors. If Fichte’s 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, for example, presented the I as a primordial act of selfpositing whereby the I freely asserts itself,36 the “Urzelle” presents the human I as dependent upon a call from the Absolute for its self-awakening: “His I is dull and 36

See Chapter 1, Section V.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

241

dumb and awaits the saving word from the mouth of God.”37 In the Star’s account of revelation, we have seen, Rosenzweig continues to maintain that the human being only awakens to her own personal identity through a reversal into relation with the divine other. But in the Star’s account, the form and the content of the divine call are given their essential determinations. God does not simply call the human being by name or summon the human being to hear and speak. God commands the “individual human I” to love Him, and the human being experiences this command to love with the immediacy of the present.38 Thus, if the experience of creation is stamped by the past tense, the divine command in revelation, according to Rosenzweig, “is pure present”; “it is the today in which the love of the lover lives” (197, 198/177). Only God’s command – “love me!” – bearing the immediacy of the present moment issues a “shocking, seizing, tearing” (200/179) force necessary to awaken the human being to her own singularity, out of her closedness within the created web of existing things in which she has hitherto lived. It is thus central to Rosenzweig’s account of the human being in the middle of the All that she is torn out of her worldly existence and awakened to her own I-hood not through an act of pure self-positing, but through a reversal into a relation of love with God. And while Rosenzweig claims interhuman love is merely a parable of this divine love,39 he thereby suggests that we experience our original awakening to our singular calling and person as individuals much as one might suggest we come to learn about who we are through our most intimate loving relationships with others. Now, Rosenzweig suggests that the moment of awakening to oneself as “I” is experienced as a being torn out of one’s worldliness.40 “What has a personal name can no longer be thing,” he asserts. “It no longer has its place in the world … but rather it carries its here and now around with it. Where it is, is a middle-point, and where it opens its mouth, is a beginning” (208/186–187). But at the same time, the love with which the human being is pulled out of the world to her I-hood both points back to its own grounding within the created world and at once sends the newly self-conscious “I” back into that world. Defining moments in one’s life, one 37

38

39 40

GS 3, p. 131/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 61. It should be noted that a scant two years after the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte offered an alternative account of the I’s self-determination as triggered by a “summons” [Aufforderung] from another self-consciousness. See J. G. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre [1796], in sämmtliche Werke III, pp. 32–6. This notion of the “summons” may well be said to foreshadow Rosenzweig’s account of the self ’s being awakened to I-hood through revelation. See also Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s parallel account in Angewandte Seelenkunde, p. 754. For a fine account of how Rosenzweig’s conception of revelation seeks to overcome the formalism of the Kantian moral law, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Rosenzweig and Kant: Two Views of Ritual and Religion,” Divided Passions, especially pp. 293–5. Cf., Stern, p. 224/Star, p. 201. Compare to Division II, Chapter II, of M. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, “Die daseinsmässige Bezeugung eines eigentlichen Seinkönnens und die Entschlossenheit,” pp. 267–301.

242

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

might suggest, shed light on the past and suggest the way one’s past has prepared for and led up to these very defining moments. It is in this sense that Rosenzweig implies that the present moment of revelation includes a “glance backwards [through which] the past proves itself as ground and prediction of the present experience housed in the I” (207/186). And at once, the present moment of revelation demands a fulfillment it will only find in the future redemption: “The personal name demands names outside of itself, as well” (208/187). Indeed, in our account of the factuality attained and still lacking in revelation, we found that the humble soul beloved of God seeks a fulfillment for her own being loved in the recognition of that love by “all humankind.” Such a recognition of God’s love for the individual human being and of the human being’s realization of her own free I-hood in the affirmation of the divine could only occurs, we discovered, in the ultimate redemptive kingdom built out of human love of neighbor in the world. The very presentness of the experience of revelation is thus inseparable from a push toward the future redemption: “Revelation culminates in an unfulfilled wish, in the cry of an open question,” “the soul must pray for the coming of the kingdom” (206/185). But should the longing with which revelation culminates be fulfilled, we have already seen, “the beloved soul would have to step beyond the magic circle of belovedness, forget the lover and open her mouth … to her own word” (228/204). The fact that the very presentness of the experience of revelation presses forward to its fulfillment in redemption, the fact that the moment of the human being’s awakening to her I-hood points forward to her redemptive vocation in the world, suggests how intimately the awakening of one’s individual I is intertwined with one’s vocation within the All. Indeed, insofar as “the love of God should express itself in the love of neighbor” (239/214) the call to I-hood at once expresses itself as the call to system: it is the call to take up one’s vocation as “I” within the course of the realization of the All.41 Revelation itself thus marks the middle moment within the human being’s existence at the middle of the All. It is an experience which finds its ground and prediction in past experiences “already there” in creation and which points to its fulfillment in the ultimate redemption of the future. As “midpoint and beginning,” the human being, equipped with personal name, stands in the middle of the All and at once at the beginning of a series of relations of love which she initiates the moment she turns out of the “magic circle” of divine love and takes up her vocation of love in the world. In thus pointing forward, the presence of revelation demands an account of the experience of the future redemption, as well. 41

We arrived at the same conclusion regarding the intertwined nature of the call to selfhood and the call to system in our reading of the “Urzelle,” in Chapter 2, Section II.2, especially in our discussion of the “secret will to system.”

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

243

ii.4 Anticipating the Kingdom: Experiencing Redemption from the Middle We have seen how redemption unites the human being and the world in a collective recognition of God which inaugurates the ultimate unification of the All. And we have already suggested that the human being experiences this final relation among the elements as quintessentially future. This future redemption, according to Rosenzweig, is a state we anticipate from our position in the middle of the system. It is through anticipation, that is to say, that we experience the unification of the All properly as “not-yet.” Through anticipation we experience both the fact that we do not stand as Absolute at the end of the system and at one and the same time the way in which this end of the system is still present for us as future, as notyet.42 The kingdom is “always already there as future.” It is “a future which, without ceasing to be future, is nevertheless present” (250/224). To anticipate this future means, according to Rosenzweig, “that the end must be expected at each moment” (252/226). This is why, Rosenzweig asserts, the futurity of redemption is distorted when it takes on secular form in the modern notion of “infinite progress.” The future is to be distinguished from the past precisely by its not being an infinite series, but rather “a tomorrow that could just as well be today” (250/224). Indeed, “without this anticipation and the inner drive to it,” Rosenzweig asserts, “without the ‘wanting to bring the messiah before his time’ and the attempt ‘to force the kingdom of heaven,’ the future is no future, but rather only a past projected forward, drawn in infinite length” (253–4/227). It is only by designating our experience of the future unification of the All as anticipation, as a pulling of the future into the present, that Rosenzweig is able to preserve the position of the human being within the middle of the All.43 For were the future unification of the All conceived as an “infinite task,” as the end point to an infinite series, any given human decision for or against the All would become infinitely inconsequential. It would make no sense to speak of the human being as “responsible midpoint” (461/414) of a system whose unification is grasped as infinitely removed from the present.44 But we might also suggest that Rosenzweig’s 42

43

44

Compare Heidegger’s discussion of vorlaufende Entschlossenheit [Anticipatory Resoluteness] in Sein und Zeit, pp. 301–10, 316–30. See Chapter 5, Sections II and III, for Rosenzweig’s account of communal prayer as a means of anticipating the kingdom of God. Cf., Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, p. 195: “What Rosenzweig calls the ‘eternity’ of life is really the eternity of a temporal orientation; it is a stance toward the future that nonetheless remains within time.” In this context, we may recall Rosenzweig’s rejection, in his “Oldest System-Program,” of the notion of system as “infinite task” which was prevalent among neo-Kantians such as Cohen. See Chapter 1, Sections I and IX. Rosenzweig seems to have been troubled by this way of grasping the future goal of knowledge as an “infinite task” from early on in his thinking. On March 4, 1908, he already notes, in a diary entry, “In its goal lying in the infinite, natural science has in principle something inexperienceable for it. … One naturally never comes nearer to the infinite, even if one advances in the finite in the direction of a point lying in the infinite. This is the immanent antinomy of natural science,” Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 [diary transcripts in series II, subseries II, box 1, folder 21], Leo Baeck Institute, p. 28. In Rosenzweig’s later writings, however, he denies that such a view of the

244

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

account of anticipation is not simply an argument over authentic or inauthentic conceptions of the future. Rosenzweig seems to claim that we really do experience the future through anticipation. We experience our goals, the tasks we take on, not as ends infinitely removed from us, and thus unrelated to our present. We experience the future we work toward as imminently as if we could reach out and touch it, no matter how remote that future may be. Only thus, we might suggest, is the future truly experienced, rather than depicted abstractly.45

ii.5 The Reciprocal Confirmation of Promise and Fulfillment We have given this brief survey of Rosenzweig’s account of the human experience of creation, revelation, and redemption in order to highlight the fact that the reversals into relation which God, world, and self undergo on their path to the All are not simply steps in a theoretical construction. These reversals into relation create the actuality we experience, and our experience of that actuality is stamped by our position in the middle of the All. Rosenzweig’s account of creation as our link to what is already there, of revelation as our ever-present awakening to “I”-hood, of redemption as a not-yet we anticipate, is thus meant to show us that we do in fact experience the very relations among the elements we have learned to think through the reversals. Now, insofar as the reversals allow us to trace the course the elements take from thinkable potentials into relations which generate our experienced actuality, we may say that the promises which we found inherent to the elemental God, world, and human being find their fulfillment in relations to which we have access in our experience. We do not merely have the ability to trace such reversals in thought – we actually experience these reversals into relation as the root events of our lives. Rosenzweig takes this relation between what can be thought and what can be experienced as a matter of no small consequence. Indeed, Rosenzweig asserts that it is nothing short of miraculous that we experience the fulfillment of what we find as promise or potential through our thinking.46 Rosenzweig suggests, moreover, that in discovering how we experience the fulfillment of what we find promised in thought, we are each given evidence,

45

46

future as “moves the goal into the infinite” may be attributable to Cohen. See, e.g., “Einleitung in die Akademieausgabe der Jüdischen Schriften Hermann Cohens,” GS 3, pp. 196–7. Cf., Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, p. 77: “The use of the cohortative, even in the present, anticipates a future. … The future of the cohortative is ours to make, and by asking us to do it, I provide us with an experience of the future today.” Rosenzweig makes the claim that this fulfillment of our thought in experience, which we have traced through the path of the reversals, is a miracle in the precise and original sense of the term. In a paper, “ ‘The More Miraculous, the More True’: Rosenzweig’s Prophetic Philosophy,” delivered at the 37th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, I have claimed that Rosenzweig’s account of miracles in the Star is only a thinly veiled announcement that Rosenzweig himself performs miracles before his readers when he shows them how the elements they have come to think through the infinitesimal method are fulfilled in their own experience. Here I have also stressed the epistemological weight which such miracles are intended to hold within the path to knowledge of

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

245

within ourselves, that gives credibility to his account of how the elements turn out of themselves into relations on their way to realizing the All. Rosenzweig’s readers need not accept his account of the All on the strength of his discursive demonstration of the reversals alone. Rosenzweig shows his readers that they have their own means of testing out his account of the All: having learned to think the generation of the elements out of their respective nothings in the first part of the Star, and having come to recognize the experience of the relations of creation, revelation, and redemption as the key moments in their lives, they can judge his account of the All on the basis of the relationship they discover within themselves between their own thought and their own experience. What kind of evidence does Rosenzweig suggest we are given in this relationship of promise and fulfillment that holds between thought and experience? Rosenzweig implies here that in this relation of promise and fulfillment, thought and experience reciprocally confirm one another, and that the reciprocal confirmation between them amounts to real evidence as to the truth of what is discovered through them. In making such a claim, one might suggest, Rosenzweig follows in Kant’s footsteps. Convinced that experience alone could produce no universal and necessary knowledge, but at once wary of the wild speculative flights to which thought is prone when not limited to the bounds of possible experience, Kant sought to spell out the a priori conditions for the possibility of experience in his Critique of Pure Reason. His method in doing so, he claimed, in the preface to the second edition of the book, was “to seek the elements of pure reason in that which admits of being confirmed or refuted through an experiment.”47 While thought or experience each on its own could yield no certain knowledge, Kant thus suggested that if “when things are considered from this twofold standpoint there is agreement with the principle of pure reason,” then the principles of reason could be considered “confirmed” through experience. Rosenzweig argues in a vein similar to Kant, I would suggest, in claiming that when thought and experience can be shown to corroborate one another, their joint evidence gains a credence that each lacks on its own.48 For example, as we noted in the third chapter, the self-construction of the elements out of their nothings in the first part of the Star lacks certainty, and Rosenzweig claims it would remain mere “possibility” were the elements not shown to reverse themselves into relations that create the actuality we experience. In the “Transition” between the first and second

47 48

the All in the Star. I hope soon to develop this argument further in an article. But see Paul MendesFlohr, “Rosenzweig’s Concept of Miracle,” Jüdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott, pp. 53–66. CPR, Bxviii–xix. In his First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, Schelling describes the relation between thought and experience in empirical science as an example of prophecy: experiments may be said to fulfill the very judgments or questions which inspire and direct the scientist to carry them out. Thus, “every experiment is a prophecy,” Schelling claims, insofar as “every experiment contains an implicit a priori judgment,” “Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie,” Sämmtliche Werke I/3: 276.

246

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

parts of the book, Rosenzweig thus asserts, “whether the elements were more than mere ‘hypotheses,’ only their capacity for building the visible course [of actuality] can confirm” (91/83). He suggests, thereby, that it is only the experience of the relations among those elements whose generation the Star’s first part traces in thought which “confirms” the truth of those theoretical constructions. It is only insofar as our experience of actuality can be shown to confirm what is thought in the elements – to fulfill what is promised in them – that Rosenzweig may “admit that to the nothing of our knowledge there corresponds an ‘actual Nothing’” (96/88). Our capacity to think may thus allow us to grasp the elements of the All: the factual God, world, and human being. Our experience of actuality may articulate different moments of systematicity: the “already-there” groundedness of all worldly particulars in the unity of the creator, the presence of my awakening to I-hood and the vocation in the world this awakening bestows upon me, the anticipated future unification of All. But it is the relation of reciprocal confirmation, of promise and fulfillment between our thought and our experience, that alone constitutes unique evidence, to which we all have access, of the legitimacy of Rosenzweig’s account of the All. The very same advance from promise to fulfillment that governed the reversals which the elements underwent on their way to reciprocal relations, we thus find, allows us to trace the move from thought to experience through which we have access to the elements and their relations, respectively. Experience confirms thought, because what is experienced in creation, revelation, and redemption is the fulfillment of what was promised in the elements conceivable through thought. Now, when we traced the reversals of the elements into the relations of creation, revelation, and redemption, in the last section, we found that this relation of promise and fulfillment that holds among the isolated elements, on the one hand, and the form in which they enter into relation, on the other, also holds among the different relations of creation, revelation, and redemption themselves. Even as creation fulfills promises held within the elemental God and world, we found, creation itself takes the form of a promise to be fulfilled in revelation, and ultimately in redemption. Now that we grasp creation, revelation, and redemption as experienced actuality, it will come as no surprise that Rosenzweig presents the relation of promise and fulfillment as governing the relationship between our experiences of creation, revelation, and redemption, as well. The relation of promise and fulfillment holds, that is to say, within experience, and not just between thought and experience. Our account of the human experience of creation, revelation, and redemption has indeed already suggested this to be the case. Experienced the right way, we recall, a revelation in the present may be grasped as the fulfillment of what has been promised to us, or of a potential that was locked within us in the past. Here the human being’s experience of creation as being a part of the objective, thingly world that is “already there” is conceived as a promise fulfilled in the experience of I-hood, of subjectivity, of personal name, given in revelation.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

247

Thus Rosenzweig claims, “Creation is the prophecy which is only confirmed in the miraculous sign of revelation,” “the thing is the necessary assumption and mute prediction of its name” (149, 209/134, 188). On the path to knowing the All, Rosenzweig suggests, one must thus recognize the corroborative relation that holds both between one’s thought and experience and – within experience itself – between one’s worldly, created being and one’s personally named I. I must listen, Rosenzweig implies, to both the thinking philosopher and the experiencing theologian within me and must pay due attention to both the worldly existence I share with all other things and the singular identity which sets me apart from all others. In the language of the “Urzelle,” one might say that I must recognize that as created part of the world and self-grounded I, I have “two relations to the Absolute.” But I must note, at once, that these two relations to the Absolute are themselves related fundamentally, as promise and fulfillment. How does this awareness of the relationship that holds between thought and experience, and between the root experiences of creation, revelation, and redemption themselves, affect the human being standing in the middle of the All? This human being experiences past, present, and future; she experiences herself as part of a world that is already there, and as an I, awakened to selfhood at a particular moment in her life. And she experiences the desire and the capacity to relate to others, and to pursue her own goals, within the world. It makes a very big difference, one might suggest, whether one interprets such experiences as contingent or recognizes in such experiences the relations among an elemental God, world, and self fulfilling different sides of their respective beings, on their path to realizing the All. It makes a difference whether I interpret my worldly existence and my personal I-hood as mutually exclusive sides of my being, or as the respective “true” and “illusory” manifestations of my being, or whether I grasp these two sides of my empirical person as mutually confirming, and as pointing together to the same ultimate redemptive fulfillment. It makes a difference, I would suggest, precisely for the person called upon to turn toward the world in love, to choose between All and Nothing. Were I to take being part of the world that is “already there” as my principal defining experience, without an awareness of how that experience holds the promise of a reality to be fulfilled through the awakening of individual I-hood and the subsequent realization the redemptive kingdom, I might well interpret the essential grounding of that world which the creator provides as my essence. I might ignore my own particular potential for being an “I” and, in the “One-andAll feeling” of pantheism, interpret the call to turn to the world as saying, “This is you – so stop distinguishing yourself from it. Enter into it, dissolve in it, lose yourself in it” (267/240). Alternatively, were I to interpret my experience of being an I, of being beloved of God, as my sole defining experience without recognizing that my worldly being both has promised that realization of selfhood and at once is in need of the very love that is awakened in revelation, I might well begin to regard the world “as if it were not God’s creation, not set up by the same God whose love”

248

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

I experience in revelation. I would neglect the call to love the world and become like that mystic who “see[s] only the one track upon which the connection from him to God and from God to him runs” (231/208).49 But if I recognize my personal self, my I, not only in its opposition to my worldly side, but at once as already “predicted” through my worldly existence, as a potential already held within my worldly existence, then I will be inclined to see my neighbor in the world as the potential soul that she is. I will experience the call to love the neighbor as saying, she “is like You, like your You, a You like You, an I – soul” (267/240). If I recognize how both my I-hood and my worldly existence seek their ultimate fulfillment in the same redemptive unification, I will likewise take it upon myself to act to realize that All. As a human being who recognizes the “miraculous” character of my existence in the middle of the All, I experience the “already there” character of my worldly being as creature, experience the call to my own personal I-hood, experience my anticipation of the ultimate unification of the All as the fulfillment of what I found promised in the elemental God, world, and human being I came to know through thinking. I bear witness, at once, to the way in which my creaturely existence as participant in a world that is “already there” held the promise of my present individual identity, and in doing so I am directed to the common fulfillment my worldly being and my “I” seek in redemption. As a consequence, when called upon to love my neighbor there is good reason to expect that I will interpret this call correctly, and that I will choose to take up my vocation within the realization of the All.

ii.6 The Unity of the All and the Figure of the Star Over the course of this chapter, I have shown how Rosenzweig uses the “genuine notion of revelation” to demonstrate how the particular elements which generated themselves out of their respective nothings – God, world, and human being – are able to realize their own respective particular being only by entering into those relations with their others which lead them to form the “true All.” By transforming the notion of reversal implied by this idea of revelation into a consistent method, we have seen, Rosenzweig is able to show how these elements must paradoxically turn out of themselves and become their opposites in order to fulfill themselves, finding the fulfillment they seek for their respective being in their relations with their others. Since particular beings may thus be said to realize themselves as particulars on their way to realizing the single “true All,” we found, Rosenzweig may claim to have articulated the “One and All” in such a way that does not reduce 49

Cf., J. Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, p. 383: “The experience of divine love would be nothing more than the experience of an isolated individual if it were not for the fact that God, whose love is made known to us, is also the creator, in whom our existence inheres.”

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

249

difference to identity. Rosenzweig understood the systems of Idealism as rooting all in a “one and universal Nothing” and thereby assuming from the beginning the unity of the All they sought to know. Such an assumption of unity, Rosenzweig claimed, barred Idealism from grasping difference as such; it fated such systems, instead, to reduce the All to One. Rosenzweig, to the contrary, finds particular beings to have emerged from their own particular nothings. He shows such particular beings to require relations with others in order to realize their potential, and he traces the reversals into relations these beings undergo that lead them – ultimately – to the redemptive realization of the All. Such an articulation of the All can grasp both unity and diversity within its systematic framework, I have suggested, insofar as it understands the unity of the All that will complete the system as future, as “not-yet.” We who stand in the middle of the All are free as individuals, as particular beings. We have the choice whether to take our place within the realization of the redemptive All or to impede such a realization. Rosenzweig has shown us, finally, that the discursive account of the course of the All and our place within it which he has given us through the reversals finds confirmation in the very experience we have of actuality and in the relationship we bear witness to between thought and experience within us. Our experience of actuality, Rosenzweig has shown, is stamped by our position in the middle of the All. The way this experience of actuality “fulfills” the very potentiality of the elements which we conceived in thought, moreover, grants us a unique kind of evidence regarding our place in the All, evidence which allows us to take up our calling within the All with some confidence. In thus having shown how Rosenzweig’s beginning in difference does indeed lead him toward an All which does not reduce diversity to unity, and in having shown how Rosenzweig’s account positions the human being in the middle of the course from the particularity of nothingness to the ultimate redemptive unity of the All, we have reached the goal which we set for ourselves at the beginning of this chapter. Rosenzweig, for his part, celebrates having taken such strides toward knowledge of the All in the “Threshold” section that ends the second part of the Star.50 In the opening lines of this section, Rosenzweig sums up the path he has charted from the particularity of the elements through their relations which realize the All and contrasts this All once more with the All of the German Idealists: Following the sinking in the under-earthly realm, where the figures dwelled as individuals, foreign to each other, in the parts of the burst All, there was the arising – the arising over the vault of the visible heaven. In this rising, the parts of the All which fell apart from each other in the sinking, are led back together again, but not again to a 50

Heinz-Jürgen Görtz’s “Zum ‘Konstruktionsgesetz des ‘Stern der Erlösung,” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig II, pp. 657–71, offers an elegant reading of the “Threshold” section of the Star, showing how “the whole [of the Star] is to be seen in it.”

250

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

unity like philosophy had sought before, and as a consequence had assumed, not to the unity of the sphere running-back everywhere in itself. Because what philosophy had expressed with naive openness in its first beginnings, that it wished to know “Being” as sphere, at least as circle, by this it remained ruled up to its denouement in Hegel. Hegel’s dialectic too believed itself to be able and to have to justify itself, in that it led back into itself. It is another unity into which the parts of the All now step with each other. (283/254)

God, world, and human being – the fundamental kinds of being which Rosenzweig had discovered in breaking up the All of Idealism in the introduction to the Star – have been “led back together again” over the course of the second part of the book. The “genuine notion of revelation” has shown us how these elements, having generated themselves out of their own particular nothings “as individuals, foreign to each other,” reverse into relation in such a way that will realize the unity of the All. But Rosenzweig insists, here, the unity of the All which the relations among God, world, and human being yield is not the unity sought from Anaximander to Hegel,51 not “the unity of the sphere running-back into itself.” The All which Rosenzweig attains “does not circle back into itself ” (284/254); it is not a circular return to a point of unity presumed from the start. As a result, we have seen, Rosenzweig can claim his All does not swallow up the difference inherent to all particulars between such identical unities as the Idealists posit at the beginning and end of their circular course. Rather, “it is another unity into which the parts of the All now step with each other.” If Rosenzweig thus rejects the Idealist representation of the unity of the system in the form of a circle, advancing from a point of unity through differentiation and returning to unity, what form might the realization of unity in Rosenzweig’s own system take on? Rosenzweig asks himself this very question as the “Threshold” proceeds, and his reflections take the following course. The path to the All began, we recall, in the self-generation of three distinct elements. Juxtaposing such a starting point over against the Idealist starting point in unity, Rosenzweig represents these distinct elements by “three points, … individuals, connectionless between themselves.” If the elemental God, world, and human being can be represented by three such distinct points, moreover, Rosenzweig suggests the relations of creation, revelation, and redemption forged among the elements might be represented by “three lines … with which we bound together … the three points which came into being in the first part,” three lines which are not to be conceived without further ado, however, as “the shortest connection between 51

Cf., Anaximander of Miletus, “apeiron [indefinite] nature, from which come into being all the heavens and the worlds in them. And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, according to necessity,” “The Extant Fragment of Anaximander,” The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, p. 118. See also, J. G. Fichte, “Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, oder der sogenannten Philosophie,” Sämmtliche Werke I: 54, G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 3. Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 23.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

251

two points, but rather [as having] originated through an act of reversal out of them that was grounded in the history-of-the-coming-into-being of the points, but all the same was groundless in itself ” (284/255). The relations of creation, revelation, and redemption, we have seen, were not straight, direct movements leading from one element to the other. Rather, each relation was the product of reversals of the two elements involved, reversals which took their starting point from the “Yes” and “No” that together had led to the “coming-into-being” of the elements, but which produced, at the same time, something utterly new and “groundless” vis-à-vis the elements themselves. Such reversals led the elements to meet, we might suggest, right in the middle of the line imagined to stretch between them. Our account of the course of relations led us to realize, moreover, that these midpoints of relation themselves – creation, revelation, and redemption – stand in relation to each other, and the relations among these relations might likewise be represented by lines stretching between these midpoints of the lines that stretch between the points of the elements themselves. In such a construction, Rosenzweig asserts, “those first three points correspond to God World Human Being … [while] these three new points thus enter for the stretching-of-the-course Creation Revelation Redemption.” It becomes evident, then, that since “the connection from one [mid]point [of the line of relations between the elemental points] to the two others again runs itself through the line of the original triangle, … the two triangles overlap” (285/256).52 It is thus, Rosenzweig suggests, that “the form-of-a-star structure … comes into being” (285/256) as that figure in which the unity of Rosenzweig’s redemptive All takes on visible form. Within this single figure of a six-pointed star, we capture the unity which God, world, and human being strive to realize through their reciprocal relations of creation, revelation, and redemption. Now, this unity, Rosenzweig notes, “which is claimed by philosophy as self-evident and able to be presupposed for the All – for us it is last result” (287/258). The image of the unity of the All which the star depicts for us represents not a present actuality, but rather a unity that is not-yet, a unity we anticipate as our redemptive future, a unity we are called on to fulfill through our own actions. For we who stand in the middle of the All, that is to say, this stellar image of unity is none other than the “star of redemption.”53 To the extent to which we human beings can know this unity of the All represented in the “star of redemption,” we have long asserted, we do so only as that which is not-yet, as that which is future. In thereby pointing toward the redemptive unity that will be, we might then ask, have we reached the limits of human 52

53

See Michal Schwartz’s account of the construction of the figure of the star in her Metapher und Offenbarung, pp. 154–61, in particular her note that “the one triangle is thus the reversal [Umkehrung] of the other and not its ground” (p. 158). Cf., Rosenzweig to R. Ehrenberg, August 25, 1919, BT 2, p. 643: “[The Star] is not called the Star of Redemption for nothing, for it is directed to [steht auf] the heaven of the future … for which one ‘hopes.’”

252

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

knowledge? In the wake of what he claimed to be the Idealist failure to grasp particularity as such within the bounds of its system, Rosenzweig has articulated a way of thinking the One and All, we have seen, that takes as its foremost goal the grasping of particularity as such within its systematic bounds. The reversals allowed Rosenzweig to claim that particular beings must step out of themselves into those relations that realize the All precisely in order to realize themselves as particulars. The unity of the All at once realized through the relations among these particular beings could be identified, we discovered, as the necessary future end of these relations among particulars. But in thereby presenting the unity of the All as the mere end point of myriad paths of difference, it may well be retorted, is not the unity of the All now obscured for the sake of its diversity? Rosenzweig at once showed us, within our experience as human beings in the midst of the All, how we relate to the ultimate redemptive unification of the All through anticipation. And he showed us how the reciprocal confirmation of which we can become aware within ourselves, between our thinking and our experience, likewise provides evidence for the future redemptive unification of the All toward which both our thought and our experience point. Yet here too, we must ask, does such experience of the anticipation of the All permit us to grasp the All in its future unity? Does the mutual confirmation of thought and experience, of our createdness and our selfhood, do anything more than “promise” once again a unity that we do not yet grasp? Posed somewhat differently, our question may be phrased as follows: can the same method(s) which guarantees us knowledge and experience of the difference inherent to the All at once grant us knowledge and experience of the unity of that All? To this question, Rosenzweig answers in the negative. The knowledge we attained through thinking, in the first part of the Star, Rosenzweig asserts, may well contain all, but only as elements, only in its parts. Experience went beyond the piecework. It was wholly in each moment; … but it had all in none of its moments. The All, that would be everything and whole, can neither be honestly known [i.e., through thought], nor clearly experienced. … The All must be grasped beyond knowledge and experience if it is to be immediately grasped. (435/391)

To grasp the All as the unified whole that it will be in redemption, this passage suggests, we demand a means of immediate knowing that goes beyond both the kind of knowing we attained through thinking the elements and the kind of experience through which we grasped the moments of relation among them. Our thinking has allowed us to know God, world, and self as the elements of the All in their factual isolation from one another. Experience exposes us to moments along the course of relations through which the elements form the All: as part of the “already there” created world we experience the groundedness of worldly particularity in the unity of the creator; as beloved of God we experience our own quintessential

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

253

singularity as I awakened in the always-present command of God, we experience our capacity as I to affirm the being of God through our reciprocation of divine love; as human being capable of love and speech, we experience our calling to love our neighbor in the world, and we anticipate the future realization of the All that remains not-yet in the present by taking our neighbor to be representative for the All. Through the reversals, we have even learned to think the course of relations we experience, relations that realize the All at the same time that they allow the elements to realize their own respective potentials as particulars. But neither in thought nor in experience do we grasp the unity of the All in its immediacy. In order to grasp the All not simply as the end result of the relations among particular beings, not simply as the aggregate of particulars which join in its formation, but rather as quintessential unity, Rosenzweig requires a methodological complement to factuality and reversals, to the confirming relations he has revealed between thought and experience. The completion of the path to knowledge of the All in the Star thus demands a means of grasping the unity of the All in its immediacy, a means which we have not yet encountered. The entirety of the next chapter will examine the unlikely methodological complement that Rosenzweig will present alongside factuality and reversals, thought and experience, as permitting the completion of the quest for systematic knowledge which he began on the first page of the Star. And it will show how, even in this ultimate crowning moment of “knowing the All” which this immediate access to the unity of the All makes possible, the human being is directed back to the standpoint she occupies in the middle of the course of the All, where she is called upon to act in such a way that will help realize the very unity of the All which she may come to know.

III. Excursus on Questions of Method: Factuality and Reversals, Thought and Experience While tracing the path particular beings take in the Star – from out of their respective nothings, to their provisional elemental being, and on through their reversals into relations that realize the All – we have seen Rosenzweig employ a handful of different “methods.” Before proceeding to address the immediate knowledge of the unity of the All which Rosenzweig will introduce to complement the mediated knowledge of the path to the All we have just traced, I want to raise some questions about the relationship between different methods Rosenzweig has employed up to this point: between factuality and reversals, on the one hand, and between “thought” and “experience,” broadly speaking, on the other. In the main narrative of this chapter I have tried to present the complex web of philosophical argumentation that fills the second part of the Star in as clear and as compelling a fashion as possible. I will now pose some questions that problematize in some ways the account I have given.

254

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

At the beginning of the second part of the Star, we found, Rosenzweig was only able to show how the elemental God, world, and human being could secure their factuality by introducing the “reversals” which are implied by a proper understanding of revelation. The reversals were introduced here as a new methodological step that was independent of the factual method through which the elements could be understood to have generated themselves, but which was thereafter fused with the factual method in the advance toward the realization of the All. But there is good reason to consider Rosenzweig’s introduction of the reversals in the second part of the Star rather as the elaboration of an aspect of factual method that was already implicit in the factual construction of the elements themselves. That is to say, there is reason to consider the factual path through which the elements advance from particular nothings to somethings, in the first part of the Star, and the path of reversals through which the elements step into relation in the second part of the book, as one and the same method. Rosenzweig alludes to the identity of these two methods in a passing comment in the Star II 3, claiming that what “happened [to] each individual element, God, world, and human being” on their paths from particular nothing to elemental factuality was in fact the “inner selfcreation, self-revelation, self-redemption of each in itself,” a fact which “at that time,” that is, in the first part of the Star, “we would have little been able to say, even if we had wanted” (270/242).54 Rosenzweig implies here that the very same movement of reversals into relation the elements undergo in creation, revelation, and redemption in fact occurs within each element in the first part of the Star. Strange as such a suggestion appears at first blush, once we are on the lookout for reversals in the factual self-generation of the elements out of their nothings, it is not difficult to spot them. For what are the two paths of the infinitesimal out of each particular nothing – the affirmation of the not-nothing and the negation of the nothing – if not paths of reversal through which that which was nothing realizes itself by reversing into its opposite?55 And what is the union of these two paths in which the element attained factual form if not the relation between these two paths of reversal? Rosenzweig’s comment thus directs us to consider the reversals not as a methodological novum introduced through revelation alone, but rather as part and parcel of the factual method which governs the movement of the elements from their very beginnings in their particular nothings. And yet, there are serious

54

55

See Chapter 3, footnote 41, for a brief comment on why Rosenzweig “wasn’t able” to describe the generation of the elements in the first part of the Star as their “inner self-creation, self-revelation, [and] self-redemption.” If we wanted to pursue this parallel further, we would have to claim that each particular nothing is itself at one and the same time a negation of what is not-nothing and an affirmation of nothing. The affirmation of what is not-nothing which emerges out of the particular nothing would thus be the “reversal” of the former aspect of the particular nothing and the negation of the nothing the reversal of the latter.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

255

reasons why Rosenzweig resists identifying the method that governs the first part of the Star with the method that governs the second part. Rosenzweig’s claim that the reversals into relation represent the radical move from thought into actuality rests, in large part, on their constituting the “particular, one-time series creation-revelation-redemption” (257/ 230), that is, on their being not simply the repetition of a “dialectical process” that has already occurred and will continue to occur, but rather a unique and one-time revelatory process that allows particular beings which already “are” in some elementary sense to realize themselves to completion. The claim that after the elements have attained factual figure, a whole new and unanticipated move must occur in order for them to form the actual and advance through relations into the All – a claim which does much to justify the very division between the first and second parts of the Star in the first place – is essential to Rosenzweig’s general assertion that we are dealing in his system with particular beings realizing themselves through relations, and not with a single overarching Absolute, determining the movement of all beings according to the same process from beginning to end. Collapsing the difference between the methods of the first and second parts of the Star would certainly seem to collapse the distinction between the “old” and the “new” thinking which many scholars of Rosenzweig’s work have suggested govern the first part and second part of the Star, respectively.56 This appears to me to be an unresolved tension in the Star. Rosenzweig seems to want to have it both ways: to preserve the methodological uniqueness of the first and the second parts of the book and nevertheless to have an identity hold between the methods of the two parts all the same.57 This tension between the methods of the first and second parts of the Star points to a second methodological quandary I would like to address, concerning the relation between the two separate but interrelated methods I have dealt with in this chapter, to wit, the logic of reversals according to which thought traces 56

57

See, e.g., Michael L. Morgan, “Franz Rosenzweig, Objectivity, and the New Thinking,” Dilemmas in Modern Jewish Thought, p. 175 (note 1). And compare Rosenzweig’s own claim that “the method of the second part [of the Star] must be different,” i.e., a “method of narrating [Erzählens],” in “The New Thinking,” GS 3, p. 148/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 121. Although I have tried to give a faithful and coherent overview of Rosenzweig’s systematic method in this book, there is tremendous room, and tremendous need, for more focused, in-depth study of Rosenzweig’s method. Future research might determine not only that the methods governing the first and the second parts of the Star are in some ways identical and in some ways different, but even that the methods governing all three parts of the book must be grasped in their identity and difference. Hence, on the one hand, one might speculate, the thought of the first part, the experience of the second part, and the intuition of the third part of the Star are to be carefully distinguished from one another. But at the same time, we might need to understand how all three are nonetheless conceivable in their unity. If this is determined to be the case, moreover, one might further speculate that it might be possible to show how the whole course of the Star is knowable through thought, through experience, and through intuition, independently, even as that course is conceived as only knowable through the proper distinction among, and combination of thought, experience, and intuition together.

256

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the path along which all particulars realize themselves while realizing the All, and the method of reciprocal confirmation between thought and experience that Rosenzweig presents as evidence which the human being finds within herself supporting the account of the All he gives. I have suggested that the reversals have a dual function in the second part of the Star: they allow us both to trace in thought the path which the elements travel and to bridge the gap between thought and experience. Yet, interrelated as they may be, these two branches of the method of reversals actually suggest two different systematic structures as governing the Star as a whole. When thought is taken as the means of knowing the elements as particulars, and experience is taken as the means of knowing the relations among them, then the immediate form of knowledge introduced to complement them will be understood as grasping the unity of that which is grasped in different ways in thought (elemental structure of particular beings) and in experience (relations among particular beings), respectively. But when the reversals are understood as enabling thought itself to grasp the way in which particular beings enter into relations to form a unified totality, then they require as complement a form of knowing which would grasp the same totality in its immediate unity. The overall systematic structures implied in the scenarios are different. It is interesting to note that Rosenzweig’s employment of these two systematic structures – one in which a form of immediate knowing will grasp as unity that which is grasped differently in thought and experience, and one in which this form of immediate knowing grasps as unity that totality of particulars grasped through the thinking of reversals alone – parallels developments in the early postKantian context, when “dialectic” or “reflection” begins to be conceived as a form of thought which bridges the gap between thought and experience.58 But it is not entirely clear to me, at this juncture, whether these two methods are dependent on each other in any essential manner for Rosenzweig, or whether they are rather to be understood simply as two independent methods (which Rosenzweig could not extricate from one another, or between which he could not decide or saw no reason to decide), yielding two different systematic structures. The reversals do allow us to think what we experience; they explain the promise-fulfillment relationship that holds between thought and experience. And Rosenzweig acknowledges the gap between thought and experience precisely by asserting that thought must undergo a reversal in the first place in order to grasp experience.59 But once thought has acknowledged the gap between itself and experience and has bridged that gap through the Umkehr, then the realms of “thought” and “experience” can

58

59

See my discussion of the different ways the German Idealists conceived of the relation between intellectual intuition, on the one hand, and thought and experience, on the other, in Chapter 5, Section I. In doing so, Rosenzweig follows in the footsteps of the late Schelling. See footnote 32 of this chapter.

“ T H E G E N U I N E N OT ION OF R E V E L AT ION ”

257

no longer be claimed to be hermetically separate. One cannot then return to the claim that thought is limited and must be supplemented by experience! Now, the presence of these two different systematic structures in the Star does not suggest to me that one needs to posit two different standpoints between which Rosenzweig oscillates in the book. Whether one thinks, from the standpoint of the middle of the system, the development of particular beings out of their nothings and into those relations which realize the All, or whether one thinks particular beings as such and experiences their relations from the middle of the system, in both cases one assumes the inherent particularity of beings from the outset, and hence the futurity of the unity of the All these particular beings enter into relations to form. In both methods, that is to say, Rosenzweig can be claimed to philosophize from the “human” standpoint. But I imagine juxtaposing these two methods as two ways of approaching “system as quintessentially human knowledge” will do little to assuage the concerns of those readers who will see in the logic of the reversals a reincarnation of the very “old thinking” Rosenzweig explicitly aims to overcome. In a method of thought capable of tracing the development of particular beings out of nothingness and into relations with all other beings – thereby forming “the All” – do we not see the old thinking Rosenzweig disposed of rear its timeless, logocentric head once again? Possibly. But it seems to me that the painstaking manner in which Rosenzweig develops the method of reversals in the second part of the Star demands that we first reexamine the reigning scholarly views regarding the forms of thinking Rosenzweig intended to include or exclude from the category of “new thinking” before we discard the reversals as a remnant of the logic of yore. I hope to take on such a reexamination in a future work, but doing so demands a far more thorough study of Rosenzweig’s account of the “new thinking” than I can offer here.60 60

Glaringly absent from my account of the method(s) that govern the second part of the Star is an examination of the independent function of “speech-thinking” to which I attend, insofar as I do, only as part of the account of the reciprocal recognition among God, world, and human being I offer. There is no question that a focused study of the way Rosenzweig’s speech-thinking either fits into or stands in tension with the overall systematic goals of the Star would greatly expand our understanding of the Star. See note 17 for my own preliminary ruminations in this direction.

5

m Seeing Stars: The Vision of the All and the Completion of the System

O

n October 4, 1918, six weeks into the composition of The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig writes a letter to Margrit Rosenstock recounting a striking vision he beheld the previous night. The details of this vision, and Rosenzweig’s own interpretation of it, shed surprising light on the systematic articulation of the One and All Rosenzweig undertakes in the Star and upon the shape in which the One and All becomes manifest in the book. Rosenzweig’s letter at once presents the context within which, I will claim, the third and final part of the Star should be understood. An interpretation of this letter will thus serve to introduce those questions that will guide us in this final chapter of our study of the Star as a system of philosophy. As he explains in the letter, Rosenzweig had worked late into the previous night finishing the “Transition” section that ends the first part of the Star and had begun writing the introduction to the book’s second part that very morning. According to Rosenzweig, the position of limbo he found himself in during the middle of the previous night, between the first and second parts of the book, suddenly permitted him to see the “Star of Redemption” – quite literally – in its entirety: I was still finishing the Transition chapter last night; it became quite crazy, and all the spirits were so let-loose that I couldn’t sleep anymore after midnight. … These are the moments in which one sees double [Doppelgänger] … because one is no longer glued right firmly in one’s body. So it all happened that I was between two parts and as a consequence the Star, which during the individual-work in the individual books faded for me, as you well know, suddenly shone as strongly as in the first days when it began. I saw it again with eyes and everything individual [alles Einzelne] in it. As I tried to write it down afterwards in the morning, it was wholly poor and scarcely more than what I had noted the evening before, at least fragmentarily. But I know this now already; this poverty of morning is only appearance [Schein]; the wealth of immediate vision is truth and verifies itself [bewahrheitet sich] later in the elaboration [Ausführung]. … Thus I saw the Star and strangely enough it rotated around itself and therein everything that I still have to write was to be seen. Early this morning I then began the introduction to the second part, a cold drop in the bath after the night and even after the “Transition”-chapter. … And now enough of the appeal [Eingabe] to the heavenly parliament. I really needed this 258

SE E I N G STA R S

259

night “between the pieces” again in the immediate sight of the whole [Anblick des Ganzen].1

In this vivid letter, Rosenzweig documents nothing less than an immediate vision of the “whole” in the shape of a star. This stellar whole shines brightly for Rosenzweig in the dark of night, but it is no pure unvariegated light which Rosenzweig sees therein. To the contrary, the whole which Rosenzweig sees in the form of a star contains “everything individual in it”; it is a whole containing all particulars within itself. Rosenzweig beholds, that is to say, a vision of the All, a vision of all individual beings in their unity, in the shape of the “Star of Redemption.” In this nighttime illumination, experienced in the midst of the writing of the Star, the very star which crystallized for us at the end of the last chapter – as the image of the All constructed out of the relations among the factual elements – appears to Rosenzweig, not in its construction, but rather in the immediacy of vision. What is the relation, we might ask, between this star that Rosenzweig sees in the immediacy of this nighttime vision and the image of the star that has been constructed out of relations among the elements? Or, asked differently, what is the relation between the star Rosenzweig sees and the Star Rosenzweig writes, whose systematic web of relations among beings we have tried to delineate over the course of the last two chapters? On the one hand, Rosenzweig’s letter suggests he is able to see the whole in its immediacy only in the brief, surreal, even dreamlike moment in which he is not involved in the daytime work of writing out the details of his book. The vision appears when he hovers, temporarily, between the first and second parts of the book, while he is occupied by neither the generation of the elements in thought nor the experience of their interrelations, whereas while he is working within these parts, the vision of the star fades. And even when Rosenzweig seeks “to write it down afterwards in the morning,” when he tries to convert this immediate vision of the whole into written form, this “wealth of immediate vision” becomes “wholly poor.” Such comments imply a certain opposition between the vision of the star and the details of the book through which Rosenzweig constructs the star. Indeed, if Rosenzweig concludes from his vision of the star that “the wealth of immediate vision is truth,” he contrasts such truth in vision to the illusory daytime state in which he writes his book without such a vision immediately before him: “This poverty of morning is only appearance.” On the other hand, the letter at once points to an intimate relation between the vision Rosenzweig has of the star and the book he is writing. The very “wealth of immediate vision,” which Rosenzweig identifies as “truth,” comes to “verify itself only in the elaboration [Ausführung],” that is, in the articulation of such immediate vision within the written system that is the Star. We might then suggest that the mere “Schein,” “appearance,” of morning is not simply to remain opposed to 1

Rosenzweig to M. Rosenstock, October 4, 1918, Gritli-Briefe, pp. 159–60.

260

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the truth of vision – it must show itself at once as the “shining” of that truth. The truth which Rosenzweig sees directly in the dark of night is to become manifest, through the written system, in the light of day. And the letter well suggests that in both its shining and fading, this star-figured vision of truth guides Rosenzweig in the writing of his book. Indeed, the nighttime vision Rosenzweig describes is not a one-time or a first-time vision, but rather it is the return of the same vision of truth which shone when Rosenzweig began writing his book. According to Rosenzweig, the star, “which faded during the individual-work in the individual books,” shines in this nightly vision “as strongly as in the first days when it began.” Rosenzweig spends this night “again in the immediate sight of the whole.” Insofar as this vision already contains in its immediacy the truth of the All which Rosenzweig “elaborates” in the Star, moreover, he is able to perceive in it in intuitive form the entirety of the content of the book he is writing. He thus recounts how, in this vision, he “saw the Star and … it rotated around itself and therein everything that I still have to write was to be seen.” Rosenzweig’s letter to Margrit Rosenstock thus strongly suggests that Rosenzweig has an immediate vision of the All in the form of a star which corresponds to his discursive account of the realization of the All in the Star. As we proceed to examine the third part of the Star, we shall find that this vision of the Star is not simply an immediate source of truth external to the discourse of the Star which “verifies itself ” in the book. Rather, an account of the possibility of seeing the All in the shape of the “star” serves a crucial role in Rosenzweig’s articulation of knowledge of the All within the Star. However, this account of the vision of the All in the form of the “Star of Redemption” appears in the Star only after the image of the star has been constructed, as we saw, out of the relations among the elements, that is, only after thought has generated the elements of that starry All in the book’s first part, and after both the discursive thinking of the reversals and the experience of actuality have traced and confirmed the orbital course upon which the elements of the All step into reciprocal relations. The Star reads, that is to say, not as the verification of a vision upon which it depends, but rather as a path to such vision. The book’s discursive construction of the Star in thought and experience leads the way to the immediate vision of the Star at the book’s end.2 Now, having labored through the methodological rigor of the first and second parts of the Star, having insisted in our last two chapters upon the vital roles the factual constructions of the elements and their reversals into reciprocal relations play in Rosenzweig’s systematic articulation of the All, it may be somewhat disconcerting to find this selfsame All suddenly served up by Rosenzweig on the platter of immediate vision. Indeed, if Rosenzweig sincerely holds, as he contends in his 2

Cf., Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, February 1, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, p. 227: “III 3 is … a ‘mysticism,’ but one which rests on the ground of all the unmystical which stands on the 500 pages before it, and then which is also neutralized again through the anti-mystical ‘Gate’ which yet follows after it.” We will have occasion to return to this comment of Rosenzweig’s at the end of this chapter.

SE E I N G STA R S

261

letter of October 4, 1918, that only “the wealth of immediate vision is truth” to be contrasted with “the poverty of morning [that] is only appearance” – that “morning” in which the articulation of the identity and difference of the All is worked out on the pages of the Star – then we may well ask why Rosenzweig leads us upon such a methodologically torturous path toward knowledge of the All in the first place! Why is the reader not encouraged to leave aside all such philosophical labor in the hope of attaining that immediate vision of the All which alone grasps it in its truth? The fact that the Star’s methodologically rigorous path culminates in immediate vision has led several scholars to declare that Rosenzweig ultimately renounces philosophy’s claims for truth in favor of a form of mysticism. Thus Gershom Scholem claims the Star “moves from the positions of reason to a theistic mysticism and gives support to strictly mystical theologoumena.”3 Kenneth Hart Green likewise asserts that “although the book is called a ‘system of philosophy’ by Rosenzweig, it is so called mainly because it begins with philosophic premises and issues, and employs a ‘systematic method’ – but it does so in order to attain an all-encompassing truth which however supersedes philosophy” in a “mystical doctrine of truth.”4 In the present chapter we will argue that Rosenzweig’s appeal to the immediacy of a vision of the All in the final part of the Star does not in fact amount to such a disavowal of the systematic task of knowing the All which Rosenzweig announces on the book’s first page and which he takes such pains to work out over the course of the book as a whole. In order to justify this claim, we will have to determine the role such immediate vision of the All plays within Rosenzweig’s “system of philosophy.” Now, we already discovered the need for a kind of immediate knowing at the end of the last chapter. Here we suggested that the knowledge we attained discursively by tracing how particular beings create the totality of the All through their reversals into relation – a knowledge confirmed in the relation between thought and experience – must be complemented by an immediate grasp of the unity of the All. Only thus, we claimed, can “the true All” be said to be grasped at once in both its unity and its diversity. Our task, in this chapter, will be to show how vision serves as this form of immediate knowledge. Vision complements the discursive knowledge of the totality of particulars which make up the All by providing an immediate grasp of the All in its unity. Moreover, we shall find that this vision of

3

4

Gershom Scholem, “On the 1930 Edition of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, p. 322. See also, N. Glatzer’s “answer to the question” he poses in his essay “Was Franz Rosenzweig a Mystic?” Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History, p. 131: “Although he was not a mystic, Rosenzweig did reach a position of ‘theistic mysticism,’ operating with ‘strictly mystical theologoumena.’ A paradoxical position? Perhaps, but one resolved by the peculiar spiritual odyssey of the man himself.” Kenneth Hart Green, “The Notion of Truth in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption,” Judaism 7, 3 (1987), pp. 314, 317.

262

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the redemptive goal of the All also serves an important role in the realization of the All itself. In asserting that the vision of the All in the figure of the Star – and the epistemological and ontological status of that vision – is the proper subject of the third part of the Star, I am making what may be an unexpected claim about the function of Rosenzweig’s discussions of the Jewish and Christian communities in the third part of the Star, to wit, that the primary role of these discussions is to demonstrate how the All that is to be realized in the redemptive fulfillment of time is at once visible to human beings in its unity even in the midst of time.5 Rosenzweig’s accounts of Jewish and Christian religious experience are surely the sections of the Star most widely read and commented upon, and when they are read together with Rosenzweig’s other writings on Judaism, they offer a wealth of insights into the nature and possibility of Jewish life – and religious life in general – in the modern world. But my claim will be that Rosenzweig intends his discussions of Judaism and Christianity in the Star to be understood within the context of the book’s systematic goals. In this systematic context, Judaism and Christianity are shown to make possible – in varying degrees – the vision of the All without which human knowledge of the All would be incomplete, and to offer the concrete communal contexts in which the human being can actualize her decision for the All and can fulfill her role in the realization of the All in view of its redemptive guiding star. In such a reading, I seek to remain faithful to Rosenzweig’s own suggestion that his discussions of Judaism and Christianity do not transform the Star into a “Jewish book,” in any ordinary sense of the term, nor into a “philosophy of religion,” but rather, these discussions are part and parcel of the “system of philosophy” Rosenzweig seeks to realize in the Star.6 The legitimacy of such a reading can only be demonstrated, needless to say, over the course of the chapter that follows. But in a biblical allusion within his letter to Margrit Rosenstock of October 4, 1918, Rosenzweig already directs us to inquire into the religious context within which he locates his own vision of the 5

6

In his Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, Robert Gibbs deals primarily with how the Star III’s account of Judaism and Christianity presents “the social practices that redeem the world,” but he too asserts that “the third part of The Star of Redemption has a unique function in the system: it is the verification of the theology of Part II. … [Verification] is Rosenzweig’s term for the making of the whole truth appear in the present moment of experience” (p. 106). Cf., Rosenzweig’s own explanation of the role of Judaism and Christianity in the Star, in “The New Thinking”: “The presentation of Judaism and Christianity … is thus not originally determined by interests of the study of religion, but rather … by generally systematic interests, in particular by the inquiry into an eternity which is [seienden Ewigkeit]. … As a result, the presentation in both cases proceeds not from each’s own consciousness … but rather from the outer visible forms through which they wrest their eternity from time,” GS 3, p. 156, translated in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 132. See also, Michal Schwartz’s Metapher und Offenbarung, p. 75, in which she notes that from “the perspective of the system … the religious lifestyle is defined as a form of life in which the truth mirrors itself [sich widerspiegelt].” The mirroring capacity of the Jewish and Christian liturgical communities will occupy us later in this chapter.

SE E I N G STA R S

263

All. In the last line of the letter Rosenzweig describes his nighttime “immediate sight of the whole” as a “night between the pieces.” As we have noted, the plain sense of such a description points to the fact that Rosenzweig himself stands, in the momentary vacuum of that nighttime, in between the parts of the book, during whose focused writing the image of the star faded. But by characterizing the context of his vision as a night “between the pieces,” Rosenzweig at once refers us back to what is surely one of the most celebrated visions ever recorded. The “covenant between the pieces” between God and Abraham marks the finale of that famous vision in Genesis 15, in which God points Abraham’s gaze up to the stars and promises him that his “seed” will be like these stars. In likening his own vision of the All in the form of a star to Abraham’s vision of the countless stars in the sky, Rosenzweig alludes, first of all, to the futurity of what is seen in both visions. Abraham, a childless wanderer, having been called by God away from his family and homeland, is taken outside into the night and shown the wealth of the “heavenly parliament,” so distant and different from him, and promised a future “like” those stars. Rosenzweig too, we might suggest, finding himself in the middle of the All, in the very fear of finitude he evokes as the starting-point of the Star, is shown the star-shaped redemptive unity of the All which we have come to know as future. If thinking gives Rosenzweig access to the origin of all beings in the particularity of nothing, if experience gives him access to the temporal actuality in which such beings step into systematic relations, so Rosenzweig’s letter of October 4, 1918, suggests that it is vision that grants Rosenzweig direct access to the ultimate unity of the All that will be in the redemptive future. But Rosenzweig does not identify his own vision of the All with Abraham’s merely to highlight the futurity of the vision of the star he imagines himself to share with Abraham. That the figure of Abraham holds great significance for Rosenzweig can be gathered from the frequency of Abraham’s appearance in the pages of the Star, as that individual who answers the revelatory call of God and who is promised a future “like” the stars in the sky.7 But Abraham’s precise significance may be said to change in the Star depending on the context in which he appears. In the heart of II 2, Abraham is that quintessential individual called by God through his “personal name.” As founder of monotheism, Abraham may be said to represent, in the second part of the Star, that human standpoint and experience that are common to both Judaism and Christianity.8 But Abraham also appears, in the third part of the Star, as the first Jew in particular and thus as bound exclusively to the Jewish people. Reading Rosenzweig’s October 4, 1918, letter, we are led to ask, therefore, with which Abraham does Rosenzweig identify when he identifies his own vision of the Star with Abraham’s original revelation? 7 8

E.g., Stern, pp. 196, 331, 385, 440/Star, pp. 176, 298, 347, 396. On Rosenzweig’s attitude towards Islam, see Chapter 4, note 9.

264

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

In the moment of his immediate vision of the All in the form of the Star, does Rosenzweig imagine himself as repeating Abraham’s revelatory experience as a Jew who – according to Rosenzweig’s division of redemptive labor between Jews and Christians in the Star – nowhere experiences revelation directly but rather has “heard the call of God and answered it with his ‘Here I am,’ only in Abraham’s loins” (440/396)? Or – since Rosenzweig here does behold a vision of the star directly – is the Abraham with whom Rosenzweig identifies in his vision of the star perhaps simply the quintessential individual human being irrespective of his religious and communal affiliations? Or, again, is the Abraham with whom Rosenzweig identifies to be understood as forbear of Jews and Christians, and does Rosenzweig then perhaps see himself as beholding a vision possible for Jews and Christians alike, but barred from those who stand outside these religious communities? As we prepare to turn our sights to the ways in which the third part of the Star portrays the vision of the All in the form of the Star, we may ask this same question about Rosenzweig’s identification with Abraham as follows: Who can attain the vision of the All in the form of the Star, and who possesses the consequent ability to attain complete knowledge of the All? Can all human beings attain such vision and knowledge? Or does Rosenzweig contend that only Jews behold such a vision of the Star, and hence that only Jews can know completely what others may know only “piecemeal”? Does Rosenzweig contend that Jews and Christians – and they alone – can see the All thus? Alternatively, we may ask, is the ultimate vision of the All in the figure of the Star grounded solely in the seer’s participation in a religious community like Judaism or Christianity, or does Rosenzweig leave open the possibility of a direct vision of the All beyond those made possible within such communities? And finally, is there only one human vision possible of the redemptive All, or might there be different visions, or different degrees of vision, of the ultimate truth possible to different individuals in different communities? These are the questions which emerge for us from Rosenzweig’s identification of his nighttime vision of the Star with Abraham’s nighttime vision, questions we will take with us as we investigate the role of vision in the third part of the Star. As we proceed we shall discover that the religious communities of Judaism and Christianity offer different, complementary, but ultimately partial visions of the All in the figure of the star to their constituents and to us – as readers of the Star – through them. In the different ways in which Judaism and Christianity “wrest their eternity from time,”9 we shall find, these communities anticipate the ultimate redemptive unity of the All, making it visible even in the midst of time. But precisely the partiality of the visions of the All made possible for those participants in the religious communities of Judaism and Christianity will lead us to inquire into the possibility of a direct, all-encompassing vision of the All in the 9

“The New Thinking,” GS 3, p. 156.

SE E I N G STA R S

265

figure of the star that transcends the limits of Judaism and Christianity. Here we shall consider the possibility that Rosenzweig believed himself to have the rare capacity for a vision of truth that transcends the bounds of ordinary human life in general, and of Jewish and Christian communal life in particular. As we shall see, Rosenzweig considered his own personal ability to see the “Star” to be “the strongest of my arts,”10 one which he seems to have been able to call upon almost at will. And while Rosenzweig may well identify his vision with that of Abraham, in his October 1918 letter, this vision does not take place within any religious communal setting, Jewish or Christian or other. It takes place in the dark of night when Rosenzweig is alone.11 As we attempt to come to terms with the role of vision in the Star’s systematic articulation of the All, finally, we will be concerned not only with grasping the function and identifying the subject of that vision, but with determining more closely the object of this vision as well. If the reversals of the second part of the Star served to demonstrate the necessity of the realization of the All through the reciprocal relations among God, world, and the human being, then vision, we have suggested, grants the seer immediate access to the ultimate redemptive unity of the All that remains “not-yet.” Now, at the culmination of our account of the reversals in Chapter 4, we highlighted the fact that Rosenzweig conceives of this ultimate unity of the All as God’s own completion more directly than it is that of world and human being: it is God who is the One and All at the peak of redemption. God will be the One and All in the future redemption which philosophy has repeatedly, and mistakenly, asserted already to be. Such an identification of God with the future All would suggest that for the seer who stands in the middle of the course of the realization of the All, the vision of the future unity of the All in the form of a star is at once a vision of God as that unity of the All which all beings strive to realize. Rosenzweig in fact seems to hint at the divine character of the Star of Redemption seen through immediate vision, once again, in his reference to Abraham’s vision in his letter of October 4, 1918. Indeed, a glance at the opening passage of Genesis 15 which documents Abraham’s vision and covenant with God reveals a far more thoroughgoing parallel between Rosenzweig’s vision and that of Abraham than appears at first glance. Genesis 15 begins as follows: “.‫ה’ אל אברם במחזה לאמר אל תירא אברם אנכי מגן לך שכרך הרבה מאד‬-‫”אחר הדברים האלה היה דבר‬ After these things, the word of God came to Abram in a vision saying, “Don’t be afraid, Abram, I am your shield. Your reward is very great.” 10 11

Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, January 15, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, p. 222. Compare Rosenzweig’s commentary on Yehuda Halevi’s poem “,‫“ [ ”יעירוני בשמך רעיוני‬Nachts”]: “The longed for has happened. A night vision has brought to the poet the experience of the vision of God. In the state between dream and being-awake, which has its autonomy [Eigengesetzlichkeit] from the former, its validity from the latter, reflecting over the connection of body and soul, he sees God as if his heart ‘had been able to appear together at Sinai,’” GS 4.1, pp. 28–9.

266

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

It is only after Abraham expresses his fears and questions God’s promise of reward in the light of his own advanced age and childlessness, that God leads him outside to count the stars and declares, “so shall your seed be.” In reading the first passage of Genesis 15, we find, first of all, that Abraham’s vision of the stars takes place within a more primary vision, a vision of God, or God’s word, which comes to quell Abraham’s fears with the assurance that “I [i.e., God] am your shield.” But the word translated as “shield” here is ‫מגן‬ [magen], which, by virtue of the six-pointed star which came to be associated with David’s battle shield,12 came to designate the “star” in the “Star of David” [magen David]. The announcement with which God initiates his appearance in a vision to Abraham might then loosely be translated as “I am your Star.” Lest such a translation appear to take unwarranted liberties with Rosenzweig’s own reading of the passage, one should note that Rosenzweig himself advocates such a translation of magen in another context, in which he may well hint at this passage too.13 In pointing from his own nighttime vision of the All in the shape of a Star to Abraham’s vision, I propose, Rosenzweig alludes not simply to the stars of God’s promise to Abraham, but to a vision of God himself as the Star of Redemption.14 When we arrive at our discussion of the “Gate” section which concludes the Star, we will find that Rosenzweig conceives of the vision of the All in the shape of the Star as a vision of God’s face. The nighttime vision of truth as the All in the figure of the Star which Rosenzweig recounts in his letter of October 4, 1918, and which he appears to assign, retrospectively, to Abraham’s own vision, is to be conceived, we may infer, as a vision of the redemptive unity of All which God will be in redemption, but out of which God’s face shines even today. Indeed, in the letter, Rosenzweig recounts that he saw the Star “with eyes and everything individual in it.” Shining out of the Star of Redemption which is the All, so it seems, Rosenzweig beholds the eyes of God looking back at him. Our task, in the present chapter, will be to make sense of the systematic role of the vision of the All in the shape of the Star in the different forms in which it is presented over the course of the third and final part of the book. Rosenzweig’s 12

13

14

Cf., Gershom Scholem, “The Star of David: The History of a Symbol,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism, pp. 257–81. See Rosenzweig’s letter to Margrit Rosenstock, 8 January 1919, Gritli-Briefe, p. 216: “I also asked Prager about the *, but he naturally also knew nothing, only Ps. 144: 1 and 2, where it means 1) my stronghold, 2) my side, 3) my castle, 4) my shelter, 5) my savior, 6) my shield. But this naturally assumes the * already.” Rosenzweig’s discussion with Prager clearly centers on the question of whether the root meaning of magen (as it appears in Psalms 144: 2: ‫ )חסדי ומצודתי משגבי ומפלטי לי מגני ובו חסיתי‬might be “star.” One might propose, furthermore, that the “*” that is “assumed,” according to Rosenzweig, by such meanings of magen in Psalm 144: 2 is the star of Genesis 15, particularly as this is the first appearance of the word magen in the Bible. According to Gershom Scholem, “magen David” is likewise used as a “predicate of God” in Joseph Gikatilla’s Gates of Righteousness (1280–90). See G. Scholem, “The Star of David: The History of a Symbol,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism, p. 269.

SE E I N G STA R S

267

October 4, 1918, letter to Margrit Rosenstock sends us to this task equipped with three fundamental questions regarding the vision of the Star we will find therein: What is the systematic function of such vision in the Star? Who is in a position to have such vision? And what exactly is seen in this vision? In what follows, we will address these questions in this very order. We will begin by assessing the systematic role of vision in the Star. Here I will point to certain instructive parallels between the function of vision in the Star and the function of “intellectual intuition” in German Idealism. Next we will explore the varying degrees of mediated and immediate vision of the All in the form of the star which Rosenzweig assigns to participants within the Jewish and Christian liturgical communities, and I will raise the question of whether a direct vision of the star is possible for the thinker who transcends the bounds of Judaism and Christianity. We will follow this discussion with an account of the vision of the Star as God’s face, with which the Star ends, and we will once more inquire into the relationship between this vision and the systematic task of the book as a whole in the light of this culminating vision. Finally, we shall descend from this account of vision to question the role such vision plays in the life of the human being who yet lives in the middle of the All.

I. The Immediacy of Vision as Complement to Discursive Knowledge: The Model of Intellectual Intuition Rosenzweig addresses the role of vision, and its relation to the systematic articulation of the course along which all particular beings realize the All in a passage toward the end of the introduction to the book’s third part: The pre-world contained only the mute elements, out of which the course of the star is built. The course itself was an actuality, but in no moment [Augenblick] to be viewed [erblicken] with eyes [Augen]. Because the star that runs the course does not stand still for a moment’s duration. Only that which has more than a moment’s duration can be viewed with eyes. Only the moment held still through its eternalization permits the eyes to view the figure in it. The figure is thus the more than elementary, the more than actual, the immediately intuitive [Anschauliche]. As long as we only know [kennen] the elements of the course and the law of the course of a star, our eyes have not yet seen it; it is just a material point, which moves in space. Only if telescope and spectroscope [Fernrohr und Spektralapparat] have brought it near to us, do we know it, as we know an appliance of our use, a picture in our room: in familiar intuition [vertrauter Anschauung]. Only in the intuitive [im Anschaulichen] does factuality complete itself; there one hears nothing more of substantial being [Sache] and of act [Tat]. (328/295)

The first part of the Star may well have taught us how to know the elements of the All, just as the second part of the book introduced us to the course upon which these elements step into relations that will realize the All in redemption. But just as the astronomer’s knowledge of the elements out of which stars are made and of the

268

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

course they chart cannot take the place of her seeing those stars, so Rosenzweig suggests that the knowledge we have gained through tracing the factual constructions of the elements and their course of reversals into relations is incomplete without an immediate vision of the unity these elements realize through their relations. The problem is that the stellar figure of the ultimate unity of the All is nowhere to be seen in the actuality of our experience in the middle of the All. In every moment of our experience, Rosenzweig suggests, we bear witness to the transformation of beings on the course of their interconnected advance toward the unification of the All. In the course of their transformations, the “star” they are in the process of realizing is ever-changing. Since it does not stand still even for a moment – for a blink of an eye [Augenblick] – we are unable to see it in the unity it will be in redemption. The “figure” of the redemptive unity of the All – the “star of redemption” – which all beings are in the process of realizing could only be seen itself, Rosenzweig suggests, if the eternity of that ultimate redemption could become visible within the present moment. Only if “telescope and spectroscope bring it close to us,” Rosenzweig claims, “do we know it … in familiar intuition.” The ultimate unity of “figure” of the All is thus to be known neither in the factual construction of the “elementary” in thought, nor in the reversals of the elements into relations which we experience as the “actual,” but rather in an immediate intuition of that figure, made possible through a kind of “zooming in” [heranholen], which brings that redemptive moment into view within the midst of time. How such a bringing of the redemptive future into the present moment is to be achieved will concern us in the following section. But we may already infer here, from this passage, how Rosenzweig conceives of the relation in which such immediate intuition stands to the modes of knowing privileged in the first and second parts of the book. For in the closing line of this passage Rosenzweig recalls the futurity of that redemptive factuality in which the substance [Sache] and the act [Tat] of the past and present attain both duration and unification. And Rosenzweig suggests here that the very factuality of method which has governed the construction of the elements and their course of interrelation through creation and revelation to redemption governs the relations among the different modes of knowledge in the Star as well. “Only in the intuitive” whereby the ultimate future unity of the All is grasped in the figure of the star, Rosenzweig suggests, “does factuality complete itself.” Intuition or vision is the means by which the human being grasps the future redemptive moment in which, we have seen, the ultimate factuality will be secured. But just as redemption unites creation and revelation, indeed, just as every “fact” is only complete as the “And” of its two poles, so too vision here, Rosenzweig intimates, is the methodological “And” which unites what the human being has come to know through the factual construction of the elements in thought, on the one hand, and the reversals of these elements into relations which we experience, on the other. The elements of God, world, and human being, the relations of creation, revelation, redemption – they

SE E I N G STA R S

269

are all grasped in their redemptive unity in the immediacy of vision. In the completion of factuality in this vision, Rosenzweig suggests, “one hears nothing more “of ‘Sache’ and of ‘Tat’”: all thought about elemental beings, and all experience of the reversals into relations among them, have found their permanent place within the intuition of the stellar figure of the All. I would like to propose that we understand the role of vision or intuition in the Star to which Rosenzweig points here as modeled upon certain German Idealist discussions of the systematic function of “intellectual intuition,” particularly those which took place during the period spanning from Schelling’s early writings of the mid-1790s to Hegel’s publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1806. Kant himself had posited a problematic notion of intellectual intuition – possible, he surmised, for God alone – as a foil for that sensible intuition which he understood to be an integral part of human knowing. Kant had shown space and time to be the forms of sensible intuition through which the finite rational being collected and ordered the appearances of things, and it was by subsuming the manifold appearances of things accessible through sensible intuition under the laws of the understanding, according to Kant, that empirical knowledge was first possible. But if human knowing thereby always demanded corroborative work between the understanding and sensible intuition, and, more broadly speaking, between the subject of knowing and her sensibly intuited object, Kant could yet envision a kind of knowing through “intellectual intuition” whereby the limits of sensible intuition, and the split between subject and object it entailed, were transcended. Whether such intellectual intuition was conceived as an immediate knowing of things in themselves, as a divine knowing of the whole, or as a kind of knowing that produces its own objects, for Kant such intuition would entail an immediate identity of subject and object, of thought and actuality.15 Kant understood intellectual intuition to be a form of knowing that is beyond the bounds of human knowledge. But Kant’s successors quickly made use of the notion of intellectual intuition even to explain what they found unaccounted for in the critical work of their teacher. As we noted in the first chapter of this work, Fichte sought to ground the whole of human knowing in an original “intellectual intuition” whereby the “I” at once produces itself and knows itself as “I.” And Fichte claimed that it was only on the grounds of such immediate intellectual intuition that one could explain Kant’s appeal, in the Critique of Practical Reason, to the categorical imperative as the source of a nonobjective, nonsensible, practical knowledge of the free self.16 But it was in the work of the young Schelling in the 15

16

Cf., CPR, B145, and Critique of Judgment, paragraph 77, Kants Werke V: 405–10. Cf., Moltke S. Gram, “Intellectual Intuition: The Continuity Thesis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XLII (1981), No. 2: pp. 287–304; Kenneth R. Westphal, “Kant, Hegel, and the Fate of ‘the’ Intuitive Intellect,” The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, pp. 283–305; Michael G. Vater, “Intellectual Intuition in Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity 1801–04,” Schelling: Zwischen Fichte und Hegel, p. 213. J. G. Fichte, “Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre,” Sämmtliche Werke I: 466, 472, 478.

270

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

mid-1790s that the notion of intellectual intuition that was to dominate German Idealism – and in relation to which I wish to situate Rosenzweig’s own appeal to immediate intuition or vision – came into its own. We have had occasion to note Schelling’s claim, in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, that the very synthesis of subject and object in the act of knowing into which Kant inquired in his Critique of Pure Reason assumes a primordial unity of that which is joined in such synthesis.17 That is to say, while our act of knowing unites us synthetically – as subjects of knowledge – with the objects of our knowledge in the world, such unification is only conceivable, according to Schelling, on the grounds of an original Absolute identity common to both subjects and objects. Schelling thus suggests that Kant’s focal question in the Critique of Pure Reason – “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” – be reformulated: “How does the Absolute come to step out of itself and set up a world over against itself?”18 In the context of these first pangs of Absolute Idealism, Schelling claimed that it was through “intellectual intuition” that we have access to the original Absolute identity of all that is. Intellectual intuition allows us to step beyond the split we experience between subject and object, between our free thinking and the actuality of the empirical world. In this nonsensible seeing of the unity of all in the Absolute, Schelling asserted, we at once intuit the Absolute within us. Throughout the Philosophical Letters, Schelling describes this intuition in terms meant to highlight its distinction from sensible intuition. “This intuition,” according to Schelling, is the innermost, most personal experience, upon which depends everything that we know and believe of a supersensible world. It is this intuition which first convinces us that anything is strictly speaking, while everything else merely appears, and we transfer that word [being] to it. It distinguishes itself from every sensible intuition in that it is only brought about through freedom …. This intellectual intuition begins when we stop being objects for ourselves, where, drawing back into itself, the intuiting self is identical with the intuited. In this moment of intuition, time and duration fade: we are not in time, but time – or rather, not time, but pure absolute eternity – is in us.19

Through this unique act of intellectual intuition, Schelling declares in these passages, human beings have access to that point in which subject and object – “intuiting self ” and “intuited” – are one and the same. If sensible intuition gives us the material for our knowledge about appearances, intellectual intuition grants us knowledge of true being in its unity – it “first convinces us that anything is” rather than “merely appears.” If sensible intuition must be subsumed under the laws of the understanding in the Kantian scheme, intellectual intuition “is only brought 17 18 19

See the Excursus, at the end of Chapter 3, above. F.W.J Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, I: 310. F.W.J Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, I: 318, 319.

SE E I N G STA R S

271

about through freedom.” If sensible intuition locates the appearances of things within space and time, in intellectual intuition “we are not in time,” but rather, “pure absolute eternity” is present “in us.” Intellectual intuition is thus claimed to grant us immediate access to the Absolute identity of all that is distinct and divided in our everyday thinking and experience. In his 1801–1802 system of identity, Schelling expresses this claim in the most direct of terms: “to view … the unity of thinking and being, not in this or that relation but rather quintessentially in and for itself, as … the truth in all truth, the purely known in everything known, means to raise oneself to the intuition of absolute unity and thereby to intellectual intuition as such.”20 Now, the extent to which intellectual intuition could be touted as the firm ground of Absolute knowledge became a point of contention between Hegel and Schelling.21 But in the years prior to Hegel’s work on the Phenomenology, both Hegel and Schelling in fact viewed the relationship between the unity which could be grasped through intellectual intuition, on the one hand, and the “full body of articulated knowledge,” on the other, as the key to systematic knowledge.22 Their varied discussions of this relation between intuition and articulated knowledge provide us with three different paradigms, I believe, which help us make sense of the way in which Rosenzweig grasps vision in the systematic context of the Star. First, as we have seen, Schelling’s Philosophical Letters in particular present intellectual intuition as a mode whereby what is distinct and divided in the syntheses of Kantian thought and experience is seen immediately in its Absolute unity. It is here that subject and object, freedom and nature, thought and empirical actuality,

20 21

22

F. W. J Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, I/4: 364. The extremity of Schelling’s claims for intellectual intuition in his system of identity (e.g., that through intellectual intuition the philosopher comes to know that “different unities have no essentiality in themselves as different, but rather are only ideal forms and images under which the whole is minted in absolute knowing. … The whole universe is in the absolute as plant, as animal, as human being, but because the whole is in each, so it is therein not as plant, not as animal, not as human being or as the particular unity, but rather as absolute unity” [ “Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie,” Sämmtliche Werke I/4: 394]) led Hegel to turn away from the method of “construction in intellectual intuition” towards what became his dialectical method, and it led him to issue his famous critique in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: “To set this one cognition, that in the Absolute everything is the same, over against the discerning and fulfilled or fulfilling of seeking and researching knowledge, or to display its Absolute as the night in which, as one has the duty to say, all cows are black, is the naivety of emptiness in knowledge,” Werke 3: Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 22. But see Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism, pp. 338–79. Since Franks understands intellectual intuition in German Idealism to be modeled on geometric construction rather than on a kind of mystical seeing, he argues for a more far-reaching connection between the “construction in intellectual intuition” of Schelling’s Identity-Philosophy and Hegel’s dialectic, two methods between which, Franks shows, Fichte himself oscillates in the 1790s. For an account of the neo-Platonic roots of the German Idealist conception of intellectual intuition, see Werner Beierwaltes, Platonismus und Idealismus, pp. 92–3, 134–7.

272

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

are grasped in their true identity.23 Such a model of intellectual intuition points to the way in which Rosenzweig understands immediate vision as a means of grasping the unity of all that has been known through the factual construction of the elements in thought, on the one hand, and their reversals into relations which we experience, on the other. If we recall the corroborative relation that held between thought and experience, between the abstract factual generation of the elements, on the one hand, and the temporal experience of the relations among them, on the other, then the immediate vision of the “star of redemption” in the third part of the book may be said to present the unity of that thought and experience, of the elements and their relations, that are separated in the first and second parts of the book, just as they are separated in our living, temporal experience. There is, furthermore, a second account of the relation between intellectual intuition and the diversity of mediated knowledge, which Hegel and Schelling both appear to promote during their corroborative work in Jena, an account which is likewise helpful in situating Rosenzweig’s use of vision within his system. According to this view, expressed in different ways in different texts, intuition and dialectical reasoning or “reflection” are conceived as working in tandem to yield complete knowledge. Reflection or dialectic, here, is understood as articulating the differences among, and the relations among finite determinations, and such reflection allows the philosopher to think the division [Entzweiung] that governs human thought and experience. But it is only through a complementary intuition of the unity of those different determinations posited through reflection that Idealism can attain knowledge of the identity of the Absolute which realizes itself in the different determinations of the system.24 “Isolated reflection, as the positing of opposites … is the capacity of being and limitation,” Hegel observes in the Differenzschrift, while “in transcendental intuition all opposition is sublated.” “It is to be shown, first and foremost,” Hegel thus asserts, “to what extent reflection is capable of grasping the Absolute, and in its business as speculation, carries the necessity and possibility of being synthesized with absolute intuition.” Said otherwise: “Speculative knowing must be grasped as the identity of reflection and intuition.”25 23

24

25

At least early on in his studies, Rosenzweig seems to understand Hegel according to this model as well. See his diary entry of May 29, 1908, in BT I, p. 82: “According to the Hegelian scheme, the line Kant-Fichte-Hegel lets itself be grasped as multiplicity – unity – allhood [Vielheit-Einheit-Allheit]: in Kant, the pure ‘empirical’ multiplicity, resting on the “findings” in the “mind”; by Fichte, the pure ‘theoretical’ unity, grounded on the scientific goal; by Hegel, the sublation of ‘empirical’ and ‘theoretical’ need through all-encompassing development, the Allhood grounded on pure ‘intuition.’ ” See Klaus Düsing’s careful studies on this subject, e.g., “Die Enstehung des spekulativen Idealismus: Schellings und Hegels Wandlungen zwischen 1800–01,” Transcendentalphilosophie und Spekulation: Der Streit um die Gestalt einer Ersten Philosophie, pp. 144–63, and “Spekulation und Reflexion: Zur Zusammenarbeit Schellings und Hegels in Jena,” Hegel-Studien 5 (1969): 93–128. See also, Michael G. Vater, “Intellectual Intuition in Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity 1801–04,” Schelling: Zwischen Fichte und Hegel, pp. 213–34. G. W. F. Hegel, “Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie,” Werke 2: 26, 43, 25–6, 43.

SE E I N G STA R S

273

Schelling likewise points to the need to draw together intuition and reflection in his 1799 “Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature.”26 And he discusses the relationship between vision and dialectic in the preface to his Ages of the World fragment from 1813, as well, declaring: Not the poet alone, but the philosopher too has his raptures. … But it is something other than the constancy of this state of intuition that fights against nature and the determination of life as it is now. For however we may consider this state’s relationship to the above, it always comes back to this, that what was together in this indivisible way, unfolds in it and is set out of each other by way of parts in it. We do not live in vision. Our knowing is piecemeal, it must be generated piece by piece, according to sections and grades, all of which cannot happen without reflection. … Thus, all science must go through dialectic.27

In the two directions these views articulate regarding the complementary relations between reflection or dialectic and intuition within knowledge – to wit, that what is known through reflection must be grounded in intuition, and what is known through vision must “pass through dialectic” – we find a further precedent for Rosenzweig’s use of vision as a mode of knowing in the Star. In the factual construction of the elements, and through the discursive account of their reversals into relations, we have seen, Rosenzweig provides us with a means of thinking the different beings that make up the All and the path of relations among these beings that leads them to realize the All. Without “passing through” such rigorous demonstration, Rosenzweig suggests, the human being could never come to recognize what is seen through immediate vision as the redemptive All that it is. But on the other hand, on the path to systematic knowledge, the method of factuality and reversal that allows Rosenzweig to trace the relations among all particular beings in their common advance toward the realization of the All, demands that immediate vision of the identity of the All to complement and confirm its mediation of difference. There is, finally, a third account of intuition given in the German Idealist context which I must mention. In contrast to the texts we have noted which assert the possibility of an intellectual intuition of the Absolute, other early texts of German Idealism are more hesitant regarding the human capacity to grasp such Absolute unity in a direct manner. They claim, nevertheless, that we do have access to an objectified version of the unity of all that is, an objectified version of intellectual intuition in – depending on the text – art or religion or the feeling of love.28 Thus 26

27 28

F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke I/3: 286. See also his Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, in Sämmtliche Werke X: 188. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, VIII 203–5. Cf., Rosenzweig’s observation, in his “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism”: “The aesthetic is not the subject of discussion in this context in [Schelling’s] ‘On the I.’ But in the Philosophical Letters it suddenly appears, still not … in its theoretically valuable mediating role, but well in its

274

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

according to Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, “Art is that which is highest for the philosopher because it opens for him, as it were, the holy of holies, where there burns in eternal and original unity … what is separate in nature and history, and what must eternally flee itself in life and in action, just as in thought.” In its capacity thereby to “authenticate what philosophy cannot present in external terms,” Schelling suggests, art reflects in objective form the original Absolute unity which – according to the System of Transcendental Idealism – can be grasped neither in thought nor in life. Art can do so, says Schelling, because “aesthetic intuition is merely transcendental-intellectual intuition become objective.”29 Hegel’s “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” (1798–1800), for its part, describes “the ‘Kingdom of God’ ” – which “completes and comprises the whole of the religion as Jesus founded it” – as “the development of the divine in men,” “a harmony through which … the partitions against other godlike beings are sublated, and the same living spirit animates the different beings, who therefore are no longer merely alike but one; they make up not a collection [Versammlung] but a communion [Gemeine], since they are unified not in a universal, a concept … but rather through life, through love.”30 According to these texts, the Absolute unity of all beings that cannot be grasped directly is taken to be reflected in concrete form in art, religion, or love, and thereby to be graspable, indirectly, for the philosopher.31 Corresponding to the German Idealist discussion of whether a direct intellectual intuition of the absolute unity of the All is possible, or rather an objectified version of this intuition is required to mirror such unity, we will have to investigate how Rosenzweig himself distinguishes between direct vision of the unity of the All and that vision which is “reflected” or “mirrored” through the liturgical cycles of Judaism and Christianity.32

29 30

31

32

place, already as the ‘intellectual intuition become objective,’ and if not as ‘organon’ … still yet as ‘document’ of philosophy,” OSP, p. 21. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke I/3: 627–8. G. W. F. Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” Werke I. Frühe Schriften, pp. 393–4. See also, Hegel’s account of religion, in his Faith and Knowledge, as representing “a truly real and at-hand redemption” in which “spirit” is the “identity” of “the original image of God” and “God’s eternal incarnation in man,” Werke II. Jenaer Schriften 1801–1807, p. 423. Cf., Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism, pp. 370–1, who suggests Hegel’s gloss on religious experience in this passage from Faith and Knowledge is part of Hegel’s attempt to identify the true “fact of reason” from which the philosopher must begin her reflection. See also Klaus Düsing, “Die Entstehung des spekulativen Idealismus: Schellings und Hegels Wandlungen zwischen 1800–01,” Transzendentalphilosophie und Spekulation: Der Streit um die Gestalt einer ersten Philosophie, pp. 146–7. Cf., Orrin F. Summerell, “Einbildungskraft und Vernunft: Die Widerspiegelung der absolut Identität in Schellings Philosophie der Kunst,” Schelling: Zwischen Fichte und Hegel, pp. 179–212, especially pp. 185–95. See also Thomas A. Schmidt’s illuminating study of the relationship between intuition and recognition in Hegel’s Jena system: Anerkennung und absolut Religion: Formierung der Gesellschaftstheorie und Genese der spekulativen Religionsphilosophie in Hegels Frühschriften. Moshe Schwarz notes this parallel in his “Art and Faith in F. Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” ‫ אומנות‬,‫ מיתוס‬,‫[ שפה‬Language, Myth, Art], p. 382.

SE E I N G STA R S

275

Insofar as Rosenzweig understands some form of vision as complementing and confirming that mediated, discursive knowledge of the course along which particular beings realize the All, I thus propose, his conception of the systematic function of such vision draws upon the range of systematic roles intuition plays in German Idealism. The vision of the All in the figure of the star will grasp in unified form those particular elements and relations we have grasped as distinct moments in thought and experience over the last two chapters; it will complement the discursive knowledge we have attained of how particular beings create the totality of the All through their reversals into relation with an immediate grasp of the unity of that All, and the account of such vision will distinguish between levels of vision – between an immediate, complete grasp of the All in its unity and mediated, partial reflections of the All. When we arrive at the closing pages of the Star, we shall find, it will only be the recognition in vision of the unity of that which we came to know as a totality of particulars, through thought and experience, through factuality and reversals, that will complete knowledge of the All and therewith, the Star itself. As we shall see, however, even as Rosenzweig draws on the German Idealist discussions of intellectual intuition, his account of vision in the Star distinguishes itself in telling ways. Consistent with his rejection of the Idealist conception of the Absolute unity of the All as original, or prior to the diversity of experience, the object of Rosenzweig’s immediate vision is the unity of the All which is the redemptive completion of the system and not its origin. Moreover – and perhaps more crucially – although Rosenzweig designates the vision he is after in the third part of the Star as “immediate,” this vision is never described as entailing the suspension of the difference between the viewer and the redemptive unity that is viewed. As we noted in our perusal of Rosenzweig’s October 1918 letter recounting his personal seeing of the “Star,” Rosenzweig’s is not a vision of pure immediacy; it is not an intuition in which “the intuiting self is identical with the intuited.” Rather, paradoxical as it may be, the All seen in its redemptive unity in the shape of a star is always depicted as other, as a divine face, into whose eyes the seer gazes. Thus we can claim that vision plays the same role in the Star as intellectual intuition plays in German Idealism. Rosenzweig even stresses the immediacy of this vision over against the mediated character of discursive or experiential knowledge. But such vision never grants the seer a view of the whole from the Absolute standpoint. Even as the Star thus demands that the philosopher transcend the limits of everyday “creaturely” life in vision in order to complete systematic knowledge, we shall see, this ecstatic vision remains stamped by the seer’s humanity. Indeed, the very divine face glimpsed at the peak of such vision, we shall find, directs the seer back into the human community of faces, to do her part in the realization of the All.33 33

It is worth noting that this distinction between the figural character of Rosenzweig’s “immediate vision” and the pure immediacy of the German Idealist intellectual intuition corresponds to

276

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

II. Cyclical Time and the Visualization of the All Examining Rosenzweig’s claims about immediate vision in the Star in the light of the German Idealist discussions of intellectual intuition has helped clarify why Rosenzweig thinks such vision is necessary within his system. How then, we may ask, is the vision of the ultimate redemptive unity of the All in the figure of the Star made possible? What is the means by which the human being may bring eternity into time and see the redemptive future unity of that which exists in states of difference and relation in the temporal middle of the All? The fleeting character of time in the midst of the All, we recall, is what prevents human beings from seeing the All in its unity, for in this state of flux nothing stands still for more than a blink of an eye. The “star which runs the course does not stand still for a moment’s duration,” and thus “in no moment [Augenblick]” can it “be viewed with eyes” (328/295). Only if the quality of eternity could be brought into the moment would “telescope and spectroscope” have made the figure of the star of redemption visible in its unity to our eye in “familiar intuition.” According to Rosenzweig, it is through the cyclical recurrence of time in the liturgical calendars of religious communities that human beings bring eternity into time in the fullest sense. Judaism and Christianity, which celebrate in the course of their yearly calendars the very creation, revelation, and redemption in which God, world, and human being unite to realize the All, represent for Rosenzweig two distinct but complementary communal contexts within which the bringing of eternity into time is realized. Now, in order for the redemptive unity of the All to become visible in the midst of time, the experience of time as changing with every moment would have to be transformed into an experience of the standing a distinction between two different kinds of mystical vision which Elliot Wolfson has explored in his Through a Speculum That Shines. According to Wolfson, “it is possible to make a distinction between two types of contemplative vision in the history of Western mysticism. The first typology is that which characterizes the introvertive mystics, influenced primarily by the Neoplatonic idea of a transcendent One beyond all image and form. For such mystics the beatific vision is described as an ‘imageless vision’ of the unity beyond differentiation and distinction. … There is, in addition, a second typology of mystical vision well attested in the various religions of the West and ultimately rooted in the prophetic and apocalyptic traditions. This is the typology of ‘cognitive’ mysticism, which affirms that supernatural or spiritual knowledge comes by way of revelation, intuition, or illumination. The culminating stage on the via mystica is not an eradication of all percepts and concepts, a stripping away of all sensational and representational form, but rather the beholding of the ultimate form – a vision of God in ‘gleams of ecstatic vision.’ Although in this case as well, the mystical experience is ‘contemplative’ and not ‘physical’, it is inevitable that the mystical vision is experienced within the phenomenological parameters of human experience as such,” Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, pp. 58–60. While Rosenzweig’s vision is “‘contemplative’ and not ‘physical’” just as is the intellectual intuition of the German Idealists, it represents the unity of the All not as “‘imageless,’” not as a pure undifferentiated unity, but rather as the “ultimate form.” Moreover, the figured character of this unity suggests that the immediacy of the vision in the Star represents this unity of the All “within the phenomenological parameters of human experience.” Rosenzweig’s vision occurs – as he himself will describe it – within “life beyond life” (471/424).

SE E I N G STA R S

277

still of that which changes in time. The liturgical calendars of religious communities carry out such a transformation, Rosenzweig claims, and in doing so they show themselves to be, in fact, merely the supreme form of a human transformation of time that occurs in all walks of life. Such a transformation of time from something fleeting to something standing still in the midst of change occurs most basically, according to Rosenzweig, in the human institution of the “hour.” In the establishment of the “hour” as the building block of human temporal calculation, Rosenzweig suggests, human beings transform that which changes in every blink of an eye – the moment, that is, the Augenblick – into something that stands still – the hour, that is, the Stunde. As the German word naming it indicates, the hour stands [Stunde, stehen, gestanden] even as the wealth of its moments succeed one another; it circles from its beginning to its end, and at its end point an hour begins again. The hour has within itself beginning, middle, and end; past, present and future; and yet it remains “equal to itself ” – the same hour – over such constant change. As such, the hour “can become what the mere sequence of individual ever-new moments can never become: a circle running back into itself ” (322/290). Thus, in the institution of the hour, Rosenzweig claims, human beings have a basic means of bringing permanence into time, of allowing the constant change of the temporal to reflect the standing unity of the eternal. And Rosenzweig suggests that just this capacity of the “hour” to transform the momentary into a reflection of the eternal makes the hour the model for how human beings come to reconstruct all quanta of time. It is “according to the image of the self-established hour, in which the human being redeems himself from the transitory character of the moment,” according to Rosenzweig, that the human being re-creates [umschaffen] the times which creation has set on his life. Day and year, week and month, are now also transformed from times of sun and moon to hours of human life. They too now contain their beginning and their end, and an end that immediately becomes beginning again. Not the circle, which the two lights, the great and the small, describe in heaven, makes them into time-markers for human beings; the circle alone without the firm [festen] point of beginning and end world still be nothing more than the mere sequence of moments. Only through the fixing [Festlegung] of that point, the festival [Fest], does the repetition, which happens in the coursing through of the orbit, become perceptible. Not the heavenly orbit, but rather the earthly repetition makes these times into hours, into guarantees of eternity in time. (323/290–1, emphasis mine – BP)

As the quintessential temporal cycle whose identity and self-repetition over the expanse of time permit it to anticipate the standing character of eternity, the “hour” becomes the model, says Rosenzweig, according to which human beings transform even naturally determined measures of time into “hours of human life” and thereby into “guarantees of eternity in time.” Rosenzweig’s claim here is perhaps counterintuitive: natural time is not inherently cyclical. Human beings do not begin to mark the cyclical character of time by observing the rising and setting

278

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

of the sun, or the waxing and waning of the moon, or the changes of the seasons. According to Rosenzweig, temporal “circles” – of the day, the month, the year – “without the firm point of beginning and end would still be nothing more than the mere sequence of moments.” Rather, such natural determinations of time first become cycles when human beings transform them into “hours,” by marking a certain moment as their beginning point and calculating the course of change over time that follows that point and eventually circles back to it. According to Rosenzweig, this fixing of the beginning and end point of each given temporal cycle is what transforms the “mere sequence of moments” into the repetitions of hours and thereby makes what transpires over the course of time “perceptible.” This cyclical repetition of time first holds something before our eyes for longer than the blink of an eye and thus first brings the eternal into view even as time passes.34 According to Rosenzweig, the original function of the religious festival is precisely to “fix” the beginning and end point of each given temporal cycle in this way – a function preserved, Rosenzweig notes, in the German word for “festival,” Fest, that is, “fixed” or held “firm.” Rosenzweig asserts that the liturgical calendars of faith communities in which such festivals are celebrated realize this bringing of eternity into time in the most supreme manner. “In the every-daily, every-weekly, every-yearly repetition of the circle of cultic prayer,” Rosenzweig asserts, “faith makes the moment into ‘hour,’ and makes time ready for the taking up of eternity” (324/292). In the festival celebrations that mark out the units of the liturgical calendar, those beginning, middle, and end points are “fixed” which allow for a cyclical representation of the whole course of the All. The daily prayers, the weekly recollection of creation and rest in the Sabbath, and the yearly celebrations of creation, revelation, and redemption in religious festivals allow the Jewish and Christian ritual calendars to hold the All firm before the eye even in the midst of time. They allow the moment in which we stand – ever in the middle of the All and thus in a present that has creation as its past and redemption as its future – to reflect for our eyes the whole course of the All. In the celebration of beginning points, the community “creates” those cycles in which the realization of the All can be reflected. And in the communal celebration of the end of any given “hour,” the ultimate redemptive culmination of the course of the All is represented in nuce.35 Now, because of the way in which the communal fixing of time through the liturgical calendar brings the whole course of the All into one’s field of vision, 34

35

Cf., Zachary Braiterman, “Cyclical Motions and the Force of Repetition in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Beginning/Again, p. 216. My reading may be contrasted with Robert Gibbs’s emphasis on the way in which the cyclical form of the hour in fact “inserts the discontinuity of the future redemption … into time. Cycles are neither linear nor simply the continuity of time. Rather, they represent the interruption and break-up of continuity,” “Lines, Circles, Points: Messianic Epistemology in Cohen, Rosenzweig and Benjamin,” Toward the Millennium, p. 374.

SE E I N G STA R S

279

Rosenzweig understands prayer within this communal context to have what appears to be a unique anticipatory capacity. As Rosenzweig asserts, when the community of believers prays for redemption within the context of this collective, cyclical fixing of time, they succeed in bringing that prayed-for redemptive moment into the present, and in holding that moment in place for the eye to see. Because “the times which the cult prepares are to none their own without being so for all others,” Rosenzweig explains, “the searchlight of prayer enlightens for each only what it enlightens for all: … the kingdom.” Here, in the prayer of the religious community, “the Star that otherwise flashes in the distance of eternity appears as the Next [das Nächste], the whole force of love turns itself to it and pulls its light with magic force [mit zaubrischer Gewalt] through the night of the future into the Today of the praying community” (325/293). In the collective unity of all members of the religious community in common prayer to God, the community anticipates the redemptive kingdom of God, the ultimate unification of all beings in the common recognition of God, and brings it into view. The star in which the future redemptive unity of the All attains figure becomes visible here in the present for all members in the community, for all who live by the same cyclical units of time. As the next section will detail, in the course of the liturgical year, the Jewish and Christian religious communities represent, in collective ritual, the whole course of the All and the ultimate unification of all beings with God that marks the redemptive completion of the All. The liturgical calendar leads all members of the community along the path toward the realization of the All as this path is refracted within the cyclical time of the ritual year. Here the path of the realization of the All is made visible within the cycle of the liturgical year. And this yearly repetition of the course of the All is to serve as preparation for the crowning vision of the redemptive unity of the All, to be attained in the ending of the yearly cycle which anticipates the ultimate completion of the All in redemption. The cyclical character of the liturgical year at once gives us a preliminary answer to the question of where the possibility of a vision of the ultimate redemptive unity of the All, in the figure of the Star, is to be found. If thought and experience, factuality and reversal, are the tools through which Rosenzweig can demonstrate for his readers the force with which all particular beings are driven to step into those relations that will realize the All, it is in the cyclical recreation of the course of the All in the liturgical calendars of Judaism and Christianity in which Rosenzweig will ground the possibility of seeing the All in its redemptive unity. After giving his specific accounts of these communities – which we will discuss in the following section – Rosenzweig summarizes this epistemological function of the prayer community in the last part of the Star. In a passage part of which we examined at the end of the last chapter, Rosenzweig asserts that while “knowledge” – by which he means here the narrow knowledge of the elements grounded in thought alone – “has all [Alles], but only as elements, only in its pieces,” and while

280

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

experience went beyond the piecework, was wholly in each moment, but because it was always in the moment – and so was always whole – yet had all [alles] in none of its moments, the All [das All] that would be all [alles] and whole can neither be honestly known nor clearly experienced. … The All must be grasped beyond knowledge and experience, if it is to be immediately grasped. Just this grasping happens in the enlightenment of prayer. We saw how the course rounds itself here into the circle of the year, and thereby the All, in that just this conclusion is entreated, presents itself immediately to view. In this last immediacy now, in which the All really comes wholly near to us, it is permitted to us to renew the name with whose denial we began our work, the name of truth. … We denied the philosophy which rested on this faith in the immediacy of knowledge to the All and of the All to knowledge. Now, after we have arrived on our way from one immediacy to the next up to this immediate view of the figure, we find at the goal the truth as the last thing, which had wanted to force itself upon us at first. In vision [Schau] we grasp the eternal truth. But we don’t see it, as philosophy intended, as ground, which for us rather is and remains Nothing, but rather as last goal. (435–6/391–2)

In the cycle of the liturgical year, Rosenzweig asserts here, the “course” of the All within which we live rounds itself into a circle, and in the communal prayer which anticipates the redemptive conclusion of the course of the All within the concluding moment of the liturgical year, “the All presents itself immediately to view.” The All is only grasped [erfassen] in its immediacy here in this seeing of the All through liturgy that transcends both the narrow knowledge of the elements grounded in thought36 and the actuality of the relations among the elements given in experience. Such immediate seeing, made possible through the cyclical bringing of eternity into time within the religious community, grasps in its unity that All which is divided in the thought and experience of the human being who stands in the middle of the All. Immediate vision grasps the All as both “everything and whole,” in both its difference and its identity. It is this All, moreover, that Rosenzweig sees as “the eternal truth.” Thus, just as intellectual intuition grasped in its unity that Absolute which was divided into subject and object, freedom and nature, in the thought and experience of the German Idealists, so for Rosenzweig the vision of the All in the course of the liturgical year serves to represent that unity of the All which is divided in thought and experience in the first and second parts of the Star. But here Rosenzweig insists that the unity which is grasped through vision is no vision of a single Absolute ground of all things. The view of the unity of the All in which “we grasp the eternal truth,” Rosenzweig avers, is a view of the redemptive end of 36

It is unfortunate for my own reading that Rosenzweig uses the term “knowledge” instead of “thought” to designate the kind of piecemeal access to the All attained in the first part of the book. But by the end of the Star Rosenzweig makes it clear that this kind of “grasping” [erfassen] of the All that occurs through vision is both a kind of knowing in itself and at once the completion of the path toward knowing the All that the Star charts as a whole. See Section V.

SE E I N G STA R S

281

all things, not its origin, which remains – despite such vision – the particularity of nothing. Indeed, Rosenzweig intimates here that only after one has traced the generation of all things out of their particular nothings in thought, and grasped one’s experience of the interrelation of all beings that serves to realize the All, can one recognize the unity of the All presented in immediate vision as the redemptive unity that it is. Only insofar as we have not assumed the unity of the All from the beginning, only insofar as we recognize our status in the middle of the All as one in which the All is not-yet unified, may we recognize truth as the last goal – and not the origin – of the system. Our task, in the section that follows, is to examine how – and whether – the Jewish and Christian liturgical calendars fulfill the task Rosenzweig has assigned to them. We must determine, that is to say, the extent to which the yearly cycle lived out in the religious communities of Judaism and Christianity brings the unity of the All “immediately into view,” brings “the star, which otherwise flashes in the distance of eternity,” into “familiar intuition.” It will turn out, in fact, that the extent to which the Jewish and Christian calendars do so is more problematic than Rosenzweig implies in the passages we have examined over the last pages. The problems implicit in Rosenzweig’s claim about Judaism and Christianity will emerge in our survey of Rosenzweig’s analyses of these communities, but we may foreshadow two particular problems, at this point, which will concern us after our survey is completed. First of all, while Rosenzweig insists that the immediate vision of the unity of the All in the figure of the Star is to be found in the “enlightenment of prayer” brought about through the cyclical repetition of time over the course of the liturgical calendar, it is far from obvious where the immediacy of this vision is to be located. Indeed, to the extent to which the unified All which we see is made possible through the cyclical repetition of time in the cult, such vision can hardly be claimed to be immediate. Rosenzweig himself will say that the cyclical repetition of time in the religious community “reflects” or “mirrors” [abspiegeln, wiederspiegeln] the redemptive completion of the course of the All.37 “Liturgy,” according to Rosenzweig, is “the concave mirror [Brennspiegel] which collects the sun-rays of eternity into the small circle of the year” (342/308). Liturgy makes possible, that is to say, a mediated vision of the unity of the All, not an immediate one.38 In this vein, Rosenzweig goes so far as to say that “the figures of 37

38

I thank Markus Kartheininger for first alerting me to Rosenzweig’s use of the Spiegel metaphor is his accounts of Judaism and Christianity. See Kartheininger’s fine account of mirroring, speculation, and the primacy of praxis in Rosenzweig in the second chapter of his Heterogenität: Politische Philosophie im Frühwerk von Leo Strauss, entitled, “Rosenzweigs ‘Neues Denken’: Die Zurückstellung des Denkens in den Horizont der Erfahrung.” See also, Michal Schwartz, Metapher und Offenbarung, pp. 123–6, where she notes Rosenzweig’s use of the “mirror” metaphor and points to the way in which the mirror is at once a figure of “perception and illusion.” Compare how Rosenzweig describes the mirroring character of Jewish and Christian liturgy in “The New Thinking”: “In them, [in] their year, the course of world time, which cannot be copied [unabbildbare] but can only be lived and narrated, takes figural shape as a formed copy [bildet sich … zum

282

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

liturgy” “represent the redeemed Beyond-world to knowledge; knowledge knows only them. It doesn’t see beyond them. The eternal hides itself behind them. They are the light in which we see the light, silent anticipation of a world shining in the silence of the future” (327/295). The liturgical form in which the religious communities of Judaism and Christianity anticipate the ultimate redemption, Rosenzweig suggests in this passage, is the only way in which we can come to see the unity of the All that will be in the redemptive future. And if this is the case, then such communal cyclical mirroring of the course of the All in the liturgical year would appear to serve the role, in Rosenzweig’s system, of the “objectified” intellectual intuition which, we noted earlier, is filled by art in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, or by the love that unites the ideal community of Christ’s followers, in Hegel’s “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate.” But if Rosenzweig here claims that the ultimate unity of the All can only be seen as reflected in the cyclical bringing of eternity into time within the liturgical communities of Judaism and Christianity, then the All cannot be said to come “immediately to view” through the yearly cycles of such liturgical communities. We are confronted here, moreover, not simply with an apparent contradiction between two of Rosenzweig’s statements, but with a threat to the completion of Rosenzweig’s systematic project in the Star as a whole. For if such systematic knowledge can be completed only if the mediated, discursive knowledge of the path to the All is complemented by an immediate grasp of the unity of the All, then the mediated vision of redemptive unity attained through the “mirrors” of the liturgical communities would fail to grant us the completion of knowledge which we seek. This mediated character of the vision of the All made possible through the liturgical calendars of Judaism and Christianity is not the only problem we face in coming to terms with Rosenzweig’s claim that the unity of the All is to be grasped through such liturgical vision. The yearly liturgical calendars of Judaism and Christianity do indeed reflect the unity of the All, but they do so in different, complementary, and ultimately only partial forms. We will have to ask how such communities can be claimed to bring to view the unity of the All as the “whole” that it is when the reflections these communities produce are only partial. Rosenzweig explores the relationship between these two communal anticipations of the All in the form of the Star at great length in III 3 of the Star, but he sums up their respective limitations most succinctly when he states that the Jews “see the Star, but not – the rays,” while the Christians “follow its rays, but they don’t see it [i.e., the Star itself] with their eyes. … It would belong to the whole truth that one saw not merely its light, but also what is enlightened by it. And so,” Rosenzweig geformten Abbild],” and “In place of the existing substances, which are everlasting only as secret preconditions of the ever renewed actuality, enter forms that eternally mirror [ewig spiegeln] this ever renewed actuality,” “Das neue Denken,” GS 3, pp. 155, 156, translated in Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 132.

SE E I N G STA R S

283

concludes, “we both have only part of the whole truth. … Immediate vision of the whole truth occurs only for the one who sees it in God. This however is a vision beyond life” (462/416). We discover, that is to say, that in neither Judaism nor Christianity is the All in the figure of the Star seen in its entirety. If this is the case, however, then what is seen in the context of the liturgical communities is not the true All, but rather, merely limited perspectives of that All. If it is only the immediate vision of the ultimate unity of the All which would complete systematic knowledge, as Rosenzweig has implied, then such limited visions of the All in the figure of the Star as Judaism and Christianity provide would once again not appear to fulfill the task they are assigned in the Star. After we analyze the mirrored visions of the All in Judaism and Christianity, therefore, I will examine the possibility that Rosenzweig hints at a truly immediate form of seeing the All which transcends the context of the liturgical community, and which would alone fulfill the demands of both immediacy and wholeness which Rosenzweig suggests must characterize such vision if it is to make possible the completion of knowledge of the All in the Star. The possibility of such a vision is suggested, of course, by Rosenzweig’s description of his own personal vision of the All in the form of the Star in his letter of October 1918, with which we began this chapter. But I will propose, tentatively, that there is evidence within the Star itself that Rosenzweig understands this unique kind of vision – a vision that stands beyond the “living vision” possible within the context of religious communities – as that vision which alone completes the path to systematic knowledge. In the following section, we will thus examine the visions of the All made possible through the reflection of that All in the liturgical cycles of the Jewish and Christian communal year. But we will follow this survey of the Jewish and Christian communities with an investigation into the possibility of an immediate vision of the All that transcends the confines of such liturgical communities. Only after sorting through the different degrees of vision in the Star, and only after attempting to determine who has the ability to have which vision of the All, will we be in a position to venture a claim about the extent to which such vision completes the systematic knowledge of the All which Rosenzweig sets out to attain in the Star.

III. Mirroring the All: Jewish and Christian Liturgical Calendars In the cycle of their respective liturgical years, Judaism and Christianity make possible a vision of the redemptive All within time. But we have already noted that the vision made possible through these liturgical cycles is nevertheless limited. “The whole truth belongs neither to them nor to us,” we have seen Rosenzweig claim. Now, while the vision of the unity of the All is likewise limited for both Jews and Christians, the limited vision each has of the All in the figure of the Star is

284

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

distinct. Rosenzweig claims that the Jews see the star itself, but not its rays, while the Christians see only the star’s rays. But “it would belong to the whole truth, that one saw not only its light, but also what is enlightened by it. … And so we both have only part of the whole truth” (462/416). In order to come to terms with the different degrees of vision which Rosenzweig delineates in the third part of the Star, we have to ask why Jews and Christians see the All in the different ways they see it, and why they only see the All in such ways. We must inquire into the ground of the distinction between the visions made possible in Judaism and Christianity, respectively. The curious answer Rosenzweig gives to the question regarding the ground of this distinction is as follows: Judaism and Christianity “reflect” the ultimate unity of the redemptive All to the extent to which they serve as the forms in which world and human being anticipate the ultimate redemption in time.39 In the “eternal life” of the Jewish people, Rosenzweig claims, “redemption was already anticipated in the world.” In the “eternal way” of the Christian, “human being, ensouled human being … already becomes heir of redemption” (466/419, emphasis mine – BP). When introducing the visions that Christianity and Judaism will present to us in the third part of the Star, Rosenzweig highlights this manner in which the Jewish people serves as the “worldly” anticipation, and the Christian as the “human” anticipation of redemption: If we now seek the outlook into the redeemed beyond-world, we know what vision awaits us there. There, we will see the human being … wholly redeemed from all ownness and selfishness into the created image-of-God; the world … wholly redeemed

39

A comprehensive explanation for the systematic roles which Judaism and Christianity play within the Star will have to await a future study. Such an explanation would demand returning to the discussion of the securing of divine factuality in redemption, which we examined in the last chapter. Redemption is marked by God’s attainment of secure factuality – in redemption, the Tat and Sache of the elemental God which split apart in order to enter into the relations of creation with the world, and revelation with the human being, are reunited through the relation between world and human being. But this factual process leads Rosenzweig to ask why the securing of the factuality of the elemental world and human being does not take the same form. If, e.g., the Tat and Sache of the elemental world split up when the world enters into the relation of creation with God and that of redemption with the human being, then according to the same factual logic through which God secured his factuality, the world should attain the securing of its factuality in the revelatory relation between God and human being. Likewise, the elemental self which splits up into the relations of revelation (with God) and redemption (with the world) should attain the securing of its factuality in the relation of creation between God and the world. In order to reconcile what would then appear to be three different redemptions for the three different elements, Rosenzweig must show that the secure factuality the world attains in revelation and the self attains in creation are not redemption in the complete sense, but rather anticipations of the ultimate redemption. Judaism and Christianity represent for Rosenzweig the way in which world and self indeed attain a kind of securing of factuality – a kind of redemption – even before the final redemption itself. Judaism and Christianity represent “guarantees” which world and self are given within the course of the All – in revelation and in creation, respectively – of the ultimate redemption they will achieve in the future.

SE E I N G STA R S

285

from all thingliness into sheer soul; and God, redeemed from all work of the six-day week and all loving need for our poor souls, as the Lord. (291/261).

The way in which God might be seen in his redeemed form will concern us in Section V. Here we wish to note, simply, that what we see in the visions which Judaism and Christianity present to us in the third part of the Star is determined by the way in which Judaism and Christianity reflect the ultimate redemption through the perspective of the redeemed world, and redeemed human being, respectively. In the Jewish people, the figure of the redeemed world is made visible as a world “redeemed from all thingliness” and become “sheer soul.” In Christianity, the figure of the redeemed individual soul is made visible in the imitation of Christ, in the Christian’s becoming an individual who is “redeemed from all … selfishness” and who realizes the very “image of God” potential that human beings have possessed, according to the biblical account, since creation. Now, the ultimate redemption itself redeems God, world, and human being in the same future moment in which they unite in the realization of the All. But one may suggest that seen from the midst of time, this future redemption appears differently depending upon whether it is anticipated from the standpoint of the world or that of the human being. Insofar as Judaism and Christianity anticipate the ultimate redemption in the form of these figures of redeemed world and redeemed human being, we can say that they make the unity of the All to be attained in that ultimate redemption visible to us through the prism of world and human being, respectively.40 Thus the cyclical liturgical calendars of Judaism and Christianity both reflect for us the unity of the redemptive All. But because Judaism anticipates the ultimate redemption from the perspective of the world, it reflects a vision of the unity of the redeemed All that is colored by this worldly perspective. Likewise, because Christianity anticipates the ultimate redemption from the perspective of the human being, the vision of the unity of the redeemed All that it reflects is colored by this human perspective. To the extent to which our vision of the unity of the All is limited to these “figures of liturgy” – and we recall that this extent remains in question – then we may say that we can only see the unity of the All through the worldly or human goggles which Judaism and Christianity place upon us. Or, to use a metaphor closer to Rosenzweig’s own: in the cyclical anticipations of eternity in Judaism and Christianity, we see the ultimate unity of the All as reflected through a world-shaped or human-shaped mirror. As we proceed now to examine these worldly and human mirrors themselves, I aim to emphasize how the cycle of the liturgical year serves as the path upon which Judaism and Christianity both reflect the All for us in the figure of the Star, and at once recreate themselves – each year – as the respective proleptic worldly 40

Cf., Else-Rahel Freund, Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence, pp. 170–1: “Judaism is … eternity that is at rest. … It has its own world, which is complete, while the rest of the world is growing. … Christianity, in contrast, is eternity in action. … The accent lies on the individual soul.”

286

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

and human prefigurations of redemption that they are. That is to say, the path of the construction of the All that these communities recreate in visible form through their liturgy is at once the path upon which they repeatedly reconstruct themselves as the distinct mirrors of redemption that they are. In the cycle of the liturgical year wherein they make the course of the All visible, the Jewish people creates itself as a redeemed world unto itself, while the Christian creates herself anew as redeemed individual. The course that stretches toward the realization of the All thus reflects itself in the realization of each respective liturgical community as its own unique worldly or human anticipation of the ultimate redemption. In seeking to show how Judaism and Christianity make the very course of the realization of the All visible while each reconstructs itself, at one and the same time, as the worldly and human mirror that it is, it will suffice to point to key moments along the course of each liturgical year. Throughout our survey, it must be recalled, we remain within the limits of the liturgically mediated vision of the unity of the All. Whether the unity of the All in the figure of the star may be seen outside the bounds of the communal year – this we will only question after we have completed our survey of Rosenzweig’s accounts of Judaism and Christianity. Within the Jewish liturgical year, Rosenzweig asserts, “The Sabbath mirrors [spiegelt] the creation of the world in the year” (345/311). The Jewish Sabbath mirrors the original creation not simply by celebrating it, furthermore, but also insofar as the succession of Sabbaths creates the Jewish year itself, according to Rosenzweig: “In the Sabbath, the creation of the year happens” (345/311). In reflecting the creation of the world through its creation of the year, the Sabbath also promises – as did creation itself – all that will be fulfilled along the path to the All itself. In the Sabbath, the “whole traversed course of the day of God is enclosed in the cycle of the day of the individual Sabbath … like a preview [Vorblick]” (347/313). While the Sabbath mirrors creation within the Jewish liturgical year, thereby previewing the whole “course of the day of God” for the Jewish community from the standpoint of creation, the “festivals of revelation” allow the members of the Jewish community to relive those fundamental experiences of intimacy with God out of which the Jewish community was originally founded. Here, Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot “in their sequence allow the changing-image [Wandelbild] of the eternal world-course of the people to appear in the firm space of the year. The three pilgrimage feasts … together form [bilden] an image [Bild] of the fate of a Volk as the carrier of revelation” (351/316). Rosenzweig’s account of these festivals emphasizes the visibility which they grant to the course of the All from creation to redemption reflected in them. Thus, in the Passover festival in which the “founding of the Volk” is celebrated, “there opens up the outlook [Ausblick] into its further fates. … They all appear pre-figured [vergebildet] in that origin” (353/318). In the celebration of Shavuot, the community reexperiences each year the very intimacy of divine love and the awakening of inner selfhood which mark revelation as the middle of the course of the All. Here, “the Volk is wholly sunk in the

SE E I N G STA R S

287

solitude-of-two with its God,” and “even the portions read from the prophets open no retrospective view or outlook [Rück- oder Ausblick] but rather lead the eye inward” (354/319). But just as the individual recipient of revelation cannot remain alone with God but is called on to turn in love to her neighbor, so the course of the Jewish year reflects how the Jewish people “must leave its hidden solitude-oftwo with its God and go out into the world” (355/319–20). Such wandering in the world in pursuit of the final redemption is celebrated, within the span of the Jewish liturgical year, in Sukkot, which “sees Redemption and lets it be seen only from the mountain of revelation” (356/321). What is to be noted in Rosenzweig’s constant reference to the images which the liturgical cycle of Judaism presents before our eyes is the extent to which the course of the All is mirrored through the course in which the Jewish people repeatedly recreates itself as an anticipation of the redeemed world. The image which these festivals make manifest “in the firm space of the year” is that of the course of relations which spans from creation to redemption in forming the All, “the eternal world course” which the Jewish people anticipates in time. But this “eternal world course” of the realization of the All is reflected in the Jewish people’s cyclical selfrealization as a communal world unto itself through its festivals. Both the self-realization of the Jewish community in the liturgical year and the course of the All which it mirrors in time reach their pinnacle in the anticipation of redemption that occurs, according to Rosenzweig, over the Days of Awe, and most specifically on Yom Kippur. It is only during the Days of Awe, Rosenzweig recounts, that “the Jew bows down.” The Jew does so, according to Rosenzweig, “not in the confession of sin, not in the prayer for the forgiveness of sins … but rather only in the seeing of the immediate nearness of God [Schauen der unmittelbaren Gottesnähe], thus in a condition raised out beyond the earthly neediness of today …, in the promise of the future moment, where every knee will bend before God” (359/323). In this nearness with God, the Jew sees herself standing alone with God even as she is united within the whole of humanity beyond the grave that defines the limits of human finitude. Here, according to Rosenzweig, “God inclines his face [Antlitz] to such collective-solitary [gemeinsam-einsam] imploring of the one humanity in death-shrouds, of a humanity beyond the grave, of a humanity of souls. … [And] the human being, to whom the divine face thus inclines itself, rejoices in the confession: He, this God of Love, he alone is God” (363–4/327). The moment of such “vision of the immediate nearness of God” anticipates the ultimate redemptive moment in which all individuals in the world will be united in love and in common recognition of God. It is in such a yearly moment of anticipation in which “God inclines his face” to a humanity that is both “one” and “a humanity of souls,” both a unity and a plurality of individuals, that the redemptive kingdom of God, the unity of the All, is made visible as mirrored within the Jewish year. Rosenzweig suggests here, moreover, that the Jew sees God’s face in

288

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

this very moment in which she finds herself as part of the proleptic kingdom of God. To the extent to which the Jew comes to anticipate redemption in this proleptic realization of the One and All, Rosenzweig asserts, the Jew “already possesses as an event in the cycle of every year, the immediacy of all individuals to God in the perfect community of All with God” toward which the world, and all individuals in it, are striving. The Days of Awe thus mark the ultimate moment within the Jewish calendar, prepared by the whole course of that liturgical year, in which the ultimate redemptive unity of the All is reflected “in the enlightenment of prayer.” Throughout our survey of the Jewish liturgical year, we have tried to highlight, as much as possible, the way in which the Jewish people serves as the specifically “worldly” anticipation of the ultimate redemption, and thus how the redemptive All which it reflects, appears through what amounts to a worldly mirror. This becomes particularly clear in Rosenzweig’s insistence that the Jewish people serves as “the image of true community” (369/332) for the peoples of the world. It is not the Jewish individual who serves as model for others – indeed, Rosenzweig claims that “as much as the [Jewish] people bears the defiant … self,” the Jewish “individual bears it just as little” (441/396). But the peoples of the world see in the Jewish people a whole redeemed world unto itself, Rosenzweig claims. In the Jewish people they “experience the closed eternity after which they themselves strive.” In the Jewish people’s “eternal circulation, they are presented with an image of their universal future” (421/378). The liturgical yearly cycle which mirrors the construction of the All through the prism of the redeemed world in the Jewish people is complemented, in Christianity, by a construction of the All mirrored in the recreation of the redeemed individual over the course of the year. Rosenzweig insists that while for the Jewish people “the world, its world, must count as finished, [while] only the soul may still be under way” (365/328) in time, in Christianity, to the contrary, “the Church year rounds itself only for the individual” (417/374). It is the experience of walking the yearly path toward redemption as individual in the face of an unredeemed world, moreover, that sends the Christian out into the actual world to redeem it. As we shall see, this task of the Christian within the world complicates the model of the communal yearly liturgical cycle within which the All is to be made visible in time, for here “the circle” of the year “opens up into a spiral” (411/370). But what is lost in the breaking up of the closed circle that would make the redemptive All come clearly into view is gained, we find, in the actual realization of that All, which the Christian is called on to perform in the world. What is seen at the culmination of the Christian liturgical year, we shall discover, is precisely the absence of that unity of the All whose presence is seen in and through the Jewish people, an absence which drives the Christian forward to redeem the world in actuality. Now, since within the confines of its yearly liturgy, Christianity presents the ultimate redemption through the prism of the redeemed individual, Rosenzweig

SE E I N G STA R S

289

explains, the path that leads to the Christian community of vision is different from the path of the Jewish community: There, where a people and its eternity were to be mirrored [abgepiegelt] in the cycle of the year, what mattered was the communal … and thus the doctrine of the forms of communal life as such had to undergird the exposition of the liturgy. Here, on the other hand, we are dealing with a common way and its eternity. … If the stations of communal silence are to reappear here, it would have to take place in the individual soul’s preparations for the communal. … To participate in the eternal way, he must decide and prepare himself as individual. (392–3/353–4)

If the Jewish calendar mirrored the course of the All within the construction of the Jewish people as a redeemed communal world unto itself, Rosenzweig suggests here that the liturgical year in Christianity mirrors the course of the All through the path upon which the individual comes to anticipate her own redemption in time. Thus while the same creation, revelation, and redemption are anticipated by the Christian as by the Jew within each liturgical year, the forms in which the Christian anticipates these steps on the course of the realization of the All are different in kind. On the one hand, just as the Sabbath reflects the creation of the world within the Jewish year by creating the Jewish year itself, so too in Christianity “the everyweekly festival of creation grounds the spiritual year” (398/358). In the Christian celebration of Sunday, “it celebrates particularly the beginning of the week under the sensible image [Sinnbild] of the beginning of the world” (399/359). But, on the other hand, insofar as Sunday reflects the “beginning” of the path of the Christian individual toward redemption, Sunday takes on a very different significance than that of the Jewish Sabbath: it becomes the celebration of “the Christian [as] eternal beginner.” As the festival of beginnings, the Christian Sunday symbolizes how “every Christian really lives his Christianity even in the present day as though he were the first. And so Sunday, in the force of its blessing sending rays over the daily work of the week, is the proper image [Bild] of this ever fresh, ever young, ever new force of Christianity, sending its rays over the world” (399/359). As celebration of the way in which “the Christian is eternal beginner,” Sunday reflects in an image the way in which each individual Christian may see herself as a “ray” from the Star sent out on the path of Christianity to be enlightened and to enlighten others. The Christian “festival of creation” thereby reflects the beginning of the course of the realization of the All as the beginning of the individual’s path toward redemption. The course of the realization of the All through time from creation through redemption, mirrored in the Jewish liturgical year in the sequence of festivals from Passover through Shavuot to Sukkot, is reflected in parallel fashion in the Christian year. Rosenzweig emphasizes how actual world time, which thus gradually encompasses and permeates all occurrence, mirrors itself [sich spiegeln] now with the most complete clarity, and [is] graspable

290

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

[fassbar] for short-living human beings in the spiritual year; and here again in particular in the festivals [of revelation] which … take the unforeseeable [unabsehbare] eternity of the day of God into the yearly cycle of the Church year. (401/361)

Just as the cyclical time fixed by the festivals did within the Jewish liturgical calendar, the spiritual year of Christianity allows the whole course of the realization of the All – a course which cannot be seen (unabsehbar) in its entirety elsewhere – to be graspable (fassbar) for finite human beings in the midst of time. The course of the All – that course which “gradually encompasses and permeates all occurrence” in time – “mirrors itself with the most complete clarity” in the festival cycle of the church year. Corresponding to Passover in the Jewish calendar, Christmas serves within the Christian calendar as the first of the “festivals of revelation.” “Both festivals celebrate the beginning of the visible course of revelation over the earth,” but each does so in a different way, and the differences between Passover and Christmas are to be understood, Rosenzweig explains, in the light of the very worldly and human perspectives on the path to redemption the Jewish people and the Christian represent. Thus, according to Rosenzweig, in the case of Christmas, “beginning … must be birth in the flesh, as by the [Jewish] people it must be exodus [Befreiung]. The becoming free of the ‘first born child of God’ to one people, and the becoming-flesh of the ‘native’ [eingeborene] [son] to one human being correspond to one another as precisely as people and individual, world and human being, can” (404/364, emphasis mine – BP). Moreover, just as Shavuot, among the three festivals of revelation in the Jewish year, celebrates revelation itself most immediately, in Christianity “only Easter is the real festival time of revelation within the three festivals of revelation” (405/364–5). Easter, furthermore, is the festival that determines the vision in which the Christian’s relation to Christ becomes manifest. “It is the cross, and nothing before it out of the ‘life of Jesus,’ ” according to Rosenzweig, “which remains ever equally near and visible for it [Christendom] out of each of the countless middlepoints of its eternal way. … So for the Christian it is not the manger, but rather the Cross that is ever present: this, not the former, he has ever before his eyes” (405–6/365). Over the Easter period from Good Friday through the day of resurrection, according to Rosenzweig, the church sets “the human being wholly immediately sensibly under the Cross. He must greet the head full of blood and wounds, immediately face to face” (406/365). Thus, over the course of the Christian liturgical year, we find, the individual Christian comes to be bound with all other Christians not only in “brotherhood,” but in the common, immediate face-to-face seeing of the divine-human Christ on the cross. “Only under the Cross,” in the presence of the countenance of Christ, does the individual soul “know herself as one with all souls” (420/377). But within the Christian year, this anticipation of the ultimate unity of all souls in mutual love and recognition of God is at once interrupted. The unity of all brothers and sisters under the cross does not culminate in something parallel to the “common bowing down”

SE E I N G STA R S

291

before God during the Days of Awe in the Jewish calendar. Christianity teaches of God’s revelation to humanity through Christ, “born in the flesh,” and makes possible a “face-to-face” seeing of Christ for those who place themselves under the cross within the Christian liturgical year. But while promising that day in which all humanity will be united “under the cross,” Christianity also records humanity’s loss of Christ in the flesh. The Pentecost thus may “bring it [redemption] to intuition [zu Anschauung bringen] as a last act of the Christ’s earthly wandering” (406/365), but as such it brings to view the loss of a visible Christ as well: This is the story of the Pentecostal time: the Lord leaves his own [die Seinen], he goes to Heaven, they remain back on earth. He leaves them, but he leaves them the spirit. They must learn to believe now without seeing him with eyes; they must learn to behave as if they had no Lord; but now they can do it too: they have the spirit. In the miracle of Pentecost, the Church, master of all tongues, begins its world course; in the symbol of the Trinity … it directs itself to the banner, which holds together its swarming [ausschwärmenden] apostles. (407/366)

In the Pentecost, we find, the church year makes visible the loss of Christ, and the breakup of the community of all souls with him. Armed with the “Spirit” to unite them, Christians are charged to “learn to believe now without seeing [Christ] with eyes”; they are charged with realizing the perfect community of One and All themselves, as if all responsibility rested on their shoulders, as if “they had no Lord” to carry out such redemptive work in the world. What is “brought to intuition” through the end of the Christian liturgical year in the Pentecost, one might then suggest, are the absence of the redeemed One and All and the concomitant recognition of the need to realize it. The glimpse of a redemptive community with God “under the cross” followed by the disappearance of that community leads the church to begin its “world course,” guiding its mission with the “symbol of the Trinity,” that is, the symbol of the ultimate unity of God, his only-begotten son, and the community of Spirit he left behind. Thus, in the very liturgical season in which we found that the kingdom of God, the One and All, becomes visible within the Jewish year, that kingdom becomes invisible for the Christian. And this is the reason, according to Rosenzweig, that there is no festival in the Christian year that corresponds exactly to the Days of Awe that culminate in Yom Kippur in the Jewish year. But Rosenzweig insists that despite this lack of direct correspondence, there is a day in the Christian calendar that allows the Christian to experience the course of the realization of the All in its entirety. Although it is the first of the festivals of revelation, Christmas has taken on the structure and significance for the Christian, according to Rosenzweig, that Yom Kippur takes on for the Jewish people. In both, Rosenzweig notes, the evening before grew to have as much meaning as the day of the festival. … Only a day consisting of night plus day till night has again completely fallen – only this is a whole day. For the day lies between two midnights; only the first of them is truly night;

292

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

the other is light. And this is what it is to live such a long day with God: to live wholly with God – the Nothing set before life, and life itself, and the Star which rises over the black of the night beyond life. The Christian lives such a whole long day in the day of the beginning, we on the day of the end. (408–9/367)

In that full day from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day until nightfall, Rosenzweig asserts here, the Christian lives “a long day with God.” In this day, the Christian experiences, in miniature, the whole span from the beginnings of the course of the All in nothingness, through the relations among the elements that generate life itself, up to the redemptive unification of the All in the form of “the Star which rises over the black of night beyond life.” Thus the Christian too – not only the Jew – appears to “live with” the Star, to intuit the unity of the All in the midst of time. Within the cycle of the liturgical year which reflects the course of the All through its “hourly” structure, Christmas and Yom Kippur are cyclical “hours” in themselves. They mirror over the course of a day the same path of the All we have found reflected in the “hour” of the liturgical year. In the Jewish people’s face-to-face recognition of the nearness of God, we found, it anticipates redemption from the standpoint of the world. The Christian may likewise “live wholly with God” in the Christian community during the celebration of Christmas. But this moment of unity with God is experienced as “the day of the beginning,” and not as the end. It sends the Christian out into the world to complete the kingdom of God whose beginning she has experienced in the church year. Thus, in Christianity, “the coming of the kingdom becomes a matter of worldly- and Church history” (409/368). There may be no moment of collective unity with God, no collective “bowing down before God” that would bring the kingdom of God into full view within time “in the eternally recurring cycle of the Church year, but” there is such a drive to kingdom “in the worldly calendar … with which that cycle unites itself in the New Year’s festival” (410/368). While the Jewish people thus lives out its insular existence as the anticipation of the redeemed world within the repeated cycles of its liturgical year, the Christian must take her own individual anticipation of redemption out with her into the actual world.41 On the path toward individual redemption within the Christian liturgical year, the individual “soul has already found its way home. She knows that her redeemer lives with no less certainty than she knows it in the eternal people. For her, the circle of the year closes.” But “the world is granted no eternal life; in it, the circle of the individual life bursts apart and flows into the spiral of a history” (417/374–5). 41

According to Rosenzweig, there is a further “vision” which spurs the Christian on in her redemptive work in the world: the vision of the Jewish people, whose complete communal-worldly anticipation of redemption reminds the Christian that the world itself is not yet redeemed: “The Jew does it. Not with words – what would words be here in this district of vision! But rather with his existence, his silencing existence. This existence of the Jew forces upon Christendom at all times the thought, that it is not yet at the goal, has not yet come to truth, but rather always – remains on the way” (459/413).

SE E I N G STA R S

293

Our survey of the Jewish and Christian liturgical calendars has sought to show the way the unity of the All and the path leading toward it are made visible within religious communal life. In the repeated cycles of their liturgical years, Judaism and Christianity serve as mirrors which reflect, within time, the redemptive unity of the All which will be but which remains “not-yet” for those of us in the middle of its course. Within their yearly liturgical cycles, Judaism and Christianity make visible the whole course that God, world, and human being have taken over the last two chapters through their reciprocal interrelations in creation, revelation, and redemption, leading up to their unification as “the true All.” Rosenzweig wants to have shown through his surveys of liturgical cycles, he claims, how “the circle of the life of the human being,” that is, the cyclical manner in which the human being lives time within these liturgical communities, “becomes the visible image [anschaulichen Bilde] for the eye, of that which resounds … in the one-time course of the day of the All which … strides-beyond every measure of the eye” (342/308). The yearly cycle of the liturgical year, we have seen, becomes a “visible image for the eye” of that “one-time” course of the realization of the All which cannot be seen in itself – which extends “beyond every measure of the eye.” It is in this manner that “liturgy” thus functions in the Star as “the concave mirror [Brennspiegel] which collects the sun-rays of eternity into the small circle of the year” (342/308). Much as art or religious love was understood to reflect the unity of the Absolute in concrete, objective form in German Idealism, so Judaism and Christianity reflect the ultimate unity of the All in the liturgical cycles they travel each and every year. In introducing the visionary capacity of Judaism and Christianity, we recall, Rosenzweig suggested that as the course of the liturgical year “rounds itself into the cycle of the year … the All … presents itself immediately to view” (435/391). Rosenzweig asserted that the yearly cycles of the religious calendar, which allow eternity to reflect itself in time, at once pull “the kingdom of God,” “the Star, that otherwise flashes in the distance of eternity … through the night of the future into the Today of the praying community” (325/293). Such a vision of the unity of the All, I have claimed, is intended to complete the path to knowledge of the All in the Star. The mediated path of knowledge of the All, which factuality and reversals, thought and experience, forged from the difference of nothingness through those relations that were shown to point toward the All’s redemptive realization, was to be complemented by an immediate vision of the redemptive unity of the All. Only thereby would Rosenzweig’s system be completed. But having traversed the cyclical courses of Jewish and Christian liturgy we must now return to some of the troubling characteristics of such liturgical reflecting of the All which we foreshadowed when we began our discussion. If we take seriously Rosenzweig’s repeated references to the “mirrored” quality of the image of the All conjured up through the course of the Jewish and Christian liturgical calendars, then the view of the All which we achieve through them would appear not to be the immediate

294

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

vision of the All in its wholeness which alone would serve to complete the path to knowledge upon which Rosenzweig has embarked in the Star. The view of the All we attain by way of the Jewish and Christian yearly anticipations of the redemptive unification of the All would appear to be neither immediate nor whole; to the contrary, we have seen ample evidence of the way Rosenzweig presents these liturgical communities as partial, one-sided – that is, either worldly or human – mirrors of the course of the All.42 In the light of his promise that the course of the liturgical year would yield an immediate view of the unity of the All, Rosenzweig’s repeated emphasis on how the Jewish and Christian liturgical years “mirror” or “reflect” the course of the All, in particular, reads as an almost intentional request that we question how such liturgical reflections can be understood as bringing the unity of the All immediately into view.43 Indeed, if as Rosenzweig insists, “the eternal hides itself behind” “the figures of liturgy,” through which alone we see its light refracted, then the kind of vision Rosenzweig delivers to us through liturgy would be the precise opposite of that which he promises! Nor does the blurriness of Rosenzweig’s account of liturgical vision end here. Despite his insistence that the unity of the All, in the figure of the Star, is brought into view through the cycles of the liturgical communities, Rosenzweig leaves it unclear, strangely enough, exactly where even a mirrored view of the unity of the All is made possible. There is no doubt that the course of the realization of the All is mirrored in two different forms, in the Jewish and Christian liturgical years, and there is no doubt that such cyclical courses present us with moments of vision in which members of the community see God’s face, and in which we see the collective that is formed between God and each community that anticipates the kingdom of God. But at no time over the course of the liturgical year does Rosenzweig explicitly identify the kind of immediate vision of the unity of the All which he has promised. Now, it is possible that we are meant to infer such a vision as taking place during those crowning moments in the liturgical year that anticipate the redemptive community of humanity united in love and in common recognition of God. In such moments, we recall, the members of each community see God or Christ, respectively, “face to face,” “immediately;” and we may recall identifying Rosenzweig’s own nighttime vision of the Star, described in his October 1918 letter to Margrit Rosenstock, as a vision of the All in the shape of the Star that was at once a vision

42

43

Even if the Jewish people possesses within “Jewish feeling,” as Rosenzweig proceeds to claim in III 3 of the Star, “the all-illuminating one star image of truth,” even if “the star of redemption shines in the innermost narrowness of the Jewish heart,” what the Jew sees therein, Rosenzweig specifies, is a vision “only in parable [Gleichnis] and copy [Abbild]” (457, 463/411, 416). See Markus Kartheininger’s “Rosenzweigs ‘Neues Denken’: Die Zurückstellung des Denkens in den Horizont der Erfahrung,” Heterogenität: Politische Philosophie im Frühwerk von Leo Strauss, p. 235: “All these mirror-metaphors emphasize that we are not dealing with an immediate vision. Only a copy [Abbild] is seen.”

SE E I N G STA R S

295

of God’s face. It will indeed be such a vision of the Star as God’s face that we will find in the closing pages of the Star, and it is possible that we are meant to read such a vision back into the liturgical year, and thereby to understand the vision of the unity of the All as occurring when the Christian “greets the head full of blood and wounds, immediately, face to face” (406/365) during Easter, or when “God inclines His face” (364/327) to the Jew who bows to him within the Jewish community during the Days of Awe. But precisely insofar as such visions of God occur within the mirroring liturgical yearly cycle, it is unclear how we are to understand the “immediacy” Rosenzweig at once attributes to them.44 Even if it were possible, moreover, to read the immediate vision of the unity of the All back into the faceto-face encounters with the divine in the course of the Jewish and Christian liturgical years – and I am inclined to question this possibility – one still wonders why Rosenzweig does not simply tell us outright that the All in the form of the Star is seen at these moments within the liturgical cycles. If the liturgical year is expressly supposed to culminate with a vision of the All in the shape of the star, it is frankly strange that Rosenzweig would fail to identify that moment of culmination clearly. Why make us guess where such a vision occurs? Why is Rosenzweig so unclear about the very vision that would complete the quest for knowledge of the All? The mirrored form in which the All becomes visible, the partial perspectives of these mirrors, and the vagueness with which Rosenzweig presents the moments of vision within the liturgical calendar all lead one to suspect that the surveys of the Jewish and Christian liturgical calendars in the third part of the Star might not in 44

In his introductory account of how religious communities bring eternity into time, addressed in Section II, Rosenzweig claimed that the shared transformation of time within the religious community into a reflection of eternity made possible the appearance of “the Star that otherwise flashes in the distance of eternity” in the “Today of the praying community.” Recalling this introduction, it seems to me that there are two plausible ways we might understand the “immediacy” of the vision of God said to occur within the course of the liturgical year which “mirrors” the actual course of the unification of the All. We may, first of all, understand the face-to-face visions of God as having been conjured up as part of the cyclical recurrence of time which brings the course of the unification of the All to a visible standstill. Much as the Absolute might be claimed, by the Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism, to be intuited objectively in a work of artistic genius, so in this scenario we would take the “God” or “Christ” who is seen within the Jewish and Christian yearly cycles, respectively, as having become visible in objective form through the repetition of the liturgical cycle that mirrors the actual course of the All. If this is how we are to understand Rosenzweig’s claim, then even if the vision of God is experienced as “immediate,” it remains mediated – it is, as it were, an immediate vision of the reflection of the unity of the All conjured up through the cyclical repetition of the liturgical calendar. Alternatively, we might understand the vision that occurs at the peak of the Jewish and Christian cyclical reflections of the course of the All as made possible by but at once independent from this cyclical anticipation of eternity itself. In this case, we would take the vision of God’s face within the cycle of the liturgical year to be an independent, immediate vision, a vision for which the liturgical calendar lays the groundwork, but which has independent force as communal prayer, possessing its own power of anticipation that enables it to bring the star into immediate view. If this is the case, we would be asked to understand the liturgical calendar’s cyclical mirroring of the course of the All to culminate in a vision that transcends the course’s mediated nature and is itself immediate.

296

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

fact fulfill Rosenzweig’s promise that here, within the liturgical year, the unified All which otherwise transcends us takes on immediate visible presence. Judaism and Christianity surely do provide us with mediated, reflected visions; they provide us with mirrors of the course of the All from the particular perspectives of world and human being. One should not belittle what is accomplished in such mediated vision over the course of the liturgical year. It remains remarkable that Rosenzweig has shown us, within the rituals of Jews and Christians, a cyclical, visible recreation of the systematic course of the All in which all beings participate. He shows how Jewish and Christian communities make possible a life in which images of the course of the All and its fulfillment are ever present on the horizon. In the Jewish and Christian communities, it may well be said, the unity of the All has become a matter of “familiar intuition,” present as the backdrop of communal life much as “a picture in our room” serves as the backdrop of our activities in it. But Rosenzweig promises an immediate view of the All through the enlightenment of prayer. And indeed, without such an immediate vision of the unity of the All, the path to knowledge of the All which Rosenzweig charts in the Star would appear to fall short. For in this case, the mediated knowledge of the ways in which all different beings push toward unity would not be complemented by an immediate knowing through vision of the unity of all beings, but rather, only by a mediated, partial vision of that unity. Now, as we shall see, in the closing section of the Star, the “Gate,” Rosenzweig does proceed to describe what is seen in the immediate vision of the All in the figure of the Star, as the truth that is at once God’s face. It is all the more curious, therefore, that Rosenzweig is so cryptic when he gives his account of where such vision occurs. One is inclined to consider that this obscuring of the site of the immediate vision of the All in the figure of the star may be intentional.45 Indeed, in a letter of February 12, 1919, in which Rosenzweig announces his imminent completion of the book, he writes, “In the early morning I’ll be finished with III 3. … In it, there is indeed talk of the *, but in a curious way, so that the reader never rightly knows: is it mere parable [Gleichnis] or the actual figure. So only in the ‘Gate’ is the figure dealt with expressly.”46 Such a comment suggests Rosenzweig is intentionally vague with regard to where the All is to be seen in the figure of the star, and with regard to the manner in which that figure comes into view – whether mediately or immediately, as “actual figure” or merely as “parable.” But Rosenzweig’s words also show that Rosenzweig himself maintains the distinction between such immediate and mediate vision, between seeing the Star as “actual figure” or as “parable.” And it certainly suggests 45

46

Kenneth Hart Green likewise notes Rosenzweig’s obscurity regarding the site of immediate vision: “Rosenzweig does not clarify just where and when such a vision may occur, and whether all men receive an equal synoptic vision, and perhaps the ambiguity is deliberate,” “The Notion of Truth in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” p. 307. Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, February 12, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, p. 236

SE E I N G STA R S

297

that the vision we will find described in the “Gate” at the close of the book is one that transcends the parabolic, reflected, partial form in which the Jewish and Christian liturgical communities make the All visible. I am not certain why Rosenzweig would promise an immediate vision of the All through the liturgical cycle of religious life and then be wholly obscure, perhaps even deliberately so, in showing where such a vision occurs within this liturgical cycle. But the gap between Rosenzweig’s promise and what he delivers is only the first of many hints which Rosenzweig drops that suggest we might need to look beyond the limits of the communal visions of Judaism and Christianity in order to locate the site of Rosenzweig’s “immediate view of the All.” In the following section, I will suggest that Rosenzweig does indeed point to the possibility of an immediate vision of the All both within the Star itself and in letters he wrote while composing the book. It will be in such seeing, I will propose, that the crowning moment in Rosenzweig’s attainment of systematic knowledge of the All occurs.

IV. Beyond Life? The Possibility of an Immediate Vision of the Redemptive All In order to examine the possibility that Rosenzweig points to a kind of immediate vision of the All in the Star that would transcend the limits of the Jewish and Christian liturgical communities and would complete the systematic quest for knowledge of the All, we turn first to a passage I have already had occasion to cite. Here Rosenzweig sums up the respective limitations of the Jewish and Christian visions of the All most succinctly when he states that the Jews “see the Star, but not – the rays,” while the Christians “follow its rays, but they don’t see it [i.e., the Star itself] with eyes. … It would belong to the whole truth that one saw not merely its light, but rather also what is enlightened by it.” Rosenzweig goes on to conclude as follows: And so we both have only part of the whole truth. … Immediate vision of the whole truth occurs only for the one who sees it in God. This however is a vision beyond life. Living vision of the truth, a vision that is at once life, for us too only grows out of the sinking into our own Jewish heart and there too only in parable and copy. And they are denied the living vision at all, for the sake of the living effecting of the truth. So we are both, they as we and we as they, just for that sake creatures, that we do not see the whole truth. (462–3/416)

I would like to suggest the possibility that Rosenzweig hints in this passage at an immediate vision of the All in the form of the star.47 This possibility hinges on how 47

I will not deal here with the distinction between the parabolic, copy image of the “whole truth” seen in Judaism and what Rosenzweig describes as an absence of vision in Christianity that pushes the Christian to realize the All in the world. This distinction is consistent, it seems to me, with my interpretation of the difference between Yom Kippur in the Jewish liturgical year and the Pentecostal marking of Christ’s leaving the community with the Spirit offered earlier.

298

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

we understand Rosenzweig’s assertion that “immediate vision of the whole truth occurs only for the one who sees it in God. This however is a vision beyond life.” It may be that in this assertion Rosenzweig simply means to suggest that it is impossible for human beings to see the whole of truth, since such a vision is “beyond life.”48 Indeed, insofar as we are “creatures,” Rosenzweig explicitly notes, “we do not see the whole truth.” But it is also quite possible that Rosenzweig is pointing, instead, to an actual vision, whose character as being “beyond life” must be understood. There is reason to take this latter alternative seriously: were Rosenzweig’s intention simply to dismiss the human ability to see the All immediately, there would be little reason for him to speak affirmatively of such “immediate vision of the whole truth” being seen “in God,” no reason for him to claim this vision “is a vision beyond life,” rather than simply to dismiss it altogether. Now, in the preceding passage, Rosenzweig distinguishes what would be an immediate vision of the All that is “beyond life” from the “living vision of the truth,” from “a vision that is at once life.” The domain of this latter vision would seem to be the domain of the liturgical community: it is the domain in which the Jew, for example, sees truth “only in parable and copy.” Rosenzweig’s distinction would then suggest that in order for a vision of the truth to be “a vision that is at once life” it can only be the kind of mediated, partial vision possible within the liturgical calendars lived out by Jews and Christians in their respective religious communities. The “vision beyond life,” on the other hand, would point beyond this liturgical domain, and beyond the life of these communities, to an immediate vision of truth. Rosenzweig in fact makes a very similar distinction between levels of vision earlier on in the Star III 3, when he contrasts that truth which Jew or Christian experiences, respectively, as her part in the truth, with the “whole truth.” Here Rosenzweig asserts that the whole too can only be seen, where it has become part, and so the whole of the truth, the whole truth can only be seen in that it is seen in God. This is the only thing that is seen in God. Here alone the human being … just watches. His part in the truth he still grasps in the immediate unity of experience and vision. But he can only see the whole truth in God, too, just because it is the whole and thus is only imparted to God, can only become part for God. … Thus in life the human being remains human being; and if he also hears God’s voice, can experience God, he by no means experiences on that account what God Himself experiences too. But in vision, he sees immediately what 48

This is how Markus Kartheininger understands Rosenzweig, interpreting this passage as a denial of immediate vision which preserves the “primacy of praxis” within Rosenzweig’s system. Cf., Heterogenität: Politische Philosophie im Frühwerk von Leo Strauss, pp. 235–7. See also, Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation, pp. 68–9: “The epistemological thrust of The Star of Redemption suggests not a progressive movement toward complete truth but a movement of recognizing the epistemological limitations of each whole of truth, represented by each part of The Star of Redemption, including the limitation of the last part.”

SE E I N G STA R S

299

God experiences, just because here he steps out of the flowing element of experience onto shore. (439/394–5)

In this passage Rosenzweig reiterates his consistent claim that the All, the whole of the truth, can only be seen in a vision of God. And Rosenzweig makes an important distinction here between levels of vision that corresponds to the distinction we noted earlier, between a vision beyond life and a vision that is both vision and life. On the one hand, Rosenzweig notes that form of vision in which each individual grasps her “part in the truth” “in the immediate unity of experience and vision.” Such a fusion of vision and experience marks the possibility of vision “in life,” and this profile of a living vision that sees the truth in part would seem to correspond quite closely with the “living vision” Rosenzweig suggested marks the realm of Jewish and Christian liturgical seeing.49 On the other hand, Rosenzweig at once points in this passage to a more pure level of vision in which the individual just sees. In such vision, the individual “steps out of the flowing element of experience onto shore.” We might suggest that this seer stands “beyond life,” just as Rosenzweig described such ultimate seeing in the previous passage. It is this latter form of vision, according to our current passage, in which the individual sees “the whole of the truth” in God. Taken together, these two passages point to a vision of the All that is more pure, more immediate, and more comprehensive than that partial, mediated, living vision which we found to be part and parcel of Jewish and Christian religious experience. This immediate vision is, moreover, a vision of the All in its redemptive unity which is God. It is precisely that vision which Rosenzweig would require, that is to say, in order to complete the system of philosophy set forth in the Star as a whole. Now, once again, Rosenzweig does not tell us who has such a vision of the All in its divine redemptive unity, or how we might go about having such a vision of the whole truth. And it may yet be that we are to read such immediate vision back somehow into the liturgical visions which Jews and Christians attain.50 But if we seek confirmation that Rosenzweig entertains a notion of an immediate vision of the All which transcends and surpasses the mirrored vision of the All made possible in the liturgical cycles of Judaism and Christianity, we need look no further than Rosenzweig’s account of his own nighttime vision of the star with which we began this chapter. In the letter we examined, Rosenzweig recounts an “immediate vision,” an “immediate view of the whole,” in the figure of the “Star” which Rosenzweig sees “with eyes and everything individual in it.” And we may recall that Rosenzweig’s immediate vision of the All in the figure of the Star, which we 49

50

Cf., Stern, pp. 384–5, where experience and vision are used almost interchangeably within the context of religious community. Such a possibility is certainly supported by Rosenzweig’s account of the Jewish liturgical community on Yom Kippur as standing “beyond the grave” (363/327).

300

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

understood to be at once God’s face, does not take place within the context of communal prayer. Indeed, we suggested that Rosenzweig’s account of the scene of vision as one of those “moments in which one sees double … because one is no longer glued firmly in one’s body” portrays the scene as offering up the very opposite of the “appearance” of everyday life. Rosenzweig’s vision here could most certainly be interpreted as a vision that is thereby “beyond life,” one that is beyond even the experiential vision of the religious community. The immediate vision of the All in the figure of the star which Rosenzweig recounts in his letter of October 1918, we recall, was not the first of its kind for Rosenzweig. Indeed, Rosenzweig reported the star to shine “as strongly as in the first days when it began”; he describes himself as standing “again in the immediate sight of the whole.” It is noteworthy, in this context, that Rosenzweig reports seeing “the Star” on another occasion, as well, and once again this vision does not take place within the framework of the liturgical year of the religious community. On January 15, 1919, he writes to Margrit Rosenstock of difficulties he had writing the previous day: Yesterday I was stuck and so unhappy, where – in itself already comical – by State and Church. Before going to sleep, it occurred to me that I had wholly forgotten the “strongest of my arts.” Then I applied it, namely, I saw for myself – the * [figure of the Star]! This I had long not done; and there suddenly everything was already rightly there, and thus today I wrote on State and Church and of Priest and Saint, everything just as it is to be seen in the *. But I had been so down, that it didn’t occur to me how nearby it was: to recall the * [an den * zu denken] if one writes of it.51

Rosenzweig’s description of how he overcomes his writer’s block by envisioning the Star in which “everything was already there” offers yet a further confirmation of the dependence of Rosenzweig’s system upon his own immediate vision of the All that was to be articulated in it. But Rosenzweig’s comments are especially instructive in the way they describe this vision, as well. The vision of the whole in the form of the Star which Rosenzweig recounts, here, not only takes place outside any liturgical setting, but repeats the nighttime “before going to sleep” setting of the vision of the Star with which we began this chapter, a setting noteworthy for its being outside daytime experience.52 And the vision here is particularly remarkable in that it suggests Rosenzweig’s apparent ability to conjure up the star at will. Citing Faust’s threat to use the “strongest of my arts” against the black dog in his laboratory metamorphosing into Mephisto, Rosenzweig designates his own ability to conjure up this vision of the Star as the “strongest of my arts.” Both of Rosenzweig’s personal accounts of seeing the All in the form of the Star confirm, it seems to me, Rosenzweig’s allusions in the Star to an immediate and 51 52

Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, January 15, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, p. 222. Compare, once again, Rosenzweig’s commentary on Yehuda Halevi’s poem “‫”יעירוני בשמך רעיוני‬ GS 4.1, pp. 28–9.

SE E I N G STA R S

301

at once comprehensive vision of the All in its unity that would indeed serve to complement the philosophical path from difference to identity Rosenzweig charts in the first two parts of the book. But other than allowing us to conclude that Rosenzweig himself had such a vision “beyond life,” and beyond the confines of the liturgically tinted vision of the All made possible in the religious community, these passages do not help us determine the standpoint out of which Rosenzweig has such visions; they do not tell us who Rosenzweig is when he sees the All in this way, and thereby who else might be capable of such immediate, comprehensive seeing. In the absence of any firm evidence, I will however permit myself to make a conjecture in this regard. It seems to me at least plausible that Rosenzweig understood himself to be one of a few elect individuals, a group of whom he was on intimate terms with, whose common trait was a capacity for such immediate vision of God as the One and All “beyond life.”53 Moreover, it strikes me that there is room to speculate where exactly such an elect group might fit within the account of vision in the Star itself. This speculation takes the following course: Every advance from one step to the next in the Star is governed by what I have deemed a factual method. Every step in the construction of the elements and in their relations, and even in our epistemological relation to such events, is forged, we have seen, out of the “And” of Tat and Sache, as the bringing to unity of components starkly different from one another. We found, for example, the elemental God to be the unity of divine freedom (Tat) and divine being (Sache), redemption to have been forged as the unification of the world’s vitality (Sache) and the human being’s act of love (Tat), and vision itself to demand the bringing together of thought and experience. It is curious, in this respect, that a final “And” between Judaism and Christianity is not explicitly presented in Rosenzweig’s account. One could well expect that 53

Evidence for Rosenzweig’s identification with such an elect group may be gleaned from his letter to M. Rosenstock of July 15, 1920: “I cannot demand such readiness for death = readiness for suicide from everyone, as I indeed had it at that time in 1913 from July to October. Did I then even have it again later? No. Rather, later I have simply always let myself grow and “renounce” nothing. How can I demand it of others? It is a grace that He once tore me out of life thus within my life. But this cannot be made into a rule. Most people have only simply their life-fate, their life-course and nothing further. It is the Particular [das Besondere] of us five, or with Eduard six men (Eugen Hans Rudi Werner me Eduard), that God in our case has not been satisfied only to speak to us through our life; but rather once has let the life collapse around us like the background of a theater decoration and has spoken with us on the empty stage. That one must know, that it is something Particular, and may draw no rule out of it, and must only indeed all the more firmly hold [us] together with one another,” Gritli-Briefe, pp. 626–7. This letter shows Rosenzweig to grasp himself as sharing with a small group of intimates – Eugen Rosenstock, Hans Ehrenberg, Rudolf Ehrenberg, Werner Picht, and Eduard Strauss – an experience of being torn by God “out of life within life.” The letter appears to suggest that such an experience of being alone with God beyond life occurred to Rosenzweig only between July and October 1913 and thus cannot be referring to the same vision of God which Rosenzweig appears to have been able to conjure up for himself later. And the letter describes not a vision, but an experience of speech. At the same time, however, it shares with Rosenzweig’s account of the highest form of vision the characteristic of being thus uniquely “beyond life.”

302

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

just as world and human being arrive at their unification in the redemption they enter into relation to realize, the two perspectives which anticipate the redemption from the side of the world and the side of the human being – that is, Judaism and Christianity – might fuse explicitly in a higher form of vision which would see the redeemed All in its purest form.54 Now, Rosenzweig makes it clear that Jews and Christians do not transcend their own partial grasps of the “whole truth,” precisely insofar as they remain “creatures,” that is to say, insofar as they remain human beings, and do not transcend their human finitude in an ascent to a form of divine knowledge. But if we understand Rosenzweig’s claim that Jews and Christians “both have only part of the whole truth,” while “immediate vision of the whole truth occurs only for the one who sees it in God,” as indicating the possibility of such a seeing that transcends these perspectives, then it strikes me as possible that Rosenzweig understands the standpoint of such a vision to be that of the “And” between Judaism and Christianity. There is no doubt that Rosenzweig rejects the possibility of such a hybrid Jew-Christian in life, but Rosenzweig’s insistence on the essential distinction between – on the “enmity for all time between” – Jews and Christians does not exclude the possibility that in vision this essential distinction might be transcended.55 Such a possibility would have to be examined both in the light of Hans Ehrenberg’s own “Jew-Christianity”56 and Rosenzweig’s comments, 54

55

56

Rosenzweig does in fact assert that we readers might be led toward the proper view of the whole truth by tracing the “reciprocal intertwining” of “the opposites of core-fire and emanating-rays,” i.e., of the eternal life of the Jewish people and the eternal way of the Christian, a “reciprocal intertwining” which – like the whole of the truth itself – “is not experienced, but can be seen.” And this suggestion leads Rosenzweig to follow the path of Jewish and Christian eschatology to see what Jews and Christians see “at the end.” But what Rosenzweig uncovers here, as the object of such supreme eschatological visions, is the very partial reflected level of vision with which we have already become familiar. Thus I do not see these results as fundamentally different than those which we arrived at through our account of “mirrors” of liturgy. It is also possible that what Rosenzweig is hiding in his cryptic account of the site of immediate vision is the opinion that only Jews have such vision. I do not think Rosenzweig holds this position; nor do I think that he would be impelled to hide such an opinion if he did hold it. His description of the Jew on Yom Kippur as “dead in the midst of life” might nevertheless be read as linked to this “beyond life” standpoint of the ultimate vision. Compare Rosenzweig’s letter to Eugen Rosenstock, February 12, 1921, in which he says that in III 3, “and its coda in the ‘Gate’ … the ‘tümer’ [i.e., Judaism and Christianity] disappear again,” GritliBriefe, pp. 729–30. See Rosenzweig’s letters to Hans Ehrenberg, of May 9–11, 1918, BT 1, pp. 553–6, 558–63. In “The New Thinking,” Rosenzweig claimed his presentation of Judaism and Christianity “does not emerge from the consciousness appropriate to both, … [and thus] does not do complete justice to the two but, for this price, transcends, probably for the first time, the apologetics and polemics usual in this field,” GS 3, p. 156/Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 132–3. Seeking to explain the standpoint which allows Rosenzweig to give such an account of both Judaism and Christianity without speaking on behalf of either, Markus Kartheininger, in his Heterogenität: Politische Philosophie im Frühwerk von Leo Strauss, pp. 239–40, appeals not to the kind of “JewishChristian” hybrid standpoint I am proposing in the case of Rosenzweig’s ultimate vision, but rather to a standpoint he claims Rosenzweig labeled that of the “heretic” [Ketzer]. This suggestion should be considered in the light of the shift in Hans Ehrenberg’s designation of the present age of Christianity from Judenchristentüm to Ketzerchristentüm. See Rosenzweig to Hans Ehrenberg, July 7, 1919, BT 2, p. 638: “Your Ketzerchristentüm really also comes to meet the Jewish concept of

SE E I N G STA R S

303

in his letters, regarding his own “special” relation to Christianity.57 In this context it might be valuable to consider Rosenzweig’s blurring – or transcending – the traditional frameworks of religion and sexuality in his intimate personal relationships with Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock, and Rudolf Ehrenberg – traditional institutional frameworks which Rosenzweig was adamant about preserving within communal “life” – as likewise attributable to a sense that elite individuals are capable of attaining moments of the “And” which unite what are otherwise ultimately divided positions of human existence. The possibility of a vision “beyond life” and thus beyond the boundaries dividing Jewish and Christian communities might be considered, finally, in relation to the “Über-Jewish (and at once Über-Christian)” standpoint Rosenzweig claims to have reached while writing his “Globus: Studies towards the World-Historical Doctrine of Space,” in 1917.58 I propose as a possibility – and only as a possibility – that Rosenzweig understands his own capacity for an immediate vision of the unity of the All in the figure of the star, to be rooted in his unique ability to stand “beyond life” and see from a standpoint that is Jewish and Christian at once. From this standpoint, Rosenzweig – and the few Jews and Christians like him – sees the unity of the star in its wholeness and immediacy which is otherwise seen in partial, mirrored form within the Jewish and Christian liturgical communities.59

57 58

59

redemption more than the Petrine or Paulinian. I think this is one of the reasons why you named it Judenchristentüm in 1918 and 1917.” See also, W. Schmied-Kowarzik, “Hans Ehrenbergs Einfluss auf die Entstehung des Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser, pp. 100–12; and Aharon Shaar-Yashuv, “‫ דיון תיאולוגי‬:‫[ ”בין פרנץ רוזנצוויג להנס ארנברג‬Between Franz Rosenzweig and Hans Ehrenberg – A Theological Discussion], ‫ דעת‬21 (1988), pp. 103–14. See Rosenzweig to Hans Ehrenberg, June 13, 1918, BT 1, 577–8. Viewing history from this standpoint, Rosenzweig suggests, is to view it from the standpoint of the prophets, i.e., “as if I were speaking with Isaiah,” for “just as Protestant and Catholic, if they go back under the ‘cross of Christ,’ no longer feel themselves different from each other, so Christian and Jew [no longer feel themselves different from each other] if they go back to the prophets,” “Paralipomena,” GS 3, p. 110. See my “From Nation State to World Empire: Franz Rosenzweig’s Redemptive Imperialism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 11 (2004), p. 4. For a fine account of “Globus,” and an analysis of its place within Rosenzweig’s thought as a whole, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 148–155. Emil Fackenheim clearly senses that Rosenzweig is stepping beyond the domains of the Jewish and Christian communities in this vision and is not a little perturbed by this possibility: “The Star here clearly rises above Jewish and Christian existence alike so as to see how each partakes of ‘the Truth.’ This gives us pause. Does not a thought thus rising understand both Jew and Christian differently from the self-understanding achieved by either? Does it not, in consequence, incongruously both assert ‘enmity between the two for all time’ and, achieving its own higher viewpoint, make an end to that enmity from that time on? Above all, in seeing the Jewish and Christian ‘part’ in the ‘whole’ truth from the standpoint of the whole truth, does the ‘system’ not, at long last, relapse from the ‘new thinking’ into the ‘old’? In the age post Hegel mortuum, is Hegel, after all, resurrected?” To Mend the World, p. 85. No less puzzled by this move is Julius Guttmann, who notes that “the concluding chapter paints the vision of the supreme eternity, before which the quarrels and differences between the two faiths will disappear in a mysterious manner which escapes both of them”(!) Philosophies of Judaism, p. 376.

304

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Let me summarize the conclusions we have reached, through our discussions of the last two sections, regarding the levels of vision of the All in the Star. By transforming moments in the middle of the course of the All into cyclical reflections of the whole of that course, the liturgical calendars of the Jewish and Christian communities “mirror” the All and thereby bring it into view. But Rosenzweig suggests that the systematic role of vision is to provide an immediate grasp of the unity of that All whose course from particularity to unity has been traced through factuality and reversals, through thought and experience. It is possible that we are to understand such immediate vision of the unity of the All to occur, in the Jewish liturgical year, when “God inclines his face” to the Jew who bows before him on Yom Kippur and, perhaps, in the Christian liturgical year, when the Christian sees Christ on the cross “immediately face to face” during Easter. But the significant problems I have raised that undermine this possibility, the account of a vision of God “beyond life” in the Star and Rosenzweig’s reports in his letters of his own solitary vision of the star, together suggest that the immediate vision which would alone complete systematic knowledge of the All in the Star is a vision that transcends the contexts of the Jewish and Christian communities. We have thus entertained the possibility that Rosenzweig believed himself to be numbered among the few who are capable of conjuring up an immediate vision of the All in its unity. Given such a range of possibilities, we must conclude that the site of immediate vision in the Star remains open to question. The Star itself, however, concludes with a vivid account of the immediate vision of the All in the form of the star which is at once God’s face. Let us then turn to this account of how such an immediate vision of the All in the form of the star completes the path to systematic knowledge upon which Rosenzweig has embarked in the Star.

V. The All, the Star, and God’s Face: Vision and Life at the End of the Star of Redemption The central claim of this chapter has been that the account of vision in the third part of the Star serves an essential role in the book’s advance to knowledge of the All. I have suggested that seeing the All is meant to grant a kind of immediate knowledge of the redemptive unity of the All which serves to complement the mediated knowledge of the course of the realization of the All, attained through factuality and reversals, thought and experience, in the first two parts of the Star. In the opening lines of the “Gate” section that ends the Star, Rosenzweig offers a direct account of the vision of the All in the form of the Star that is at once God’s face, an account that appears to confirm such a claim. He writes: This shining of the divine face alone is the truth. It is no freely hovering-for-itself figure, but rather the shining-forth countenance of God alone. … As He turns his face to us, so we may know Him. And this knowledge does not know inadequately (uneigentlich).

SE E I N G STA R S

305

Rather it knows the truth, as it is, namely as it is in God: as His countenance and His part. … In the Star of Redemption, in which we saw the divine truth become figure, there thus shines nothing other than the countenance, which God turns shining to us. Yes the Star of Redemption itself, as it now finally arose as figure for us, we will now recognize it in the divine face. And only in this recognition [Wiedererkenntnis] does its knowledge [Erkenntnis] complete itself. Because as long as we only knew the course, without already seeing its figure, for so long the order of the original elements was not yet fixed. (465/418–19)

Rosenzweig describes, in this passage, the vision of the All in the figure of the star of redemption as nothing less than the completion of the path to systematic knowledge which he has set out upon in the Star as a whole. The star is seen here – as we claimed it was in Rosenzweig’s nighttime vision of October 1918 – as the “shining of the divine face.”60 In describing the truth that is seen in this vision to be truth “as it is in God,” as God’s “part,” moreover, Rosenzweig alludes back to his hints at a kind of vision that transcends the realm of “experience and vision” – which we identified with the living vision of the Jewish and Christian liturgical communities – and sees “immediately” “the whole truth in God,” the whole truth which “can only become part for God.” Insofar as the seeing described in this passage is said to yield a kind of authentic knowledge – a “knowledge [that] does not know inadequately” – Rosenzweig directs us to identify the immediate seeing of the All here, in the figure of the star that is God’s face, as immediate knowledge of the All which God alone will be in redemption. Immediate as it may be, Rosenzweig suggests there is something familiar about what is seen in this vision. Indeed, the knowledge that this vision produces is not simply “cognition” [Erkenntnis]; it is “re-cognition” [Wiedererkenntnis].61 In the immediate vision of the Star as God’s face which we may come to attain only beyond the limits of everyday life, Rosenzweig suggests, we recognize what we have already come to know as living human beings. Rosenzweig points here in several directions at once regarding what it is that is recognized in this vision. In the vision of the Star as the face of God we recognize the God who loves us and awakens our “I” in revelation. In the face of God, Rosenzweig will proceed to suggest, we come to recognize our own faces – and the faces of our human others – as reflections of the divine face.62 But above all, I would propose, what is recognized 60

61

62

For a reflection on Rosenzweig’s description of the divine face in the context of the Jewish mystical tradition, see R. Cohen, “The Face of Truth and Jewish Mysticism,” Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas, especially pp. 261–73. Cf., Kenneth Hart Green, “The Notion of Truth in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” p. 303: “Rosenzweig, like Plato, points towards a kind of anamnesis as making knowledge accessible.” Compare Nicholas of Cusa, Vision of God, p. 23: “Thy true face is freed from any limitation, it hath neither quantity nor quality, nor is it of time or place, for it is the Absolute Form, the Face of faces. When, therefore, I meditate on how that face is truth, and the most adequate measure of all faces, I am brought into a state of great wonder. … I comprehend Thy face to precede every face that may be formed, and to be the pattern and true type of all faces, and all faces to be images of Thy face,

306

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

in the immediate vision of the star in this passage is the figure of the Star which constructed itself, at the end of the second part of the Star, as the image of the unity of the All, built out of the relations among the elements we came to know through factuality and reversals, through thought and experience. The All took on the figure of the star, we found, as the symbolic expression of the relations through which the particular kinds of beings – God, world, and human being – realize themselves on the way to realizing the All. But “as long as we only knew the course, without seeing its figure,” we have repeatedly noted, as long as “telescope and spectroscope” had not brought to “familiar intuition” that star whose elements and course we knew, such knowledge could not claim to be complete. Rosenzweig identifies the relation between the mediated knowledge of the way in which particular beings unite to form the All and the immediate knowledge of the redemptive unity of the All as that of recognition. He suggests that one only recognizes the stellar figure of the All in its redemptive unity seen in God’s face if one has traversed the path of mediated knowledge Rosenzweig charts through the first two parts of the book. Indeed, pointing to just this relationship that makes recognition possible – between the “mystical” immediate vision at the end of the Star and the discursive path of the Star leading to it – Rosenzweig himself writes, in a letter on February 1, 1919, “III 3 is … a ‘mysticism,’ but one which rests on the ground of all the unmystical which stands on the 500 pages before it.”63 Immediate as the vision of the All at the end of the Star may be, Rosenzweig thus suggests it is yet prepared for by the “unmystical” mediated path of knowledge which leads the reader of the Star toward it. We recognize in immediate vision what we have come to know mediately through factuality and reversals, confirmed through the relation between thought and experience. In this recognition, the same All which we have known mediately, as a unified totality of particulars, is now known immediately, in its identity. And in grasping, through this recognition, the identity that holds between the All known mediately, as the ultimate totality of particulars, and the All known immediately in its unity, the system has attained its goal: it has articulated the All in the identity of its identity and its difference. The knowledge of the All we could only “hope” for when we began our quest in the “piecework” of particular nothings thus reaches its completion in this clear, immediate vision of redemptive unity. It is “only in this recognition,” Rosenzweig asserts, that “knowledge completes itself.” But in this moment of the completion of systematic knowledge in the immediate vision of the All which God will be in redemption, Rosenzweig directs us, one last time, back to our standpoint in the middle of the course of the very All we have come to know. The site of this vision which completes knowledge, the “sanctum”

63

which may not be limited or shared. Each face, then, that can look upon Thy face beholdeth naught other or differing from itself, because it beholdeth its own true type.” Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, February 1, 1919, Gritli-Briefe, p. 227.

SE E I N G STA R S

307

in which “the star of redemption has become face,” Rosenzweig reiterates, “had to be a piece of the beyond-world in the world itself, a life beyond life.” It stands at “that limit of life where vision is granted. Because no human being remains in life who sees Him” (471/423–4). But in this ultimate vision of the All in the form of the star, Rosenzweig claims, “the human being catches sight of none other than a face like his own”; here, what Rosenzweig sees “in this beyond of life … is – nothing other than what I already could have heard [vernehmen] in the middle of life” (471/424). Even in the immediacy of the crowning vision at the end of the Star, we find, the seer who grasps the All in its unity does not lose herself in the unity of this perceived redemptive All. The seer is not dissolved in a mystical union with the divine. As we noted when we compared Rosenzweig’s use of vision to the role of “intellectual intuition” in German Idealism, even the most immediate of visions in the Star does not produce a state in which “the intuiting self is identical with the intuited.” The seer does not see herself as the Absolute unity of the All in such vision. But rather, the stellar image of the All stands over against me as my other in this vision. The vision of God’s face makes the unity of the All that will be in redemption perceptible to me in the present, but not at the price of eliminating my self in the present.64 No sooner do I glimpse God’s face than I recognize it, says Rosenzweig, as “a face like [my] own.” The vision directs me back to consider my own face, my own individuality, within the course of the All leading to redemption. The first chapters of this study showed how Rosenzweig embarked on a quest for systematic knowledge which eschewed the Absolute standpoint of the German Idealists and thereby came to articulate a conception of system as quintessentially human knowledge. The completion of that knowledge in vision at the end of the Star well takes Rosenzweig to the very “limit” of the human standpoint – to a “beyond life in life,” to a “beyond-world in the world itself.” But the divine face seen in this immediate vision at once directs him back from this limit to consider his own face; and it directs him back to the place and the time he occupies “in the middle of life.” To recognize what one sees immediately in the star-figured unity of the All which is God’s face as nothing other than the same truth which one “perceives in the middle of life,” one may suggest, is to recognize the fundamental link between one’s awakening to free selfhood in the middle of the All and the ultimate

64

But compare Elliot R. Wolfson’s identification of the ultimate vision at the end of the Star with “mystical death” or “spiritual death”: “Note that Rosenzweig says that God allows himself to be seen at the border of human life. In this visual gaze, God is his truth, and his truth is the countenance that reflects the face of the human being. By beholding the countenance of God in the star of redemption, the person sees his own image. In that moment of self-reflection, the ontic gap separating human and divine is closed. Seeing the face of God leads to death for the self is mystically identified with God,” “Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997), p. 80.

308

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

unity of the All which will be in the redemptive future. It is at once to recognize the call to turn toward the faces “like one’s own” around one in the middle of the All as likewise fundamentally linked to the ultimate realization of the All.65 As human beings in the middle of the course of the All, Rosenzweig has long claimed, we are called upon to realize this All whose true unity we can anticipate through vision but which remains hidden, remains “not-yet,” within the actuality of our moment in the middle of the All’s course. Seeing the unity of the All as future leads us to recognize our vocation in the middle of the All; it directs us back to the decision we are called upon to make between taking up our place within the All or choosing Nothing. As Rosenzweig has long suggested, choosing to take up this position within the All is no simple matter. For in the middle of the All we live neither in the absolute certainty of being grounded in an all-encompassing All, nor in the absolute certainty of our own individual self-groundedness. In the middle of the All we live in the fear of death – in the awareness of the way we hover between the particular nothings out of which all beings generate themselves and the ultimate redemptive unity of the All in which alone all beings will find their secure factuality. In the face of this experience of the instability of beings, of their wavering between nothing and secure being, Rosenzweig suggested, in the “Introduction” of the Star, one is well tempted to declare all beings and Being itself to be nothing: one may take the path of nihilism. Alternatively, one may be inclined to seek solace by positing one kind of being as the substantive All of which all particular beings are mere manifestations, a single substantive ground out of which all particular beings have emerged. In such a case, we found, the nothingness revealed in the fear of death would be tamed by its transformation into the “one and universal Nothing,” which already contains within itself the secure unity of the All from the beginning. But Rosenzweig also suggests that we may take up the nothing-something character of all beings as we experience them: as indications of our position in the middle of the course of an All which is still to be realized, which depends on our own decisions, action, and relations. Taking such a fragile experience of life as it is – without declaring all that we experience to be either the All or Nothing from the very outset – is a difficult 65

See Richard Cohen, “The Face of Truth and Jewish Mysticism,” Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas, p. 245: “Upon reflection we realize that it is no accident that Rosenzweig describes the human face just before making the final and ultimate gesture of the Star: launching out from text into life, from conceptual or imaginary truth into eternal truth, truth lived as love for the neighbor within a revealed religious community. Eternal truth, as Rosenzweig understands it, is found in a return from concepts and images to face-to-face relations, to faces encountered in love, ethics, and spirituality, faces at once human and divine.” But compare Elliot R. Wolfson, who in the light of the ultimate vision at the Star’s end asks, “In light of the all-consuming blaze of the star can the correlative and dialogical relationship with the other ultimately be preserved?” “Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997), p. 73.

SE E I N G STA R S

309

undertaking. And in reflecting on the relation between the ultimate vision of the redemptive All and our vocation as human beings on the course that leads to that All, Rosenzweig suggests doing so demands courage: “We find ourselves present. But we must have the courage to find ourselves present in the truth, the courage to say our Truly in the middle of the truth. We may do so. Because the last truth – it is indeed none other than ours” (436/392). In the middle of the course of the All, we are called on “to say our Truly in the middle of the truth.” We are called on to affirm the very being of that divine who will “be” the All in redemption. We are called on to turn in love toward others whose faces, as our own, reflect the star-figured shape of the All which emerged as God’s countenance. But how can we find the courage necessary to take on such a vocation? How can we take our own particularity seriously and at once work toward the realization of an All when we find ourselves, as we do, in the fear of death, suspended over our own nothingness? We can only have the courage necessary to take up this calling, Rosenzweig suggests in this passage, insofar as we recognize “the last truth” to be at once “none other than ours.” This “last truth,” we have long found, is not-yet truth: the ultimate unity of the All is not-yet. And we have come to see that this very instability of the All in the present, our own instability as beings hovering over our own nothings, is at once the root of the unconditional freedom we yet possess as individuals. Only in this situation in which all beings remain at risk to fall back into nothingness, Rosenzweig has indicated, is individual freedom real within the course of the realization of the All. Only in finding ourselves thus suspended over our own nothingness can we recognize the “last truth” as “none other than ours.” Our decisions, our actions, our loving relations, play their part in realizing such truth. The “last truth” is none other than the systematic task we take upon ourselves in the midst of the All. The vision in which knowledge of the All reaches its completion at the end of the Star may thus occupy a position “beyond life,” but this vision directs the person who sees the ultimate figure of the truth back into the midst of life, back to the vocation placed upon her as individual within the course of the All. The Star famously concludes its closing “Gate” by opening up out of the “mysterious-miraculous light of the divine sanctum in which no human being can remain alive” back “into life” (472/424).66 At the end of the Star, we thus return from “beyond life,” from out of the ultimate vision of the All in the figure of the Star in which the system completes itself, 66

See Rosenzweig’s response to Hans Ehrenberg’s review of the Star which appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, December 29, 1921. Ehrenberg claimed that the Star ends “in the call: ‘from philosophy to life.” In a letter to Ehrenberg at the end of December, Rosenzweig writes, “The ‘life’ in the last word is indeed no opposite to ‘philosophy.’ Indeed, there, this is not at all any longer the issue. In this life one can surely also philosophize; why not? (I do it). What no longer happens, is only the ‘Seeing.’ The vision, not philosophy, is here the opposite out of which life springs. … The tendency is antimystical, not anti-intellectual,” BT 2, pp. 735–6.

310

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

back “into life,” into our human existence in the middle of the All. In doing so, one might suggest, we find ourselves at once returning to the very experience of human existence within the middle of the All with which the Star began. We return from a state like death, that is, “beyond life,” back into a life which “remains in the fear of death.” In such fear of death, we recall, we were given insight into the fundamental finitude of our particular being. In a certain sense, we have not seen this character of our finitude change one bit over the course of the Star. All the while that we traced the self-generation of particular beings out of their nothings, and their reversals into reciprocal relations that form the All we have indeed remained “in the fear of death.” The method of thought whereby we conceived of the factual generation of the elements was rooted in the particularity of nothingness which we discovered in the fear of death; our experience of creation, revelation, and redemption, we found, was stamped by our position as particulars in the middle of the course of the All, and not at its end. And even from the height of the ultimate vision which takes us to a point of “life beyond life,” we are directed back to our particular existence in the middle of the All. But even as Rosenzweig himself emphasizes that “we remain” in this fear of death over the whole course of the Star, that “we wish to live,” that “we hold on to our creatureliness … [and] don’t want to let it go” (463/416), it may well be claimed that we attain a kind of victory over our fear of death at the same time.67 For in returning now to that standpoint in the middle of the All out of which the Star began, we recognize that which provoked our fear, the particular nothingness at the root of our being, as the guarantee of our individual freedom and particularity within the All. And in the potential 67

In his “Into Life”??! Franz Rosenzweig and the Figure of Death,” AJS Review 23/2 (1998), Zachary Braiterman offers a compelling revision of the conventional view of the Star as charting a “lifeaffirming” course “from death” “into life,” arguing that “the figure of death appears both at the beginning and at the end of Rosenzweig’s magnum opus” (p. 204). Just as we have noted the position of the immediate vision of the All in the figure of the Star as being “beyond life,” Braiterman asserts that the “vision of the face [which] constitutes the apex of the Star … occurs at the gates of death” (p. 211), and he understands the “into life” with which the Star ends “to mean into life directed toward death,” itself a directive which “follows the climactic vision of God’s face like a decrescendo” (p. 212). While I find little reason to disagree with Braiterman’s claim that “death, light, silence, and a spectacular vision of the truth represent the highpoint and highest good in Rosenzweig’s thought” (p. 212), I do not draw the conclusion that Braiterman draws from such passages to the effect that Rosenzweig’s thought thus “exhibit[s] a prominent morbid strain” (204) or that it betrays a “radiant view of death” (p. 220). Because I take death as pointing to the nothingness at the root of particular being which both threatens us and alone makes us free to take up our vocation in the All, I see such remaining in the fear of death as including a recognition that finitude, after all, has its perks. Braiterman himself seems to shift his own position slightly in “Cyclical Motions and the Force of Repetition in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Beginning/Again, noting the change that nevertheless accompanies the cyclical move from death through the system and back: “At the end of the book, Rosenzweig returns to the figure of death but now associates it with a pictogram of absolute truth. … Death has been reinscribed within a radically transformed context and thus takes on new thematic meaning and literary form. As such, the graft allows death to become a redeeming figure (the border at which the beloved soul apprehends a detailed vision of the face), not the object of creaturely terror” (pp. 229, 231).

SE E I N G STA R S

311

we have for relations with other beings in this position between nothingness and Allhood, we recognize our vocation within the All, the demand that we utilize this freedom all our own to fulfill our systematic task of realizing the redemptive unity of the All. Out of the fear of death we find ourselves called upon to realize the All. It is a calling we can freely take on because of our rootedness in the particularity of nothing. Thus, in the affirmation of the ultimate truth with our “Truly,” in the affirmation of our task of realizing the All which is not-yet but will be truth in redemption, we affirm ourselves as free parts of the ultimate truth: “the true All, the All which does not spring into pieces as in the world of Nothing, but rather the one All. The All and One” (428/385).

Conclusion: The All and the Everyday

fter having led his readers out through the concluding “Gate” of the Star “into life,” Rosenzweig was famously adamant about turning his own sights away from the writing of books and toward everyday life. In the very letter in which he introduced the Star to Martin Buber in August 1919, Rosenzweig already declared, “I see my future only in life, no longer in writing,”1 and explaining his decision, a year later, not to pursue an academic career, he wrote to his Doktorvater, Friedrich Meinecke, “No longer the writing of books [but rather] the little, often very little ‘demands of the day’ … have become the beloved content of my life.”2 Although Rosenzweig would yet engage in some important book writing after the publication of the Star – most notably his Yehudah Halevi book of 1924 and his Bible translations with Martin Buber – much of what remained of his short, illness-plagued life was indeed devoted to what might be called the “everyday” concerns of Jewish communal life in Frankfurt. It is tempting to interpret Rosenzweig’s turn away from book writing after the publication of the Star as a rejection of the systematic task of philosophy he undertook in it. Perhaps here at long last, one might surmise, we find the Rosenzweig who rejects system for the sake of dialogue, totality for alterity, philosophy for religious life – the Rosenzweig, that is, whom so many scholars have sought to identify even as the author of the Star itself. But Rosenzweig’s own musings about the relationship between the philosophical quest to “know the All” and everyday life suggest we should not accept such an interpretation of Rosenzweig’s “no-longer-book” stage of life too hastily. At the end of the “New Thinking,” Rosenzweig has the following to say about the ending of the Star and about the entryway into everyday life through which it guides its readers. “Everyone should philosophize once. Everyone should look all around from his own standpoint and life-point,” Rosenzweig writes. “But this vision [Schau] is not an end in itself. The book is no attained goal. … It must itself be taken responsibility for, rather than bearing itself or being borne by others of its kind. This responsibility occurs in the everyday [Alltag] of life. Except that to know and live it as All-tag [ “everyday” or “day of the All”], the life-day of the All had to be traversed.”3

1 2 3

Franz Rosenzweig to Martin Buber, end of August 1919, BT 2, p. 645. Franz Rosenzweig to Friedrich Meinecke, August 30, 1920, BT 2, pp. 680–1. “Das neue Denken,” GS 3, p. 160/Philosophical and Theological Writings, p. 137.

312

C ONC LU SION

313

The completion of the Star’s systematic quest for “the All,” Rosenzweig insists here, is not in fact an “attained goal,” but rather, demands of the book’s readers to take “responsibility” for it in the “everyday of life.” And Rosenzweig can expect his readers to take responsibility for the All traversed in his book, one might propose, precisely because he has shown them where they stand in the middle of the All. Insofar as the reader of the Star comes to conceive of herself as grounded in her own particular nothing and not merely in the unity of the Absolute; insofar as she grasps her own individual self-realization as intimately intertwined with the realization of all other beings; insofar as she comes to recognize the unity of the All that is glimpsed in the Star as future, as “not-yet,” the “everyday” ceases to designate the realm of the mundane or commonplace. Indeed, as Rosenzweig explains, the reader directed back to resume her “everyday” life after concluding the Star does so with a very different grasp of the everydayness of her life than she had beforehand. Having traveled the path Rosenzweig forges to knowledge of the All, the reader now recognizes the “everyday” – in a play on the German Alltag – as the very time and place in which the “All” is to be realized, as the context within which she is both capable of taking responsibility for the All and called upon to do so. Rosenzweig asserts that it is only in having “traversed” “the life-day of the All” from its beginnings in the particularity of nothings to its redemptive unification that we can “know and live” the “everyday” as the “Alltag” – as the “day of the All” – that it truly is. Thus Rosenzweig does indeed send his readers out from the systematic philosophizing of The Star of Redemption “into life.” But the life into which we as readers are sent is in no way divorced from the systematic course charted in the book itself. We are sent out from the Star to live that system which we have come to know in it. It is in this life that we are called on to make the task of system our own. The goal of this book has been to show that in characterizing the Star as a “system of philosophy” – rather than a “philosophy of religion” or a “philosophy of Judaism”4 – Rosenzweig was not simply offering a general category under which to classify his book, nor merely marking the form in which the book’s ideas were expressed; nor was he merely offering a directive against reading the Star as a religious or Jewish text. In declaring the Star to be a “system of philosophy,” I have claimed, Rosenzweig identified the fundamental philosophical task which he aspired to fulfill in the book: grasping, articulating, and realizing “the All,” the identity and difference of all that is. That Rosenzweig would take on such a task, I have shown, meant he committed himself to a conception of the task of philosophy “discovered” by the German Idealists. But much of this book has been devoted to showing that Rosenzweig nevertheless sought to fulfill this task of system in a manner that may be distinguished in important ways from the systems of German Idealism. 4

BT 1, p. 909, 1026; GS 3, p. 140.

314

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

Over the course of the book, I have tried to clarify Rosenzweig’s conception of system by calling it “system as quintessentially human knowledge.” In this moniker, I have aimed to identify the way in which Rosenzweig carries out the task of system not from the Absolute standpoint of Idealism, but instead as a human being who stands in the midst of all things, in the middle of the system. It is this standpoint in the middle of the All, I have claimed, that allows Rosenzweig to grasp particularity as such within the system, without reducing particulars to mere parts or manifestations of the unity of the whole. Such a standpoint has taken us from Rosenzweig’s starting-point in the self-generation of particular beings out of their own respective nothings and through the reversals of these particular beings into those relations that lead them toward the redemptive realization of the “true All.” For human beings who stand in the middle of this All, we have seen, the ultimate redemptive unification of the All remains future. It is in large part our task to realize the system which is still “not-yet” realized in the present. But while the realization of the All itself remains future, I have claimed that Rosenzweig asserts that knowledge of the All in its identity and difference is nevertheless possible from the standpoint of the human being who stands in the middle of the course of the All’s realization. The method of such knowledge, I have suggested, is built up of factuality and reversals, confirmed by the relation between thought and experience, and unified within an immediate intuition of the redemptive All itself. In the wake of this vision which completes the path toward systematic knowledge in the Star, we found, Rosenzweig directs the gaze of his readers back to their place in the middle of the All, to that point in which they are called upon to decide, to act, and to love in such ways as will contribute to the realization of the very redemptive All they have come to know. My aim has been to show that in guiding his readers toward “knowledge of the All” in the Star Rosenzweig shows himself to be deeply and deliberately committed to the very systematic task of philosophy he has long been held to have rejected. I hope I have shown that an appreciation of Rosenzweig’s commitment to systematicity illuminates the remarkable unity of purpose and inner consistency of the Star both as a whole and in its intricate details. But while I have aspired to offer as clear and as comprehensive an account of Rosenzweig’s systematic project as possible, there are a number of scholarly questions regarding both philosophical themes internal to the Star and the Star’s relation to intellectual trends of its time that remain open here, questions whose consideration in the future would help elucidate the systematic character and purpose of the Star in important ways. Rosenzweig’s development of a “speech-thinking” in the heart of the Star, for one, and his account of the relation between history and redemption over the course of the Star, for another, are two topics which receive only passing mention here; they are especially deserving of extended treatment in the future, to determine the extent to which they fit into, or stand in tension with, the overarching systematic project I have claimed governs the Star as a whole. While I have devoted

C ONC LU SION

315

considerable space in this book to questions of philosophical method in the Star, there remains much to be gained from further research in this area, both from more focused analyses of different aspects of the Star’s method itself, and from the situating of that method more precisely in the post-Kantian context, in relation to both German Idealist and neo-Kantian approaches to method. Finally, while I have taken steps toward uncovering the immediate context within which Rosenzweig developed his systematic ideas – the circle of confidants that included Hans and Rudolf Ehrenberg, Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, and Viktor von Weizsäcker, among others – there is considerable need for further scholarly inquiry into this circle of “new thinkers” and into Rosenzweig’s position in it.5 My reading of the Star as a system of philosophy suggests that there is good reason to understand Rosenzweig’s philosophical commitments and, accordingly, Rosenzweig himself, differently than he has so often been portrayed in the scholarship of the last decades. The Franz Rosenzweig who emerges from my account is not an existentialist committed to articulating the authenticity of individual existence; he is not a harbinger of postmodernism who seeks to deconstruct philosophical totality and to celebrate difference or otherness; he is not a Jewish penitent invested in the return of his contemporary alienated Jews back to Jewish tradition; he is not a philosopher of dialogue. The Rosenzweig who emerges here is a systematic philosopher who recognizes, first and foremost, that one cannot live “everyday” life, and cannot ask the basic questions that emerge in everyday life, without inquiring into “the All” and one’s place in it. But he is at once a systematic philosopher who recognizes that to carry out the task of system, to know the All, one must recognize the uniqueness of individual existence, one must attend to the faces of others, one must engage in dialogue, and one must be open to the ways in which life within religious community holds the potential for orienting one’s sights to a horizon of metaphysical questioning. Now, if Rosenzweig is understood, first and foremost, as a philosopher committed to the task of system, then one must concede that he no longer serves to confirm the regnant trends in contemporary Continental philosophy and in Jewish 5

There are a growing number of scholars who are studying this circle of friends. See, e.g., HeinzJürgen Görtz, “‘Gottesreich’ und ‘Zwischenreich’: Geschichtstheologische Implikationen des Religionsgesprächs zwischen Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) und Hans Ehrenberg (1883–1958),” Christen und Juden. Ein notwendiger Dialog, pp. 79–95, and “Der Stern der Erlösung als Kommentar: Rudolf Ehrenberg und Franz Rosenzweig,” Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum ‘Stern der Erlösung,’” 119–71; Reiner Wiehl, “Experience in Rosenzweig’s New Thinking,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 42–68; Hartwig Wiedebach, “Apologie gegen sich selbst: Zur Antilogik der Person bei Viktor von Weizsäcker und Franz Rosenzweig,” Religious Apologetics – Philosophical Argumentation, pp. 531–50; Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, “Zur früh-existentialistischen Idealismuskritik der Vettern Hans Ehrenberg und Franz Rosenzweig,” Existentielles Denken und gelebte Bewährung, pp. 91–120, and “Hans Ehrenbergs Einfluß auf die Entstehung des Stern der Erlösung, Rosenzweig als Leser, pp. 71–117. Through his editing and republication of the works of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and of Hans Ehrenberg, Michael Gormann-Thelen is contributing to our understanding of this circle, as well.

316

T H E SYS T E M AT IC TA SK OF P H I L O S OP H Y

thought in the way he has long been held to do. Rosenzweig’s significance can then no longer lie in the way he already appears to have anticipated, in 1918, ideas that have become part of conventional wisdom today. The view that system is the task of philosophy, which Rosenzweig articulates in the Star, is conspicuously unfashionable by contemporary philosophical standards. I hope I have shown nonetheless that Rosenzweig’s account of “the All” and our place in it is no less compelling for being unfashionable. Yet we hardly need to call on contemporary thinkers to become orthodox Rosenzweigian systematicians in order to assert the abiding relevance of Rosenzweig’s thought. In the painstaking, comprehensive manner in which he takes up the task of system, Rosenzweig shows us the discursive labor and the clarity of vision that must attend to any elaboration of philosophy’s task.

Bibliography

Works by Franz Rosenzweig “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus: Ein handschriftlicher Fund,” Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften III. Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken. Edited by Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984, pp. 3–44. [Footnotes use the abbreviation OSP.] “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus: Ein handschriftlicher Fund,” Sitzungberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophischhistorische Klasse, 1917, number 5. “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” 1914. Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 (manuscript in series II, subseries III, Box 2, Folder 29), Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History, New York. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften I–IV. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976–1984. I. Briefe und Tagebücher. 1. 1900–1918. 2. 1919–1929. Edited by Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann with the cooperation of Bernhard Casper. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. [Footnotes use the abbreviations BT 1 and BT 2.] II. Der Stern der Erlösung. Introduction by Reinhold Mayer. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976 [4th edition]. III. Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken. Edited by Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. [Footnotes use the abbreviation GS 3.] IV. Sprachdenken im Übersetzen. 1. Band: Jehuda Halevi. Fünfundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte. Edited by Rafael N. Rosenzweig. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983 [Footnotes use abbreviation GS 4.1]. 2.Band: Arbeitspapiere zur Verdeutschung der Schrift. Edited by Rachel Bat Adam. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. Die “Gritli”-Briefe: Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy. Edited by Inken Rühle and Reinhold Mayer, with a preface by Rafael Rosenzweig. Tübingen: Bilam Verlag, 2002. [Footnotes use the abbreviation Gritli-Briefe.] Hegel und der Staat. Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1920, reprint Aalen: Scientia, 1962. “Innerlich bleibt die Welt eine”: Ausgewählte Texte zum Islam. Edited by Gesine Palmer and Yossef Schwartz. Berlin: Philo, 2003. “Paralipomena,” Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 (Manuscript in Series II, Subseries III:D, Box 2, Folders 39–40), Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History, New York. Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Diaries, Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001 (Diaries in Series II, Subseries I), Leo Baeck Institute, New York. 317

318

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

Rosenzweig to Rudolf Ehrenberg, November 18, 1917 (“Urzelle”), Hans Ehrenberg Archiv, Ev. Kirche von Westfalen Landeskirchliches Archiv, 3:17-II/B. Der Stern der Erlösung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, 1988.

English Translations of Rosenzweig’s Writings Consulted: Cultural Writings of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited and translated by Barbara E. Galli. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. Presented by Nahum Glatzer, with a new foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. God, Man, and the World: Lectures and Essays. Edited and translated by Barbara E. Galli. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Judaism despite Christianity: The “Letters on Christianity and Judaism” between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and translated by Dorothy Emmet. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Philosophical and Theological Writings. Translated and edited, with notes and commentary, by Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000. The Star of Redemption. Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. The Star of Redemption. Translated by William W. Hallo. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1971. [Footnotes use abbreviation Star for pages from this translation.] Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God. Edited and translated by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Noonday Press, 1953.

Primary Sources Bacon, Francis. The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon. Translated by Robert L. Ellis and James Spedding. Edited by John M. Robertson. London: Routledge and Sons, 1905. Berkeley, George. De Motu and the Analyst. Edited and translated by Douglas M. Jesseph. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992. Cohen, Hermann. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis. Berlin: Cassirer, 1902. Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte: Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik. Berlin: Dümmler, 1883. Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Leipzig: Gustav Fock G.m.b.H, 1919. Nicholas Of Cusa. Vision of God. Translated by Emma G. Salter. New York: Ungar, 1960. Descartes, René. “The Principles of Philosophy,” The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I. Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R .T Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Ehrenberg, Hans. “Das Philosophieren und der Philosoph. Einleitung zu einer Vorlesung über das philosophische system,” H. E. Archiv, 3:17-X.1, given in Heidelberg some time between 1910 and 1912. Die Parteiung der Philosophie: Studien wider Hegel und die Kantianer. First edition: Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1911. Reprint edited by Michael Gormann-Thelen. Essen: Die Blaue Eule Verlag, 1998. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by J. H. Fichte. Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1845. [Footnotes cite volume and page number.]

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

319

Fichte Translations Consulted: Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Early Philosophical Writings. Translated by Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Foundations of Natural Right According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre. Translated by Michael Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Science of Knowledge. Translated by Peter Heath and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. “Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation: Lectures 1–4.” German Idealist Philosophy. Translated by Daniel Breazeale. Edited by Rüdiger Bubner. London: Penguin Books, 1997, pp. 121–59. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust. Eine Tragödie. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Ausgabe 9. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1962. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke im zwanzig Bänden. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. [Footnotes cite volume and page number.]

Hegel Translations Consulted: Hegel, G. W. F. The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. Translated by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001. Translations from Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. “What Is Metaphysics? (1929).” Translated by David Farrell Krell, Pathmarks. Edited by W. McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 82–96. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hyperion in Sämtliche Werke III. Edited by F. Beissner. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1957. Husserl, Edmund. “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, 1,1 (1910): 289–341. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. Werke. Band 1, 1. Edited by K. Hammacher, W. Jaeschke, and I. Piske. Hamburg: Meiner, 1998. Translations cited from The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill. Translated by George di Giovanni. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994. Kant, Immanuel. Kants Werke. Akademie Textausgabe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900. [Footnotes cite volume and page number, with the exception of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, which is cited according to the standard A and B pagination of the 1871 and 1877 editions.]

Kant Translations Consulted: Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Mathews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

320

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Critique of Pure Reason: Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. [Footnotes use abbreviation CPR with the standard A or B edition pagination.] “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” Practical Philosophy: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” Religion and Rational Theology: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Translated by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Leibnizens Mathematische Schriften. Vol. IV. Edited by C. I. Gerhardt. Halle: H. W. Schmidt, 1859. Mehlis, Georg, editor. Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, 1, 1(1910). Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff in Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1997, pp. 506–56. Rickert, Heinrich. System der Philosophie. Erster Teil: Allgemeine Grundlegung der Philosophie. Tübingen: Mohr, 1921. Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen. Angewandte Seelenkunde: In Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts II. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1963–64, pp. 739–810. Soziologie. Leipzig: Gruyter, 1925. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by K. F. A. Schelling. Cotta: Stuttgart. [Footnotes cite division, volume, and page, according to the original edition, but I have worked from Manfred Schröter, ed., Schellings Werke. Munich: Beck and Oldenbourg, 1927, and the Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985.] Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/42. Edited with an introduction by Manfred Frank. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993.

Schelling Translations Consulted: Schelling, F. W. J. The Ages of the World. Translated by Jason M. Wirth. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. Translated by Keith R. Peterson. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004. “Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy,” translated by Michael G. Vater, The Philosophical Forum, XXXII, 4 (2001): 373–97. On the History of Modern Philosophy. Translated by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom. Translated by James Guttman. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1936, 1992. “Presentation of My System of Philosophy,” translated by Michael G. Vater, The Philosophical Forum, XXXII, 4 (2001): 339–71. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Translated by Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978.

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

321

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by Paul Deussen. Munich: Piper, 1912. Spinoza, Benedict. The Complete Works. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett, 2002. Weizsäcker, Viktor von. Gesammelte Schriften 2: Empirie und Philosophie: Herzarbeit/ Naturbegriff. Edited by P. Achilles and W. Schindler, with R. M. E. Jacobi, D. Janz, M. Kütemeyer, and W. Rimpau. Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 1998. Windelband, Wilhelm. Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie. Tübingen: Mohr, 1903. Präludien I. Tübingen: Mohr, 1921. Wolff, Christian. Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General. translated by Richard J. Blackwell. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Wundt, Wilhelm M. System der Philosophie. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1897.

Secondary Sources Altmann, Alexander. “Franz Rosenzweig on History,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988, pp. 124–37. Ameriks, Karl. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Amir, Yehoyada. ‫ עיונים במשנתו של פרנץ רוזנצוויג‬:‫[ דעת מאמינה‬Believing Knowledge: Studies in the Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig]. Jerusalem: Am Oved, 2004. Anidjar, Gil. The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Avineri, Shlomo. “Rosenzweig’s Hegel Interpretation: Its Relationship to the Development of his Jewish Reawakening,” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Vol. II. Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Freiburg: Alber, pp. 831–38. Bambach, Charles R. Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Batnitzky, Leora. Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Bauer, Johanan E. “A Note Concerning Rosenzweig and Levinas on Totality,” Jewish Philosophy and the Academy. Edited by Emil L. Fackenheim and Raphael Jospe. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, pp. 136–41. Beierwaltes, Werner. Platonismus und Idealismus. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972. Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Bergman, Shmuel Hugo. Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber. Translated by Arnold A. Gerstein. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991. Bertoldi, Robert. “Die Frage des Pantheismus bei Franz Rosenzweig,” Theologie und Philosophie, 77, 3 (2002): 338–56. Bertolini, Luca. “Das Nichts und die Philosophie. Rosenzweig zwischen Idealismus und einer Hermeneutik der religiösen Erfahrung,” Franz Rosenzweigs “neues Denken.” Freiburg: Alber, 2006. “ ‘Schöpfung aus Nichts’ in Franz Rosenzweigs Stern der Erlösung,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13, 3 (2006): 247–64.

322

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

Bieberich, Ulrich. Wenn die Geschichte göttlich wäre: Rosenzweigs Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel. St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1990. Bienenstock, Myriam. “Rosenzweig’s Hegel,” Owl of Minerva, 23, 2 (Spring 1992): 177–82. “Auf Schellings Spuren im Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung.” Edited by Martin Brasser. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2004, pp. 273–90. Böhm, Wilhelm. “Hölderlin als Verfasser des ‘Ältesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus,’” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 4 (1926): 339–426. “Zum ‘Systemprogramm’: eine Erwiderung,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 5 (1927): 734–43. Bowie, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1993. Braiterman, Zachary. “Cyclical Motions and the Force of Repetition in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Beginning/Again: Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts. Edited by Aryeh Cohen and Shaul Magid. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002, pp. 215–38. “ ‘Into life’??! Franz Rosenzweig and the Figure of Death,” AJS Review 23, 2 (1998): 203–21. Brakelmann, Günther. Hans Ehrenberg: Ein jüdenchristliches Schicksal in Deutschland. Band 1: Leben, Denken, und Wirken 1883–1932. Waltrop: Spenner, 1997. Brasser, Martin, editor. Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung,” Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2004. Bubner, Rüdiger, editor. Das älteste Systemprogramm: Studien zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus. Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 9. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1973. Casper, Bernhard. Das Dialogische Denken: Eine Untersuchung der religionsphilosophischen Bedeutung Franz Rosenzweigs, Ferdinand Ebners und Martin Bubers. Freiburg: Herder, 1967. “Von Einheit und Ewigkeit, ein Gespräch zwischen Leib und Seele; ein unveröffentlichter Text Franz Rosenzweigs,” Leo Baeck Institute Bulletin 74 (1986): 65–78. Religion der Erfahrung: Einführungen in das Denken Franz Rosenzweigs. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004. “Responsibility Rescued,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Paul MendesFlohr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988, pp. 89–106. Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Immanuel Kant: Die Persönlichkeit als Einführung in das Werk. Munich: Bruckmann A. G., 1909. Charry, Ellen T. “The View of God in ‘The Star of Redemption,’” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Vol. II. Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied Kowarzik. Freiburg: Alber, 1988, pp. 585–98. Cohen, Richard A. Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Dagan, Hagai. “Franz Rosenzweig – Biography and Personal Standpoint,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 10, 2 (2001): 289–312. “Philosophizing in the Face of Death – Schopenhauer and Rosenzweig,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, 8, 1 (2001): 66–79. Dober, Hans Martin. Die Zeit ernst nehmen: Studien zur Franz Rosenzweigs ‘Stern der Erlösung, Würzburg: Königshaus und Neumann, 1990.

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

323

Düsing, Klau’s. “Die Enstehung des spekulativen Idealismus: Schellings und Hegels Wandlungen zwischen 1800–01,” Der Streit um die Gestalt einer ersten Philosophie (1799–1807). Transcendentalphilosophie und Spekulation. Edited by Walter Jaeschke. Hamburg: Meiner, 1999, pp. 144–63. “Spekulation und Reflexion: Zur Zusammenarbeit Schellings und Hegels in Jena,” HegelStudien 5 (1969): 93–128. Ehrenberg, Hans. “Einleitende Bemerkungen,” Hegels erstes System. Edited by H. Ehrenberg and H. Link. Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1915. “Kants Kategorientafel und der systematische Begriff der Philosophie,” Kant-Studien, XIV (1909): 392–439. “Neue Philosophie,” Frankfurter Zeitung, December 29, 1921. “Vorlesungen über Schelling: Identitätsphilosophie,” Hans Ehrenberg Archiv, Ev. Kirche von Westfalen Landeskirchliches Archiv, 3:17-II/X. Fackenheim, Emil. To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken, 1982. The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Fiorato, Pierfrancesco. “ ‘Hier Hermann Cohen und dort Gritli’: Bemerkungen über Rosenzweigs Verhältnis zu H. Cohen im Licht der ‘Gritli’-Briefe,” Judaica 58, 2 (2002): 93–105. Fiorato, Pierfrancesco and Hartwig Wiedebach, “Hermann Cohen im Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung.” Edited by Martin Brasser. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2004, pp. 305–55. Forster, Michael. “Hegel’s Dialectical Method,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Edited by Frederick Beiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 130–70. Franks, Paul W. “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Edited by K. Ameriks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. “Freedom, Tatsache, and Tathandlung in the Development of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 79, 3 (1997): 331–44. Franks, Paul W. and Michael L. Morgan, “From 1914 to 1917,” in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings. Edited by Paul W. Franks and Michael Morgan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000. Freund, Else-Rahel. Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence: An Analysis of the Star of Redemption. Translated by S. L. Weinstein and Robert Israel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. Fricke, Martin. Franz Rosenzweigs Philosophie der Offenbarung: eine Interpretation des Sterns der Erlösung. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004. Fuchs, Gotthard and Hans-Hermann Hendrix, editors. Zeitgewinn: Messianisches Denken nach Franz Rosenzweig. Frankfurt am Main: J. Knecht, 1988. Fulda, Hans Friedrich and Jürgen Stolzenberg, editors. Architektonik und System in der Philosophie Kants. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001. Fulda, Hans Friedrich and Christian Krijnen, editors. Systemphilosophie als Selbsterkenntnis. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2006. Funkenstein, Amos. “An Escape from History: Rosenzweig on the Destiny of Judaism,” History and Memory, 2, 2 (1990): 117–35.

324

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

Gibbs, Robert. Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. “Lines, Circles, Points: Messianic Epistemology in Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin,” Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco. Edited by Peter Schäfer and Mark Cohen. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 1998. Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Glatzer, Nahum N. “Was Franz Rosenzweig a Mystic?” Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History Presented to Alexander Altmann on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday. Edited by S. Stein and R. Loewe. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979, pp. 121–32. Görtz, Heinz-Jürgen. “ ‘Gottesreich’ und ‘Zwischenreich.’ Geschichtstheologische Implikationen des Rellgionsgesprächs zwischen Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) und Hans Ehrenberg (1883–1958),” Christen und Juden: Ein notwendiger Dialog. Edited by Peter Antes, u.a. Hannover: Niedersächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1988, pp. 79–95. “Zum Konstruktionsgesetz des ‘Stern der Erlösung,’ ” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Vol. II. Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Freiburg: Alber, 1988, pp. 657–71. “Der Stern der Erlösung als Kommentar: Rudolf Ehrenberg und Franz Rosenzweig,” Rosenzweig als Leser. Kontextuelle Kommentare zum ‘Stern der Erlösung,’” edited by Martin Brasser. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2004, pp. 119–71. Tod und Erfahrung: Rosenzweigs “erfahrende Philosophie” und Hegels “Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewusstseins.” Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1984. Gordin, Jacob. Untersuchungen zur Theorie des unendlichen Urteils. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1929. Gordon, Peter Eli. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003. “Science, Finitude, and Infinity: The End of Neo-Kantianism and the Birth of Existentialism,” Jewish Social Studies, 6, 1 (1999): 30–53. Gram, Moltke S. “Intellectual Intuition: The Continuity Thesis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XLII, 2 (1981): 287–304. Green, Kenneth Hart. “The Notion of Truth in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption: A Philosophical Enquiry,” Modern Judaism, 7 (October 1987): 297–323. Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg. Better Than Wine: Love, Poetry, and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996. Guerriere, Daniel. “With What Does Hegelian Science Begin,” Review of Metaphysics, 30 (March 1977): 465–85. Guttmann, Julius. Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig. Translated by David W. Silverman. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1964. Guyer, Paul. “The Unity of Nature and Freedom: Kant’s Conception of the System of Philosophy,” The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Edited by Sally Sedgwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. Hansen, Frank-Peter. “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus”: Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989.

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

325

Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985. Henrich, Dieter. “Aufklärung der Herkunft des Manuskriptes ‘Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,’” Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels “älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.” Edited by C. Jamme and H. Schneider. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984, pp. 144–69. Henrich, Dieter, editor. Ist Systematische Philosophie Möglich? Hegel-Studien Beiheft 17. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1977. “Systemprogramm?: Vorfragen zum Zurechnungsproblem,” Das älteste Systemprogramm: Studien zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus. Edited by Rüdiger Bubner. HegelStudien, Beiheft 9. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1973. Hösle, Vittorio. Hegels System: Der Idealismus der Subjektivität und das Problem der Intersubjektivität. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1998. Horwitz, Rivka. “The Shaping of Rosenzweig’s Identity According to the Gritli Letters,” Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung.” Edited by Martin Brasser. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2004, pp. 11–42. “Warum liess Rosenzweig sich nicht taufen?” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Vol. I. Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Freiburg: Alber, 1988, pp. 79–96. Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. Hutter, Axel. Geschichtliche Vernunft: Die Weiterführung der Kantischen Vernunftkritik in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996. Idel, Moshe. “Franz Rosenzweig and the Kabbalah,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988, pp. 162–71. Jamme, Christoph and Helmut Schneider, editors. Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels “älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.” Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Kartheininger, Markus. Heterogenität: Politische Philosophie im Frühwerk von Leo Strauss. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006. Kavka, Martin. Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, editors. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Klein, Hans-Dieter, editor. Systeme im Denken der Gegenwart. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1993. Kojève, Alexandre. “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” G. W. F. Hegel: Critical Assessments, Vol. II. Edited by Robert Stern. London/New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 311–58. Lehmann, Matthias. “Franz Rosenzweigs Kritik des Islams im ‘Stern der Erlösung,’ ” Jewish Studies Quarterly 1 (1993–94): 340–61. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Foreword” to Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992, pp. 13–22. “Franz Rosenzweig,” translated by Richard A. Cohen, Midstream, November, 1983, pp. 33–40.

326

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

Levy, Heinrich. Die Hegel-Renaissance in der deutschen Philosophie. Charlottenburg: Pan Verlag, 1927. Levy, Zev. ‫ משנתו של פראנץ רוזנצוויג ויחסה לשיטת הגל‬:‫[ מבשר אקזיסטנציאליזם יהודי‬Harbinger of Jewish Existentialism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy and Its Relation to Hegel’s System]. Tel-Aviv : Sifriyat Poalim, 1969. Licharz, Werner and Manfred Keller, editors. Franz Rosenzweig und Hans Ehrenberg: Bericht einer Beziehung. Frankfurt am Main: Herchen Verlag, 1986. Löwith, Karl. “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig: A Postscript to Being and Time,” Nature, History, and Existentialism, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History. Edited by Arnold Levison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966, pp. 53–78. Longuenesse, Beatrice. “The Point of View of Man or Knowledge of God: Kant and Hegel on Concept, Judgment, and Reason,” The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Edited by Sally Sedgwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mayer, Reinhold. Franz Rosenzweig: Eine Philosophie der dialogischen Erfahrung. Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1973. Meineke, Stefan. “A Life of Contradiction: The Philosopher Franz Rosenzweig and His Relation to History and Politics,” LBIYB, 36 (1991): 461–89. Meir, Ephraim. “The Unpublished Correspondence between Franz Rosenzweig and Gritli Rosenstock-Huessy on the ‘Star of Redemption,’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 9, 1 (2002): 21–70. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. “Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988, pp. 138–61. “Franz Rosenzweig and the German Philosophical Tradition,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988, pp. 1–19. “Franz Rosenzweig’s Concept of Philosophical Faith,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 34 (1989): 357–69. German Jews: A Dual Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. “Rosenzweig and Kant: Two Views of Ritual and Religion,” Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. “Rosenzweig’s Concept of Miracle,” Jüdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott: Festschrift für Stéphane Mosès. Edited by Jens Mattern, Gabriel Motzkin, and Shimon Sandbank. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2000, pp. 53–66. Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Jehuda Reinharz. “From Relativism to Religious Faith: The Testimony of Franz Rosenzweig’s Unpublished Diaries,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 22 (1977): 161–74. Merlan, Philip. From Platonism to Neoplatonism. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Meyer, Torsten L. Franz Rosenzweigs Stern der Erlösung: Ein Beitrag zur Logik der Philosophie; Transcendentalismus, Kategorienlehre, Sprachphilosophie, Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2001. Morgan, Michael L. Dilemmas in Modern Jewish Thought: The Dialectics of Revelation and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. “Franz Rosenzweig: Objective Truth and the Personal Standpoint,” Judaism, 40 (Fall 1991): 521–30.

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

327

Mosès, Stéphane. System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Nancy, Jean-Luc and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, editors. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by P. Barnard and C. Lester. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988. Oppenheim, Michael. “Death and Man’s Fear of Death in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” Judaism 27, 4 (1978): 458–67. Pöggeler, Otto. “Between Enlightenment and Romanticism: Rosenzweig and Hegel,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988, pp. 107–23. “Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” Mythologie der Vernunft, Hegels “älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.” Edited by C. Jamme and H. Schneider. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984, pp. 126–43. “Das Menschenwerk des Staates,” Mythologie der Vernunft, Hegels “älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.” Edited by C. Jamme and H. Schneider. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984, pp. 175–225. Pollock, Benjamin. “‘Erst die Tatsache ist sicher vor dem Rückfall ins Nichts’: Rosenzweig’s Concept of Factuality,” Franz Rosenzweigs “neues Denken.” Freiburg: Alber, 2006. “From Nation State to World Empire: Franz Rosenzweig’s Redemptive Imperialism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 11, 4 (2004): 332–53. “Die ‘geheimnissvolle Wurzel’ von Rosenzweigs System der Philosophie,” Alpha-Bet: Jahrbuch des Franz-Rosenzweig-Zentrums, Herausgegeben von Alfred Bodenheimer und Jens Mattern (forthcoming). Rescher, Nicholas. “Leibniz and the Concept of a System,” Studia Leibnitiana 13 (1981): 113–22. Ricoeur, Paul. “The ‘Figure’ in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption,” Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995, pp. 93–107. Rotenstreich, Nathan. Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times: From Mendelssohn to Rosenzweig. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1968. “Rosenzweig und die Philosophie der Existenz,” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Vol. II. Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Freiburg: Alber, 1988, pp. 577–84. “Rosenzweig’s Notion of Metaethics,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988, pp. 69–88. Rubinstein, Ernest. An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption. Albany : SUNY Press, 1999. Rühle, Inken. “Leben im Angesicht des Todes: Zum Verständnis des Todes im Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser, Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung.” Edited by Martin Brasser. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2004. Samuelson, Norbert M. “The Concept of ‘Nichts’ in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption.” In Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Freiburg: Alber, 1988, pp. 643–56. A User’s Guide to Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. Richmond, VA: Curzon, 1999. Santner, Eric L. The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

328

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

Schmidt, Friedrich W. Zum Begriff der Negativität bei Schelling und Hegel. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971. Schmidt, Thomas A. Anerkennung und absolut Religion: Formierung der Gesellschaftstheorie und Genese der spekulativen Religionsphilosophie in Hegels Frühschriften. Spekulation und Erfahrung. Texte und Untersuchungen zum Deutschen Idealismus, Abtl II. Bd. 38. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1997. Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich. Existentielles Denken und gelebte Bewährung. Freiburg: Alber, 1991. “Hans Ehrenbergs Einfluss auf die Entstehung des Stern der Erlösung,” Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung.” Edited by Martin Brasser. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2004, pp. 71–117. Rosenzweig im Gespräch mit Ehrenberg, Cohen, und Buber. München: Karl Alber, 2006. “Vom Totalexperiment des Glaubens. Kritisches zur positiven Philosophie Schellings und Rosenzweigs,” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Vol. II. Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Freiburg: Alber, 1988, pp. 771–99. Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich, editor. Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). Freiburg: Alber, 1988. Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich, editor. Franz Rosenzweigs “neues Denken.” Freiburg: Alber, 2006. Schnädelbach, Herbert. Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933. Translated by Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Scholem, Gershom. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Schwartz, Michal. Metapher und Offenbarung: Zur Sprache von Franz Rosenzweigs Stern der Erlösung. Berlin: Philo, 2003. Schwarz, Moshe. “Atheism and Modern Jewish Thought: The Impact of the MendelssohnJacobi Controversy on Steinheim and Rosenzweig,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 44 (1977): 127–50. ‫[ ממיתוס להתגלות‬From Myth to Revelation]. Tel-Aviv : Bar-Ilan University and HaKibutz HaMeuchad, 1978. ‫ עיונים במחשבה היהודית בעת החדשה‬:‫ אומנות‬,‫ מיתוס‬,‫[ שפה‬Language, Myth, Art: Studies in the Jewish Thought of the Modern Period]. Jerusalem/Tel-Aviv : Schocken, 1966. Schweid, Eliezer. 20-‫[ תולדות ההגות היהודית במאה ה‬History of Jewish Philosophy in the Twentieth Century]. Tel-Aviv : Dvir, 1990. Sedgwick, Sally, editor. The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Shaar-Yashuv, Aharon. “‫[ ”בין פרנץ רוזנצוויג להנס ארנברג – דיון תיאולוגי‬Between Franz Rosenzweig and Hans Ehrenberg – a Theological Discussion]. ‫דעת‬, 21 (1988): 103–14. Strauss, Leo. “Preface to the English Translation,” Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. Translated by E. M. Sinclair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Strauss, Ludwig. “Hölderlins Anteil an Schellings frühem Systemprogramm,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 5 (1927): 679–734. Summerell, Orrin F. “Einbildungskraft und Vernunft: Die Widerspiegelung der absolut Identität in Schellings Philosophie der Kunst,” Schelling: Zwischen Fichte und Hegel. Edited by C. Asmuth, A. Denker, and M. Vater. Amsterdam: Grüner, 2000, pp. 179–212. Vater, Michael G. “Intellectual Intuition in Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity 1801–04,” Schelling: Zwischen Fichte und Hegel. Edited by C. Asmuth, A. Denker, and M. Vater. Amsterdam: Grüner, 2000, pp. 213–34.

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

329

Westphal, Kenneth R. “Kant, Hegel, and the Fate of ‘the’ Intuitive Intellect,” The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Edited by Sally Sedgwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 283–305. Wiedebach, Hartwig. “Apologie gegen sich selbst. Zur Antilogik der Person bei Viktor von Weizsäcker und Franz Rosenzweig,” Religious Apologetics – Philosophical Argumentation. Edited by Y. Schwartz and V. Krech. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2004, pp. 531–50. ”Rosenzweigs Konnektionismus: Der Stern der Erlösung als Tatsächlichkeits-System,” Franz Rosenzweigs “neues Denken.” Freiburg: Alber, 2006. Wiehl, Reiner. “Experience in Rosenzweig’s New Thinking,” The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1988, pp. 42–68. “Logik und Metalogik bei Cohen und Rosenzweig,” Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Vol. II. Edited by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik. Freiburg: Alber, 1988, pp. 623–42. “Metaphysik und die Architektonik der Systeme,” Metaphysik und Erfahrung: Philosophische Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996, pp. 68–99. Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Williams, Robert R. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley : University of California, 1997. Wolfson, Elliot R. Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997): 39–81. Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Zank, Michael. “The Rosenzweig-Rosenstock Triangle, or, What Can We Learn from ‘Letters to Gritli’? A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 23, 1 (2003): 74–98.

Index

reductive All of philosophy, 24–5, 28, 29, 70–1, 130, 132, 133, 141, 229 as totality of “I”s, 225, 227–8 unity of in redemption, 9, 183, 224, 227–9, 252, 280–1 Altmann, Alexander, 228–9 Amir, Yehoyada, 130, 132 Anaximander of Miletus, 250 “And”. See elements; factuality anticipation, 243–4, 284–5, 287, 292, 294 Archimedes, 84 architecture. See also system: German Idealist conceptions of as model for German Idealist system, 31–2, 69–70, 131 Rosenzweig’s critique of, 70–4

Absolute, 55, 75–6, 77, 128, 181. See also God act and being, 28, 29–30, 38–9, 136 dependence on human being of, 94, 95, 110–1, 111–2, 191, 206–8 human being’s two relations to, 94–5, 96–7, 108, 111, 112, 114, 120, 129, 237, 247 Idealism, 39, 40–2, 66, 67, 71, 136, 270 monologue, 79–80, 98, 101 standpoint, 8, 12, 40–2, 51, 66, 67, 70, 71, 77, 82, 83, 88, 94, 95, 114, 115, 120, 121, 127, 141, 146, 181, 230, 307 The “All”. See also One and All; system ambivalence of term, 24–5, 130–1 futurity of, 183, 218, 225, 229–30, 230–5, 313 God as in redemption, 179, 227–9, 265, 266, 305 human freedom within, 9, 143, 167–8, 233–4, 308–9, 309–11 human vocation within, 9, 112–3, 143, 167–8, 177, 233, 234, 249, 306–11, 313–14 knowledge of, 1, 5–6, 120, 125, 127, 128, 131, 135, 136, 140, 143, 155, 157, 235, 262, 275, 293, 297, 304–6, 309, 314 mediated and immediate, 252–3, 259–62 middle of and human standpoint, 9, 12, 107–8, 115, 120–1, 155, 157, 181, 183, 229–30, 232, 235, 236–7, 249, 306–11, 314 nothing and, 137–44, 155–7, 167–9, 233 pantheism and, 228, 229 realization of, 9, 12, 112–3, 143, 181, 188, 225–36, 248, 262, 279, 288, 306–11 through self-realization of particulars, 182–3, 201, 226, 227–8, 233, 248–9

Bacon, Francis, 85–6 Batnitzky, Leora, 298 Beiser, Frederick C., 38 Berkeley, George, 152 Bertolini, Luca, 133, 163, 195 Bieberich, Ulrich, 56, 94 Braiterman, Zachary, 278, 310 Buber, Martin, 2, 5, 312 Bubner, Rüdiger, 46 calendar. See liturgical calendar Casper, Bernhard, 99, 103, 140, 234 Charry, Ellen T., 194 Christianity active redemptive work in world of, 288, 290–1 experience of absence of redemption in, 288, 290–1 human being’s reflection of redemption and, 284–6, 288–9, 292 331

332

I N DE X

Christianity (cont.) liturgical calendar and mirroring of course of the All, 10, 288–93 partial vision of the All within, 282–4 vision of God within, 290, 294–5 Cohen, Hermann, 5, 64, 151–3, 243 on determinate nothing, 151–3 Logic of Pure Cognition, 5, 153 Principle of the Infinitesimal Method and its History, 151–2 Cohen, Richard, 122, 137, 308 Cohn, Jonas, 64 courage, 130, 308–9 creation, 189, 195–204, 213–14, 215, 222–3 as fact, 201–2 human experience of, 197, 201, 239–40 instability of elements in, 203–4, 215 out of nothing, 42, 43, 137 reflection of in Christian liturgical calendar, 289 reflection of in Jewish liturgical calendar, 286 reversals of God and world into relation of, 195–201 as step toward realization of the All, 201–2 Cusanus, Nicholas, 305 death. See fear of death Descartes, René, 27 dialectical method factual method and, 12, 161–3 as key to German Idealist achievement of system, 52, 63 dialogue between absolute monologues, 79 I-You, 211 difference. See also particular/particularity ; system beginning of Rosenzweig’s system in, 144, 177–80, 181 reduction of to identity, 24–5 differential, 150–3, 158–9, 254 Ehrenberg, Hans, 61–5, 145, 301, 302, 309, 315 “Kant’s Table of Categories and the Systematic Concept of Philosophy”, 62

Parteiung der Philosophie. Studien wider Hegel und die Kantianer, 62 revival of task of system by, 55, 61–3 Ehrenberg, Rudolf, 4, 67, 69, 92, 96, 119, 301, 315 elements epistemological versus ontological status of, 159 generation of out of nothings, 158–69 need to enter/reverse into relations of, 170–1, 174–6, 183–4, 188–94 one-sided conceptions of, 165–8 stability and instability of, 171–4, 175, 182, 184–5, 188–94, 230–1 substantial and active poles of, 159–60 Yes-And-No structure of, 159, 160, 163, 179–80, 181 everyday, 9, 13, 312–3, 315 experience corroborative relation to thought of, 201, 235–6, 244–8, 249 of creation, 197, 239–40 from middle of the All, 235–6, 244, 249 of redemption, 243–4 of revelation, 100–1, 103–4, 240–2 face. See vision: of God’s face Fackenheim, Emil, 145, 159, 200, 303 factuality, 12, 161–5, 169, 202 of creation, 201–2, 237 of elements, 164, 179–80, 181, 184–5, 195, 230 futurity of the All and, 230–5, 236 human experience of in middle of All, 237 of redemption, 231–2, 237 of relations between elements, 165, 202, 212–3, 230–1 of revelation, 212–4, 237 reversals and, 253–5 Tat-und-Sache/Yes-And-No structure of, 164–5, 167, 231–2 threat of fall back into nothing and, 167–8, 171, 176, 182, 203–4, 213–14, 230–2 vision and, 267–9, 301–3 faith, 4, 174, 278 confirmation of divine being and, 206–8, 209–10, 220 human freedom and, 209–10

I N DE X

333

fear of death. See also nothing denial of and reductive All, 130–1, 133, 135 German Idealist attitudes toward, 128–9, 131 human freedom and, 143, 177, 183, 236–7, 308–11 insight into nothing-something character of particular beings and, 133–4, 148 insight into particularity of nothing and, 12, 128, 143, 181 realization of the All and, 143, 183, 308–9, 309–11 as starting point of Rosenzweig’s system, 12, 120–1, 127–31, 177, 181, 236–7 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 3, 29, 36–8, 136, 241 development of concept of system in, 37, 38 on intellectual intuition, 36, 269 on self-positing I, 36–7, 42, 241 system as infinite task in, 37, 39 Wissenschaftslehre, 30, 36, 241 finitude. See fear of death Franks, Paul W., 38, 84–5, 92, 95, 117, 271 freedom as choice between All and nothing, 167–8, 177, 183, 233, 234, 236, 247, 307–8 divine and human, 192–3, 208–10 fear of death and, 143, 177, 183, 236–7, 308–11 as predicated upon nothing, 143, 167–8, 233, 308–11 realization of the All and, 112, 143, 183, 249, 307–8 revelation and, 100–4, 112, 204–5, 208–9 Freund, Else-Rahel, 56, 131, 186, 285 futurity of the All, 112, 155, 183, 225, 230–5, 313 anticipation of redemption and, 243–4, 263 human freedom and, 143, 233

Rosenzweig’s critique of, 8, 12, 70–4, 86, 92–4, 114, 139–40, 142, 149, 162–3, 240 Gibbs, Robert, 123, 160, 230, 244, 278 God. See also Absolute; the “All”: God as in redemption; God, world, human being; One and All: God as in redemption; vision: of God’s face as “I”, 211–2, 224, 225 limitations of elemental form of, 190–1 metaphysical, 145, 147, 159, 160 reversal of into creation, 196 reversal of into revelation, 204 at risk to fall back into nothing, 203–4 self-realization of through reversals, 198–9, 205–8 God, world, human being. See also elements; God; human being; world as elements, 148, 157–77 generation of out of nothing, 158–69 need to enter/reverse into relations of, 170–1, 174–6, 182, 188–94 stability and instability of, 171–4, 182, 190 as fundamental kinds of beings, 26–7, 102, 145–7 as nothings, 147–8, 155, 157–8 as objects of special metaphysics, 26–7, 145–8 respective claims to be One and All of, 172, 174–5, 182, 189, 191, 192, 194, 226–7 threat of falling back into nothing of, 165–8, 172, 182 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 56, 94, 107, 146, 156 Faust, 155–7, 300 Görtz, Heinz-Jürgen, 56, 131, 249, 315 Gordon, Peter Eli, 124, 127, 134, 190, 218, 230, 239, 243 Gormann-Thelen, Michael, 315 Green, Kenneth Hart, 235, 261, 296 Guttmann, Julius, 123, 248, 303

German Idealism, 7, 8, 11, 14–16, 21–2, 29–65, 66–7, 70–4, 114, 115, 127, 136–43, 161–3, 177–80, 269–75, 280 conception of nothing in, 137–8 discovery of system in, 3, 7, 18, 25, 26, 59, 74, 146

Halevi, Yehuda, 265, 312 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 14, 48, 55, 136, 250 architectural model of system of, 69–74 conception of nothing of, 138 dialectical method of, 63, 161–3

334

I N DE X

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (cont.) Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 272 as first to complete task of system, 51–2 on intellectual intuition, 271, 272, 274 Phenomenology of Spirit, 39, 188, 211, 269, 271 on recognition, 188, 211 Science of Logic, 136, 138, 139, 161 “Spirit of Christianity and its Fate”, 274, 282 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 50, 54, 98, 99, 124, 134, 239, 241, 243 Henrich, Dieter, 43, 46, 58 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 61, 93 hour, 277–8, 292 human being. See also freedom; God, world, human being; human standpoint; the “I” confirmation of divine being by in revelation, 206–8 as “I”, 211–2 limitations of elemental form of, 192–3 metaethical, 145, 147, 159, 160 as part of world, 96, 97 reversal of into redemption, 216 reversal of into revelation, 204–5 self-realization of through reversals, 208–10, 218–21 two relations of to Absolute, 94–5, 96–7, 108, 112, 114, 120, 129, 237 vocation of within the All, 104–5, 112–3, 143, 167–8, 177, 183, 242, 247–8 as whole individual/self-grounded particular, 77, 78–9, 80–1, 97, 98, 99–100, 104, 106, 219 human standpoint, 83, 85, 92, 94, 112, 114, 120, 157 Husserl, Edmund, 19 the “I”, 212. See also human being; revelation call to I-hood, 100–1, 205, 240–1 call to system and, 104–5, 242 fear of death and, 128–9 German Idealist conceptions of, 36–7, 240, 241

as medium of identity within the All, 211–2, 225, 227–8 Idel, Moshe, 207 identity and difference. See system infinite task, 37, 39, 40, 114 Rosenzweig’s critique of, 243–4 infinitesimal. See differential intellectual intuition. See also vision Fichte’s conception of, 36, 269 Hegel’s conception of, 272, 274 Kant’s conception of, 269 Schelling’s conception of, 269–74 systematic function of, 269–75, 282 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 28–9, 38, 71 Jamme, Christoph, 43 Judaism/Jewish people liturgical calendar and mirroring of course of the All, 10, 286–8 partial vision of the All within, 282–4 vision of God within, 287–8, 294–5 worldly reflection of redemption and, 284–6, 288–9 Kant, Immanuel, 29, 30–6, 60, 124, 148, 153 ambivalence toward task of system, 30–4 Critique of Practical Reason, 99–100, 269 Critique of Pure Reason, 31–4, 84, 139, 147, 245, 270 on freedom, 34, 36, 73, 99–100, 103 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 73 on intellectual intuition, 269 models of system projected by, 33–4 architectural, 31–2, 73–4, 139, 178 kingdom of ends, 72–4 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, 100 Kartheininger, Markus, 281, 294, 298, 302 Kavka, Martin, 153, 225 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 54 Leibniz, Gottfried, 27, 64, 151–2, 320 Levinas, Emmanuel, 122 liturgical calendar. See also vision bringing eternity into time through, 276–7

I N DE X

mediated/mirrored vision of the All and, 274, 281–2 visibility of course of All within time and, 10, 13, 276–7, 278–9, 283–96 love, 91, 211, 274, 279, 287, 290, 293, 294, 314. See also redemption; revelation divine and human, 204–10, 213, 215, 220–1, 241, 286 of neighbor/redemptive, 10, 105, 106–7, 112, 193, 216, 217–18, 219, 220, 222, 223, 225, 236, 242, 248, 309 Löwith, Karl, 129 Mayer, Reinhold, 51 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 14, 103, 241, 245, 303 Merlan, Philip, 27 metaethics. See human being: metaethical metalogic. See world: metalogical metaphysics (general and special), 26–7. See also God: metaphysical method, 253–7. See also factuality; reversals (into relation); vision dialectical, 161–3 factual, 12, 161, 164–5, 167 immediate vision and, 259–62, 272 reciprocal confirmation of discursive and intuitive, 272–3, 279–81, 293, 305–6 of thought and experience, 244–8, 255–7, 272 reversals as, 188, 194–5, 248 middle (of the All), 9, 12, 107–8, 114, 155, 183. See also the “All” experience of creation from, 239–40 experience of redemption from, 243–4 experience of revelation from, 240–2 human experience of system from, 238–44 miracle, 107, 126, 236, 244, 248 mirroring the All through liturgy, 274, 281–2, 284–6, 293–4. See also liturgical calendar; vision Morgan, Michael L., 84, 92, 95, 117, 255 Mosès, Stéphane, 3, 56, 82, 95, 122, 123, 124, 208 mysticism, 207, 248, 260, 261, 275, 306, 307

335

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 54 Neo-Hegelianism, 61–3 Neo-Kantianism, 16, 18, 88 Rosenzweig’s attitude toward, 63–4, 243 Newton, Isaac, 151 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19, 86, 145 nihilism, 155, 157, 174, 308 “No”. See elements; factuality “not yet”. See the “All”: futurity of; futurity nothing. See also fear of death as already All, 139–43 freedom and threat of fall back into, 143, 167–8, 233, 236, 308–11 German Idealist conception of, 137–8 levels of, 176, 187 nothing-something character of particular beings, 70–1, 148, 155 one-and-universal, 133, 134, 135, 137–8, 139–43, 149, 181, 249, 308 particularity of, 9, 12, 138, 139, 149, 150–3 starting point of Rosenzweig’s system in, 134–6, 143–4, 150–1, 153–5 “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” (fragment), 14–16, 19–20, 42–56, 57–60, 137 as copy of original, 57–60 as program, 53–4 Rosenzweig’s recovery of for his time, 12, 19–20, 53, 56, 59 scholarly controversy over, 15, 45–6 systematicity/lack of systematicity of, 42–8 title of, 15, 16, 46, 53, 59–60 One and All, 21–6, 31–2, 35, 37, 43–5, 52, 60, 69, 70, 82, 93, 95, 96, 102, 105, 106, 109, 112, 114, 121, 164, 169, 177, 183, 288, 291. See also the “All”; God, world, human being: respective claims to be One and All; system God as in redemption, 95, 108, 110, 114, 227–9 Oppenheim, Gertrud, 4, 118 Oppenheim, Michael, 123

336

I N DE X

pantheism, 107, 197, 228, 247 particular/particularity failure to grasp within system, 24–5, 70–1, 74, 114 grasp of within system, 23, 233, 248–9 self-realization of and realization of the All, 182–3, 225–6, 248–9 Pesikta de Rav Kahana, 207 Picht, Werner, 89, 301 Plato, 26, 27, 57–8, 305, 320 Pöggeler, Otto, 43, 46 positivism, 16, 18 recognition divine and human need for, 191, 193, 204, 206, 207–8, 211–2, 219–21, 223, 224, 225 elements and, 211–2 Hegel’s conception of, 188, 211–2 redemption, 189, 212, 213–14, 216–29, 285, 305 experience of absence of in Christianity, 290–1 as fact, 231–2 from fall back into nothing, 9, 213–14, 231–2 human experience of, 243–4 interpenetration of soul and world in, 223–5, 227, 229 realization of All and, 223–5 reflection of in Jewish liturgical calendar, 287–8 reversals of human being and world into relation of, 216–23 relations, 9, 69, 74, 76, 83, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 105, 165, 171, 174–6, 181–2, 183–4, 185–7, 189–90, 230–1, 248–9. See also Absolute: human being’s two relations to; creation; redemption; revelation; reversals (into relation) revelation, 81–2, 84, 91, 108, 189, 204–14 broad and narrow sense of, 96, 185, 189 as call to I-hood, 100–1, 103–4, 205, 211, 213, 240–2 as fact, 212–4 factuality and, 185–8 freedom and, 100–1, 103–4, 112, 204–5, 208–9

“genuine notion of ”, 185–7, 189, 195, 226, 250 human experience of, 9, 12, 100–1, 103–4, 205, 240–2 instability of elements in, 214–15 reflection of in Christian liturgical calendar, 290 reflection of in Jewish liturgical calendar, 286–7 as reversals into relation, 186–7 reversals of God and human being into relation of, 204–10 as step toward realization of the All, 107, 210–1, 212–4, 242 reversals (into relation) of creation, 195–201 factuality and, 253–5 fulfillment of promise through, 187–8, 194–5, 197–201, 205–10, 218–23, 244–8 “genuine notion of revelation” and, 186–7 of redemption, 216–23 and relation between thought and actuality of experience, 235–6, 237–8, 244, 255–7 of revelation, 204–10 self-realization of elements/particulars through, 186–7, 197–201, 225–6, 248–9 Rickert, Heinrich, 63, 64, 179 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 12, 67, 72, 78, 83–6, 163, 241, 301, 315 Rosenstock-Huessy, Margrit, 4, 55, 118, 209, 258, 315 Rosenzweig, Franz “Gritlianum”, 91, 118 Hegel und der Staat, 14 “New Thinking”, 2, 238, 262, 312 “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism” (article), 11, 14–61, 64, 86, 102, 114, 136 “Paralipomena”, 87, 88, 89 Star of Redemption, 1, 4–5, 6–8, 10, 119, 120–80, 181–257, 258–311 trends in scholarly reception of, 2–3, 56–7, 122–4 “Urzelle”, 4, 82–3, 92–116, 155, 183, 191, 228, 237, 239, 240

I N DE X

Rotenstreich, Nathan, 193 Rubinstein, Ernest, 53 Santner, Eric, 108–9, 209 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 2, 3, 14, 39, 55, 238, 245 Ages of the World, 92, 104, 178, 187, 195, 272–3 conception of nothing of, 138, 140 failure to complete task of system, 48–51 as first to grasp task of system, 29–30, 40–1, 50–1 on intellectual intuition, 269–74 On the History of Modern Philosophy, 136, 238, 273 On the I, 49, 136, 273 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 104, 138, 168, 209 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, 41, 42, 43, 129, 178, 270–1 plurality of system possibilities in, 45, 47, 48 System of Transcendental Idealism, 15, 45, 273–4, 282 Schiller, Friedrich, 44, 127 Schmidt, Friedrich W., 163 Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich, 65, 303, 315 Schneider, Helmut, 43 Scholem, Gershom, 261, 266 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 86, 145 Schrempf, Christoph, 103 Schwartz, Michal, 251, 262 Schwarz, Moshe, 50–1, 56, 76, 123 science architectonic structure of, 31–2, 83–4, 163, 178 coitus of, 85–6, 92, 95–6, 109–10 two-poled structure of, 84–92, 95–6, 163 self. See human being; the “I” Shakespeare, William, 86 speech-thinking, 212, 257 Spinoza, Benedict, 27–9 Ethics, 27, 28, 29, 38, 42 German Idealist systems as reaction to, 27, 29–30, 42, 136

337

Jacobi’s critique of, 28–9, 38, 71 “spirit of Spinozism”, a nihilo nihil fit, 38, 137–8 standpoint. See Absolute: standpoint; human standpoint star philosophical construction of, 250–1, 259, 305–6 vision of, 258–60, 266, 267–8, 272, 283–4, 296–7, 300, 304–5 Strauss, Eduard, 301 Substance. See Absolute; God; Spinoza, Benedict system. See also the “All”; One and All completion of, 51–3, 107, 113–14, 189, 225–36, 275, 283, 293, 304–6, 309 freedom and. See the “All”: human freedom within futurity of, 109, 112–17 German Idealist conceptions of architectural structure of, 31–2, 69–74, 94, 95, 98, 114, 131, 139–40, 162–3, 178–9 Rosenzweig’s critique of, 70–4, 92–4, 114, 131, 139–40, 142, 149, 162–3 German Idealist discovery of, 18, 20, 26, 59, 74, 146, 181 hiddenness of, 24–5, 59, 105, 107–8, 113, 115, 116, 141, 143 history of philosophy and, 20, 23–6, 130, 141 human experience of from middle, 238–44 as human knowledge, 8–10, 92, 112, 114–16, 120–1, 181, 230, 306–11, 313–14 as knowledge of fundamental kinds of beings in their identity and difference, 27, 40, 66, 102, 145–6, 147 as knowledge of One and All in their identity and difference, 6, 24, 40, 66, 74, 82, 113, 120, 121, 211, 229–30, 248, 305–6, 313 Rosenzweig’s concept of, 12, 69, 74–7, 114–16 starting point of, 12, 127–44, 177–80, 250, 314 as task of philosophy, 5–6, 9, 10–1, 12, 17, 20, 25, 29, 52–4, 112–3, 183, 234

338

I N DE X

task. See system: as task of philosophy temporality cyclical time and representation of the All, 276–8 experience of actuality and, 238–44 liturgical transformation of, 276–96 middle of system and, 230, 238–44 realization of the All and, 175–6, 213–14 Thales, 24, 25, 28, 29, 112, 130, 141 thought. See experience; method Tillich, Paul, 2 truth, 78–9, 128, 148, 259–61, 280–1, 282–3, 297–9, 305 systematic conception of, 5, 22–6, 81–2 “truly” and, 308–9 vision Abraham’s, 263–6 discursive knowledge and, 13, 259–62, 272–3, 279–81, 293, 305–6 factuality and, 267–9, 303 of God’s face, 266, 275, 287–8, 290–1, 294–5, 304–7 grasp of unity of All through, 258–9, 261–4, 265, 267–8, 272, 279–81, 287–8, 304–7 immediate, whole, 13, 264–5, 280, 281–3, 296–9, 304–7 in life and beyond life, 264–5, 283, 297–304 partial, mediated, mirrored, 264, 274, 281–3, 293–6

Rosenzweig’s unique capacity for, 264–5, 283, 299–303 of the star, 13, 258–9, 266, 282–3, 304–7. See star, vision of systematic function of, 260, 261–2, 266, 275, 276–83, 304–6 Weizsäcker, Viktor von, 12, 69, 83, 86–92, 145, 163, 315 “The Critical and the Speculative Concept of Nature”, 87, 88–9 “Empiricism and Philosophy”, 87, 89 Weltanschauung philosophy, 17, 19, 22 Wiedebach, Hartwig, 91, 315 Wiehl, Reiner, 91, 124, 153, 163 Windelband, Wilhelm, 18, 61 Wolff, Christian, 27 Wolfson, Elliot R., 76, 129, 143, 207, 275–6, 307, 308 world. See also God, world, human being fear of death and, 127, 129 I-hood and, 224, 225, 227, 241–2 limitations of elemental form of, 191–2 metalogical, 145, 147, 159, 160 reversal of into creation, 196–7 reversal of into redemption, 216–17 self-realization of through reversals, 199–200, 222–3 as totality of particulars, 197, 200, 202, 222–3 Wundt, Wilhelm, 18 “Yes”. See elements; factuality