## 1. Personal and Intellectual Development




Rosenzweig was born in 1886, and grew up as the only child of Georg
and Adele Rosenzweig, in an intellectually and culturally vibrant,
assimilated Jewish home in Kassel. After beginning his university
studies in 1904 with the intention of studying medicine, first in
Gottingen and then in Munich, Rosenzweig moved in the fall of 1906
to Freiburg. The University of Freiburg was one of the centers of the
Southwest school of neo-Kantianism at the time, and Rosenzweig studied
philosophy there with Heinrich Rickert and Jonas Cohn, and history with
Friedrich Meinecke. By the early months of 1908, Rosenzweig had decided
to write a dissertation on the genesis of Hegel's political
philosophy under Meinecke.


### 1.1 Baden-Baden




Perhaps the most important early influence on Rosenzweig's
philosophical development was his cousin, Hans Ehrenberg, whom
Rosenzweig would later claim was "my real teacher in
philosophy." Ehrenberg was a student of Wilhelm Windelband, and
he was a notable figure in the rise of neo-Hegelianism which Windelband
described, with a mixture of interest and surprise, in his 1910
landmark lecture, "*Die Erneuerung des
Hegelianismus*." The question of the possibility of a renewal
of Hegelianism was at the heart of Ehrenberg's attempt, early in
1910, to collect some of the brightest young intellectuals, historians,
and scholars of philosophy from southwest Germany together in
Baden-Baden for a series of symposia devoted to making
"contemporary culture into the object of historical
contemplation." Rosenzweig shared in Ehrenberg's enthusiasm
in founding this "Baden-Baden Gesellschaft," so much so
that its subsequent failure had a dramatic effect on his own thinking.
Rosenzweig apparently saw as the task of the Baden-Baden group the
revival of a philosophical-historical consciousness that would rival
what Hegel's "Spirit" had meant for its age.
Together, the young Rosenzweig believed, these up-and-coming
intellectuals would reconcile in science their respective subjectivity
with the objectivity of their time. They would take seriously the
radical individuality of person and specialization of science that
typified the age, and would at once forge the "unity" of
such "ununifiables" in a holistic vision of
knowledge and culture befitting the *Zeitgeist*. But the first,
and what would end up being the only meeting of the society, appears to
have been an abysmal failure precisely because the historians who came
to the meeting--most of whom were, like Rosenzweig, students of
Meinecke--could in no way stomach the kind of sweeping,
metaphysical account of history leading up to the present that
Rosenzweig sought to revive. The Baden-Baden Gesellschaft dissolved as
quickly as it was formed.




The failure of the Baden-Baden experiment led Rosenzweig to reach
what he took to be an important conclusion: the individualism of
contemporary culture and the specialization of contemporary science
were not to be dissolved in an intellectual-spiritual unity of the
*present*. In Rosenzweig's diagnosis of the failure of
Baden-Baden, one thereby finds hints towards Rosenzweig's later
insight that for a system of philosophy to grasp particulars as such,
the unity of that system must be grasped as *future*.


### 1.2 *Hegel and the State*




In the fall of 1910, Rosenzweig left Freiburg for Berlin, where he
began a period of archival work on Hegel's handwritten
*Nachlass*. Here he gathered the material for what would
eventually be his two-volume work, *Hegel und der Staat*.
Rosenzweig earned his PhD in the summer of 1912 for part of this work,
and the book was nearly completed before the outbreak of the First
World War, but Rosenzweig would only come to publish it in 1920.
Rosenzweig's *Hegel und der Staat* addresses itself to the
task Meinecke had delineated, in his *Cosmopolitanism and the
National State*, of understanding the political ideas of the
19th Century as rooted in the personal and intellectual
development of the creative thinkers who articulated them. In the book,
Rosenzweig traces the genesis of Hegel's political thought back
to Hegel's earliest personal and philosophical musings over the
relationship between the human being and the world. Through careful
readings of Hegel's early handwritten manuscripts, Rosenzweig
attempts to show that the Hegel of the mid-1790s found himself in a
state of perplexity over the possibility of reconciling the radical
subjectivity of the free individual human being with the objectivity of
the world. According to Rosenzweig, the path which the young Hegel
finds out of this perplexity, whereby he comes to understand the free
self as realizing itself, and at once reconciling itself to the world,
*in time*, enabled Hegel's own personal reconciliation
with his moment in history. More decisively for the history of
political philosophy, it determined both the historical character of
Hegel's later thought, and the way he later came to understand
the reciprocal relation between the individual and the state in
history.




Towards the end of the book, Rosenzweig--once again taking up
Meinecke's *Fragestellung*--considers Hegel's
ambiguous relation to the idea of the nation state. He notes how far
Hegel's rational view of the state is from the nationalist
thought that arose in the second half of the 19th Century.
But he at once finds the confidence in the state which Hegel bequeathed
to later nationalist thinkers--a confidence in the state as the
locus of personal or national fulfillment, respectively--to have
contributed to both the rise and the fall of the Bismarckian Reich.




In his post-war preface to *Hegel und der Staat*, Rosenzweig
reflects on his initial hopes that the book might serve to
"dissolve the hard and limited Hegelian conception of the state
... in its coming-to-be through the life of its thinker."
It is indeed the case that in situating Hegel's mature views of the
state within the trajectory of a lifetime of reflection about the
relationship between the self and the world in time, these mature
views seem to give way before the myriad political ideas and practical
possibilities Hegel's thought might generate. Perhaps the greatest
contribution *Hegel und der Staat* makes to its time, then, is
the way it shows Hegel's political thinking to be unexpectedly
fruitful, just as Dilthey and Nohl had shown Hegel's theological thought to
be in the first decade of the 1900s. For it introduces to its readers
a Hegel whose reflections on selfhood, politics, and history are
remarkably diverse, and hence available for appropriation in
remarkably diverse directions. It is for this reason Rosenzweig had
hoped, before the outset of the First World War, that his presentation
of Hegel might help "open up the prospect of a German future
that would be--both inwardly and outwardly--more
spacious," that it might "play its small part in
preparing, insofar as a book can", the path upon which
"the Bismarckian state, its breathing restricted both internally
and externally, would expand itself into a free empire breathing the
air of the world." After the War, however, Rosenzweig could only
mourn the fact that "a field of ruins marks the spot where the
empire previously stood."


### 1.3 "The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism"




While still at work on *Hegel und der Staat* in 1913,
Rosenzweig made a scholarly discovery which led him--and
scholars of German Idealism after him--to rethink the origins of
German Idealism, and which at once precipitated a controversy in the
field that continues to this day. Earlier that year, the Prussian Royal
Library in Berlin had acquired a fragment of a text, written by Hegel,
given the title "An Ethics," because these were the
text's first two words. But a study of the fragment's
content convinced Rosenzweig that the text was no narrow investigation
of a particular field of philosophy, i.e., ethics, but rather took up
the very task that would later define German Idealism for posterity:
the task of system. Indeed, the text revealed its author committed to
constructing "a complete system of all ideas or, what is the
same, of all practical postulates"; it claims to find the point
of unity for the distinct philosophical domains of nature and freedom
in the aesthetic act; it calls for a new mythology in the service of a
new religion which would unify the enlightened and unenlightened
together in "the last great work of humankind." Utilizing a
method of dating Hegelian manuscripts introduced by Dilthey and Nohl,
by which manuscripts could be dated according to landmarks in the
development of Hegel's handwriting, Rosenzweig determined the
text to have been written in the early summer months of 1796. This led
Rosenzweig to conclude that he had found, in this fragment, the
"Oldest System-Program of German Idealism," an explicit
articulation of the defining task of German Idealism, written
"three or at least two years before that work which up to now has
counted ... as the first systematic attempt of the idealistic
movement ... to bound the whole philosophical world between the
covers of a book, Schelling's [*System of*]
*Transcendental Idealism.*"




In his study of the fragment he found, moreover, Rosenzweig reached
a further controversial conclusion. If the text was to be dated in the early summer of 1796, as
Hegel's handwriting suggested, this
would place the writing of the text at the very moment in Hegel's
life when, according to Rosenzweig, he was in the midst of his
melancholic despair over the possibility of reconciling the
subjectivity of the free self with the objectivity of the world. If
this were the case, Rosenzweig reasoned, Hegel *couldn't*
possibly have been the author of the text. "Only one person in
the philosophical Germany of 1796 possessed this youthful-victorious
tone" that pervades the text-fragment, Rosenzweig determined, and
that person was Hegel's friend and former fellow-student at the
Tubinger Stift, F.W.J Schelling. In all likelihood, surmised
Rosenzweig, 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 mistakenly been assigned to Hegel himself. In
Rosenzweig's "Oldest System-Program of German
Idealism," an article he wrote in 1914 and published in 1917,
Rosenzweig presented the two-page text, together with a demonstration
of his conclusions and a determination of the position the text might
be said to occupy within Schelling's early writings.
Rosenzweig's presentation received high praise from its initial
reviewers, but his conclusions about the text--and about
Schelling's authorship, in particular--have been hotly
contested ever since. Although no scholarly consensus has yet been
reached regarding the actual author of the fragment--whether it
be Hegel himself, Schelling, Holderlin, or perhaps yet another
figure in their circles--scholars have generally come to
question the supposition that Hegel suffered from a depression during
the late 1790s that would rule him out as its author.


### 1.4 1913: Near-Conversion and Return




Rosenzweig moved to Leipzig for the winter and summer semesters of
1913. There, while still conducting his research on Hegel, he studied
mathematics and jurisprudence, and began what was to become a close
friendship with a young lecturer in jurisprudence, Eugen Rosenstock.
The two began to meet regularly to discuss philosophical and
theological matters. At stake for Rosenzweig appear to have been
questions closely linked to those he had contemplated during the
Baden-Baden experiment and which remained on his mind as he
investigated Hegel's coming of age in *Hegel und der
Staat*: how can our radical subjectivity or selfhood be reconciled
with our grasp of the world? and how must the divine be conceived such
that it be understood as grounding and unifying both selfhood and
worldliness? The failure at Baden-Baden had led Rosenzweig to question
his earlier historicist view that individual subjects might find their
fulfillment as subjects in the world by joining together to form a
*zeitgeistig* unity, worshipping in the *Zeitgeist*
"the God revealing itself in the here and now." But how
else was the relationship between self and world to be grasped? This
question appears to have been the source of some existential disquiet
for Rosenzweig, and heading into the summer of 1913, he appears to have
entertained certain Gnostic notions that one could only realize
one's selfhood, and ground that selfhood in a relation to the
divine, through a denial of the world. But on July 7, 1913, Rosenzweig
engaged in an all-night discussion with Rosenstock and his
(Rosenzweig's) cousin Rudolf Ehrenberg, which Rosenzweig would
later look back on as the transformative event in his life. Over the
course of this night, Rosenstock convinced Rosenzweig not only to
rethink the significance of Christianity--Rosenzweig apparently
came into that evening with a view of "true" Christianity
as inherently *anti*-worldly, while Rosenstock stressed
Christianity's redemptive work in the world--but even that
a Christian life grounded in revelation and devoted to the mission of
redeeming the world *through* history represented the only
coherent and compelling path to the kind of reconciliation of selfhood
and worldliness which Rosenzweig sought. Rosenstock's challenge
precipitated a crisis in Rosenzweig: he later claimed to have spent the
hours after the conversation alone in his room, pistol at hand,
"face to face with the Nothing." He emerged from the
experience determined to convert to Christianity in order thereby to
take up his place in the historical realization of redemption in the
world.




Three months later, having returned to Berlin in October of 1913,
Rosenzweig reversed his decision, this as a result of a new conception
of Judaism which would remain central to his thought for the rest of
his life. Through its mission of neighborly love, Rosenzweig continued
to maintain, Christianity carries out the redemptive realization of
unity in the world. But Judaism also has a vital role to play in the
world's redemption. The Jewish people lives in large part closed
off from the rest of the world; but in its insular communal life,
Rosenzweig now claims, it anticipates the ultimate redemption, and
thereby represents to the rest of the world the goal they must ever
pursue. Having arrived at a manner of grasping the reconciliation of
the self and the world in history that was common to Christianity and
Judaism, Rosenzweig no longer saw himself compelled to convert, and
instead committed himself to a return to the Judaism that was his by
birth.


### 1.5 Hermann Cohen




During the following year, Rosenzweig rededicated himself to Judaism
by enrolling in courses at the Berlin "Hochschule fur die
Wissenschaft des Judentums." Hermann Cohen, the esteemed
neo-Kantian, had retired from his professorship in Marburg the year
before and was teaching at the Hochschule, and Rosenzweig developed an
especially close relationship with the elder philosopher. Rosenzweig
formulated his earliest ideas on Jewish education through a public
correspondence with Cohen, and it was in the wake of that exchange that
Cohen worked together with Rosenzweig and his father--in the
months before both Cohen and Rosenzweig's father died--to
establish a new "Academy for the Study of Judaism" meant to
advance both scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies and a new
program for Jewish communal education. In the month before
his death, furthermore, Cohen allowed Rosenzweig to read the proofs to his last
great work, *Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism*,
published after his death, in 1919. Rosenzweig found in this work what
he took to be a significant break away from Cohen's critical
Idealism, and from the Idealist tradition in general. Moreover, in the
book's presentation of God and the human being as
"correlated," as independent but at once reciprocally
determining one another, Rosenzweig believed to discover an
anticipation of his own developing view of actuality as grounded in the
reciprocal relations between God, self, and world.


### 1.6 Revelation and "Atheistic Theology"




In 1914, already under Cohen's influence and unmoved by the
romantic theology of Martin Buber popular at the time, Rosenzweig wrote
his first essay in Jewish theology, "Atheistic Theology."
The article criticized as atheistic those tendencies of contemporary
Jewish theology, Buber's foremost among them, to conceive of the
idea of God as an expression of the vital Jewish aspiration for unity.
Such theology, Rosenzweig argued, reduced the divine to no more than a
human projection. In lieu of such contemporary trends, Rosenzweig
insists that theology in his time cannot avoid taking seriously the
notion of revelation: the notion that God, transcendent to and
independent of the human being in the world, at once enters into
relation with the human being in the world. Indeed, Rosenzweig claims
here that only by taking the transcendence and at once the revelation
of God seriously--rather than reducing the divine to an
expression of a Jewish life force--can we grasp the split the
human being experiences in history, between his personal
self-realization and the realization of the world. It is the notion of
revelation, Rosenzweig suggests, that allows us to view history along
an absolute redemptive trajectory, established by God's relation
to the human being in the world. Such a notion of revelation would
reappear at the center of Rosenzweig's systematic work, *The
Star of Redemption*, a few years later. 


### 1.7 Wartime Political Writings




For much of the First World War, Rosenzweig served in an
anti-aircraft unit stationed on the Balkan front. Rosenzweig wrote a
number of pseudonymous essays while serving at the front--signed
"Adam Bund" or "Macedonicus"--exploring
the political ramifications of the war. Some of these essays show
Rosenzweig's interest in the possibility that Germany might
develop through the war into the centerpiece of a
"middle-European" empire. Rosenzweig's most original
political composition of the war years was a sweeping account of
political geography entitled, "Globus: Studies towards the
World-Historical Doctrine of Space." "Globus" was
Rosenzweig's attempt to take seriously the designation of the war
in which he was participating as a *World* War. In it,
Rosenzweig presents the history of the shifting geographic landscape of
political power in the world, from the Roman Empire to the present, as
the gradual realization of the unity of the globe. The current war,
Rosenzweig suggests, pits three world empires against one another to
decide which will guide the globe towards its ultimate unification.
Rosenzweig makes it clear, in "Globus," that he understands
the events of the war as rooted in the absolute trajectory of world
history that began in the world's creation and will lead to its
redemption.


## 2. The New Thinking




In a series of correspondences during the war, Rosenzweig also began
to formulate those basic philosophical ideas that would govern his most
important works. Here Rosenzweig articulated a critique of the
philosophical tradition culminating in German Idealism, and along with
it a positive vision of the direction philosophy and theology, in
tandem, should take in his time. Rosenzweig would later understand
these ideas as part of an intellectual project called the "new
thinking" which he shared with his closest interlocutors, Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy, Rudolf Ehrenberg, Hans Ehrenberg, and Viktor von
Weizsacker, and whose core insights had also been reached by
Martin Buber and Ferdinand Ebner. Drawing from Rosenzweig's 1925
essay, "The New Thinking," and taking into consideration
Rosenzweig's varied comments about the "new thinking"
in other writings, one can highlight the key ways in which Rosenzweig
understood this "new thinking" to differ from the
"old thinking" of the philosophical tradition.




Rosenzweig understood himself to be living at a transitional moment
in the history of philosophy. The systems of German Idealism, by
Rosenzweig's account, brought to completion a 2500-year arc of
philosophical thinking initiated by the pre-Socratics. In so doing,
however, they at once brought to light tendencies of the philosophical
tradition that prevented its representatives from achieving the very
knowledge they set out to attain. These tendencies of what Rosenzweig
refers to as the "old" thinking, include the following:


* **Abstracting from time.** In their quest to grasp what is
universally and essentially true, philosophers abstract from the
temporal, relational context in which human beings experience the world
around them. This abstraction that points to *what* things are
essentially, Rosenzweig suggests, cannot yield knowledge of things
*as* they are. Indeed, such knowing, according to Rosenzweig,
takes the pathological case--the case of a being stripped of the
very temporal and relational qualities that allow it to be the way it
is--as what is normal, or as the ideal against which our
experience must be measured.
* **Reductive reasoning.** The attempt to grasp what things
are *essentially* inclines the old thinking to reason out a
single ground for all beings, thereby reducing particular beings to
something other than what they are. Our everyday experience confirms
for us, Rosenzweig claims, the fundamental difference between divine,
worldly, and personal beings. But over the course of the philosophical
tradition, philosophers have repeatedly sought to reduce these three
objects of special metaphysics one to the other, rather than to take
each up as independent and irreducible. Thus ancient philosophy, by
Rosenzweig's account, tends to reduce the divine and the human to
aspects of the cosmos; medieval philosophy reduces world and selfhood
to aspects of the divine; and modern philosophy finds in the human self
alone the firm ground upon which knowledge of all else is to be
rooted.
* **Thinking from the Absolute standpoint.** The quest for
the most comprehensive answer to the "what is" question of
the philosophical tradition leads the old thinking, in its German
Idealist manifestation, to aspire to an "Absolute"
standpoint from which the whole of what is--the
"All"--can be grasped in its unity. But even if one
were to grant the philosopher the possibility of seeing things from the
standpoint of the Absolute, such a standpoint would take away from the
philosopher the very unique outlook on the actual world which she
possesses as *individual*. Moreover, seeking to grasp the whole
of what is from the Absolute standpoint leads the German Idealist
philosopher to grasp particular beings not as they are, but rather as
mere parts of or manifestations of "the All." Grasping such
particulars from the perspective of the Absolute hence reduces the
particulars qua particulars to nothing.




Faced with the reductive tendencies of the "old
thinking" Rosenzweig proposes a "new thinking" that
pursues knowledge of God, world, and the self in their interrelations,
*from out of the individual standpoint of the human being in
time*.




The new thinker aims to grasp all beings within the "whole
horizon" of her individual standpoint, but her standpoint remains
that of an individual human being. She does not transcend her
individual, finite standpoint in order to attain a standpoint that
would pretend to be Absolute. She does not, according to Rosenzweig,
"have to take out her own eyes in order to see right." In
this emphasis on the fundamental individuality of the human being,
Rosenzweig sees himself as following in a line of post-Hegelian thought
begun by Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, and epitomized in the life and
thought of Nietzsche. For only in such thinkers, Rosenzweig claimed,
did the individual first cease to be a negligible quantity for
philosophy.




The new thinker takes the temporal character of human experience
seriously. Our temporal experience is stamped, Rosenzweig suggests, by
past, present, and future, and thus our knowledge of the actual is
mediated through these tenses of time. Before one even begins to
philosophize, one finds oneself in a world that is already there; thus
the new thinker relates to the things of the world through the prism of
the *past*. The human being experiences her own selfhood as
categorically *present*, and thus the new thinker relates to her
own self and to the call to selfhood she experiences as present. From
out of the presence of selfhood, the human being opens up into
relations with others, and the new thinker relates to those ultimate
aims which she shares with these others as *future*. 




In its emphasis on temporality, Rosenzweig contends, the new
thinking breaks away from assumptions about the nature of truth that
dominate the philosophical tradition. For the new thinking suggests
that one does not attain truth by stepping out of the river of time,
but rather that truth is that which "unfolds in time."
Thus, it is not enough to grasp what beings are *sub specie
aeternitatis*; such beings must be grasped in the nexus of temporal
relations in which we experience them.




Finally, just as Rosenzweig's new thinking seeks to reform
philosophy's long-standing assumptions about the object of the
philosophical pursuit (truth) and the standpoint out of which the human
being may seek to carry out this pursuit (Absolute or individual), so
he suggests that philosophy's traditional reliance on reason must
be qualified in order to attune itself to the temporality of human
experience. According to Rosenzweig, if thinking according to reason
alone runs the risk of reducing all that is to a single ground, it is
speech whose fundamental link to the actuality of our temporal
experience can serve to temper the reductive excesses of reason. We
articulate our experience of time through the tenses of our spoken
language; through language we name the things around us; and it is the
spoken word through which we enter into actual relations with others.
Inspired by the "narrative philosophy" to which Schelling
alludes in the preface to his *Ages of the World*, and by the
thought of his contemporary and friend Eugen Rosenstock, Rosenzweig
thus proposes a form of "speech-thinking" [see separate
section below] as integral to the new thinking's pursuit of truth
in time.




Rosenzweig understands the new thinking to have been made possible
for philosophy, in part, by a turn towards theology. Indeed, Rosenzweig
suggests that the new philosophical approach towards understanding the
nature of beings which the new thinking proposes--to wit, that
our access to knowledge about beings comes not primarily through an
inquiry into what beings are essentially but rather through serious
consideration of the nexus of temporal relations in which we experience
such beings--rests on an insight that is theological at its
root. Recall that one of the failings of the "old
thinking," according to Rosenzweig, was its tendency to reduce
the different kinds of beings to one: grounding the world and the self
in God, grounding gods and selves in the world, or grounding God and
world within the self. But the story theology tells about God, world,
and the self--and by "theology" Rosenzweig refers
quite narrowly to certain dominant trends of Jewish and Christian
theology--is not a story about the grounding of any one of these
fundamental kinds of being in the other, but rather is the story of the
*relations* between God, world, and human being. That is to say,
the theology in which Rosenzweig is interested assumes the independent,
irreducible reality of God, world, and self, and accounts for the
actuality we experience through the relations between these beings.
Taking this theological insight as his lead, Rosenzweig proceeds to
label the very threefold temporal experience of actuality through which
the new thinking grasps the nexus of relations between beings with
theological categories: our experience of the things of the world as
already being there in the moment we awaken to our selves is the
experience theology describes through its category of *creation*
and understands as rooted in a relation between the world of things and
its divine creator; our experience of being awoken or called to
selfhood in the present moment is the experience theology describes
through its category of *revelation* and understands as the
divine call to the human self; our experience of the ultimate goal we
share with other beings, which we anticipate as future, is the
experience theology describes through its category of
*redemption* and understands as the vocation placed upon human
beings in the world by the divine.




In addition to denoting the narrow relation between God and the
human self, "revelation" for Rosenzweig is the broad
umbrella concept which designates the theological insight which the new
thinking takes as its lead: if one is to grasp beings as they are, if
one is to grasp truth in its unfolding in time, then one must grasp the
trajectory of the relations into which the three fundamental kinds of
beings enter spanning from creation to redemption. Revelation amounts
to the "orientation" after which the philosopher has long
sought, according to Rosenzweig, because it shows the new thinker her
place and calling within that trajectory of relations.


## 3. *The Star of Redemption*




Rosenzweig spent the last months of the war in and out of military
hospitals for bouts of influenza, pneumonia, and malaria. At the end of
August, 1918, he began writing *The Star of Redemption* and
sending what he wrote back home to his mother on military postcards.
After the war ended, he returned home first to Kassel, and then to
Freiburg, devoting himself entirely to writing. He finished the
*Star* in the middle of February, 1919.


### 3.1 Overview




Rosenzweig understands *The Star of Redemption* as his
contribution to the "new thinking," and the book does
polemicize against those systems of German Idealism in which Rosenzweig
finds the "old thinking" to be most fully realized. But the
*Star*'s post-Kantian metaphysical aspirations, its
systematic structure, and its dramatic scope recommend its comparison
to the great systems of Schelling and Hegel more than to any other
philosophical work. Indeed, Rosenzweig insists in numerous contexts
that the *Star* be understood "only as a system of
philosophy," that is, as committed to the very task of systematic
thinking to which the German Idealists were committed. This tension
between the systematic goals of the *Star* and
Rosenzweig's explicit call for a "new thinking" that
would turn away from the assumptions and tendencies of the
philosophical tradition culminating in German Idealism has been the
source of considerable puzzlement among readers of the *Star*
from Rosenzweig's own time down to the present. One might suggest
that Rosenzweig shares with the German Idealists the conviction that
the fundamental questions human beings ask--including those
questions about the relationship between the individual self and the
whole of the world which perplexed Rosenzweig during his own personal
and intellectual development--can only find their grounded
answers within the context of a philosophical system. At the same time,
however, Rosenzweig insists that the perennial philosophical quest for
"knowledge of the All" can only reach its goals if
philosophy takes into consideration the insights of the "new
thinking" regarding temporality, revelation, and the human
being's fundamental individuality.




The *Star* is such a multi-faceted work, however, that
generations of readers have discovered in it myriad philosophical
insights which far outspan its systematic aspirations. The book's
influence on later Jewish thought and continental thought may well be
said to rest far more heavily on the fruitfulness of some of those
individual insights in the book that appear to be decidedly
*anti-systematic*, than on the book's own overall
commitment to systematicity. The book offers a rich account of the
temporal situatedness of the human being, and suggests that the
actuality we experience can only be understood through the tenses of
past, present, and future. It exemplifies the fusion of philosophy and
theology which the "new thinking" is meant to realize; and
its philosophical utilization of theological concepts like
"creation," "revelation," and
"redemption," seeks both to aid philosophy in fulfilling
its own 2500-year potential, and to answer those perennial questions of
Jewish and Christian theology that have perplexed religious thinkers
throughout the ages. The *Star* works out its own aesthetics and
history of art. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the *Star*
is its formulation of a "speech-thinking," which presents
language as the "organon" through which the unifying
relations between beings occur and can be understood. At the center of
this speech-thinking is a philosophy of dialogue which traces the
awakening of selfhood through an I-You relation into which the self is
called by the Absolute other. The book introduces a form of dialectical
logic meant to rival Hegel's. It offers a series of
interpretations of Biblical texts meant to evoke the uniqueness of the
Bible as a written text which nevertheless makes it possible to hear
the divine word. The *Star* presents Judaism and Christianity as
communal forms whose institutions and liturgical calendar enable human
beings to bring eternity into time. And the book includes within it a
sweeping history of religion and philosophy, politics and culture, from
ancient times to the present. In short, much like the systems of German
Idealism, the *Star* offers the reader numerous points of
access; but all these points of access are meant to hold together
within a single overarching vision of truth and the path to it.




Rosenzweig understands the task of system to entail grasping and
articulating "the All"--the whole of what is--in
its identity and difference, that is, as both a single unity and as
the most comprehensive diversity of particulars. While he sees the
quest for knowledge of the All as rooted in the early questions of the
pre-Socratics, he identifies the German Idealists as those who
"discovered" system as the explicit overarching task of
philosophy. Committed as Rosenzweig remains, in the *Star*, to
this systematic task, he breaks from German Idealism perhaps most
dramatically in the standpoint out of which he insists systematic
knowledge is to be attained. In the systems of German Idealism, the
philosopher seeks to attain the standpoint of the Absolute--the
very Absolute out of which all particular beings are understood to
have unfolded dialectically. According to Rosenzweig, such Absolute
Idealism fails to grasp particulars in their particularity, because it
assumes the fundamental unity of all particulars within the Absolute
from the start. In contrast, Rosenzweig seeks to grasp the
"All", in the *Star*, not from an Absolute
standpoint, but rather from the standpoint of the finite individual
human being whom he finds situated
*in the middle of the course of the All*, a course Rosenzweig
understands as beginning in particularity, and advancing through the
relations between particulars to an ultimate redemptive realization of
unity. One may read the very first sentence of
the *Star*--"All knowing of the All begins in death,
the fear of death"--as a programmatic announcement of
Rosenzweig's basic quarrel with German Idealism over the standpoint
out of which systematic knowledge may be attained: an Absolute
standpoint that claims to overcome the limits of human finitude will
not yield true knowledge of the All. Only a proper recognition of the
unique character of the individual mortal human being holds the
promise for systematic knowledge.




The *Star* is a disorienting work in many ways. Keeping in mind
the overall structure of the book can do much to help keep the reader
from getting lost while reading it. The *Star* is divided into
three parts, each of which is itself divided into three
"books" and includes, as well, both an introductory
chapter presenting the particular sort of shift in thinking Rosenzweig
wants to achieve through the books of that part, and a transitional
chapter that prepares the reader to move on to what comes next. The
three books of the first part of the *Star* present
philosophical constructions of what Rosenzweig asserts to be the three
fundamental kinds of beings--God, world, self--as
the *elements* out of which the system will be realized. The
three books of the second part introduce the *course* along
which God, world, and self enter into relations among themselves that
advance towards unity, relations Rosenzweig denotes through the
theological notions of creation, revelation, and redemption. The third
part of the book inquires into the possibility of envisioning
that *figure* of the star, in its redemptive unity, whose
construction out of the elements along their course the reader has
followed in the first and second parts of the book. The *Star*
ends with a depiction of what is seen in this vision--God's face
in the form of the *star of redemption*--and then guides
the reader out from the setting of such vision back into everyday
life.


### 3.2 Part I




Rosenzweig begins the *Star* with a reflection on human
mortality, and his consideration of the irreducible uniqueness of the
individual revealed in death precipitates the break-up of the
"All", which philosophy has long claimed to know, into what
Rosenzweig takes to be the three fundamental--and fundamentally
independent--kinds of beings: God, world, and self. Moreover,
the insights Rosenzweig draws from the human fear of death in the
opening pages of the *Star* serve to direct him in his own quest
for knowledge of the "true All" that has eluded the
"old thinking" of the philosophical tradition. The most
important of these insights are the following:


1. Rosenzweig locates in the fear of death the source of the
awareness of the basic split between selfhood and worldliness which
had perplexed him at least since his university years. In the fear of
death, Rosenzweig claims, in the opening paragraphs of
the *Star*, the human being experiences her own "tornness
from the whole world". She is confronted with the fact that her
"I would be an 'it'" if she died. As
the *Star* proceeds along its course, Rosenzweig will both
offer an account of this split the human being experiences, and show
how the reconciliation of selfhood and worldliness will only come with
the completion of the "All" in redemption.
2. In serious contemplation of death, Rosenzweig suggests, one
experiences *nothingness* in a particular, and particularly
immediate fashion. The human being is set "face-to-face with the
Nothing" in the fear of death. Death shows the human being the
"unthinkable annihilation
[*Vernichtung*--i.e., the
making-into-Nothing, or nothing-ing]" of her
"I". The fear of death thus compels the human being to
recognize the extent to which her self or "I" is not at
all securely self-grounded or absolute, but rather is ever suspended
in nothingness. Moreover, Rosenzweig devotes considerable attention to
the *particular* quality of the nothingness experienced in the
fear of death. I do not experience nothingness as a universal or
absolute state in the fear of death, Rosenzweig suggests, but rather I
experience *my* nothingness--I experience nothingness as
a particular "something" that threatens me and me
alone.




The particularity of nothingness over which the human being hovers
in the fear of death leads Rosenzweig to critique the starting points
of the systems of German Idealism and to suggest his own alternative to
them. German Idealist systems--and here Rosenzweig alludes to
various sources in the writings of Schelling and Hegel--conceive
of the absolute ground of "the All" as an undifferentiated,
"orphic unity," out of which the differentiated reality we
experience unfolds dialectically. Armed with the particular character
of nothingness drawn from the experience of the fear of death,
Rosenzweig suggests that the German Idealists "presuppose"
the undifferentiated, universal character of the Absolute, as the
origin of the "All," and they thereby mistakenly root the
myriad particular beings we experience in actuality in an original
unity (i.e., an absolute or universal "nothing"). However,
Rosenzweig reasons, particulars that are ultimately the dialectical
product of absolute unity cannot be said to *be* particulars at
all. And thus the systems of German Idealism do not in fact attain or
articulate knowledge of the identity and difference of
"All" that is; rather, they *reduce* the unique
difference inherent to the different kinds of particular beings to a
common unity.




The particularity of nothingness experienced in the fear of death thus
leads Rosenzweig to take up a starting point in difference. Every
particular kind of being must be taken up as derived from its own
particular nothing, rather than as rooted ultimately in a common
unity. Censuring the tendency of the philosophical tradition, once
again, to reduce the three domains of special metaphysics one to the
other--to reduce selfhood and world to manifestations of the
divine, or the divine and the self to aspects of the cosmos, or the
divine and the external world to products of the human
mind--Rosenzweig takes up each of these three different kinds of
beings as having generated itself out of its own particular
nothing.




Taking its lead from the particularity of nothing revealed in the
fear of death, the first part of the *Star* thus begins by
constructing the particular respective being of God, world, and self
each out of its own particular nothing. While Rosenzweig insists on the
fundamentally independent natures of these kinds of being, the method
by which he traces each's self-generation out of its particular
nothing is the same. God, world, and self each emerges as an
*element* in Rosenzweig's system through a process in
which Rosenzweig depicts two paths leading out of each particular
nothing and arriving at a point of unity. The two paths that Rosenzweig
traces out of each particular nothing are as follows: 1) the path from
out of the particular nothing driven by the *affirmation* of
what is "not-nothing." Rosenzweig identifies this path as
the path of the "Yes." 2) the path from out of the
particular nothing driven by the *negation* of that very
nothing. Rosenzweig identifies this path as that of the
"No." These two paths then come to a unity in what
Rosenzweig refers to as the "And" of "Yes" and
"No."




Rosenzweig claims that he models his method for constructing the
elements of the *Star* on the mathematical notion of a
differential. (The differential models for Rosenzweig the possibility
of generating something from nothing--when that nothing is a
determinate nothing, rather than a nothing conceived as absolute.) But
in order to make sense of what Rosenzweig aims to achieve through his
constructions of the elemental God, world, and self in the first part
of the *Star*, it is helpful to consider the kinds of qualities
Rosenzweig identifies with the affirmative and negative paths,
respectively, which emerge out of each particular nothing and merge
together in each respective element. In Rosenzweig's
construction, the affirmation of what is not-nothing 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. Thus it is infinite being (Yes) and
freedom (No) which fuse together in the self-generation of the
elemental God; the presence of logos (Yes) and the vital plenitude of
particulars (No) that fuse together to form the elemental world;
enduring character (Yes) and free will (No) that unite within the
elemental self.




If thus Hegel famously insisted that truth be grasped "not only
as substance, but equally as subject," Rosenzweig asserts that
the realization of this same kind of identity of substantiality and
activity is necessary to allow each of the elements to generate itself
out of its nothing. Rosenzweig in fact devotes considerable time over
the course of the first part of the *Star* to demonstrating
that *only* those beings which construct themselves out of the
unification of the dual paths of substantiality and activity, of
"Yes" and "No," can hold themselves out of
their respective nothings. Rosenzweig sees in this two-poled structure
of each being its inherent "factuality." Indeed, he
highlights the way the German word for fact
itself--*Tatsache*--brings together "act"
(*Tat*) and "substantiality" or
"matter" (*Sache*). Rosenzweig writes, "Not
the substance [*Sache*], not the act [*Tat*], only the
fact [*Tatsache*] is secure from falling back into the
nothing," thereby indicating that only by emerging as the fusion
of an active and substantial pole, can God, world, and the self gain a
standing in being each over against its respective nothing.




Thus eschewing the tendency of the philosophical tradition to root
all beings in a single, unconditioned ground, Rosenzweig begins the
*Star* by showing how all particular beings--divine,
worldly, personal--can be understood as generating themselves
each out of its own particular nothing. But throughout the first part
of the *Star*, these constructions of the elemental God, world,
and self remain "hypothetical." Rosenzweig suggests that
one only attains "certainty" regarding these constructions
when they are shown to be the necessary conditions for the actuality we
experience. As Rosenzweig proceeds to argue, in the second part of the
*Star*, the actuality we experience is born of the
*relations* *between God, world, and selves*. That is to
say, the actuality we experience is not to be understood as rooted in
an original metaphysical unity, but rather in the relations between
particulars each of which generates itself out of its own nothing.
Moreover, Rosenzweig proceeds to show that in entering into the
reciprocal relations with one another which ground our experience,
elemental beings take steps towards the ultimate systematic unification
of the "All".


### 3.3 Part II




The second part of the *Star* introduces theology as
complement to philosophy: here the theological "categories"
of creation, revelation, and redemption are shown to
"fulfill" what is promised in the philosophical
constructions of God, world, and self from the book's first part.
This fulfillment occurs through the "course" along which
the elemental God, world, and self step into relations with one
another, relations that form the actuality we experience. Rosenzweig
designates the divine turning into relation with the world as
*creation*; the divine turning into relation with the individual
self as *revelation*; and the turning of the self into loving
relation with the world as *redemption*. How we are to
understand the beginning of this chain of relations--i.e.,
*why* the divine "creates" the world--is an
open question among scholars, and some claim that Rosenzweig intends
the original turning of the divine to the world, and to the self,
respectively, to be grasped as acts of will or love inexplicable by
philosophical means. But Rosenzweig also makes it clear that particular
beings *need* to step into relations with one another precisely
in order to realize themselves as what they are. God does not
*actually* become the God he is elementally until he realizes
divine freedom in the grounding of the existence of the world in
creation, and until he receives human recognition for his divine being
through revelation. The world does not *actually* become the
world it is elementally until it receives its essential grounding from
the divine in creation, and until its particulars attain to their own
vital self-determination in redemption. The self does not
*actually* become what it is elementally until it is awoken to
its free I-hood through revelation, and until it realizes its freedom
in its turning in love to the world in redemption.




Now, in order for each element to fulfill itself through its
relations to its others, Rosenzweig asserts, each must undergo a
certain transformation. Rosenzweig here draws methodological
consequences from the very notion of revelation itself. The German for
revelation, *Offenbarung*, suggests that every being must
undergo a kind of "opening up" in turning into the
relations with others that revelation entails. Such opening up
and turning outward demands what Rosenzweig calls a
"reversal" [*Umkehr*] of the "Yes" and
the "No" which united within each isolated element. What
was the "Yes" pole within a given elements (i.e., its
substantial pole) reverses into a "No" (i.e., activity),
and what was the "No" pole within the element reverses into
a "Yes". Relations between elements are constituted, then,
when, e.g., the "No" pole within a given element reverses
into a "Yes" and then unites up with what had been the
"Yes" pole within another element, now reversed into a
"No". To give an example: *creation* demands that
the active, free pole of God ("No") reverse itself into the
substantial grounding ("Yes") of the existence of the world
("No") which itself emerged out of the reversal of the
essential pole ("Yes") within the elemental world. The
union of divine "Yes" and worldly "No" forged
in creation, then, attains the same "factual" character as
relation as did the union of "Yes" and "No"
within each element: creation is a *fact*--a
"Tatsache"--according to Rosenzweig, insofar as it
results from the unifying relation between the being of the divine
creator ("Sache") and the active existence
("Tat") of the world




Rosenzweig devotes great care to demonstrating that the elemental
beings fulfill themselves through their reversals into relations with
their others. But over the course of the second part of the
*Star*, Rosenzweig proceeds to show that while God, world, and
self realize themselves as the beings that they are by entering into
these reciprocal relations, this very course of
relations--creation, revelation, redemption--will at once
lead them to realize the unity of the "All". Indeed,
the *Star* locates the unity, posited by the German Idealists
at the beginning of their systems, in the
redemptive *conclusion* of its systematic course. And
Rosenzweig can claim to have articulated the "All" in both
its identity and difference within his system because the very course
of relations that leads particulars to form the unity of the
"All" at once permits each particular to realize itself as
particular.




The course God, world, and self take into relations through the
second part of the *Star*, according to Rosenzweig, generates
the actuality which we experience. Indeed, as indicated in the
"New Thinking" section above, Rosenzweig aims to show that
we have access to these relations of creation, revelation, and
redemption, through the quintessentially temporal quality of our
experience. We experience the world we inhabit as
"already-there" from the moment we become aware of it, and
this experience of the world as our *past*, Rosenzweig contends,
is an experience of *creation*. Each of us experiences her own
awakening to free selfhood as an experience that is quintessentially
*present*; it is none other than this experience of awakening to
free selfhood which Rosenzweig understands as our experience of
revelation. Finally, we experience our opening up into loving relations
with others in the world, and the possibilities such relations
generate, through the prism of the *future*; and it is through
this future-directed experience that we anticipate
*redemption*.




Rosenzweig draws important epistemological consequences from the
fact that we can be shown to experience the relations of creation,
revelation, and redemption that occur between God, world, and self. He
asserts that the fact that we have access *through experience*
to the relations between those elements whose construction we traced
*through thought*, offers us evidence for the credibility of
those very constructions. Rosenzweig suggests that the relationship
between the thought of the first part of the *Star* and the
experience of the second part of the *Star* should be understood
as one of promise and fulfillment; and he understands himself to be
bringing together philosophy and theology in this very relation. For as
the elements constructed in the first part of the *Star* are
shown to realize themselves, to fulfill their elemental potential
through the theological relations of creation, revelation, and
redemption, in the book's second part, Rosenzweig can claim to
have shown that philosophy finds its abstract constructs realized in
theology's account of actuality, and that theology finds the
conditions for the possibility of its account of actuality in the
constructs of philosophy. It is this very reciprocally-confirming
relationship between philosophy and theology that Rosenzweig believes
exemplifies the "new thinking."




Much as it was in his earlier thinking, the central theological
concept here in the second part of the *Star* is revelation. In
Rosenzweig's earliest formulations, revelation denotes the
turning of the absolute other into relation with the human self in the
world, a relation through which the human self orients herself in the
world. In the *Star*, this same relation occurs in the midst of
a nexus of relations between beings, and it does indeed orient the
human being who receives revelation within this nexus of relations.
Aware of herself as having been born into the world, awakening to her own
free selfhood, the human being is called on to enter into those
relations with others in the world that will realize the redemptive
unity of the "All." Insofar as this unity of the
"All" is anticipated as *future*, moreover, its
realization may be said to depend on human beings taking up the
vocation they become aware of in revelation. The systematic unity of
the "All" Rosenzweig seeks to *know* in the present,
remains a possibility to be actualized. And Rosenzweig understands
revelation to orient the human being towards this actualization.


### 3.4 Speech-Thinking




The second part of the *Star* is also home to
Rosenzweig's account of "speech-thinking," the
centerpiece of his contribution to the "new thinking" in
the *Star*. Here Rosenzweig understands himself to be working
out a form of the "narrative" or "historical"
thinking which Schelling described, in the preface to his *Ages of
the World*, as the necessary complement to the philosophy of
reason. Rosenzweig presents speech as more deeply linked to temporal
experience than is rational thought, and hence as a tool eminently
capable of grasping and articulating the relations of creation,
revelation, and redemption which we experience in time. We express our
experience of time through the tenses of language. We grasp the things
of the world through our naming of them and in the stories we tell
about them. I articulate my own selfhood by calling myself
"I", and I experience my most intimate personal
relationships through a personal address to others as
"You," or through calling them by their first names. In
song, moreover, Rosenzweig suggests we have a form of speech in which
we articulate the supreme hopes we anticipate for our future.




In the second part of the *Star*, Rosenzweig suggests that we
can grasp through speech the relations into which God, world, and the
self enter, first and foremost, because speech in fact accompanies the
whole of the course that leads from creation to redemption. As that
which makes us human, Rosenzweig claims, the power of speech is
implicit in every human being since creation; and yet the complete
fulfillment of speech in a universal language that would be equally
each person's own and at once common to all, can only be imagined
as part of the redemptive future of humankind. In between creation and
redemption, language both unites and divides people from one another:
we all share speech, but speech is different in every mouth. Within the
course of the systematic relations between God, world, and self that
stretches from creation to redemption, Rosenzweig thus understands
language as a tool of unification that does not reduce different
individuals to that which is the same: speech only unites those who
recognize or understand each other.




Rosenzweig thus views speech as the unifying thread whose genesis
accompanies the relational advance of God, world, and self from
creation through revelation to redemption, and thus as an
"organon" at our disposal for grasping these relations.
Each step in the genesis of speech accompanies one of the relations we
experience along the path God, world, and self take towards their
ultimate unification in the "All." Rosenzweig presents the
generation of the grammatical building blocks of *narrative* as
integral to creation, the relation between God and the world which we
experience as past. He presents the revelatory relation between God and
the self as a *dialogue* between an "I" and a
"You" always experienced as present; and he shows how
*both* the divine "I" and the self as
"You," are constituted as such through such reciprocal
dialogic exchange. And Rosenzweig depicts the redemptive bringing
together of the worldly objects of narrative and the persons of
dialogue in the *communal song* that anticipates the ultimate
unity of redemption.




The speech-thinking of the second part of the *Star* seeks to
show that relations between particular beings are best grasped through
speech. But more importantly, Rosenzweig demonstrates in his
"speech thinking" that these relations *occur*
through speech. Speech, Rosenzweig suggests, is the tool through which
we come to recognize ourselves as selves, and which at once unites us
with others along our path towards redemption. Speech, for Rosenzweig,
is thus not only a tool for grasping relations. It is a tool for
realizing the path to the "All" through relations.




By the end of the second part of the *Star*, Rosenzweig has
set forth the course of his system, along which particular beings enter
into relations that will ultimately bring about their unification
within the "All." Rosenzweig celebrates this achievement,
at the end of the book's second part, by presenting the reader
with the geometric image that he suggests is constructed out of the
elements in their relations. Depicting God, world, and self as three
points equidistant from one another, he shows, yields a single
triangle. The relations between each of the elements, furthermore,
suggest three further points, each one between those two elements which
unite through it. The image befitting the system, Rosenzweig thereby
proclaims, is not the "circle" which has steered
philosophical thinking from Anaximander to Hegel, but rather the
six-pointed star formed by the three elemental points coupled with the
three points of relation into which the elements enter: the star of
redemption.




Before turning to survey the third and final part of the
*Star*, we should note here the situation Rosenzweig's
reader finds herself in by the time she arrives at the end of the
second part of the book. By this point in the *Star*, the reader
has been asked to see herself as situated in the middle of the course
leading to the unification of the "All". As a result, the
book directs a certain challenge to the reader to take up her role in
the systematic advance towards the redemptive unity which Rosenzweig
envisions. Because the unity of the "All" is projected as
future, that is, the reader is called on to do her part to realize in
actuality the very system of the "All" which she may come
to know through reading the *Star*.


### 3.5 Part III




But if the unity of the system is projected into the future, can it
truly be *known* in the present? The third part of the
*Star* presents life within the Jewish and Christian religious
communities as the surprising answer to this question. According to
Rosenzweig, life within these communities allows for the possibility of
"anticipating" the ultimate redemptive unity of the
"All". The social practices through which these communities
constitute themselves lay the groundwork for such communal
anticipation. More significantly, the course of the Jewish and
Christian liturgical calendars--the yearly path along which
Jewish and Christian communities celebrate creation, revelation, and
redemption, each in its own particular manner--makes it
possible, according to Rosenzweig, for members of these communities to
envision within time, the ultimate unity of the "All" that
will only be actual in the future redemption. Judaism and Christianity
are thus to be understood, according to Rosenzweig, as
"guarantees" of that ultimate redemption. Life within
Jewish or Christian community enables the person who stands in the
middle of the course of the "All" to see the ultimate unity
towards which all particular beings strive through relations, and to
take her place within this course with confidence.




But even as they serve as "guarantees" of the future
redemption, Judaism and Christianity also serve crucial roles,
according to Rosenzweig, in realizing the *actual* redemption in
the world. Here Rosenzweig introduces the conclusions he reached back
in 1913 regarding the complementary roles Judaism and Christianity play
in the world's advance towards redemption. The Jewish people
anticipates the ultimate redemption of the world within the closed,
communal life it forges out of its intimate experience of relation with
the divine. Christianity advances the cause of the *actual*
redemption of the world, by uniting the globe through its message of
divine love. While Christianity thus takes up the historical task of
guiding the world towards redemption, it would lose its way, according
to Rosenzweig, if the Jewish people did not perpetually serve as
reminder, through its own communal anticipation of redemption, of the
kind of unity before the divine for which the world is to strive.




After presenting the course of relations between God, world, and the
self as directed towards the ultimate unification of the
"All", then, Rosenzweig suggests that the ways in which
Judaism and Christianity make it possible to anticipate the ultimate
future unity of the "All" itself, serve to bring the
systematic knowledge of the "All" that is possible for
human beings to its completion. In the "Gate" section with
which the *Star* ends, Rosenzweig depicts the vision of
redemptive unity with which knowledge of the identity and difference of
the "All" is completed, as a vision of the *star of
redemption*, the same star Rosenzweig suggested was constructed
geometrically out of the elemental God, world, and self as they stepped
into the relations of creation, revelation, and redemption. In this
image of a star, Rosenzweig identifies the face of God. But he suggests
that seeing God's face at once directs those human beings who
pursue knowledge of the "All" back into the domain of human
faces, into that nexus of interpersonal relations through which the
redemptive unity of the All is to be achieved in actuality.




Rosenzweig sends his readers out of the "Gate" at the
end of the *Star* back "into life," directing them
to take on the redemptive task of unifying the "All" which
the book itself describes. Rosenzweig thereby ascribes to human beings
a noteworthy relationship to truth itself. The systematic truth
revealed in the *Star* is not a thing that one might claim to
know or to experience like other things in the world. Truth is the
redemptive goal of a course in which human beings participate. As a
result, human beings stand, according to Rosenzweig, in a relationship
of "verification" to truth itself. Human beings verify the
truth of the unity of the "All" by taking up the task of
its realization. It is the task of the readers of the *Star*,
Rosenzweig implies, to make the "everyday" context of their
lives reflect and take part in this advance towards redemptive
truth.




The ending of the *Star* also sends the reader
back into life at a particular moment in history. Here one must note
that Rosenzweig saw his time in history as particularly momentous.
The culmination of the philosophical tradition in German Idealism, so
Rosenzweig contended, coincided with the ending of the second epoch of
the world's historical advance towards redemption under Christian
auspices, and the beginning of its third and final historical epoch:
the founding of the Church of John which Schelling foretold in his
*Philosophy of Revelation*. Rosenzweig understood his own time
to be that of the "Johannine completion" of historical
temporality, and he even saw in the battles and revolutions through
which he wrote the *Star* evidence of the advance of world
history towards its ultimate redemption.


## 4. Life and Thought after *The Star*


### 4.1 Lehrhaus




In the year after the war ended, as Rosenzweig prepared both the
*Star* and his *Hegel and the State* for publication, he
turned his attention back to some of those issues in Jewish education
that had occupied him during his exchanges with Hermann Cohen.
Encouraged by a group of Jewish intellectuals in Frankfurt to join
their efforts to establish a new institute for Jewish adult education,
Rosenzweig began to formulate a program for Jewish education for his
assimilated Jewish contemporaries, Jews who were educated and
successful in a variety of fields but who were, for the most part,
"amharatzim"--ignoramuses--when it came to
the Jewish sources. Rosenzweig traced the challenges facing Jewish life
in his time back to the emancipation, which had brought unimaginable
freedoms and opportunities to the Jews of Europe, but which had, at the
same time, severed the organic connection between Jewish life, on the
one hand, and Jewish study and practice, on the other, that had been
the signature of traditional Judaism. Those who fought against the
assimilationist tide of the 19th Century and continued to
devote themselves to Jewish law, in Rosenzweig's eyes,
transformed the living Torah into a rigid set of laws and practices
requiring zealous obedience. In his own time, Rosenzweig thus claimed,
neither the orthodox nor the liberal forms of Judaism set out a path of
Jewish study and practice that was *livable*. Rosenzweig's
educational program made the re-discovery of one's own personal
Jewish life, or the renewed commitment to one's own Jewishness
the starting point of the path of Jewish learning, and thereby sought
to ensure that whatever was learned, whatever practices were taken on,
would become part of a living Judaism.




Rosenzweig here brought certain Platonic insights regarding the
dangers of enlightenment to bear on his program of Jewish education.
His goal, he claimed, was to make it possible for contemporary
"hyphenated" Jews to travel the path of return to Judaism
without losing in the process all that had oriented them in their lives
up to that point. Such an intent led him to assert, in a 1923 open
letter to Martin Buber called "The Builders," that
observing particular laws and practices of the Torah and the Jewish
tradition in his time had to be rooted in each individual Jew's
*ability* rather than in her *will*. Only that Jew who
was *capable* of hearing the divine voice of revelation speaking
and commanding through a particular law or practice, could relate to
such a law or practice as an integral, meaningful part of her Jewish
life, rather than as an obsolete ritual demanding rigid, rote
obedience.




The institute for Jewish adult education which opened, under
Rosenzweig's leadership, in the fall of 1920, was called
"The New Jewish *Lehrhaus*," and its name both
linked it to the traditional Jewish house of study, the "Beit
Midrash" and, as "new", distanced itself from
traditional study at the same time. The *Lehrhaus* aimed to
implement, even in the form of instruction it adopted, the approach to
Jewish return Rosenzweig had formulated. It did so by doing away with
the usual distance in the classroom between teacher and students. In
the *Lehrhaus*, most teachers were intentionally *not*
masters of the subject they chose to teach; they did not come to the
classroom with answers, but saw themselves, rather, as engaged in a
questioning-in-common with their students. The job of the institute and
its leader, Rosenzweig asserted, was to ensure the "pedagogical
fruitfulness of *amhaaratzus* [i.e., ignorance]." Here the
questions that emerged naturally among thoughtful students who
recognized their own ignorance of Jewish sources, served to forge a
living and intellectually satisfying path of Jewish enlightenment.




The *Lehrhaus* attracted many of the leading, up-and-coming
Jewish intellectuals of Weimar Germany into its classrooms. In its
early years, Martin Buber, Eduard Strauss, Ernst Simon, Richard Koch,
Rudolf Hallo, and--before his death--Nehemiah Nobel, were
heavily invested in the conceptual and practical development of the
institute. Through the 1920s, the *Lehrhaus* enjoyed the
participation of such notables and future notables as Siegfried
Kracauer, S.Y Agnon, Erich Fromm, Bertha Pappenheim, Gershom Scholem,
Leo Strauss, and Leo Loewenthal.


### 4.2 *The Little Book of Healthy and Sick Understanding*




Rosenzweig's turn from philosophy to life, after completing
the *Star*, was dramatic and remarkable. Although Rosenzweig
continued to think and write after the *Star*, he engaged in
very little *philosophical* writing, traditionally
conceived--an indication of both his satisfaction with the way
the
*Star* expressed what he had to say, and the seriousness of his
commitment to turn away from philosophical writing and towards Jewish
life after having completed it.




There are two exceptions to Rosenzweig's turn away from philosophy
proper. In 1925, Rosenzweig wrote an essay, "The New
Thinking," that offered an overview of the systematic structure
and insights of the *Star* and which situated the book within
the movement of the "new thinking" to which Rosenzweig
understood himself to have contributed. Moreover, in the summer of
1921, the year the *Star* was published, Rosenzweig was
commissioned by the Frommann Publishing House to write a popular
introduction to his philosophy. He produced "The Little Book of
Healthy and Sick Human Understanding," a title which puns on the
German term for "common sense," "*gesunder
Menschenverstand*," in order to imply that philosophy
becomes sick when it deviates from the insights of common
sense. Rosenzweig ended up so dissatisfied with the book that he
refused to have it published, but Nahum Glatzer edited and published
the book some forty years after it was written, first in an English
translation and subsequently in the German original. The "little
book" is noteworthy for the story it tells about a person who
becomes paralyzed by philosophical questioning: he cannot walk for
fear there is no real "ground"; his eyes won't see for
fear all is a dream; his hands won't grasp for lack of any ultimate
reason to do so. Rosenzweig explains this paralysis as a result of an
unhealthy reaction--characteristic of philosophy--to the
human experience of wonder. In moments of awareness of ourselves, of
others, of the world, we may be struck by wonder in the midst of
life. When we allow life to unfold in time, Rosenzweig suggests, such
wonder is resolved on its own: those relations which are the source of
our wonder become part and parcel of the actual life we live. But
philosophy, Rosenzweig claims, cannot wait for wonder to resolve
itself in the course of life. Moreover, in the way that it questions
the source of its wonder--"what is
this *x*?"--philosophy ends up removing itself, and
the source of its wonder, from the flow of life. Any answers it
thereby receives for its questions no longer correspond to the very
course of actual life in which alone they would be meaningful.




Treatment for such philosophical paralysis, Rosenzweig claims, is
not to be sought in the philosophical pursuit of grounds, but rather in
an appeal to common sense. The "healthy" character of
common sense, according to Rosenzweig, derives from its inherent trust
in the flow of temporal life, and in the language we use to describe
the things and persons we encounter within it. Common sense does not
ask "what" things are, Rosenzweig suggests, not because it
lacks curiosity, but because it recognizes implicitly that all things
and persons we encounter in life are part of a course of development in
which alone they realize themselves as "what" they are. The
patient can only emerge from his paralysis, then, by turning away from
the pursuit of essential grounds and regaining that trust that allows
him to reclaim his place in the flow of everyday life.


### 4.3 Illness




In the fall of 1921, less than a year into his directorship of the
*Lehrhaus* and--eerily--months after he wrote his
account of philosophical paralysis, Rosenzweig began to notice symptoms
of a disturbance of the nervous system. In February of 1922 he was
diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Rosenzweig
continued to devote himself to directing and teaching in the
*Lehrhaus*, but already in the spring of 1922, his speech was
significantly impaired and he experienced difficulty writing. At the
end of the summer of 1922, Rudolf Hallo replaced Rosenzweig as the
institute's director, although Rosenzweig remained intimately involved
in the programmatic development of the *Lehrhaus* in the years
that followed. By the end of 1922, Rosenzweig could no longer write;
he remained able to communicate orally to his wife and to a few others
close to him--and through these to others as well--until the
spring of 1923. At that time the Rosenzweigs purchased a special
typewriting machine which allowed Rosenzweig first to type, and then
simply to indicate, the letters (and later, the first letters) of the
words he wished to communicate, by using a lever to move a disk to the
desired letter. As Rosenzweig became further incapacitated, more and
more was demanded of his wife, Edith, who would regularly guess the
word Rosenzweig wished to convey from Rosenzweig's indication of that
word's first letter. Incredibly, this procedure allowed Rosenzweig not
only to continue to communicate with others in person, but to continue
"writing" as well up until the time of his death.


### 4.4 Translation




Rosenzweig's most important intellectual and cultural
contribution during the years of his illness came in his work on
translation. In the fall of 1922, his writing and speech already
significantly impaired, Rosenzweig began drafting a book of
translations of poems written by the medieval Jewish poet and thinker,
Judah HaLevi. He finished the translations, together with commentaries
on each poem and an afterword outlining his views on the task of
translation itself, in the first week of 1923, and the book was
published as *Sixty Hymns and Poems of Judah HaLevi* in 1924
(an expanded edition, *Ninety-two Hymns and Poems of Judah
HaLevi*, appeared in 1927). In May of 1925, Martin Buber invited
Rosenzweig to collaborate with him on a new German translation of the
Bible, and Rosenzweig devoted much of the last years of his life to
this project.




In both the "Afterword" to the *Judah HaLevi*
book, and in a series of articles addressing the challenges of
translating Scripture, Rosenzweig articulated the theory of translation
that stood behind these works. According to Rosenzweig, the task of the
translator was not to transform the text being translated into a form
that would be easily accessible to those reading it in its new
language, but rather to transform the language into which the text was
being translated through this very introduction of a foreign text into
it. Rosenzweig sought to convey precisely the unfamiliar character of
the original language in his translations because he saw such
translation both as a means of rejuvenating the language into which the
foreign text was translated, and--more dramatically--as a
step towards the ultimate redemptive harmonization of all
languages.




In order to convey precisely the unfamiliar, authentic quality of
the original Biblical text, Rosenzweig and Buber made an effort to
imitate certain characteristics of the original text not often attended
to in translations seeking to convey the meaning of texts literally.
They attempted to reproduce the cadence of the original Biblical text,
and to imitate what they understood to be its "spoken"
quality, by dividing any given section they were translating into
"breath-units." They paid special attention to the roots of
the words translated, imitating the repetition of words with common
roots so regularly employed in the Biblical text, and often seeking to
convey the way such roots refer intertextually to other Biblical
passages, as well. 




The origins of Rosenzweig's thoughts on translating stretch back to
the speech-thinking he developed in the *Star*. In order to
make sense of the tremendous import with which he invests the act of
translation, it is helpful to recall two aspects of that
speech-thinking in particular. First of all, the *Star*
introduces speech as a revelatory form of relation that unites
different individual beings--divine, worldly, and
human--even as it secures them as individuals. In his writings on
translation, Rosenzweig points back to this relational quality of
speech and discovers in it the very act of translation
itself. "All speech," he writes, "is
translation." In every dialogue with another person, Rosenzweig
suggests, one engages in a miniature act of translation. Insofar as
such relations contribute to my own self-realization, this very act of
translating--of being open to and cognizant of the words of
someone "foreign" to me--becomes an integral part of
the way I realize myself. The way in which the introduction of a
foreign text into a language can enable that language to realize
itself in new ways reproduces, then, on the level of whole languages,
the manner in which the individual comes to realize herself, according
to Rosenzweig, through the act of translation involved in every
interpersonal exchange.




Furthermore, insofar as the *Star* presents speech as part
and parcel of the series of relations between beings that stretches,
for Rosenzweig, between creation and redemption, it depicts the
diversity of human languages as both rooted in the common capacity for
speech inherent in every human being from the time of her creation, and
at once as destined to find common fulfillment in a redemptive
universal language which all human beings would share. If this is the
case, then translation can be understood to revitalize or rejuvenate a
language, when introducing a foreign text into it, precisely because it
thereby awakens within that language possibilities which that language
already has dormant within it, possibilities rooted in both the common
ground and the common future that language shares with all others.
Insofar as translation can then be said to actualize, within each
language, an aspect of the ultimate universal language which all
particular languages share as their redemptive future, then translation
can be understood as playing a vital role in the world's advance
to redemption which Rosenzweig projected in the *Star*.




Here one should note the unique role Rosenzweig sees the Bible as
filling in the world's advance towards redemption. Rosenzweig
understands the Bible to be that written work which, more than any
other, has enabled human beings to hear the spoken divine word, and
thereby has directed them towards a common, redemptive purpose in the
world. According to Rosenzweig, the translation of the Bible into a new
language, or for a new generation, serves to usher the people who speak
that language, or who are part of that generation, into this
world-historical advance towards redemption. Rosenzweig may thus
understand his own act of translating the Bible as playing its own
small part in this quest for redemption, and for the harmonization of
all languages which would announce it.


### 4.5 Davos: Cohen, Cassirer, Heidegger




Rosenzweig died on December 10, 1929. Seven months before his death,
in May of 1929, Rosenzweig had written a short essay, "Transposed
Fronts," occasioned by the coincidence of two events: the recent
second issuing of Hermann Cohen's *Religion of Reason out of
the Sources of Judaism*, and the celebrated disputation held at
Davos, in March-April of that year, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin
Heidegger. Rosenzweig's essay claims that a consideration of the
Davos exchange in the light of Cohen's late work suggests,
surprisingly, that it is not Cassirer, Cohen's disciple, but
rather Heidegger, the heir to Cohen's position of prominence at
Marburg, who carries on in the direction of Cohen's most
significant contribution to the thought of the time. Rosenzweig's
late essay is important, moreover, for the way it shows Rosenzweig,
shortly before his death, reflecting on contemporary philosophical
developments and trying to situate such developments within the context
of, or in relation to, his own "new thinking".




"Transposed Fronts" repeats the controversial claim
Rosenzweig had made in his 1924 "Introduction" to Hermann
Cohen's *Jewish Writings*: the notion of
"correlation" which Cohen develops in his late work amounts
to a break from the critical Idealism which had made him the center of
Marburg neo-Kantianism, and an advance into the "new
thinking" espoused by Rosenzweig's circle. Cohen's
critical idealism, Rosenzweig had asserted in his
"Introduction," took "nature" and
"humanity" to be products *of* reason in its
theoretical and practical domains, and it thus remained exemplary of
the tendency of the "old thinking" to root all that is in a
single Absolute ground. But the notion of "correlation"
which Cohen develops, in his *Religion of Reason* in particular,
portrays reason not as generative of its objects, but rather as the
medium through which God and human being, posited as irreducibly
factual beings, step into reciprocal relation.




The irony of the Davos disputation, Rosenzweig suggests, is that
Cohen's actual disciple, Cassirer, proves himself still mired in
the "old thinking" of Cohen's early work, while
Heidegger, the apparent usurper of the Marburg stage upon which Cohen
made his name, turns out to be more true to Cohen's decisive
philosophical contribution. Indeed, Rosenzweig suggests that
Cohen's notion of "correlation" leads the way to
Heidegger's "leap into Dasein." Heidegger's
sense that the task of philosophy is to uncover for the
"finite" human being the "nothingness" wrapped
up in her freedom, rather than to posit an Absolute being as her
ground, makes him the proper heir indeed to Cohen's late
discovery of the irreducibility of the individual being standing in
correlation with the divine. It thereby stamps Heidegger's
thought as kin to the very "new thinking" whose crowning
representative Rosenzweig himself was.