## 1. Overview



As with Franz Rosenzweig (who goes to great length in *The Star of
Redemption* and *Understanding the Sick and the Healthy* to
demonstrate that God, man and world underpin three fundamentally
different and irreducible foundations of explanation which have shaped
our history), Rosenstock-Huessy was convinced that humanism's attempt
to free itself from all gods (making humanity and/or nature the ground
of reality) was based upon a failure to grasp more ancient insights
into the nature of the real and the relationship between reality,
language and history. To this important extent, again like Rosenzweig,
he argued that language was more fundamental than either philosophy or
religion and philosophy's attempt to free itself from and reduce
religion to a deficient kind of philosophy was based upon its failure
to take language, and hence reality, sufficiently seriously. As he
would say in a letter to Cynthia Harris: 'Not religion but
language forces man to distinguish between this world and the real
world, the world as we know it and the genuine, or better known world.
The crux of theology is a crux of language, and all our rationalists
are not protesting against religion but against speech' (1943,
162).



But unlike Karl Barth or Paul Tillich, for example, who saw themselves
as fusing philosophy and theology, Rosenstock-Huessy refused to see
himself primarily as a philosopher or theologian--though when the
term philosopher was qualified by the preceding 'social',
he was more willing to accept that
 designation.[2]
 His criticisms of theology and philosophy were numerous, varied in
content and highly nuanced--and hence unable to receive full
treatment here. Generally, though, he thought both were, what he
called, 'second order activities', or products of the
reflective mind at 'play'. Philosophical and theological
speech trailed behind and were dependent upon the more urgent and
creative acts of 'founding', that is, those acts which
emerge out of life's exigencies, which are epoch making
'events' and which are at the source of human institutions
and new forms of life, and which cannot be separated from the
vocabulary, or, more specifically, the shared names and foci of
orientation which connect us across space and over
 time.[3]
 In the most philosophical of all his works, the first volume of his
*Soziologie*, when contrasting the respective limits of
theology with philosophy, he says that theology is guilty of reducing
us to sinners and angels and thus not adequately accounting for our
being flesh and blood, while philosophers tend to reduce us to objects
and things in the dead space of the universe and 'to mirror the
objective world in their subjective world' (1956, 286).
'Religion,' he says in that same section, 'is unjust
against nature and the human spirit (*Geist*)'; while
philosophy is blind to 'the time-endowing forces'
('*die zeitstiftenden
 Gewalten*').[4]




Against philosophers and theologians, he saw his task as restoring our
attunement to the potencies embedded in our speech and institutions so
that we could draw upon the power of past times in order to strengthen
our openness to the promise of the future in the present. To this end,
while his corpus cuts across numerous disciplines, his major
systematic work, one rewritten throughout the course of his life, was
his two part Sociology  *Im Kreuz der Wirchlichkeit* (In the
Cross of Reality)--the first volume of which is to appear with
Transaction in 2017: volume one originally appeared (to use the
English title) in 1925 as *The Forces of Community*, and then
reworked as  *The Hegemony of Spaces*; volume two being *The
Full Count of the Times*. His social philosophy is concerned with
how, when a world implodes on or devours them--through what he
terms the four social diseases of anarchy, decadence, revolution and
war (1970a, 11-16)--people can escape the tyranny of forces
that have come to rule the space in which they dwell by founding a new
time which will then open up other spatial possibilities. For him,
then, the key to human freedom is the capacity both to found the new
and draw upon the powers encapsulated in bodies of time past which
enable us to live in a present in which we feel blessed by the future.
Rosenstock-Huessy repeatedly argues that philosophy generally is
particularly weak in assisting us with this task and it is ultimately
to sociology that Rosenstock-Huessy turned as 'the way to win
again our freedom over spaces and through times' (2009,1, 22).
Hence against the Cartesian cogito, which he saw as providing the
underpinning formulation of the philosophy of modernity,
Rosenstock-Huessy retorts with the much more archaic *Respondeo
etsi mutabor*--'I respond although I will be
changed' (1938, 817-830; 1970b, 17-33). In other
words, we are fundamentally responsive creatures--and our
creations are shaped by our responses either to the weight and push of
the past, the burdens or joys of the present or the pull and call of
the future. Like Vico, whom Rosenstock-Huessy greatly admired, he
believes we are inescapably rooted in history, even though our great
revolutions attempt to rip us out of it, in order to begin anew and
build a much better world, thereby opening up new paths of
 self-hood.[5]




Philosophy's major deficiency, for Rosenstock-Huessy, is that it is
not sufficiently sensitive to time, speech or history. To a large
extent this is because logic itself is timeless. As he says in
'The Terms of the Creed', 'logic is that mode of
spiritual life in which the divinity of timing is omitted'.
Logic transports us out of time and offers the mind a stable, but
unreal space. For Rosenstock-Huessy, this search for a stable space is
reflected in recurrent philosophical elements which privilege the
implacability of space (or a particular space) over the ceaselessness
of time. Modern philosophy's division of things into subject and
object (a spatial configuration) is a case in point, but it goes back
to the ancients whose building blocks such as topics (from
*topos* place), 'categories' (from *kata* =
'down to' and *agora* = 'the public
assembly' i.e. declaiming in the assembly), reason's
sphericality, and ideas (the very term idea, *eidein* =
'to see', referring to something visible to the mind's
eye) all suggest a commitment to (the mental) space's primacy. The
same point is made somewhat more elaborately in the first volume of
the *In the Cross of Reality* (2009, 1,307 -311) where he
argues that dialectical thought is triadic, but anything that really
happens and makes itself manifest, i.e. appears (*erscheint*),
is at least
 quadrilateral.[6]
 It must be something in space and time, and hence conform to the
inner/outerness or subjective/objective matrix of space, as well as
the trajective and prejective-ness of time. He called this four-fold
matrix the cross of reality and it is applied repeatedly throughout
his works.



While Rosenstock-Huessy provided a range of arguments against
philosophers wanting to make more of reason and less of language, time
and history than their due, and while he preferred to classify himself
as a sociologist, he can also be seen as a social philosopher who
argued for the philosophical necessity of the fusion of history,
linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and religion. Franz Rosenzweig
certainly saw Rosenstock-Huessy in this light, and he once said to
him: 'You have never...been to me anything other than a
"philosopher"'(1969,
 82).[7]
 In this respect he belongs to that long line of critics of philosophy
that range from ancients to moderns and comic poets to religious
thinkers--from Aristophanes to Lucian, to Rabelais, from Tatian,
to Tertullian to Luther, and Pascal to Marx and Nietzsche. All these
critics have provided criticisms of philosophy that have ended up, in
different ways, and at different times, transforming the direction and
content of philosophy.


## 2. Life and Work



Eugen Rosenstock was born in 1888. His parents were assimilated (i.e.
non religious) German Jews. His mother and father, a banker,
encouraged academic pursuits in their children. At school his classes
were in Latin, and from a young age he devoted himself to history and
linguistics. His passion for learning languages extended to teaching
himself Egyptian hieroglyphics while a teenager. He is probably one of
the very few social philosophers who (apart from his fluency in
several modern European languages) not only read the biblical writers,
ancient philosophers, poets, orators and Church fathers in their
original languages, but was equally at home deciphering the walls of
an Egyptian temple. This schooling formed the basis of an approach to
reality which always considered the different underlying
imperatives--divine and human--that fused a group or led to
its dissolution. It also provided him with what he insisted was a
guiding methodological principle in his life: to make no historical
argument that was not based upon his own consultation of the original
source material.



He joined the Protestant church at 17. By his own account, this was
not due to any great existential anxiety, but to having reached the
conclusion at a very young age that what was stated in the Nicene
Creed was manifestly obvious (1970b, 197). Rosenstock-Huessy insisted
that Christianity was not a religion of transcendence and was not to
be confused with Platonism of any sort, but was about building the
ages or times to come in this world. It was first and foremost a
discovery about the process of incarnation and the way to overcome
social death. Nor for him was the Church, as it was, for example, for
Karl Barth or Emil Brunner, for the great part a massive deviation
from the gospel. Rather, not only in spite of but, to a significant
extent, because of its flaws, it was the story of the incarnation of
the spirit and the recreation of human nature into a different body,
the body of Christ. In other words, the task of the Church was that of
making man like God, what the Church fathers in the Athanasian creed
had called 'anthropurgy' (1946, 108). Such core Christian
terms as 'last judgment' or 'redemption',
then, had nothing to do with the individual surviving after death in a
place called heaven or hell (an idea he thought owed more to Plato
than Jesus or Paul). Resurrection meant the resuscitation of
historically spent forms of life so that their powers could be tapped
for generations to come; the last judgment refers to the decision
either to 'resurrect' a dead form of life, or let it die.
Thus in his 'Faculty Address on The Potential Christians of the
Future':



> 
> And I know of the Last Judgment as a reality because I have seen Last
> Judgments passed on Proust's France, on Rasputin's Russia, on Wilhelm
> II's Germany, President Harding's America. Similarly I believe in
> resurrection of the body because I see resurrections of bodies, all
> through history, on earth. Any genuine soul will be incarnated time
> and again (1941, 11-12).
> 



Examples of incarnations he mentions, beside Christ himself in the
Church, are St. Francis in the Franciscan order and all its
achievements, Leonardo da Vinci by succeeding generations of
engineers, Sigmund Freud in the psychiatric movement, Marx in the
workers' movement, and so on (1956, 303-309).



Rosenstock-Huessy studied jurisprudence and received his doctorate
(for *Herzogsgewalt und Friedensschutz*) from the University of
Heidelberg at the age of 21, from which time he went on to teach at
the university. He was also to receive a second doctorate in 1923 in
History from the same university, for his *Konigshaus und
Stamme in Deutschland zwischen 911 und 1250*, a book he had
published in 1914. His teachers included Rudolf Sohm and Otto Gierke,
both key figures in the historical school of law. While he was not a
disciple of either, throughout his life he would never cease writing
on the growth and decay of socio-political formations and what forced
people to hate one form of life and seek to found another.



Amongst his students was Franz Rosenzweig. In 1913 Rosenstock-Huessy
played a pivotal role in convincing Rosenzweig that the 'living
God' was not the God of metaphysics who, thankfully, had been
pronounced dead by Nietzsche, but referred to a power more
'meaningful' and 'truthful' than could be
accounted for by the limited powers of philosophy. By this he was not
referring to any mystical powers, but the full gamut of creative and
redemptive powers that are created and revealed throughout the human
story. In this respect he played an important role in convincing
Rosenzweig that truth was not so much a property of things or states
of affairs captured by the reflecting mind, but a state of fecundity
produced by the act appropriate for the time in which it was
performed. If Rosenstock-Huessy can be said to have an epistemology
which can be reproduced in one sentence, it is Goethe's 'What is
fruitful, that alone is true', which is but a recasting of the
biblical 'by their fruits you shall know them' (1968,
11).



In 1914, he met and married Margrit Huessy whom he loved dearly. They
had a son, Hans, and they remained married until her death in 1958. He
was then joined by Freya von Moltke, who was to be his companion until
his death in 1973. Freya von Moltke was the widow of his former
student, Helmuth von Moltke, a key member of the Kreisau circle who
was executed by Hitler near the conclusion of World War 2.



During the Great War, Rosenstock-Huessy served as a captain in the
German army where he fought on the Western front. In 1916 he began an
intense correspondence with Rosenzweig (now published in English as
*Judaism Despite Christianity*) who by that time had decided
not to follow Rosenstock-Huessy and his cousins, the Ehrenbergs, into
Christianity, but to fully embrace the Jewish faith into which he had
been born. That correspondence has remained a major post-Nietzschean
Christian/Jewish dialogue. While in that correspondence
Rosenstock-Huessy was uncompromising in his insistence that Judaism
was a spent historical force, he continued to reflect upon
Rosenzweig's decision to remain a Jew throughout his life. He came to
the opinion that Rosenzweig had convincingly demonstrated the eternal
role of Judaism in the human story.



A year after this exchange began Rosenzweig met and fell in love with
Rosenstock-Huessy's wife, Margrit or Gritli. Rosenstock-Huessy
accepted, though not without suffering (Stahmer, 2006), the love that
had developed between his best friend and his wife, and years later he
would confide to his friend and devotee Georg Muller that Margrit
had been Rosenzweig's muse throughout the writing of *The Star of
Redemption*, and, more precisely, that Rosenzweig's understanding
of revelation, which plays such a decisive role in that same work,
came directly out of his experience of his love for Gritli. This has
been borne out in the relatively recent publication of Rosenzweig's
letters to Gritli (*Briefe an Gritli*) which has been the
biggest event in Rosenzweig scholarship since Edith Rosenzweig's
edition of his *Briefe* in
 1935.[8]




Rosenstock-Huessy had entered the Great War as a Christian
Nationalist. By the War's end he was convinced that Germany's
salvation required the dropping of all nationalist
allegiances--its failure to do so, he predicted, would only throw
it back again into further war. He also emerged from the War with an
idea (first outlined in book-form in *Die Hochzeit des Kriegs und
der Revolution*) that he would develop in *Out of
Revolution* and *Die Europaischen Revolutionen und der
Charakter der Nationen*--that the Great War was the
culmination of a millennium of revolutions and that it was these very
catastrophes which provided the genesis of new and more powerful
institutional bulwarks for what would become the fulfillment of the
kingdom promised to the Jews and later to the human race through
Christianity.



A core element of Rosenstock-Huessy's social philosophy, which emerged
directly from his experience of the War and his subsequent
'vision' of the meaning of a thousand years of European
wars and revolutions and political legacies, was that suffering was a
fundamental component of human learning. For the most part, and
particularly socially, truth was something imprinted on us by pain and
trauma rather than something merely learnt by candlelight. As he said
bluntly in one public lecture: 'suffering is the only source of
wisdom, and not my brain here ' (1967, Microfilm 656, Reel 18).
He develops this idea in 'The Secret of the University' in
a manner which suggests we should be much more attentive to the
catastrophic conditions under which any new philosophy emerges if we
wish to see it in its proper light-- philosophy being but one
response to a social catastrophe which requires a great redirection of
energies for either society's survival or its complete overthrow and
the establishment of a new type.



> 
> No philosopher ever sat down as if in a classroom to answer the
> questions of his predecessor. To consider the history of philosophy in
> this way is insanity. Descartes grew out of the Thirty Years War. He
> has remained its eternal Privat-dozent. Kant became a philosopher
> after the Seven Years War, Schopenhauer came to meditation on the
> battlefields of Napoleon. The Franco-Prussian War forced Friedrich
> Nietzsche out of mere philology (1950, Item 427, Reel 8).
> 



After the War Rosenstock-Huessy worked in Daimler Benz as an editor of
a worker's magazine before he returned to the academic life. The
desire to bridge the divide between education and the world remained a
constant thread of Rosenstock-Huessy's life, including his being a
founding member of institutions such as the Academy of Labor in
Frankfurt (1921) and the German Academy for Volk Research and Adult
Education (1926) and being vice chairman of the World Association of
Adult Education (1928-1932). He was also a pioneer of the German
work service movement in Germany, which was designed to engage
students with the rest of the community (a movement which was later to
be politicized and corrupted by the Nazis), and, after emigrating to
the United States, the establishment of Camp William James in Vermont
(which was undertaken as part of Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian
Conservation Corps). The importance of the fusion of education with
work, for Rosenstock-Huessy, was based on his fundamental belief that
humanity would only free itself from the perils of its past through
creative collective acts, including reinvigorating the institutions
which had themselves emerged as responses to, and ways out of,
catastrophes, as well as the establishment of new institutions
appropriate for the times.



With Hitler's coming to power in 1933, Rosenstock-Huessy, his wife and
son left Germany. The emigre political scientist Carl
Friedrich helped him get work at Harvard, but it was not a satisfying
experience for him or many of his colleagues. He was forced to leave
Harvard because he insisted that 'God' was a living
presence in history. Within 'speech thinking', a core
axiom is that a name which generates reality (as 'God'
does through invocation, supplication, devotion and the like) is real
(more real, he insisted, than abstractions such as mind or body). At
Harvard there was the collision of two paradigms and their respective
vocabularies: Rosenstock-Huessy's 'speech or
dialogical-thinking' with its anti-naturalism (ironically, in
that environment, a voice of one) versus the naturalistically based
behaviorism that then predominated. A good example of the differing
perspectives can be seen in Crane Brinton's scathing comments on
*Out of Revolution* (1938) and Rosenstock-Huessy's withering
retort in his review of Brinton's *The Anatomy of Revolution*
(1939).



Rosenstock-Huessy then started teaching social philosophy at Dartmouth
where he remained for the rest of his academic career. While the stars
of former friends and associates, such as Buber and Tillich, waxed in
the United States, he was largely unknown and unlistened to, except
for some devoted undergraduates who taped his undergraduate lectures
for posterity. He had not been completely forgotten in Germany, where
his post-war lectures were well attended and his books reviewed in
newspapers. While his name still crops up from time to time in
European historical or sociological works (his *Die Europaischen
Revolutionen* is something of a German minor classic in European
Studies), Rosenstock-Huessy's ideas have not received a large
audience. In part, at least, this has to do with his failure to
conform to conventional academic categories of classification and
scholarly protocols and disciplinary requirements, in particular the
theological/secular divide. In addition, there was almost no
prevailing mood into which Rosenstock-Huessy's thought seemed to tap:
neither the aesthetic/literary mood of modernism (in general
Rosenstock-Huessy thought art was play--and the period which
spanned two world wars was not a time in which play would help stave
off the next catastrophe); nor the subsequent radical student mood
which Marxian-based social theories attended to (Rosenstock-Huessy
thought neo-Marxists of all kinds to be a hundred years out of date);
nor the psychoanalytic movement that derived from Freud or Jung (he
deeply mistrusted psychiatry, believing it placed too much weight upon
the ego and did not adequately grasp the collective socio-historical
formations which shape it); nor phenomenology (whose dependence upon
lived experience was closer in spirit to his own thought, but,
nevertheless, its purview remained insufficiently dialogical and
insufficiently institutional for him to see much value in it). He was
also unforgiving of Heidegger (as he was of Carl Schmitt whom, before
Hitler's rise to power, he had once been on cordial terms with) and in
the *Soziologie*, he recounts, with contempt, a story in which
Elfride Heidegger talks of her husband and her having to weigh up
whether they would back the Marxists or the Nazis (2009, 2, 57). The
proliferation of work in linguistics, which might have seemed to have
provided him with natural allies, did not help his case because he was
deeply opposed to what he thought was the prevailing atomistic and
unduly scientistic approach to the study of language. Mauthner and
Saussure, for example, he thought were so wrong they barely warranted
engaging with. And someone like C.S. Peirce, whose pragmaticism has
certain affinities with Rosenstock-Huessy's understanding of truth,
also differs from Rosenstock-Huessy in his preoccupation with
'reasonable' and 'objective statements' as the
road to truth. He saw himself more in the organicist tradition of
Humboldt and was glad to find in R.A. Wilson's *The Miraculous
Birth of Language* a contemporary linguist who had reached some
similar conclusions to his concerning language's role and character in
our social evolution.



This lack of academic 'fit' was a fact not lost on him and
in the final paragraph of his *Out of Revolution* he wrote,
with an eye as much to his Harvard experience as to his awareness of
how he was being read:



> 
> I have survived decades of study and teaching in scholastic and
> academic sciences. Every one of their venerable scholars mistook me
> for their intellectual type which he most despised. The atheist wanted
> me to disappear into Divinity, the theologians into sociology, the
> sociologists into history, the historians into journalism, the
> journalists into metaphysics, the philosophers into law,
> and--need I say it?--the lawyers into hell, which as a
> member of our present world I have never left. For nobody leaves hell
> all by himself without going mad (1938, 758).
> 



By the time Rosenstock-Huessy died in 1973 he had left behind a huge
collection of written work including his two volume
*Soziologie* (the second volume of which is an attempt at
universal history), the works on revolution, a collection of essays
and small books gathered in a two volume work on language, *Die
Sprache des Menschengeschlechts*, and a three volume work on
church history (with Joseph Wittig), *Das Alter der
 Kirche*,[9]
 to various writings on grammar, biblical interpretation, Egyptology,
Medieval history, industrial law and the organization of the work
place.



A few years before he died, a former student, Clinton Gardner, had
formed Argo Press, to keep his work alive. A *Gesellschaft* had
been started in Germany which produced a journal/newsletter,
*Stimmstein*, devoted to his work, influence, and related
issues. In 1972 four families in Holland set up
'Rosenstock-Huessy House' in Haarlem to put
Rosenstock-Huessy's ideas concerning adult education and voluntary
service into practice through providing accommodation for people in
crisis. A DVD edition of his collected works has been created, thanks
to the labours of Lise van der Molen and the efforts and donations of
the Rosenstock-Huessy Fund. W.H. Auden first heard of
Rosenstock-Huessy in 1940 from a friend and wrote a preface to a
collection of his writings (published by Argo in 1970 under the
salient title *I am an Impure Thinker*). After
Rosenstock-Huessy's death, Auden wrote a valedictory poem,
'Aubade', which was published in *The Atlantic
Monthly*.


## 3. Speech, Time, History



In *Ja und Nein*, a work written a little over four years
before his death, Rosenstock-Huessy thanked Georg Muller for
having summed up seven decades of thought in the three words: speech,
time, history. 'I seem' he says 'to have pursued the
daily life of peoples and their members as reflections of this
trinity. I have looked at the speech of individuals and nations, the
times of lovers and haters, the history of empires, the church and
society as the reflections of the divine trinity' (1968, 9).
These three terms not only sum up the orientation of
Rosenstock-Huessy's life work, they also provide the key to
understanding where he thinks philosophy has gone wrong.



For Rosenstock-Huessy, speech's significance was not to describe a
litany of factual statements about the world of the sort 'it is
raining'--see "*Es Regnet oder die Sprache steht
auf dem Kopf*" in *Die Sprache des
Menschengeschlects*). Nor is it, as Saussure held, simply a means
of *A* expressing his or her intention to *B*. Moreover,
Rosenstock-Huessy's interest in speech is restricted to what he calls,
in *The Origins of Speech*, 'authentic speech'.
This is not the kind of speech which has its parallels in the animal
kingdom. Authentic speech is the foundation and perpetuation of
constitutions and institutions--social acts that reach across
generations and establish patterns of social complexity which show us
the difference in our self- and world-making and that of animals.



> 
> We exist in a social reality which has been made by others and which
> we make for others. And thus speech gives us a plasticity which
> separates us from other animals and which enables us to work with time
> and space like no other species familiar to us. Speech is the way that
> we reorganize the universe (1970a, 19).
> 



> 
> No language is communication with others only, it is communication
> with the universe. We try by speaking to communicate our experience of
> the universe to our fellow men; by listening, reading, learning, we
> try to get hold of their experience of the universe. To speak means to
> reenact cosmic processes so that these processes may reach others. In
> every sentence, man acts within the cosmos and establishes a social
> relation for the sake of saving the cosmos from wasting acts in vain.
> Man economizes the cosmic processes by making them available to all
> other men. Man, by speech, establishes the solidarity of all men for
> the acceptance of our universe (1970a, 122-123).
> 



That solidarity is ultimately historical, for it is only by being able
to draw upon the powers of the past and future that the human being
can survive the crises of their present. Thus speech and history form
an indissoluble connection. As he says, 'Language is the vehicle
on which history invades the animal life of man. And the study of
history and the study of language are one and the same study'
(1943, 173).



Speech, then, is a responsive and creative act in which we discover
things about ourselves, each other, and the world itself which we
would never have chanced upon had we not the power to reframe the
universe through speech--speech accounts for our unpredictable
nature. And a large part of Rosenstock-Huessy's objection to
naturalism is that either it ignores speech completely and reduces us
to more basic animal or physical processes, or, if it does take
account of speech, it places speech on the same continuum as animal
cries and calls.



The social character of speech also means that it is not only a matter
of what is being said when we speak to one another, but also who is
talking to whom--what a parent says to a child, a president to
his or her people, what friends say to one another. As he writes in
*Ja und Nein*:



> 
> In speech it is not a matter of what I think about myself, or even
> just what I say, rather it's a matter of how we address each other
> reciprocally. We don't speak, as the semanticists declare, to
> understand something. We speak, so that each understands the other
> through the manner that we address him and we ourselves through the
> way he address us. Each man proceeds thus: A false address can
> irritate someone for the entire day. Because speech comes into the
> world in order to ensure that your representation of me, and mine of
> you, is situated in the right places in the cosmos (1968, 23).
> 



This one example shows how Rosenstock-Huessy differs from Saussurian
linguistics which break up the world into the units of language
irrespective of how language circulates socially. It also shows how
far removed Rosenstock-Huessy is from the naturalistic based
philosophical models which see the world as an object to be
understood. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the truth of the world we
participate in--which includes the panoply of names and concepts
and theories which we ascribe to nature--could never have been
'noticed' by a disinterested scientific spectator some
three thousand years ago because it wasn't there yet. It takes time
for us and our truths to become created and revealed to us and speech
is the power of disclosing ourselves to each other, and ourselves, in
part through our respective roles which enable us to preside over a
particular domain of 'powers'. Speech takes and makes
time. In an important sense, for Rosenstock-Huessy, speech is
revelation which is, in turn, orientation (which is also a process of
mutual development):



> 
> The double character of revelation consists in the way in which it
> allocates to the speaker as much as to the people whom the speaker
> sees before him, a new and at the same time a determined
> place...revelation is orientation. Orientation is a correlation
> between at least two new poles; one may call it a
> 'correspondence', because this relationship between two
> letter writers is today more likely to be understood than between two
> speakers. In a correspondence two speakers respond in such a manner
> that the longer it continues the more each correspondent becomes
> polarized in his own character (1968, 21).
> 



In speech then we really make each other and hence we are literally,
for Rosenstock-Huessy, the word made flesh. The corollary of this is
that 'we ourselves become structured by grammar'. He puts
it more forcefully when he writes 'most men are shards of broken
grammar' (1968, 37 and 43), and he went so far as to hold that
grammar is the key to us as social organisms. In keeping with this, he
proposed a re-working of the social sciences on the basis of a
grammatical revolution. Indeed, he believes that as things are now,
the social sciences rest on a grammar that is akin to Ptolemaic
astronomy. (See '*Die kopernikanische Wendung der
Grammatik*' in *Die Sprache des
Menschengeschlechts*.)



Very briefly, he argues that the intellectual life of nations, and the
professions which give us social orientation, are responses to the
universe seeking its own enhancement through the distribution of tasks
and activities which have a grammatical underpinning. Thus, deploying
the quadrilateral matrix necessary for correctly observing any social
reality, he argues that our experiences will be accumulated and
devolved through these spatial/temporal grammatical modules so
that:



> 
> the subjunctive of grammar, in the life of a great nation, is
> represented by music, by poetry, by all the arts. The equations of our
> calculating logic are spread out in all the sciences and techniques.
> The trajective, linking us with the living past, lives in us through
> all the traditions. The prejective is represented by prophecy, ethics,
> programmatic movements (1970a, 187).
> 



Accordingly, the professions (lawyers, preachers, artists and
scientists) are grammatical necessities, each profession accentuating
an aspect of reality whose grammatical mode is the trajective,
prejective, subjective and objective respectively. For
Rosenstock-Huessy, a society's survival and development depends very
much on its ability to cope adequately with its inner and outer
spatial and trajective and prejective temporal potencies. We need to
work with all these potencies and the great danger of philosophy is
that it elevates its own importance--and the procedures and
grammatical elements which constitute it--at the expense of other
potencies which are only disclosed and developed through other
grammatical elements and procedures. In this respect,
Rosenstock-Huessy sees that when philosophy tries to dominate society
it does so at the expense of other powers of society and hence
ultimately is pernicious. Its main deficiency lies in its
under-appreciation of the fecundity and importance of the polyform
nature of speech.



Rosenstock-Huessy complains that linguistics has followed philosophy
in elevating the mind above speech, as if the mind itself is the real
thinker and speech simply a rather poor means to get from *a*
to *b*. ('Fritz Mauthner wrote 6000 pages and proved in
one and a half million words that all words lie' (1962, Vol. 1,
554)). Such approaches to speech all follow what he calls 'the
abstract madness of the school grammar', which makes the mistake
of explaining 'the last grammatical creation, the declarative
sentence "these are", as the beginning of speech.'
In fact, he says, a declarative sentence is:



> 
> only a conclusion, behind which it has to be started again from the
> beginning. From the declarative sentence nothing ensues for the
> future. That's why no knowledge of nature helps us to answer the
> question how we should live. The bible with its 'let there be
> light' and 'there was light' has the experiential
> demonstrable grammar. Imperative (prejective), conjunctive or optative
> (subjective), preterite or perfect (trajective), neutral indicative
> (objective) are grammatical necessities arising out of times and
> spaces. A higher scientific grammar can exist because from now we can
> see the modes, the tenses, persons in a completely different way to
> the Alexandrians (1968, 32).
> 



For Rosenstock-Huessy, the Alexandrian grammar table, which was
originally developed in the 4th century BC as part of
larger pedagogical architectonic of the sciences and which is still
the standard manner of grammar instruction, has been one of the great
hidden obstacles to understanding real or speech thinking. His claim
is that the Alexandrian architectonic carries with it a specific
orientation to ourselves and reality whose core elements mistakenly
become solidified and privileged and passed on as if reality itself
were essentially--always and everywhere--composed of its
elements. In particular it privileges the disinterested, impersonal,
reflective mode, which breaks up the world into subject and predicate,
subject and object. This orientation also brings everything under the
rule of the indicative mood of the declarative sentence.



It is this emphasis upon the declarative sentence, which provides the
answer to 'what is?', that lies behind the repeated
accusation he makes against philosophy--that it has
instrumentalized speech. As Rosenstock-Huessy says in 'The Race
of Thinkers or the Knacker's Yard of Faith' (1962, Vol. 2, 612):
'The scandalous [and terrific and unheard] claims of the
thinkers consist in this: that first they think, and only after that
do they mis-advisedly or treacherously disclose what they think to us
with the help of speech as their
 tool.'[10]




Of course, philosophy from its inception appealed to the possibility
of judging the world. Thus the importance to it of the subjunctive or
optative mood. As he wrote in his early work  *An Applied Science
(or Know How) of the Soul*:



> 
> Things controlled by the indicative are calmly dismissed into the
> world. The indicative describes and tells about things which are
> resting, which have been, which are finished or at hand... Being
> and existence are indeed the epitome of the indicative in all its
> varieties, because it 'allows' something to be said about
> the world...The philosophy which deifies man is called Idealism
> since it thrives on freedom of the will. Freedom, however, is the most
> pithy expression for the subjunctive which expresses everything coming
> to be. Freedom is the most pithy expression for not wanting to obey
> yet the laws of existence, for wishing to think of oneself not as part
> of the world but as divinely inspired, as an Idealist (1924, 14).
> 



Also:



> 
> Philosophy in which the intellect lets everything revolve around the
> 'I' starts with the assumption of eternal freedom. Natural
> science, emphatically revolving around the 'it', starts
> with the principles of law (1924, 42).
> 



Kant's distinction between theoretical and practical reason
exemplifies how this move from indicative to subjunctive is
attempted--as the categorical imperative first requires
acknowledging that the will (the base of the subjunctive) is only free
when it is not in violation of the laws potentially knowable by
theoretical reason (the indicative). Thus, when Kant says that he
wishes to create a rational faith by defining the limits of
experience, just as when he says that 'ought' implies
'can', he is really showing, from Rosenstock-Huessy's
perspective, that the entire metaphysical edifice is derived from a
lexical ordering of grammar.



The architecture of the Alexandrian grammar was itself a result of the
central role that it had ascribed to philosophy in the sciences so its
concurrence with philosophy in grammatical priorities should come as
no surprise. To a large extent it does this because it has already
made some fundamental linguistic commitments which Rosenstock-Huessy
thinks have plagued philosophy from its very inception and whose span
can be witnessed from Parmenides to Heidegger, and which he also sees
as repeatedly dragging philosophy and its followers into phantasmic
pursuits. In the first instance, and what he holds responsible for
philosophy's break from what he calls its 'aboriginal
humanity', is its grammatical preference for pronominals rather
than names (1970b, 77-90).



Rosenstock-Huessy argues that it is not only from the moment of birth
that one is inducted via names--the names of one's parents, their
family, one's birthplace, one's own name-- but our life is a
continuous accrual of names as each person is shaped by his or her
experiences, thus developing new qualities or characteristics. Through
the course of a life each of us is enmeshed in an expanding cluster of
titles that reflect one's responses to the callings and imperatives of
one's parents, friends, teachers, spouse and children, colleagues,
government, society and, far from being least, one's enemies. Naming
is orientating. As he says in *Ja und Nein*:



> 
> In every healthy society, one is inducted and introduced
> (*vorgestellt*), because life continues as a chain of people
> and things who have been introduced/ represented
> (*Vorgestellten*). That's how one enters history, in so far as
> one asks after my name and then one acclaims the other...The
> human world does not consist of 'will and representation'
> but as love and introduction/representation (1968, p.
>  22).[11]
> 



Names, then, refer to dynamic processes that move over time. On the
other hand pronominals transport us beyond those processes to
something more stable; they take us out of the specific relationship
and have us think about relationships in a more general manner. As
with Schelling's distinction between positive and negative philosophy
and the limits of the later, Rosenstock-Huessy is highly suspicious of
abstractions and he believes that philosophers have tended to put too
much faith in them, believing that they provide the magic key for
bringing order into the disorder of the world. The accusation by
Socrates that his interlocutors do not have a specific virtue unless
they can provide a logically tight definition for 'what (the
specific) virtue is', and the Parmenidian formulation that
'being is' are, for Rosenstock-Huessy, but variants of
this mistaken grammatical faith.



For Rosenstock-Huessy, the problem with the kind of case Plato makes
in favor of essences and against names in the *Cratylus* (where
he provides a satire on the sophists' use of etymology) is that the
essence is purchased at the expense of the many processes which names
rightly recognize as many. Of course Plato insists that the one and
the many must be brought into the union of knowledge's correct
definition. But Rosenstock-Huessy argues that names are primarily an
historical founding, and hence not a logical matter. Rosenstock-Huessy
emphasized this point in his *Lectures on Greek Philosophy*
when he contrasted Book 2 of the *Iliad*, where Homer recalls
the ships and the names of the places and commanders of the different
armies of the Greeks, with Plato. 'Homer's heart,' he
says, 'is in following the first impressions also in the
physical, in the real life...He's not systematic. He's
anti-philosophical...Because a philosopher must have all his
material gathered before he can subdivide it...Therefore it's
always a second impression, it's an afterthought.' Whereas the
philosopher is suspicious of the same name that may be concealing
different essences, Homer is not interested if two people have the
same name in trying to establish a common essence, but in this naming
of the ships 'poetry has to keep the individual names of every
one city here' (1956b, Oct 18).



Unlike a pronoun, a specific name locates, sums up, emphasizes an
event that has been or will become; it is done to orientate (even if,
as in a lie, to veil). As Rosenstock-Huessy says:



> 
> 
> The political power of names makes people circulate. Names signify our
> division of labor. They make room for a man and a thing. The
> 'throne', the 'hustings', our
> 'tongue' as Greeks, the 'eye of justice', the
> 'thunder of Zeus', those were all names whose invocation
> made people move out or in...
> 
> 
> 
> Names make no sense unless they stand in mutual relation. Mother is
> not mother unless she may call, under the law, somebody the father.
> Brother is brother to a sister. And unless he calls her sister and she
> calls him brother, the name is worthless. The general and the
> sergeant, the master and the apprentice, the army and the navy make
> room for each other, in the wonderful whole of names. All names belong
> to this *holon*, to society. No name is good without the
> others. The Pan of the universe drives people panicky, that is they
> lose speech. The *holon* of the city gives everybody a name in
> such a manner that everybody else now can be named by him, too (1970b,
> 83-84).
> 
> 
> 



On the other hand, a pronoun is a way of not being precise about such
things as location, emergence, faith, hope, or love:



> 
> 
> Pronouns are a compromise between the real name of a person or a thing
> and the pointing finger while such person or thing is within the reach
> of our sense perception. To call a spade a spade is one thing; to
> point to the spade while it lies before us, which simply requires the
> gesture and a 'there!', is a totally different act. One is
> the act of naming, the other is an attempt to reduce naming to its
> informal minimum (1970b, 82).
> 
> 
> 



For Rosenstock-Huessy the problem of names is also a key component in
the dispute between Heraclitus' flux and Parmenides' sphere of being.
Like Nietzsche, he saw that the two philosophies represent the choice
between one path generally not taken by philosophers (Heraclitus')
which would enable us to enter more deeply into the tensions and
struggles of life, and another (the road more traveled of Parmenides)
which stabilizes and logicizes and hence simplifies the abstract
world, thus making it of very limited real worth for orientating us in
life. In what he calls a 'conjuration', a letter he
composes from Heraclitus to Parmenides, he has Heraclitus say to
Parmenides: '"Being" is the scalp of the divine acts
and the political names. This scalp hangs dangling on your belt. To
hell with your "pronoun", to hell with your
"pro-verb" "being". Or we shall all find
ourselves in hell' (1970b, 90).



In *Ja und Nein* he makes the point that what is done with
nouns is also done with verbs, most notably in the case of philosophy
with the verb *sein* (to be)/ noun *Das Sein* which is
then rendered as being, which he sees as simply the dead husk or the
smoke of what once had life.



> 
> Children say 'you', 'I', 'there',
> 'here'... Philosophers though love one pronoun above
> all others: the little word 'being'. Being involves the
> loss of seeing and hearing (*Sein. Da vergehen ihm Horen und
> Sehen*). He wants to ground being. 'Being'
> ('*Das Sein*') along with the forms am, are, is, is
> a pro-verb in exactly the same way as 'this' is a pronoun.
> The famous copula 'is' stands for all verbs as a
> stenophon, an abbreviation. Only one who experiences all verbs and
> cites them as 'being' can talk of being. This is because
> pronouns are senseless without the words for which they stand. Most
> philosophies of being speak of 'being', without having
> drunk from and been sated by the fullness of all verbs; that's why
> they are noise and smoke, and that's why the existentialists explained
> the war to them. There is only the essence of God after you have
> experienced that God rages, creates, blesses and shakes up (1968,
> 38-39).
> 



The great choice for post-Nietzschean thinking, for Rosenstock-Huessy,
is not so much, as Heidegger believed, a choice between continuing to
remain entrapped in our compliance with beings rather than Being, but
between continuing to take our orientation from pronominals rather
than giving attention to names. In this respect Heidegger is
Greek--i.e. still philosophical--whereas Rosenstock-Huessy
is (to use a much loved word of Heidegger) genuinely
'primordial' or pre-philosophical because he thinks the
pre-philosophical was wiser in its fidelity to language. Moreover,
from Rosenstock-Huessy's perspective, what Heidegger has in common
with the essentialist thinking he is so critical of, is that he still
fools himself into thinking that he is not part of the great events of
historical experiences which are encapsulated in names. Heidegger
thinks that with thought he can move beyond them. The thought itself,
for Heidegger, when it is not merely pronominal pro-verbial thought,
is so saturated in history it cannot be overleaped except by a social
rupture and a new social foundational act and
 name.[12]
 From Rosenstock-Huessy's perspective, Heidegger's deployment of
Being, as a gesture of defiance against the technicity into which the
world has fallen, is precisely the same kind of optatively-governed
gesture which characterizes the philosopher's freedom (an aesthetic/
moral one). Heidegger's refers to himself in his *Der Spiegel*
interview of 1966 as awaiting a new god, a god who must remain
nameless, on an earth from which the gods have fled. From
Rosenstock-Huessy's perspective, this is indicative of just how barren
is his landscape of possibilities. For all Heidegger's talk of being
beyond metaphysics, from Rosenstock-Huessy's perspective, Heidegger is
so afraid of repeating the gestures and moves of metaphysics that he
is imprisoned by them. He is still primarily a philosopher, and far
less a *Mensch,* as the speech thinkers like Rosenstock-Huessy
sought to be*,* exercising 'common sense' and
working with the common stock of names.



By appealing to the primacy of names, Rosenstock-Huessy is not saying
that one must always accept one's tradition; traditions have to
constantly be reinvented or reconfigured. However he does dispute that
the basis of that transformation is primarily a philosophical act, as
if the disinterested philosopher could digest and judge everything
with his or her own mind. Names are constantly being renegotiated and
'to think means to introduce better names' (1970a, 174).
But for the most part this process occurs through the trial and
catastrophes of events and a social consensus about the meaning of the
event. Tracing the naming of what is now known as the Holocaust is one
example of how naming is often a matter of trial and error before
there is a consensus about which name is appropriate for the
experience that has traumatized a group and which that social group
wishes to embed in its collective/institutional memory and pass on to
future generations (1970a, 174).



The downgrading of the importance of the name in philosophy, for
Rosenstock-Huessy, has as its counterpart the downgrading of the
vocative case and hence the dialogical component of truth. For
Rosenstock-Huessy, the vocative is the condition of dialogue and hence
the real condition of a new truth. Unlike philosophers, who generally
begin with the nominative case, he argues that a case such as the
nominative is dependent upon, and hence subordinate to, the vocative.
'Vocatives create the preconditions for reciprocal
communication; whereas nominatives and other cases take their place
inside of communication. The vocative provokes the
conversation', he says in *Ja und Nein* (1968, 25).
And:



> 
> The vocative means: turn around and face me; we want to talk with each
> other for a while. Such a summons, invitation, challenge, introduction
> sets men in motion. The other cases enable all the named to have their
> place. The vocative, however, turns them around!...The nominative
> only points to different things, how they stand or lay...but the
> vocative belongs in the conjugation. The caller and the called belong
> in the conjugation (1968, 26).
> 



This may be contrasted with the Socratic and more modern Cartesian
traditions. In these traditions the concrete self dissolves either
into the object to be studied or into the cognitive or methodological
rules of the transcendental subject. In both instances the truth is
the objective fact or state of affairs. But for Rosenstock-Huessy what
is being left out of this picture is the participative role we all
have in world-making and that role brings with it a knowledge and
sense of our own purposefulness. What is so important is that creative
address requires being open to the unpredictable. The social world is
generated by decisive acts of inspiration and history and is , inter
alia, a tapestry of inspired and unpredictable acts. The more
predictable a group's actions become, the more spiritless they
become.



This lack of emphasis upon the vocative is closely related to
Rosenstock-Huessy's attempt to redress what he sees as the over
accentuation of the modern faith in analysis, which is part of its
philosophical legacy and also part of philosophy's aspiration to rule.
According to Rosenstock-Huessy, the real sequence of orientation is:
obey, communicate, explain, systematize.



> 
> In the first instance one hears a name called out above one, then one
> communicates with another, who participates in the same named group as
> him. In the third we report, everything that has been done and has
> happened under this name; we report, we explain and we establish what
> is happening. Finally we oversee everything and compare and draw the
> sum of everything into a logical system. We analyze (1968, 32).
> 



Analysis, then, is the conclusion of a process. At no stage does
Rosenstock-Huessy claim that analysis or philosophy are completely
unhelpful--but their benefits require that they are part of a
linguistic whole and that whole is what forms the social organism
within which philosophy may play its role. According to
Rosenstock-Huessy, philosophy tends to mistake the part for the whole
and wrongly assume that the small measure of reason we have is being
powerful enough to be the measure of all. The process briefly
described above is what forms the collective 'we'. This
formation of the 'we' is at the basis of all common
endeavors. It applies as much to the case of philosophers or natural
scientists--for the group of 'analysts'--as for
any group. Science tends to concentrate on the array of its results
and the application of methods and experiments etc. which achieve
them. However, no less real are the human and institutional processes
that are involved. The audacity of Galileo; the sweat and sacrifice of
a science student to learn difficult material; the solidarity in
pursuit of the truth about nature's workings: these are all
indispensable to science and enable scientists to share a common
pursuit and what Rosenstock-Huessy calls a particular
'present' in a 'time body'. As he writes in
his *The Hegemony of Spaces*:



> 
> Only because all physicists describe one Physics, because
> 'Physics' has existed from 1600 to 1950, thanks only to
> this omnipresence of Physics for 350 years, is the chain of
> experiments and mistakes meaningful. Physics can make gigantic
> mistakes and false teachings, a thousand times more than a single
> mortal, because it has a great present, on which the most distant
> future and the oldest past work (2009,1,318).
> 



In contrast to real speech, which is developed over time,
Rosenstock-Huessy sees that 'philosophy talks to man as though
the experiment of living had not yet taken place before the
experiment, so to speak. "Reason" always argues before the
event, before our soul, has been incarnated, before God has come into
the world' (1941, 6). Philosophy is able to occupy a zone in
which our problems and its solution are
'eternalized'--it stops time and that shows in its
solutions. In sum, it is a-historical while our challenges and crises
are in history and in time.



Although other philosophers (in particular Heidegger, Schelling, and
Bergson) make time important, Rosenstock-Huessy was not at all
convinced that they had done it sufficiently. In the case of Schelling
and Bergson it was because they remained imprisoned by the mechanistic
conception of sequential time in which past, present and future move
in the one direction. Thus, in the opening chapter of volume 2 of the
*In the Cross of Reality*, he takes issue with Schelling's
declaration in the *Ages of the World* that 'the past is
known, the present cognized, the future intimated' (2009, 2 16).
While Schelling is a major critic of mechanistic philosophy, and his
call for a narrative philosophy is explicitly acknowledged by Franz
Rosenzweig as being one of the most important precursors of the new
thinking, the notion of time expressed here is decisively sequential
and not at all at odds with the mechanistic conception of time which
has evolved out of
 philosophy.[13]
 Such a representation of space and time as one finds in the new
sciences of the philosophies of Descartes, Newton, and Kant (for all
their differences), certainly enables the sharpening of our
understanding and observation of causal or material process. However,
socially and personally we experience time as the push of the past and
the future. Our present is not simply a passing point on a one-way
flow, but the intersection of past and future in our
present--future coming back to us as much as past coming toward
us. Rosenstock-Huessy believed that this is how we experience the
historical catastrophes which come from the conflict between
suffocating spaces and the freedom to found a new time. Heidegger's
emphasis upon thrownness and projection make him much closer to
Rosenstock-Huessy, but his substitution of historicity for real
history, and hence real times, evident in the above discussion on
names, remains a dividing line between them.



For Rosenstock-Huessy, our temporal and purposeful nature is evident
in our grammar and our institutions. Institutions are the embodiment
and reproduction of a particular coalition of temporal forces.
'Without a multiplicity of times', he says 'I remain
speechless' (1968, 12). Moreover, time and passion and history
form an important connection which all come together in speech. Above
all, time is experienced as history and this is as much so
individually as collectively. History is not simply a sequential flow
of forces which have their naturalistic counterparts. Rather,
different events stamp themselves in the hearts and minds of a people
and continue to impact upon a group long after their occurrence,
thereby, at different times and to different degrees, activating
passions of subsequent generations. Much of Rosenstock-Huessy's work
is devoted to the great 'events', the great catastrophes,
and the time bodies ensuing from them which have given us our
particular historical character. More generally, this activation of
the passions by past events and the replacement of one pantheon of
names by another--as a hateful future is replaced by the promise
of one more venerable--is a fundamental aspect of world-making
and it is ultimately why, for him, names are so important. Names are
testimonies to events and, just as our speech is a means to activate
us, they are the fundamental triggers of the passions and hence of our
world making. Names are the testimonies of what we love, of what calls
us to act or of what has become so hateful that new directions must be
opened up and new names found. History is a great pantheon of names,
names which are the registers of passions and total commitments past.
When those names no longer em-passion then that component of a group's
history is dead.



However, history is not simply a plurality of names. Rosenstock-Huessy
argued that it also tends toward a common story, as speakers and
listeners are forced by successive catastrophes to become increasingly
integrated into common spaces and times and to see the connection
between the times and hence between each other. Such a connection can
only be a real connection if it takes account of the bloody conflicts
and the different responses and causes behind war and revolution as
much as the moments and successes of common cause. That is, it must be
multi-vocular. However, being multi-vocular is not the same as being
an archipelago of hermetically sealed cries; history provides the
difference between Babel (the interminable inability to communicate
one's suffering and one's love, faith, and hopes) and a possible
common future. 'All history is the tale of acts in which some
speaker and some listener have become one' (1970a, 109). It is
the formation of 'we '. Thus, he says in *Ja und
Nein*, 'we discover the founding act of life as the shaking
up or shock (*Erschutterung*) of a man so that he is
activated, finally activated and called upon to join in the formation
of history in his own name' (1968, 26).



What ultimately concerns Rosenstock-Huessy is incarnation and he
believes that philosophy not only has not been sufficiently attentive
to the process of incarnation and its historical importance, but that
religions, especially Christianity, have been far more successful in
their fruits than philosophy--a claim he attempts to back up in
his historical writings on the Church and Christendom. Modernity was
in many ways an attempt by philosophy to replace Christianity in
Europe as an incarnatory force with its sciences and morals and art,
in sum its humanism. But he believed--and this is the seminal
event overhanging all his thought--that the devastation of the
World Wars had disproved its claim, and that humanism had discovered,
but not sufficiently digested, the truth of incarnation: that it is
based upon service to somebody. The nations became the gods of the
moderns. This had not been foreseen by those philosophers who had
divinized nature and/or the self. Nor had the pioneers of humanism
ever envisaged a world in which monsters, such as Stalin, Hitler and
the like, would be as gods ruling over 'selves' and the
sciences.


## 4. The Partitioning of Spaces and Times in *In the Cross of Reality*



The matter of incarnation is central to Rosenstock-Huessy's
magnum opus *In the Cross of Reality*. For it is this work that
most thoroughly examines love and suffering as the great drivers of
human endeavour through their spatial and temporal incarnations. The
founding and perpetuation of new institutions which store our loves,
carry us across the times, and hence (when working well) replenish us,
is, for Rosenstock-Huessy the real capacity for freedom that we bear.
For this drawing upon the times and being able to found new bodies of
time is our way of immortalising ourselves. Our world is what we make
of it; our different historicities are our creations, our
'compositions' that reach across the times. 



> 
> 
> The scores of this composition, the histories, must be paraphrased in
> so many editions as there are generations of humankind. For the
> composition is recomposed in each generation by those whose love
> overcomes a murder or a death.
> 
> 
> 
> So history becomes a great song, Augustine's Carmen Humanum; in
> its every line, perhaps every tone, becomes a lived human life. As
> soon and as often as the lines rhyme, love has once again become
> stronger than death. Then from out of absurd contingencies, from
> adverse circumstances, from silent events of epoch-making necessities,
> in which a lengthy ingested illness is finally confronted,
> crossfertilized and consequently overcome (2008/9, 3: 513).
> 
> 
> 



That this task is all too frequently eclipsed by more philosophical
visions of reality is for Rosenstock-Huessy in large part due to
philosophy failing to understand the 'forces of community'
which are constitutive of our reflexivity and activity.



The first volume of *In the Cross of Reality, The Hegemony of
Spaces*, is primarily a work of method. It simultaneously provides
a critique of the philosophical inheritance that Rosenstock-Huessy
argues distorts our social understanding or reflexivity and
participation or actualization, whilst excavating more primordial
elements, moods, and insights that emerge in social experience.
Rosenstock-Huessy's argument is predicated upon the distinction
between spaces of play and living spaces. He claims that play prepares
us for life. Thus, like Horace Bushnell (whose work inspired him to
rethink his earlier drafting of the first volume of *In the Cross
of Reality*) and Johan Huizinga, he sees play as generating
crucial conditions of reflexivity.



Socratic philosophy, with its turn to abstract distance and
definition, confirms this for him. Socrates, says Rosenstock-Huessy,
is the spectator who gives advice to the 'athletes' in the
intermission (Rosenstock-Huessy, 2009, 1: 107). Rosenstock-Huessy
argues that philosophy commences a spatially preoccupied way of
thinking, which requires that living processes be stabilized. The
collective affirmations and directions of social appeals and socially
agreed upon names become essences or substantiations processed by the
philosophical mind, which finds itself magically outside of the
reality it processes. Philosophical reality becomes populated with
metaphysical entities such as the individual, subject, and object,
appearance and reality etc. In this mentally sequestered space the
mind is only beholden to its own elements and powers. Thus logic can
become king in a philosophical world; while we on the earth remain
caught up in the forces that accompany the seismic events which shake
us into new realities. *The Hegemony of Spaces* claims that
this philosophical preoccupation culminates in the mechanistic
dissolution of the world into space (exemplified by Descartes'
*The World*): thus too the lived times which we register in the
calendar, in holidays, in days of remembrance and prayer etc. are
simply dissolved into the mechanics of a spatially derived time or
sequential chronology. The response to this process of mechanization
is exemplified by Nietzsche's equally one-sided response to
reality--the aestheticization of life and exaggerated emphasis upon
the will.



For Rosenstock-Huessy, the philosophies of Descartes and Nietzsche
intensify the spatial 'crampedness' that is the outcome of
the spatial hegemony accompanying the triumph of abstract reflexivity
over our play and life-spaces. Their different responses contribute to
a more spatially defined (more mechanized albeit more aestheticized)
world: modernity becomes a 'tyranny of spaces'.



In so far as much of what has just been said has certain thematic
overlaps and overlays with Nietzsche's, and even
Heidegger's, critique of metaphysics, the last point should
clarify how he differs from them. For Rosenstock-Huessy, while our
space-partitioning is secondary to our time-partitioning, and thus
founding of new ways to be in the world, he sees that the intersection
of what he calls our trajective and prejective powers requires that we
engage far more deeply with our historicity than either are prepared
to do.



Central to this volume, and what is a fundamental departure from
Nietzsche, is Rosenstock-Huessy's identification of the social
processes and elements of tensional reciprocity that are intrinsic to
our capacity for space partitioning. Thus, for example, whether it be
the family, the workplace, or the army, these institutions function
precisely because the members of each institution work on different
fronts of reality. Ultimately the work is a critique of the kind of
abstract understanding of sociality that sacrifices the reality of
tensional reciprocity for a more uniform 'picture' of
social reality, as he believes has become increasingly typical of
modern thought, irrespective of whether it is liberal, fascist, or
Marxist.



*The Full Count of the Times* is essentially a work of
universal history. It is devoted to exploring the distinctive social
orientations and formations and their enduring components and
development. It claims to identify the past elements of recurrent
experience, the paths of 'future-directed' events and
their mutual interplay or strengthening in the formation of
world-transforming institutions. In particular, Rosenstock-Huessy
dwells upon how the discrete forms of antiquity and the peoples of
tribes, empires, the Greek city states, and the future orientated
people of the prophets (the Jews) formed a hitherto unknown kind of
social tensional 'unity' through their absorption and
reconfiguration within Western Christian lands . He then seeks to
identify how that tensionality that had been formed through the
presence and activity of the Church subsequently broke out and
developed, initially in Europe, into nations and then, through the
world wars, the planet as whole.


## 5. A Christianity of Non-transcendence



Rosenstock-Huessy always insisted that he was a Christian thinker. If
he is known at all by people in the English speaking world it is as
Rosenzweig's 'Christian' dialogical partner and friend who
tried, but failed, to convert Rosenzweig to Christianity. It is,
however, important to understand what Rosenstock-Huessy meant by
Christianity. The need to do this is also underscored by the fact that
Rosenstock-Huessy was a thinker who wished to explicate what it means
to be a Christian in a post-Christian age, i.e. in an age where most
people not only no longer know what it means to be Christian but do
not know that they do not know, and yet, nevertheless, are far more
Christian than they realize.



Rosenstock-Huessy's Christianity has to be seen in light of his
treating all past human formations (whether of the tribe, the empire,
the polis, etc.) as vital compounds formed by the vocabularies, with
all the expectations and summonings, of the people constituting them.
These vocabularies expressed the underlying realities which made them
possible. Thus talk of Jesus' divinity in Europe in the Middle Ages
was connected with, and testified to, the everyday world of churches
through hymns, paintings, oaths and social office. Likewise Zeus and
Athena were the conditions of the Greeks making the world they made,
just as Horus and Osiris and the *ka* were for the Egyptians.
Their social classes, political powers, oaths, buildings, paintings,
music etc. were not something extraneous to the powers they summoned,
spoke of, or revered in their day-to-day actions. These respective
ages and the creations which defined them were impossible without the
gods and the extraterrestrial powers that infused these worlds. And
with Rosenstock-Huessy, whether he was talking about burial sites and
totems, or Horus, and Osiris and the bestowing of the *ka* upon
the Pharaoh, or Homer and the Greek pantheon, or the Jewish decision
to abandon the ways of empire, he was primarily undertaking an
archaeological act of linguistic and sociological excavation to show
his readers what trials each people were responding to and how they
had all founded new forms of life which still resonate through our
lives today, if we are but attentive enough to notice.



For Rosenstock-Huessy, what was unique about the Christian faith was
that it was a way of world-making dedicated to bringing all of human
kind into one family based upon fundamental truths about suffering,
love, death, creation, redemption, and incarnation. For him, the
Church was big enough to embrace those with
'otherworldly', childish understandings and those who
understood that Christianity was a commitment to making the world on
the basis of sacrificial love. Whether rightly or wrongly he was
generally puzzled and astonished at what he thought were the inane and
childish reductions that constituted the humanist and rationalist
understanding not only of Christian life, but of all pre-humanist
pagan life
 forms.[14]
 Indeed, he generally associated this attitude with a non-historical
understanding of humanity--one which he saw as widespread even in
the discipline of history--which so often simply transposed
contemporary orientations (names) back into the past and thus missed
so much of the experience of humanity because it insisted upon
ascribing its own modern 'denuded' (humanist) view of
'man' to worlds which knew nothing of 'man' as
such.



One consequence of the triumph of humanism and rationalism, he
believed, was that most moderns have simply forgotten what gods were.
And he returns repeatedly to the term 'god' to bring out
its sense as a power we serve which makes us speak, and guides our
actions. In one particularly pithy formulation, which neatly captures
the thrust of the new thinking's insistence upon God and Man as two
irreducible subjects of historical predications, he says that
'God and Man is a reciprocal letter exchange' (1968, 23).
Restated in thoroughly secular terms and from our side, the forces we
surrender to in our lives make us what we are; we become what we
serve; what we sacrifice ourselves to, makes us.



The failure to understand what a god is, for Rosenstock-Huessy, is on
a par with our widespread failure to see beyond our own horizon and
understand the truths behind the animism of tribal peoples or the
insights into the moving heavens by early imperialist peoples. Thus it
was, he believed, that today so many, including so-called Christians,
failed to fathom the claims about Jesus' divinity, which had to do
with the overpowering of death, not in any mystical or Pythagorean
manner of the continuity of the individual soul in a netherworld, but
in the triumph over death and deadly forces through forming a body
across time, the Church. For Rosenstock-Huessy, Jesus was proof that
Caesar and Pharaoh and 'great men' were not gods and
Jesus' divinization meant that after him no one else would be God,
that our redemption was universal and mutual. Jesus' taking on the
role of the crucified was to show us that we crucify God when we do
evil to each other, and that we fail to achieve the maximum of our
powers (our own divinity) in our failure to obey the law of love, and
that to obey the commandment of love means being continually prepared
to leave abodes ruled by death and die into new forms of love and
fellowship.



For Rosenstock-Huessy, the basic terms of Christianity emerged out of
pagan and Jewish historical experience, and this fusion was a source
of great historical truth about how reality is formed out of suffering
and love. Hence a huge part of Rosenstock-Huessy's corpus is devoted
to showing the reality and power--the truth--of tribal and
pre-modern imperial life (particularly Egypt) as well as the Greek
city states and the Jewish
 people.[15]




Rosenstock-Huessy also argued that Christianity emerged as a response
to many of the same forces which created these other forms of life,
only at a different historical time, a time where their degeneracy and
deficiency had forced a new stratagem of social survival. The
uniqueness of this new stratagem is that due to its peculiar fusion of
suffering, sacrificial love, death, and *universal* redemption
it was able to reinvigorate and reconstitute forms once spent. It thus
enabled the possibility of tribal peoples to harmonize with empires,
and poets and philosophers to join with prophets in an attempt to
realize the New Jerusalem. (Rosenstock-Huessy refers to this song of
Blake's a number of times.)



This was what he meant by Christianity's founding the full count of
the times due to its resuscitating 'bodies' from other
times (see especially 1938 and 1987). Like Rosenzweig, who also
interpreted this combination of universalisation and redemption as the
unending task of Christianity, Rosenstock-Huessy interpreted
Christianity through the same broad triadic rhythm as Schelling:
Petrine, Pauline and Johannine, where there is the movement from the
Church visible established by Rome, to the Church invisible of the
Reformation, to the Church fully devolved, yet alive, in modern
society.


 In Rosenstock-Huessy's account, the first millennium of the
Church had created a widespread consciousness of love of the
neighbour, having taken a faith of the Jews into the pagan world. By
the ninth century it had created what he calls 'the
world's first universal democracy' in All Soul's Day
which declared that the soul of the poorest peasant or widow was as
much loved by God as the pope or emperor and all lived in the
knowledge of the judgment to come. By contrast, the second millennium
had been a connected series of 'total revolutions'. These
revolutions involved the fierce actuality of last judgments, as people
who had lived with the promise of the second coming in their hearts
had reached such a state of hatred, desperation and lack, a hatred of
love's and heaven's absence in the society surrounding
them, that they had fought to bring heaven into the world. Each
revolution, while total in aspiration, had only been partial in
success. But the conditions of modern social and political freedom
were, he attempts to show in his two main works on revolution, the
by-products of local revolts with total ambitions circulating in a
world that was being fused by a common history and destiny. The World
Wars were, he argued, the continuation of this revolutionary
process. In sum, when Christ had said he had come to bring a sword,
even though he was not urging the deployment of worldly means, the
teaching of love that he had sought to place in the hearts of men and
women had led to a series of convulsions and cataclysms that were
forcing us to obey the law of love--or perish. These revolutions,
which stretched from the Investiture Conflict (or what he calls the
Papal Revolution) to the First World War and the Russian Revolution,
had given the modern world its shape. And, he believed, its solution,
which was the fulfillment of the messianic promise to Abraham and the
real rationale for the Church's very existence and which had
become the real future-building mission of the (originally European,
now planetary, bodies) politics of the last millennium.



That solution was what he called a metanomical society, a planetary
society in which discordances could be peacefully accommodated in
creative tension. In fact, while Rosenstock-Huessy remains completely
passed over by what can loosely be called post-modernism (although he
had used the term as early as 1949, in his paper 'Liturgical
Thinking', as a way of describing contemporary life), he shares
two major concerns with postmodernists: (a) the recognition that the
global economy has reactivated the local and that any genuinely
desirable revolutionary outcome must be receptive to local customs
which enrich people, and (b) that we will only be able to create a
life worth living at a planetary level if differences are not
dissolved but able to retain their vitality.



According to Rosenstock-Huessy the lesson of history and the
accumulated memory (history) of human suffering gathered through our
speech-formed, time-building capacity was that we all must live as
Jew, Christian, and Pagan. In his *The Christian Future* and
the second volume of the *Soziologie* he would elaborate on
this by arguing that in our times we needed to fuse Christ, Abraham,
Buddha and Lao Tse. His decision to make Buddhism and Taoism essential
components of the contemporary cross of reality was part of his
attempt to help found a metanomical framework which would enable the
concordance of disparities. But it is fair to say that neither
Buddhism nor Taoism, nor Islam (which he writes a section on in volume
2 of the *In the Cross of Reality*), nor Hinduism occupied his
attention anywhere near as much as the spirits of the tribes, Egypt,
Greece, the Israelites and Christian peoples.