In the Cross of Reality

The Hegemony of Spaces

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412865074
• eBook ISBN: 9781351295260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book makes the first volume of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's Soziologie available in English for the first time since its 1956 publication in German. Rosenstock-Huessy argues that social philosophy has favored abstract and spatially contrived categories of social organization over temporal processes. This preference for space-thinking has diverted us from recognizing the power of speech and its relationship to living on the front lines of life.

Taking speech and the social responsibilities and reciprocities that accompany naming as the key to social reality, In the Cross of Reality provides a sociological exploration of "play" spaces as the basis for reflexivity. It also explores the spaces of activity and their correlation in war and peace to the spheres of "serious life." If we are to survive and flourish, different qualities and reciprocal relationships must be cultivated so that we can deal with different fronts of life. Arguing that modern intellectuals and their obsession with space have created a dangerously false choice between mechanical and aesthetic salvation, Rosenstock-Huessy clears a path so that we better appreciate our relationship between past and future in founding and in partitioning time.

Part I

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The Entrance into the Cross of Reality: The Actualization of Sociology

1

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Speech in Crisis: The Malfunction of the Name

[…] What is really envisaged in the term sociology? Scarcely what one will find under that entry in any conventional dictionary. Rather, the question must be addressed as an inclusive interrogative: “How can a term that I have stumbled upon regain that inner self-evidence and intimacy that it possessed when I handled it, prior to its going stagnant? How can it reenter my thoughts, now as a conscious concept, and become as fluent and familiar to me in speech and writing as it had been?”

[…] Most books on sociology get stuck on the problem that a writer fills many pages telling us what he thinks about sociology, and what we, in his opinion, should conceive it to be. Immediately another comes along and develops an entirely different theory. It seems that everyone has the right to think what he wishes about sociology. It follows that theory lacks the persuasive force to confer familiarity on the name, to make us conversationally confident with it, so that even our Somebody can handle it with ease. Theory fails us, here.

Accordingly, sociology is likely to be numbered among the counterintuitive magnitudes of our life—like most names. Our question can therefore close in on it, and ask if such magnitudes actually exist?

All theory is eye-obsessed.¹ It makes no difference if physically I close my eyes: for if I do this, it is only for the sake of a clearer inner depiction and to imaginatively represent something to myself “from all sides.” This way, the idea of a matter (that is, image, view, face) is most clearly grasped. It then presents itself more clearly to the inner eye than to the merely optical instrument. At once we are enlightened, the facts of the case have been illuminated by theory. It is now possible to turn from pure theory and the contemplative state to pure practice. The theoretical gain is an insight that now governs our actions. This is how, for example, we proceed from our theoretical scrutiny of chemical elements to practical analysis, from the theory of mechanics to the construction of a machine. Whatever comprehension has seized, can be returned to the world through practical applications—each bearing the stamp of a triumphant theory along with it.

Yet our eyes—whether empirical or inner—have one limitation, despite all their capabilities for insight and outlook. They may contemplate all sorts of things from every side, except one: They cannot see him who sees. In the fairy tale, we hear of a princess who saw everything, literally everything, of the round Earth from her thirteen windows, and yet she failed with all her art to discern the princely suitor who had nested himself as a kitten in her tresses. In the same way, man, the spectator, loses sight of everything that fills the background hovering behind his powers of sight and below the threshold of his consciousness. This hinterland of the real man, however, comprises all the things to which we are connected with our love, or with passions of other kinds: thus the self-loved “I,” the beloved “You,” the hated “He,” the feared “They,” and so on.

This connection to our hinterland is inaccessible to any theory. For these powers heave and surge without rest, and change incessantly. We have no other choice but to listen closely so as to hear their roar and sough. But at times we need not go even this far, because these forces speak through us, whether we like it or not. For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Never will we see this, for it resounds in us. With our eyes, and with theory, we can grasp the impressions that our sensibility discovers outside, in nature. Thus Sven Hedin’s map of Tibet enables us to visualize a plot of earth that he discovered; photographs or drawings can bring the most distant cultures to us. We can even look at ourselves from time to time in cold blood, merely as nature, and contemplate our body anatomically and physiologically—but it will not include the voice that speaks. The cry of the right mother in front of the judge’s chair of Solomon, which revealed the bond between her and the child—this cry alone brought to her and the king’s consciousness the love that possessed her. […] Genies and ghosts are the powers that force us to speak. These we must conjure up.

The reality that steps out of names to face us is inapproachable through abstract concepts. This is an insight of considerable, far-reaching consequence. Many sociologists have offended against it, whose pet theories construe an obscure Force A and a Relation B that happens to affect Mr. Y (similar to the “cases” of lawyers and borrowed from them). They pretend that their science addresses a nameless world. But X and Y are unknown to reality, and so are “if A, then B” scenarios. First of all, a state of affairs, an event, must be brought to examination, together with the lives and names, the place and date pertaining to it, before it is possible to derive any sort of conclusions. Actualization involves calling things by their real names; and giving a name to something is an ineluctable precondition for thinking about the real world. Until this pertains, we remain stuck in unreality. For in reality, the year and day, the place and environment, change every reality—not just somehow, but utterly. Reality needs constantly to be renewed in actualization. Sociology, therefore, must not begin with hoisting its concepts, but rather with laying hands on, and firmly grasping, the laws of an all-encompassing actualization.

And so actualization, not definition, is our scientific business. Name and species, place and origin, are the elements of actualization. Names are the first of these we hear or know. Thereafter, the species comes forth, more precisely, the individualized expression of the name-bearer, its self-testimony. Third, we can only become familiar with a reality whose place in the empirical world—in space—is ascertained. In fourth place comes the genealogy, the tree of descent or, as we shall put it, “the origin,” which must be investigated for every instance of reality.

[…]

Storytelling has never aspired to scientific status nor even thought it possible. For scientific method involves verification. Which is why so many lies circulate around human issues. There are no limits to storytelling. Historyas-science therefore adopted into its canons […] the knowledge of origins, and is engaged (as we all know) with carting away the debris of thousands of years in order to lay bare its “sources” and “origins.” This was progress. But it did not stop the lies. Our present-day historians either lie complicitly or else they stick to their sources and forget all about actualization. It follows that another motive has to come into play. It concerns a question not explicitly answered by the historian, even though it is the question of all questions, and compulsory for the sociologist. And he must ask it, long before he can look to resolving his task of actualization.

This crucial question, which puts narration under control, concerns the hour at which the telling is done. We must not confuse this with the standpoint of the narrator, for the latter is all too vulnerable for mistaking it himself. No, the hour when some actual occurrence is narrated indicates to us whether the narrative itself is listening to the story, or brings up an ancient, lost world of legendry, or whether it transports us into strange lands of mystery and imagination. We shall have to examine and reexamine this first law of all sociological thinking throughout the course of this book, for it is of the utmost importance to us that fixing the hour is our only recourse to the proper discernment of any kind of actualization. Here is an example that will quickly elucidate what our meaning is.

Let sociology itself comprise the example. We consider it to be something real; and now we wish to bring to cognizance whether sociology, this mere word without content employing a name, is an actual power. The name is “present.” But now we need to find out what sociologists themselves would tell us about their calling and their aspirations. These expressions of specificity would lead us into the heart of the matter.

Then we need to determine the situation of sociology from the outside—that is, its home in the midst of other realities. This external side will make itself apparent when it encounters resistance. Struggle with adversaries constrains us; it designates the place we may occupy in the world. The resistance offered to sociology is therefore the subject of another section.

Once the issue of the self-perception of sociologists and of questions on the perceptions of their opponents who contend against this representation of sociology are resolved, the two questions concerning its temporal nature come up. Both are antithetical to each other. The first queries origins: Who is the ancestor, creator, or primeval model of sociology? The answer to this, however, will not be found in the whole long history from Year X down to 1960, but in the “story of its birthday”—of its emergence, development, or lineage. This differentiation has almost fallen into oblivion in modern his-tory writing, where origin and development tend to be dovetailed into one continuous history.

But we separate origin from development. For in any look back into the past, only the great event of birth, of genesis, lends itself to comprehension. The more we are affected by the impression of this historical occurrence, the more crucial it is for us to ask: In which hour of history does it figure? What relation does this date bear to the living hour? Does it simply fall as a splinter of history into present life? Does it hover before us as an unfulfilled vision, or does it belong into our midst and our living struggles? If those phenomena are contemporary with us, then we still have to clarify their temporal incidence—namely, whether it denotes exact simultaneity or a younger or older stage in relation to us. Do they indicate a goal or a preliminary stage? In other words: A narrator tells his story differently, depending on whether he is speaking at a funeral, or of something still awaiting its realization, or simply in the presence of those of whom he speaks.

Is sociology really necessary? The name we have thus far pursued on four tracks of deliberation, in four different modes of scrutiny—and, so to speak, in four different styles—must now be pursued further back so as to reveal the life that lies behind it. It is the only way of reinvesting a historical name with the power—missing in contemplation—to saturate our consciousness. Its elements must resound in these four styles—or rather, tonalities—for us to prick up our ears as in the days of yore, when speaking simple-mindedly we used words as plainly as they broke into our consciousness. Repeated practice will eventually convey to us the “right concept.” For these tonalities disclose the inside of the name, the shell of its nature, its origin in the past, its necessity for the future.

With this, we have gained a fundamental insight into sociological methodology as a whole. A force to which all men answer, which animates them and acquires voice through them, can hardly be caught in a theoretical construction; but it is equally unavailing to “put it before your eyes” in the hope of sensory apprehension of its spirit. On the contrary, it requires an exertion in which the many different faculties of the spirit participate. It begins with our divided self-consciousness, our ordering and systematizing intuition, and all the way down to a historical sense of tact and acknowledgment of responsibility for ourselves. It makes itself felt in every thread of thought about the name and its blank stare.

• This name, which has ceased to be self-verifying, is retained in memory. Otherwise we would become speechless.

• Its life is mirrored in the self-consciousness of speakers, which in reflection divides itself.

• It is integrated into the empirical world by the reifying gaze, which apprehends it objectively and turns it into a thing among things.

• Living experience gropes for the name’s origin, where the life is sourced which it commands.

• Its future effectiveness depends on personal cooperation, on the significant affirmation.

To the various operations described in these sentences, we will in future affix brief technical terms in parentheses:

Reflexivum: The self-testimony of speakers, corresponding to the operation of self-contemplation, reflection upon themselves.

Activum: The active opposition of adversaries, turning the name into an objective feature.

Traject: The ways of experience bring themselves into relief by patient and passive behavior toward the tradition, where the individual “swims with the tide.”²

Prejectivum: This is the experience of being thrown into the future [Zugeworfenheit].³

It should be stressed that these expressions are quite incidental to our presentation; they are necessary, solely by reason of their entanglement with later theoretical issues. For the moment, only the factual result that facilitates our entry into sociology itself is of importance.

Sociological knowledge has as its bearer not a philosophical head, but “you with all your heart, and with all your strength.”⁴ And, by principle and methodologically, it can have only this bearer. […]

Here lies the difference to all natural science and philosophy. The external objects of material nature and the theoretical concepts of the intellectual tradition are present and accounted for, whether I like it or not, and irrespective of whether I exert myself on their behalf. They are objective, matter-of-fact features, ready-made for me as a subject to perceive, comprehend, and conceptualize. The so-called subject required for this transaction is nothing other than a philosophical head.

All the powers and figures of history, on the other hand, undergo change precisely because, and when, I join forces with anyone who is preoccupied with these ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Note
• Introduction (by Wayne Cristaudo)
• Author’s Preface
• An Introduction to the Work: Freedom
• Part I. The Entrance into the Cross of Reality: The Actualization of Sociology
• Part II. The Play Spaces of Our Reflexivum
• Part III. The Living Spaces of Our Activum
• Part IV. Conclusion: The Tyranny of Spaces and Their Collapse
• References
• Index