The Star of Redemption

Franz Rosenzweig, William W. Hallo

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1985
• ISBN:
  9780268161538
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

The Star of Redemption is widely recognized as a key document of modern existential thought and a significant contribution to Jewish theology in the twentieth century. An affirmation of what Rosenzweig called "the new thinking, " the work ensconces common sense in the place of abstract, conceptual philosophizing and posits the validity of the concrete, individual human being over that of "humanity" in general. Fusing philosophy and theology, it assigns both Judaism and Christianity distinct but equally important roles in the spiritual structure of the world, and finds in both biblical religions approaches toward a comprehension of reality.

PART

I

THE ELEMENTS
or
THE EVER-ENDURING PROTO-COSMOS

INTRODUCTION

On the Possibility of the Cognition of the All

In philosophos!

Concerning Death

All cognition of the All originates in death, in the fear of death. Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting, and Hades of its pestilential breath. All that is mortal lives in this fear of death; every new birth augments the fear by one new reason, for it augments what is mortal. Without ceasing, the womb of the indefatigable earth gives birth to what is new, each bound to die, each awaiting the day of its journey into darkness with fear and trembling. But philosophy denies these fears of the earth. It bears us over the grave which yawns at our feet with every step. It lets the body be a prey to the abyss, but the free soul flutters away over it. Why should philosophy be concerned if the fear of death knows nothing of such a dichotomy between body and soul, if it roars Me! Me! Me!, if it wants nothing to do with relegating fear onto a mere “body”? Let man creep like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the fast-approaching volleys of a blind death from which there is no appeal; let him sense there, forcibly, inexorably, what he otherwise never senses: that his I would be but an It if it died; let him therefore cry his very I out with every cry that is still in his throat against Him from whom there is no appeal, from whom such unthinkable annihilation threatens—for all this dire necessity philosophy has only its vacuous smile. With index finger outstretched, it directs the creature, whose limbs are quivering with terror for its this-worldly existence, to a Beyond of which it doesn’t care to know anything at all. For man does not really want to escape any kind of fetters; he wants to remain, he wants to—live. Philosophy, which commends death to him as its special protégé, as the magnificent opportunity to flee the straits of life, seems to him to be only mocking. In fact, Man is only too well aware that he is condemned to death, but not to suicide. Yet this philosophical recommendation can truthfully recommend only suicide, not the fated death of all. Suicide is not the natural form of death but plainly the one counter to nature. The gruesome capacity for suicide distinguishes man from all beings, both known and unknown to us. It is the veritable criterion of this disengagement from all that is natural. It is presumably necessary for man to disengage once in his life. Like Faust,¹ he must for once bring the precious vial down with reverence; he must for once have felt himself in his fearful poverty, loneliness, and dissociation from all the world, have stood a whole night face to face with the Nought. But the earth claims him again. He may not drain the dark potion in that night. A way out of the bottleneck of the Nought has been determined for him, another way than this precipitate fall into the yawning abyss. Man is not to throw off the fear of the earthly; he is to remain in the fear of death—but he is to remain.

He is to remain. He shall do none other than what he already wills: to remain. The terror of the earthly is to be taken from him only with the earthly itself. As long as he lives on earth, he will also remain in terror of the earthly. And philosophy deceives him about this “shall” by weaving the blue mist of its idea of the All about the earthly. For indeed, an All would not die and nothing would die in the All. Only the singular can die and everything mortal is solitary. Philosophy has to rid the world of what is singular, and this un-doing of the Aught is also the reason why it has to be idealistic. For idealism, with its denial of everything that distinguishes the singular from the All, is the tool of the philosopher’s trade. With it, philosophy continues to work over the recalcitrant material until the latter finally offers no more resistance to the smoke screen of the one-and-all concept. If once all were woven into this mist, death would indeed be swallowed up, if not into the eternal triumph,² at least into the one and universal night of the Nought. And it is the ultimate conclusion of this doctrine that death is—Nought. But in truth this is no ultimate conclusion, but a first beginning, and truthfully death is not what it seems, not Nought, but a something from which there is no appeal, which is not to be done away with. Its hard summons sounds unbroken even out of the mist with which philosophy envelops it. Philosophy might well have swallowed it up into the night of the Nought, but it could not tear loose its poisonous sting. And man’s terror as he trembles before this sting ever condemns the compassionate lie of philosophy as cruel lying.

The Philosophy of the All

By denying the somber presupposition of all life, that is by not allowing death to count as Aught but turning it into Nought, philosophy creates for itself an apparent freedom from presuppositions. For now the premise of all cognition of the All is—nothing. Before the one and universal cognition of the All the only thing that still counts is the one and universal Nought. Philosophy plugs up its ears before the cry of terrorized humanity. Were it otherwise, it would have to start from the premise, the conscious premise, that the Nought of death is an Aught, that the Nought of every new death is a new Aught, ever newly fearsome, which neither talk nor silence can dispose of. It would need the courage to listen to the cry of mortal terror and not to shut its eyes to gruesome reality. Instead, it will grant precedence over the one and universal cognition only to the one and universal Nought which buries its head in the sand before that cry. The Nought is not Nothing, it is Aught. A thousand deaths stand in the somber background of the world as its inexhaustible premise, a thousand Noughts that are Aught precisely because they are many, instead of the one Nought which really would be nothing. The multiplicity of the Nought which is premised by philosophy, the reality of death which will not be banished from the world and which announced itself in the inextinguishable cry of its victims—these give the lie, even before it has been conceived, to the basic idea of philosophy, the idea of the one and universal cognition of the All. The millennial secret of philosophy which Schopenhauer spilled at its bier, namely that death was supposed to have been its Musaget, loses its power over us. We want no philosophy which joins death’s retinue and deceives and diverts us about its enduring sovereignty by the one-and-all music of its dance. We want no deception at all. If death is something, then henceforth no philosophy is to divert our glance from it by the assertion that philosophy presupposes Nothing. Let us, however, look more closely at this assertion.

Was not philosophy itself already all full of presupposition, indeed all presupposition itself, through that presupposition that it presuppose nothing, its “sole” presupposition? Again and again, everything else that was possibly worthy of inquiry was attached to this question. Again and again, the answer to the question was sought in reasoning. It is as if this presupposition of the intelligible All, so magnificent in itself, threw the whole circle of other possible inquiries into the shade. Materialism and idealism, both—and not just the former—“as old as philosophy,” have an equal share in this presupposition. One silenced or ignored whatever laid claim to independence in its face. One silenced the voice which claimed possession, in a revelation, of the source of divine knowledge originating beyond reason. Centuries of philosophical labors were devoted to this disputation between knowledge and belief; they reach their goal at the precise moment when the knowledge of the All reaches a conclusion in itself. For one will have to designate it as a conclusion when this knowledge encompasses completely no longer only its object, the All, but also itself, completely at least according to its own requirements and in its own peculiar manner. This happened when Hegel included the history of philosophy in the system. It seems that reason can go no further than to place itself visibly as the innermost fact known to itself, now as part of the system’s structure, and of course as the concluding part. And at the precise moment when philosophy exhausts its furthest formal possibilities and reaches the boundary set by its own nature, the great question of the relationship of knowledge and belief which is pressed upon it by the course of world history seems now, as already noted, to be solved.

HEGEL

More than once, it already seemed as if peace were concluded between the two hostile powers, whether on the basis of a clean division of their respective claims, or on the basis of philosophy’s supposing that it possessed in its arsenal the keys to unlock the secrets of revelation. In either case, therefore, philosophy allowed revelation to count as truth, inaccessible to it in the one case, confirmed by it in the other. But neither solution ever sufficed for long. The pride of philosophy very soon rose up against the first, unable to bear the thought of acknowledging a locked gate; belief, conversely, was bound to remonstrate against the second solution if it was not to be satisfied with being recognized, quite incidentally, as one truth among others by philosophy. What Hegelian philosophy promised to bring was, however, something entirely different. It asserted neither dichotomy nor mere congruity, but rather an innermost interconnection. The cognitive world becomes cognitive through the same law of reasoning which recurs as the supreme law of existence at the apex of the system. And this law, one and the same in thinking and being, was first annunciated, on the scale of world history, in revelation. Thus philosophy is in a sense no more than fulfilling what was promised in revelation. And again, philosophy carries out this function not merely occasionally or only at the zenith of its orbit; in every moment, so to speak with every breath that it draws, it involuntarily confirms the truth of what revelation has declared. Thus the old quarrel seems settled, heaven and earth reconciled.

KIERKEGAARD

Yet the [Hegelian] solution of the question of belief, as well as the self-fulfillment of knowledge, was more apparent than real—most apparently apparent, it is true, for if that aforementioned presupposition holds and all knowledge is directed toward the All, if it is all included in the All but at the same time omnipotent in it, then indeed that appearance was more than appearance, it was truth. Then anyone still wanting to raise an objection had to find an Archimedean footing, a “place where to stand” outside that cognitive All. A Kierkegaard, and not only he, contested the Hegelian integration of revelation into the All from such an Archimedean fulcrum. That fulcrum was the peculiar consciousness of his own sin and his own redemption on the part of Sören Kierkegaard himself or whatever might happen to be his first and last names. This consciousness neither needed a blending into the cosmos nor admitted of it, for even if everything about it could be translated into universal terms, there remained the being saddled with first and last name, with what was his own in the strictest and narrowest sense of the word. And this “own” was just what mattered, as the bearers of such experience asserted.

THE NEW PHILOSOPHY

At least this was a case of one assertion against another. Philosophy was accused of an incapacity or, more exactly, of an inadequacy which it could not itself admit since it could not recognize it. For if there was here really an object beyond it, then philosophy itself, especially in the conclusive form which it assumed under Hegel, had locked this and every Beyond from its view. The objection disputed its right to a sphere whose existence it had to deny; it did not attack its own sphere. That had to happen in another manner. And it happened in the philosophical period that begins with Schopenhauer, continues via Nietzsche, and whose end has not yet arrived.

SCHOPENHAUER

Schopenhauer was the first of the great thinkers to inquire, not into the essence but into the value of the world. A most unscientific inquiry, if it was really meant to inquire into its value for man, and not into its objective value, its value for some “something,” the “sense” or “purpose” of the world, which would after all have been only another way of saying an inquiry into its essence. Perhaps it was even meant to inquire into its value for the man Arthur Schopenhauer. And so in fact it was meant. Consciously, it is true, he inquired only into its value for man, and even this inquiry was deprived of its poisonous fangs by ultimately finding its solution after all in a system of the world. System of course already implies in itself independent universal applicability. And so the inquiry of presystematic man found its answer in the saint of the concluding part produced by the system. Thus a human type and not a concept closed the arch of the system, really closing it as a keystone; it did not simply supplement it as an ethical decoration or curlicue. Even this was already something unheard of in philosophy. And above all, the enormous effect can be explained only by the fact that one sensed—and this really was the case—that here a man stood at the beginning of the system. This man no longer philosophized in the context of, and so to say as if commissioned by, the history of philosophy, nor as heir to whatever might be the current status of its problems, but “had taken it upon himself to reflect on life” because it—life—“is a precarious matter.” This proud dictum of the youth in conversation with Goethe—it is significant that he said “life” and not “world”—is complemented by the letter in which he offered the completed work to the publisher. There he declares the content of philosophy to be the idea with which an individual mind reacts to the impression which the world has made on him. “An individual mind”—it was then after all the man Arthur Schopenhauer who here assumed the place which, according to the prevailing conception of philosophizing, should have been assumed by the problem. Man, “life,” had become the problem, and he had “taken it upon himself” to solve it in the form of a philosophy. Therefore the value of the world for man had now to be questioned—a most unscientific inquiry, as already indicated, but so much the more a human one. All philosophical interest had hitherto turned about the cognitive All; even man had been admitted as an object of philosophy only in his relationship to this All. Now something else, the living man, independently took a stand opposite this cognitive world, and opposite totality there stood the singular, the “unique and his own,” mocking every All and universality. This novum was then thrust irretrievably into the riverbed of the development of conscious spirit, not in the book so headed, which in the last analysis was only that—a book—but in the tragedy of Nietzsche’s life itself.

NIETZSCHE

For only here was it really something new. Poets had always dealt with life and their own souls. But not philosophers. And saints had always lived life and for their own soul. But again—not the philosophers. Here, however, was one man who knew his own life and his own soul like a poet, and obeyed their voice like a holy man, and who was for all that a philosopher. What he philosophized has by now become almost a matter of indifference. Dionysiac and Superman, Blond Beast and Eternal Return—where are they now? But none of those who now feel the urge to philosophize can any longer by-pass the man himself, who transformed himself in the transformation of his mental images, whose soul feared no height, who clambered after Mind, that daredevil climber, up to the steep pinnacle of madness, where there was no more Onward. The fearsome and challenging image of the unconditional vassalage of soul to mind could henceforth not be eradicated. For the great thinkers of the past, the soul had been allowed to play the role of, say, wet nurse, or at any rate of tutor of Mind. But one day the pupil grew up and went his own way, enjoying his freedom and unlimited prospects. He recalled the four narrow walls in which he had grown up only with horror. Thus mind enjoyed precisely its being free of the soulful dullness in which nonmind spends its days. For the philosopher, philosophy was the cool height to which he had escaped from the mists of the plain. For Nietzsche this dichotomy between height and plain did not exist in his own self: he was of a piece, soul and mind a unity, man and thinker a unity to the last.

Man

Thus man became a power over philosophy—not man in general over philosophy in general, but one man, one very specific man over his own philosophy. The philosopher ceased to be a negligible quantity for his philosophy. Philosophy had promised to give him compensation in the form of mind in return for selling it his soul, and he no longer took this compensation seriously. Man as philosophizer had become master of philosophy—not as translated into mental terms, but as endowed with a soul, whose mind seemed to him only the frozen breath of his living soul. Philosophy had to acknowledge him, acknowledge him as something which it could not comprehend but which, because powerful over against it, it could not deny. Man in the utter singularity of his individuality, in his prosopographically determined being, stepped out of the world which knew itself as the conceivable world, out of the All of philosophy.

METAETHICS

Philosophy had intended to grasp man, even man as a “personality,” in ethics. But that was an impossible endeavor. For if and as it grasped him, he was bound to dissolve in its grasp. In principle ethics might assign to action a special status as against all being; no matter: in practice it drew action, of necessity as it were, back into the orbit of the cognitive All. Every ethics ultimately reconverged with a doctrine of the community as a unit of being. Merely to distinguish the special nature of action, as against being, offered, apparently, insufficient guarantee against this convergence. One should have taken one more step backward and anchored action in the foundation of a “character” which, for all it partook of being, was nevertheless separated from all being. Only thus could one have secured action as a world to itself as against the world. But with the single exception of Kant, that never happened. And even in Kant’s case the concept of the All again carried off the victory over the individual through his formulation of the law of morality as the universally valid act. With a certain historically logical consistency, the “miracle in the phenomenal world”—as he felicitously designated the concept of freedom—sank back into the miracle of freedom—sank back into the miracle of the phenomenal world with the post-Kantians. Kant himself serves as godfather to Hegel’s concept of universal history, not only with his political philosophy and his philosophy of history, but already with his ethical fundamentals. And while Schopenhauer incorporated Kant’s doctrine of intelligible character into his doctrine of the will, he debased the value of the former doctrine, and that in the opposite direction from the great Idealists. He made will the essence of the world and thereby let the world dissolve in will, if not will in the world. Thus he annihilated the distinction so alive in himself, between the being of man and the being of the world.

The new world which Nietzsche unlocked to reason thus had to lie beyond the orbit described by ethics. One must acknowledge the otherworldliness of the new inquiry as against everything which the concept of ethics hitherto solely meant and solely was meant to mean, the more so if one wants the spiritual achievement of the past to count for everything which it accomplished rather than to destroy it in a riot of blind destructiveness. A way of looking at life (Lebensanschauung) confronts a way of looking at the world (Weltanschauung). Ethics is and remains a part of the Weltanschauung. Its special relationship with a life-focused point of view is only that of a particularly intimate contradiction, just because both seem to touch each other, inde...