The Star of Redemption (Modern Jewish Philosophy & Religion: Translations & Critical Studies) (Modern Jewish Philosophy and Religion: Translations and Crit) - Softcover

Rosenzweig, Franz; Galli, Barbara E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299207242 ISBN 13: 9780299207243

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

Synopsis

    The Star of Redemption is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding religion and philosophy in the twentieth century.  Fusing philosophy and theology, the book assigns both Judaism and Christianity distinct but equally important roles in the spiritual structure of the world. Franz Rosenzweig finds in both biblical religions approaches to a comprehension of reality. 
    The major themes and motifs of The Star&;the birth, life, death, and the immortality of the soul;  Eastern philosophies and Jewish mysticism; the relationship between God, world and humanity over time; and revelation as the real biblical miracle of faith and path to redemption&;resonate meaningfully.

About this title

About the Author

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) helped establish Das freie judische Lehrhaus (Free House of Jewish Learning) in Frankfurt-am-Main. Rosenzweig is one of the greatest contributors to Jewish philosophy in the twentieth century.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE STAR OF REDEMPTION

By FRANZ ROSENWEIG

The University of Wisconsin Press

Copyright © 2005 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-20724-3

Contents

Acknowledgments Barbara E. Galli.......................................................................viiForeword Michael Oppenheim.............................................................................xiIntroduction to Barbara Galli's Translation of Rosenzweig's Star Elliot R. Wolfson.....................xviiThe Star of Redemption Franz Rosenzweig................................................................1Index...................................................................................................449

Chapter One

THE ELEMENTS OR THE EVERLASTING PRIMORDIAL WORLD

INTRODUCTION

ON THE POSSIBILITY OF KNOWING THE ALL in philosophos!

From death, it is from the fear of death that all cognition of the All begins. Philosophy has the audacity to cast off the fear of the earthly, to remove from death its poisonous sting, from Hades his pestilential breath. All that is mortal lives in this fear of death; every new birth multiplies the fear for a new reason, for it multiplies that which is mortal. The womb of the inexhaustible earth ceaselessly gives birth to what is new, and each one is subject to death; each newly born waits with fear and trembling for the day of its passage into the dark. But philosophy refutes these earthly fears. It breaks free above the grave that opens up under our feet before each step. It abandons the body to the power of the abyss, but above it the free soul floats off in the wind. That the fear of death knows nothing of such a separation in body and soul, that it yells I, I, I and wants to hear nothing about a deflection of the fear onto a mere "body"-matters little to philosophy. That man may crawl like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the whizzing projectiles of blind, pitiless death, or that there he may feel as violently inevitable that which he never feels otherwise: his I would be only an It if it were to die; and he may cry out his I with every cry still in his throat against the Pitiless One by whom he is threatened with such an unimaginable annihilation-upon all this misery, philosophy smiles its empty smile and, with its outstretched index finger, shows the creature, whose limbs are trembling in fear for its life in this world, a world beyond, of which it wants to know nothing at all. For man does not at all want to escape from some chain; he wants to stay, he wants-to live. Philosophy, which commends death to him as its special little shelter and as the splendid opportunity to escape from the narrowness of life, seems to be only jeering at him. Man feels only too well that he is certainly condemned to death, but not to suicide. And it is only suicide that that philosophical recommendation would truly be able to recommend, not the death decreed for all. Suicide is not natural death, but a downright unnatural one. The dreadful capacity for suicide distinguishes man from all beings that we know and that we do not know. This capacity indicates precisely this step out of all that is natural. It is, of course, necessary that man step out one day in his life; he must one day devoutly fetch down the precious vial; in his dreadful poverty, he must have felt at some time lonely and adrift from the whole world, standing for a night facing the nothing. But the earth wants him back. He may not drink up the brown juice that night. For him, there is reserved another exit from the impasse of the nothing than this fall into the yawning of the abyss. Man should not cast aside from him the fear of the earthly; in his fear of death he should-stay.

He should stay. He should therefore do nothing other than what he already wants: to stay. The fear of the earthly should be removed from him only with the earthly itself. But as long as he lives on earth, he should also remain in fear of the earthly. And philosophy dupes him of this should when around the earthly it weaves the thick blue haze of its idea of the All. For clearly: an All would not die, and in the All, nothing would die. Only that which is singular can die, and everything that is mortal is solitary. This, the fact that philosophy must exclude from the world that which is singular, this ex-clusion of the something is also the reason why it has to be idealistic. For, with its denial of all that separates the single from the All, "idealism" is the tool with which philosophy works the obstinate material until it no longer puts up resistance against the fog that envelops it with the concept of the One and the All. Once all things are enveloped in this fog, death would for certain be swallowed up, if not in eternal victory, then at least in the one and universal night of the nothing. And here lies the ultimate conclusion of this wisdom: death would be-nothing. But actually, this is not an ultimate conclusion, but a first beginning, and death is truly not what it seems, not nothing, but a pitiless something that cannot be excluded. Even from out of the fog with which philosophy envelops it, its harsh cry resounds unremittingly; philosophy would have liked to swallow it into the night of the nothing, but it could not break off its poisonous sting; and the fear man feels, trembling before this sting, always cruelly belies the compassionate lie of philosophy.

But when philosophy denies the dark presupposition of all life, when it does not value death as something, but makes it into a nothing, it gives itself the appearance of having no presupposition. In fact, all cognition of the All has for its presupposition-nothing. For the one and universal cognition of the All, only the one and universal nothing is valid. If philosophy did not want to stop its ears before the cry of frightened humanity, it would have to take the following as its point of departure-and consciously as its point of departure-: the nothing of death is a something, each renewed nothing of death is a new something that frightens anew, and that cannot be passed over in silence, nor be silenced. And instead of the one and universal nothing that buries its head in the sand before the cry of mortal terror, and which alone philosophy wants to let precede the one and universal cognition, philosophy would have to have the courage to listen to that cry and not close its eyes before the terrible reality. The nothing is not nothing, it is something. In the dark background of the world there rise up, as its inexhaustible presupposition, a thousand deaths; instead of the one nothing that would really be nothing, a thousand nothings rise up, which are something just because they are multiple. The multiplicity of the nothing that philosophy presupposes, the reality of death that cannot be banished from the world, and announcing itself in its victim's cry that cannot be stifled, it is this that makes a lie of the basic thought of philosophy, the thought of the one and universal cognition of the All, even before it is thought. Schopenhauer revealed, on its tombstone, the secret that philosophy had kept for two and a half thousand years: death was its Musaget; but this secret is losing its power over us. We do not want a philosophy that puts itself in the service of death and deludes us about its lasting reign due to the one and universal harmony of its dance. We do not want any illusions. If death is something, then no philosophy is again going to make us avert our eyes with its assertion that it presupposes nothing. But let us consider that assertion more closely.

With that "sole" presupposition that it presupposes nothing, wasn't philosophy already itself full of presuppositions, indeed presupposition through and through? And yet, thinking has again and again run down the slope of the same question: What is the world? And again and again all sorts of other more problematic realities were linked up with this question; and finally, again and again the answer to the question was sought in thinking. It is as if this presupposition, imposing in itself, of the thinkable All were throwing a shadow over the entire sphere of other possible questions. Materialism and idealism, both-not just the former-"as old as philosophy," have an equal share in this presupposition. That which, in the face of it, claimed independence was either reduced to silence or paid no attention. It was reduced to silence, the voice that claimed to possess through a Revelation the source of divine knowledge, springing up beyond thinking. The philosophical task has been devoted for centuries to this debate between knowledge and faith; it reaches its goal in the precise moment where knowledge of the All comes to a conclusion in itself. For it must indeed be called a conclusion when this knowledge no longer includes merely its object, the All, but also includes itself with no remainder, with no remainder at least according to its own claims and its own particular modalities. This happened when Hegel enclosed the history of philosophy in the system. It seems that thinking cannot go any further than to present itself visibly, that is to say the innermost reality that is known to it, as a part of the systematic edifice, and naturally as the part that finishes it off. And just at this moment, where philosophy exhausts its ultimate formal possibilities and reaches the limit set by its own nature, it seems, too, as already noted, that the great question put to it by the course of universal history, that of the relationship between knowledge and faith, has been solved.

More than once, so far, it seemed that peace had been concluded between the two hostile powers, be it on the strength of a tidy separation of the mutual claims, or be it such that philosophy believes it possesses in its arsenal the keys that would open the mysteries of Revelation. In both cases, philosophy agreed to regard Revelation as truth, a truth inaccessible to it on the one hand, but on the other hand confirmed by it. But neither solution was ever sufficient for long. Against the first solution, the pride of philosophy always immediately rose up: it could not bear to acknowledge that a door was locked to it; against the other solution, conversely, it is faith that had to bristle up: it could not be satisfied with being acknowledged by philosophy in this way, passing as one truth among others. But Hegel's philosophy now promised to introduce something completely different. Neither the separation nor mere agreement was asserted, but an innermost connection. The knowable world becomes knowable by the same law of thinking which returns to the summit of the system as a supreme law of being. And this one law of thinking and being is first announced for universal history in Revelation, so that philosophy is only to some degree the fulfillment of that which is promised in Revelation. And in its turn, it does not exercise this office occasionally, solely, or as it were only at the zenith of its trajectory, but at each moment; to some degree, with its every breath, philosophy necessarily confirms the truth of that which Revelation has uttered. So the old quarrel seems settled, heaven and earth reconciled.

But that was only appearance, both for the solution given to the question of faith and for the self-completion of knowledge. A highly apparent appearance at any rate; for if the presupposition that was mentioned first is valid, and if all knowledge concerns the All, if it is enclosed in it while being all-powerful in it, then that appearance was certainly more than appearance, then it was truth. Whoever still wanted to raise an objection had to feel under his feet an Archimedean point outside of that knowable All. It is from such an Archimedean point that a Kierkegaard, and not only he, contested the Hegelian integration of Revelation into the All. The point in question is Sren Kierkegaard's own consciousness, or the consciousness designated by some other first and last name, of personal sin and of personal Redemption, which neither aspired to nor gave access to a dissolution into the cosmos; it did not give access to it: for even if everything in it could be translated into the universal-there remained the fact of having a first and last name, the most personal thing in the strictest and narrowest sense of the word, and everything depended precisely on that personal reality, as the bearers of these experiences asserted.

At any rate, one assertion here countered another assertion. Philosophy was accused of a deficiency, or more accurately, of an insufficiency which it could not itself admit because it could not recognize it: for, if there really was here an object situated beyond it, then, in the completed form it assumed under Hegel, it had precisely closed off any view of this beyond, as well as that of any other; the objection contested its right on a domain whose existence it had to deny; this objection did not attack its own domain. That had to happen in another way. And this happened in the philosophical epoch inaugurated by Schopenhauer and carried on by Nietzsche, and its end has not yet come.

Schopenhauer was the first among the great thinkers to be concerned, not with the essence, but with the value of the world. A highly unscientific concern, if he really was enquiring into the objective value, the value of "something," the "meaning" or the "purpose" of the world-which, after all, would only be another expression for enquiring into the essence-but if the enquiry was about its value for man, and perhaps even for the man Arthur Schopenhauer. And this is the way it was meant. Of course, it was consciously that one only asked about the value for man, and even this question's poisonous fangs were extracted so that it found its solution, after all, in a system of the world. For system quite simply signifies that things already have value independently and universally. And so the question of man prior to the system found its answer in the saint, produced by the system in its terminal phase. At any rate, this was already an unheard-of thing in philosophy, that a human type and not a concept closed the arch of the system, really closed it as its keystone, and did not complete it as an ethical ornament or trifling appendage. And more than all the rest, its prodigious influence has only one explanation that corresponds as well to the reality of things: one felt that here there was a man at the beginning of the system, a man who no longer philosophized in the context of the history of philosophy and so to speak as its proxy, as the heir to the present status of its problems, but a man who "had resolved to reflect upon life," because it-life-"is a toilsome thing." These proud words of the adolescent in a conversation with Goethe-just the fact that he says "life" and not "world" is remarkable-find their complement in the letter where he proposed the completed work to the publisher. He specifies there, for the content of philosophy, the idea by which an individual mind would react to the impression the world has made on it. "An individual mind": this was precisely the Arthur Schopenhauer who here occupied the place which, according to the prevailing conception in philosophy, the problem would have had to occupy. Man, "life," had become the problem, and because he had "proposed" to resolve it in the form of a philosophy, the value of the world for man had to be questioned-an extremely unscientific question as already admitted above, but all the more a human one. Till now, all philosophical interest had revolved around the knowable All; even man had been entitled to be an object of philosophy only in this relationship to the All. Now, facing this knowable world, there rose another independent reality: the living human being; before the All there rose the One who mocked all totality and all universality, there rose the "Unique One and his property." It was not in the book of that title-which was after all only a book-but through the tragedy of Nietzsche's life that this innovation was then encrusted into the riverbed of the evolution of the conscious mind.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE STAR OF REDEMPTIONby FRANZ ROSENWEIG Copyright © 2005 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System . Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299207242
• ISBN 13: 9780299207243
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 459