A Jewish postmodern critique of Rosenzweig's speech thinking and the concept of revelation (original) (raw)
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Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig & Ordinary Language Philosophy.docx
1 "We begin to feel, or ought to, terrified that maybe language (and understanding, and knowledge) rests upon very shaky foundationsa thin net over an abyss. (No doubt that is part of the reason philosophers offer absolute 'explanations' for it.)" 1 In 1921, Franz Rosenzweig published what is arguably the greatest work of modern Jewish philosophy, The Star of Redemption. Although the book wears its religious commitments on its sleeves, and is chock full of theological language (building on the categories of creation, revelation, and redemption), Rosenzweig argued that the book should be understood as "merely a system of philosophy." I have argued elsewhere that the systematic character of the Star is markedly post-Kantian: the Star depicts worldhood and selfhood as distinct domains of human life which find their reconciliation in a future, divinely-guaranteed redemptive unity. Again, in spite of the book's theological language, I have suggested the Star offers an account of systematic knowledge as "quintessentially human knowledge," for Rosenzweig rejects the quest to know "the All" from the Absolute standpoint (which presumes, says Rosenzweig, the unity of what is from the get-go) and instead shows the path to unitytheoretical and practicalfrom out of the standpoint of the particular human being. 2 But in the very year the Star appeared in print, Rosenzweig also composed what was intended to be a kind of commoner's guide to his ideas, "The Little Book of Healthy and Sick Human Understanding" ["Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand"with a pun on the German term for "common sense"]. Although sharing fundamental philosophical and theological sentiments with the Star, including, I will want to suggest, its insistence on a unifying horizon for our experience among particulars, Rosenzweig's "Little Book" is a very different sort of text than the Star. (Rosenzweig himself never published the book, saying it was "bad," but we get a sense of what he was aiming at in it when he suggests 1 S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. 178-79. 2 Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (Cambridge, 2009). "The All and the Everyday": Franz Rosenzweig and Ordinary Language Philosophy Benjamin Pollock Hebrew University 2 that, were he to rewrite it, he would name it "Philosophie der ganzen Kerle," 3 something like "The Whole Dudes' Philosophy.") As Harvard dudes Hilary Putnam and Paul Franks have argued, the "Little Book" shares much more in common with the work of the later Wittgenstein than it does with the grand systems of German Idealism to which the Star is naturally compared. The "Little Book" presents the traditional philosophical quest for essences (for answers to "what is" questions) as symptomatic of a sickness of the understanding which can lead to paralysis ("acute apoplexia philosophica," in fact), and it presents ordinary language both as an antidote to philosophical sickness and as the only context in which philosophical questions findnot answers, properly speaking, but their resolutions. 4
Originally published in Spanish as: "La posibilidad redentora del lenguaje. Del «nombre propio» en Rosenzweig al «decir tú » en Buber", Nuevo pensamiento, XI (18), 2021 (julio-diciembre): 295-310. Faced with the oblivion of the individual being, Rosenzweig proposes to relocate the concrete reality in the center of the philosophical thoughts and the proper way to do this is through language. The «name», especially, will be, according to Rosenzweig, the way to make the Redemption effective in the world. This idea influences another contemporary thinker, Martin Buber. But the Austrian philosopher understands the redemptive possibility of language, not in the «name», but in «saying Thou». The purpose of this essay is to set forth this ethical comprehension of language, essential to the "new thinking" proposed by Rosenzweig, relating it with that of his friend and collaborator Martin Buber.
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