Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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THE STAR OF REDEMPTION

The University of Wisconsin Press

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

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...