Franz Rosenzweig spent the last months of the war in and out of military hospitals for bouts of influenza, pneumonia, and malaria. At the end of August, 1918, he began writing The Star of Redemption and sending what he wrote back home to his mother on military postcards. After the war ended, he returned home first to Kassel, and then to Freiburg, devoting himself entirely to writing. He finished the Star in the middle of February, 1919.
1. Overview
Rosenzweig understands The Star of Redemption as his contribution to the “new thinking,” and the book does polemicize against those systems of German Idealism in which Rosenzweig finds the “old thinking” to be most fully realized. But the Star's post-Kantian metaphysical aspirations, its systematic structure, and its dramatic scope recommend its comparison to the great systems of Schelling and Hegel more than to any other philosophical work. Indeed, Rosenzweig insists in numerous contexts that the Star be understood “only as a system of philosophy,” that is, as committed to the very task of systematic thinking to which the German Idealists were committed. This tension between the systematic goals of the Star and Rosenzweig's explicit call for a “new thinking” that would turn away from the assumptions and tendencies of the philosophical tradition culminating in German Idealism has been the source of considerable puzzlement among readers of the Star from Rosenzweig's own time down to the present. One might suggest that Rosenzweig shares with the German Idealists the conviction that the fundamental questions human beings ask—including those questions about the relationship between the individual self and the whole of the world which perplexed Rosenzweig during his own personal and intellectual development—can only find their grounded answers within the context of a philosophical system. At the same time, however, Rosenzweig insists that the perennial philosophical quest for “knowledge of the All” can only reach its goals if philosophy takes into consideration the insights of the “new thinking” regarding temporality, revelation, and the human being's fundamental individuality.
The Star is such a multi-faceted work, however, that generations of readers have discovered in it myriad philosophical insights which far outspan its systematic aspirations. The book's influence on later Jewish thought and continental thought may well be said to rest far more heavily on the fruitfulness of some of those individual insights in the book that appear to be decidedly anti-systematic, than on the book's own overall commitment to systematicity. The book offers a rich account of the temporal situatedness of the human being, and suggests that the actuality we experience can only be understood through the tenses of past, present, and future. It exemplifies the fusion of philosophy and theology which the “new thinking” is meant to realize; and its philosophical utilization of theological concepts like “creation,” “revelation,” and “redemption,” seeks both to aid philosophy in fulfilling its own 2500-year potential, and to answer those perennial questions of Jewish and Christian theology that have perplexed religious thinkers throughout the ages. The Star works out its own aesthetics and history of art. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Star is its formulation of a “speech-thinking,” which presents language as the “organon” through which the unifying relations between beings occur and can be understood. At the center of this speech-thinking is a philosophy of dialogue which traces the awakening of selfhood through an I-You relation into which the self is called by the Absolute other. The book introduces a form of dialectical logic meant to rival Hegel's. It offers a series of interpretations of Biblical texts meant to evoke the uniqueness of the Bible as a written text which nevertheless makes it possible to hear the divine word. The Star presents Judaism and Christianity as communal forms whose institutions and liturgical calendar enable human beings to bring eternity into time. And the book includes within it a sweeping history of religion and philosophy, politics and culture, from ancient times to the present. In short, much like the systems of German Idealism, the Star offers the reader numerous points of access; but all these points of access are meant to hold together within a single overarching vision of truth and the path to it.
Rosenzweig understands the task of system to entail grasping and articulating “the All”—the whole of what is—in its identity and difference, that is, as both a single unity and as the most comprehensive diversity of particulars. While he sees the quest for knowledge of the All as rooted in the early questions of the pre-Socratics, he identifies the German Idealists as those who “discovered” system as the explicit overarching task of philosophy. Committed as Rosenzweig remains, in the Star, to this systematic task, he breaks from German Idealism perhaps most dramatically in the standpoint out of which he insists systematic knowledge is to be attained. In the systems of German Idealism, the philosopher seeks to attain the standpoint of the Absolute—the very Absolute out of which all particular beings are understood to have unfolded dialectically. According to Rosenzweig, such Absolute Idealism fails to grasp particulars in their particularity, because it assumes the fundamental unity of all particulars within the Absolute from the start. In contrast, Rosenzweig seeks to grasp the “All”, in the Star, not from an Absolute standpoint, but rather from the standpoint of the finite individual human being whom he finds situated in the middle of the course of the All, a course Rosenzweig understands as beginning in particularity, and advancing through the relations between particulars to an ultimate redemptive realization of unity. One may read the very first sentence of the Star—“All knowing of the All begins in death, the fear of death”—as a programmatic announcement of Rosenzweig's basic quarrel with German Idealism over the standpoint out of which systematic knowledge may be attained: an Absolute standpoint that claims to overcome the limits of human finitude will not yield true knowledge of the All. Only a proper recognition of the unique character of the individual mortal human being holds the promise for systematic knowledge.
The Star is a disorienting work in many ways. Keeping in mind the overall structure of the book can do much to help keep the reader from getting lost while reading it. The Star is divided into three parts, each of which is itself divided into three “books” and includes, as well, both an introductory chapter presenting the particular sort of shift in thinking Rosenzweig wants to achieve through the books of that part, and a transitional chapter that prepares the reader to move on to what comes next. The three books of the first part of the Star present philosophical constructions of what Rosenzweig asserts to be the three fundamental kinds of beings—God, world, self—as the elements out of which the system will be realized. The three books of the second part introduce the course along which God, world, and self enter into relations among themselves that advance towards unity, relations Rosenzweig denotes through the theological notions of creation, revelation, and redemption. The third part of the book inquires into the possibility of envisioning that figure of the star, in its redemptive unity, whose construction out of the elements along their course the reader has followed in the first and second parts of the book. The Star ends with a depiction of what is seen in this vision—God's face in the form of the star of redemption—and then guides the reader out from the setting of such vision back into everyday life.
2. Part I
Rosenzweig begins the Star with a reflection on human mortality, and his consideration of the irreducible uniqueness of the individual revealed in death precipitates the break-up of the “All”, which philosophy has long claimed to know, into what Rosenzweig takes to be the three fundamental—and fundamentally independent—kinds of beings: God, world, and self. Moreover, the insights Rosenzweig draws from the human fear of death in the opening pages of the Star serve to direct him in his own quest for knowledge of the “true All” that has eluded the “old thinking” of the philosophical tradition. The most important of these insights are the following:
- Rosenzweig locates in the fear of death the source of the awareness of the basic split between selfhood and worldliness which had perplexed him at least since his university years. In the fear of death, Rosenzweig claims, in the opening paragraphs of the Star, the human being experiences her own “tornness from the whole world”. She is confronted with the fact that her “I would be an ‘it’” if she died. As the Star proceeds along its course, Rosenzweig will both offer an account of this split the human being experiences, and show how the reconciliation of selfhood and worldliness will only come with the completion of the “All” in redemption.
- In serious contemplation of death, Rosenzweig suggests, one experiences nothingness in a particular, and particularly immediate fashion. The human being is set “face-to-face with the Nothing” in the fear of death. Death shows the human being the “unthinkable annihilation [Vernichtung—i.e., the making-into-Nothing, or nothing-ing]” of her “I”. The fear of death thus compels the human being to recognize the extent to which her self or “I” is not at all securely self-grounded or absolute, but rather is ever suspended in nothingness. Moreover, Rosenzweig devotes considerable attention to the particular quality of the nothingness experienced in the fear of death. I do not experience nothingness as a universal or absolute state in the fear of death, Rosenzweig suggests, but rather I experience my nothingness—I experience nothingness as a particular “something” that threatens me and me alone.
The particularity of nothingness over which the human being hovers in the fear of death leads Rosenzweig to critique the starting points of the systems of German Idealism and to suggest his own alternative to them. German Idealist systems—and here Rosenzweig alludes to various sources in the writings of Schelling and Hegel—conceive of the absolute ground of “the All” as an undifferentiated, “orphic unity,” out of which the differentiated reality we experience unfolds dialectically. Armed with the particular character of nothingness drawn from the experience of the fear of death, Rosenzweig suggests that the German Idealists “presuppose” the undifferentiated, universal character of the Absolute, as the origin of the “All,” and they thereby mistakenly root the myriad particular beings we experience in actuality in an original unity (i.e., an absolute or universal “nothing”). However, Rosenzweig reasons, particulars that are ultimately the dialectical product of absolute unity cannot be said to be particulars at all. And thus the systems of German Idealism do not in fact attain or articulate knowledge of the identity and difference of “All” that is; rather, they reduce the unique difference inherent to the different kinds of particular beings to a common unity.
The particularity of nothingness experienced in the fear of death thus leads Rosenzweig to take up a starting point in difference. Every particular kind of being must be taken up as derived from its own particular nothing, rather than as rooted ultimately in a common unity. Censuring the tendency of the philosophical tradition, once again, to reduce the three domains of special metaphysics one to the other—to reduce selfhood and world to manifestations of the divine, or the divine and the self to aspects of the cosmos, or the divine and the external world to products of the human mind—Rosenzweig takes up each of these three different kinds of beings as having generated itself out of its own particular nothing.
Taking its lead from the particularity of nothing revealed in the fear of death, the first part of the Star thus begins by constructing the particular respective being of God, world, and self each out of its own particular nothing. While Rosenzweig insists on the fundamentally independent natures of these kinds of being, the method by which he traces each's self-generation out of its particular nothing is the same. God, world, and self each emerges as an element in Rosenzweig's system through a process in which Rosenzweig depicts two paths leading out of each particular nothing and arriving at a point of unity. The two paths that Rosenzweig traces out of each particular nothing are as follows: 1) the path from out of the particular nothing driven by the affirmation of what is “not-nothing.” Rosenzweig identifies this path as the path of the “Yes.” 2) the path from out of the particular nothing driven by the negation of that very nothing. Rosenzweig identifies this path as that of the “No.” These two paths then come to a unity in what Rosenzweig refers to as the “And” of “Yes” and “No.”
Rosenzweig claims that he models his method for constructing the elements of the Star on the mathematical notion of a differential. (The differential models for Rosenzweig the possibility of generating something from nothing—when that nothing is a determinate nothing, rather than a nothing conceived as absolute.) But in order to make sense of what Rosenzweig aims to achieve through his constructions of the elemental God, world, and self in the first part of the Star, it is helpful to consider the kinds of qualities Rosenzweig identifies with the affirmative and negative paths, respectively, which emerge out of each particular nothing and merge together in each respective element. In Rosenzweig's construction, the affirmation of what is not-nothing within each element (“Yes”) always corresponds to a certain quality of “substantiality” or “being” attributed to that element, while the negation of nothing within each element (“No”) always corresponds to an “active” quality attributed to the element. Thus it is infinite being (Yes) and freedom (No) which fuse together in the self-generation of the elemental God; the presence of logos (Yes) and the vital plenitude of particulars (No) that fuse together to form the elemental world; enduring character (Yes) and free will (No) that unite within the elemental self.
If thus Hegel famously insisted that truth be grasped “not only as substance, but equally as subject,” Rosenzweig asserts that the realization of this same kind of identity of substantiality and activity is necessary to allow each of the elements to generate itself out of its nothing. Rosenzweig in fact devotes considerable time over the course of the first part of the Star to demonstrating that onlythose beings which construct themselves out of the unification of the dual paths of substantiality and activity, of “Yes” and “No,” can hold themselves out of their respective nothings. Rosenzweig sees in this two-poled structure of each being its inherent “factuality.” Indeed, he highlights the way the German word for fact itself—Tatsache—brings together “act” (Tat) and “substantiality” or “matter” (Sache). Rosenzweig writes, “Not the substance [Sache], not the act [Tat], only the fact [Tatsache] is secure from falling back into the nothing,” thereby indicating that only by emerging as the fusion of an active and substantial pole, can God, world, and the self gain a standing in being each over against its respective nothing.
Thus eschewing the tendency of the philosophical tradition to root all beings in a single, unconditioned ground, Rosenzweig begins the Star by showing how all particular beings—divine, worldly, personal—can be understood as generating themselves each out of its own particular nothing. But throughout the first part of the Star, these constructions of the elemental God, world, and self remain “hypothetical.” Rosenzweig suggests that one only attains “certainty” regarding these constructions when they are shown to be the necessary conditions for the actuality we experience. As Rosenzweig proceeds to argue, in the second part of the Star, the actuality we experience is born of the relations between God, world, and selves. That is to say, the actuality we experience is not to be understood as rooted in an original metaphysical unity, but rather in the relations between particulars each of which generates itself out of its own nothing. Moreover, Rosenzweig proceeds to show that in entering into the reciprocal relations with one another which ground our experience, elemental beings take steps towards the ultimate systematic unification of the “All”.
3. Part II
The second part of the Star introduces theology as complement to philosophy: here the theological “categories” of creation, revelation, and redemption are shown to “fulfill” what is promised in the philosophical constructions of God, world, and self from the book's first part. This fulfillment occurs through the “course” along which the elemental God, world, and self step into relations with one another, relations that form the actuality we experience. Rosenzweig designates the divine turning into relation with the world as creation; the divine turning into relation with the individual self as revelation; and the turning of the self into loving relation with the world as redemption. How we are to understand the beginning of this chain of relations—i.e., why the divine “creates” the world—is an open question among scholars, and some claim that Rosenzweig intends the original turning of the divine to the world, and to the self, respectively, to be grasped as acts of will or love inexplicable by philosophical means. But Rosenzweig also makes it clear that particular beings needto step into relations with one another precisely in order to realize themselves as what they are. God does not actually become the God he is elementally until he realizes divine freedom in the grounding of the existence of the world in creation, and until he receives human recognition for his divine being through revelation. The world does not actually become the world it is elementally until it receives its essential grounding from the divine in creation, and until its particulars attain to their own vital self-determination in redemption. The self does not actually become what it is elementally until it is awoken to its free I-hood through revelation, and until it realizes its freedom in its turning in love to the world in redemption.
Now, in order for each element to fulfill itself through its relations to its others, Rosenzweig asserts, each must undergo a certain transformation. Rosenzweig here draws methodological consequences from the very notion of revelation itself. The German for revelation, Offenbarung, suggests that every being must undergo a kind of “opening up” in turning into the relations with others that revelation entails. Such opening up and turning outward demands what Rosenzweig calls a “reversal” [Umkehr] of the “Yes” and the “No” which united within each isolated element. What was the “Yes” pole within a given elements (i.e., its substantial pole) reverses into a “No” (i.e., activity), and what was the “No” pole within the element reverses into a “Yes”. Relations between elements are constituted, then, when, e.g., the “No” pole within a given element reverses into a “Yes” and then unites up with what had been the “Yes” pole within another element, now reversed into a “No”. To give an example: creation demands that the active, free pole of God (“No”) reverse itself into the substantial grounding (“Yes”) of the existence of the world (“No”) which itself emerged out of the reversal of the essential pole (“Yes”) within the elemental world. The union of divine “Yes” and worldly “No” forged in creation, then, attains the same “factual” character as relation as did the union of “Yes” and “No” within each element: creation is a fact—a “Tatsache”—according to Rosenzweig, insofar as it results from the unifying relation between the being of the divine creator (“Sache”) and the active existence (“Tat”) of the world
Rosenzweig devotes great care to demonstrating that the elemental beings fulfill themselves through their reversals into relations with their others. But over the course of the second part of the Star, Rosenzweig proceeds to show that while God, world, and self realize themselves as the beings that they are by entering into these reciprocal relations, this very course of relations—creation, revelation, redemption—will at once lead them to realize the unity of the “All”. Indeed, the Starlocates the unity, posited by the German Idealists at the beginning of their systems, in the redemptive conclusion of its systematic course. And Rosenzweig can claim to have articulated the “All” in both its identity and difference within his system because the very course of relations that leads particulars to form the unity of the “All” at once permits each particular to realize itself as particular.
The course God, world, and self take into relations through the second part of the Star, according to Rosenzweig, generates the actuality which we experience. Indeed, as indicated in the “New Thinking” section above, Rosenzweig aims to show that we have access to these relations of creation, revelation, and redemption, through the quintessentially temporal quality of our experience. We experience the world we inhabit as “already-there” from the moment we become aware of it, and this experience of the world as our past, Rosenzweig contends, is an experience of creation. Each of us experiences her own awakening to free selfhood as an experience that is quintessentially present; it is none other than this experience of awakening to free selfhood which Rosenzweig understands as our experience of revelation. Finally, we experience our opening up into loving relations with others in the world, and the possibilities such relations generate, through the prism of the future; and it is through this future-directed experience that we anticipate redemption.
Rosenzweig draws important epistemological consequences from the fact that we can be shown to experience the relations of creation, revelation, and redemption that occur between God, world, and self. He asserts that the fact that we have access through experience to the relations between those elements whose construction we traced through thought, offers us evidence for the credibility of those very constructions. Rosenzweig suggests that the relationship between the thought of the first part of the Star and the experience of the second part of the Star should be understood as one of promise and fulfillment; and he understands himself to be bringing together philosophy and theology in this very relation. For as the elements constructed in the first part of the Star are shown to realize themselves, to fulfill their elemental potential through the theological relations of creation, revelation, and redemption, in the book's second part, Rosenzweig can claim to have shown that philosophy finds its abstract constructs realized in theology's account of actuality, and that theology finds the conditions for the possibility of its account of actuality in the constructs of philosophy. It is this very reciprocally-confirming relationship between philosophy and theology that Rosenzweig believes exemplifies the “new thinking.”
Much as it was in his earlier thinking, the central theological concept here in the second part of the Star is revelation. In Rosenzweig's earliest formulations, revelation denotes the turning of the absolute other into relation with the human self in the world, a relation through which the human self orients herself in the world. In the Star, this same relation occurs in the midst of a nexus of relations between beings, and it does indeed orient the human being who receives revelation within this nexus of relations. Aware of herself as having been born into the world, awakening to her own free selfhood, the human being is called on to enter into those relations with others in the world that will realize the redemptive unity of the “All.” Insofar as this unity of the “All” is anticipated as future, moreover, its realization may be said to depend on human beings taking up the vocation they become aware of in revelation. The systematic unity of the “All” Rosenzweig seeks to know in the present, remains a possibility to be actualized. And Rosenzweig understands revelation to orient the human being towards this actualization.
4. Speech-Thinking
The second part of the Star is also home to Rosenzweig's account of “speech-thinking,” the centerpiece of his contribution to the “new thinking” in the Star. Here Rosenzweig understands himself to be working out a form of the “narrative” or “historical” thinking which Schelling described, in the preface to his Ages of the World, as the necessary complement to the philosophy of reason. Rosenzweig presents speech as more deeply linked to temporal experience than is rational thought, and hence as a tool eminently capable of grasping and articulating the relations of creation, revelation, and redemption which we experience in time. We express our experience of time through the tenses of language. We grasp the things of the world through our naming of them and in the stories we tell about them. I articulate my own selfhood by calling myself “I”, and I experience my most intimate personal relationships through a personal address to others as “You,” or through calling them by their first names. In song, moreover, Rosenzweig suggests we have a form of speech in which we articulate the supreme hopes we anticipate for our future.
In the second part of the Star, Rosenzweig suggests that we can grasp through speech the relations into which God, world, and the self enter, first and foremost, because speech in fact accompanies the whole of the course that leads from creation to redemption. As that which makes us human, Rosenzweig claims, the power of speech is implicit in every human being since creation; and yet the complete fulfillment of speech in a universal language that would be equally each person's own and at once common to all, can only be imagined as part of the redemptive future of humankind. In between creation and redemption, language both unites and divides people from one another: we all share speech, but speech is different in every mouth. Within the course of the systematic relations between God, world, and self that stretches from creation to redemption, Rosenzweig thus understands language as a tool of unification that does not reduce different individuals to that which is the same: speech only unites those who recognize or understand each other.
Rosenzweig thus views speech as the unifying thread whose genesis accompanies the relational advance of God, world, and self from creation through revelation to redemption, and thus as an “organon” at our disposal for grasping these relations. Each step in the genesis of speech accompanies one of the relations we experience along the path God, world, and self take towards their ultimate unification in the “All.” Rosenzweig presents the generation of the grammatical building blocks of narrative as integral to creation, the relation between God and the world which we experience as past. He presents the revelatory relation between God and the self as a dialoguebetween an “I” and a “You” always experienced as present; and he shows how both the divine “I” and the self as “You,” are constituted as such through such reciprocal dialogic exchange. And Rosenzweig depicts the redemptive bringing together of the worldly objects of narrative and the persons of dialogue in the communal song that anticipates the ultimate unity of redemption.
The speech-thinking of the second part of the Star seeks to show that relations between particular beings are best grasped through speech. But more importantly, Rosenzweig demonstrates in his “speech thinking” that these relations occur through speech. Speech, Rosenzweig suggests, is the tool through which we come to recognize ourselves as selves, and which at once unites us with others along our path towards redemption. Speech, for Rosenzweig, is thus not only a tool for grasping relations. It is a tool for realizing the path to the “All” through relations.
By the end of the second part of the Star, Rosenzweig has set forth the course of his system, along which particular beings enter into relations that will ultimately bring about their unification within the “All.” Rosenzweig celebrates this achievement, at the end of the book's second part, by presenting the reader with the geometric image that he suggests is constructed out of the elements in their relations. Depicting God, world, and self as three points equidistant from one another, he shows, yields a single triangle. The relations between each of the elements, furthermore, suggest three further points, each one between those two elements which unite through it. The image befitting the system, Rosenzweig thereby proclaims, is not the “circle” which has steered philosophical thinking from Anaximander to Hegel, but rather the six-pointed star formed by the three elemental points coupled with the three points of relation into which the elements enter: the star of redemption.
Before turning to survey the third and final part of the Star, we should note here the situation Rosenzweig's reader finds herself in by the time she arrives at the end of the second part of the book. By this point in the Star, the reader has been asked to see herself as situated in the middle of the course leading to the unification of the “All”. As a result, the book directs a certain challenge to the reader to take up her role in the systematic advance towards the redemptive unity which Rosenzweig envisions. Because the unity of the “All” is projected as future, that is, the reader is called on to do her part to realize in actuality the very system of the “All” which she may come to know through reading the Star.
5. Part III
But if the unity of the system is projected into the future, can it truly be known in the present? The third part of the Star presents life within the Jewish and Christian religious communities as the surprising answer to this question. According to Rosenzweig, life within these communities allows for the possibility of “anticipating” the ultimate redemptive unity of the “All”. The social practices through which these communities constitute themselves lay the groundwork for such communal anticipation. More significantly, the course of the Jewish and Christian liturgical calendars—the yearly path along which Jewish and Christian communities celebrate creation, revelation, and redemption, each in its own particular manner—makes it possible, according to Rosenzweig, for members of these communities to envision within time, the ultimate unity of the “All” that will only be actual in the future redemption. Judaism and Christianity are thus to be understood, according to Rosenzweig, as “guarantees” of that ultimate redemption. Life within Jewish or Christian community enables the person who stands in the middle of the course of the “All” to see the ultimate unity towards which all particular beings strive through relations, and to take her place within this course with confidence.
But even as they serve as “guarantees” of the future redemption, Judaism and Christianity also serve crucial roles, according to Rosenzweig, in realizing the actual redemption in the world. Here Rosenzweig introduces the conclusions he reached back in 1913 regarding the complementary roles Judaism and Christianity play in the world's advance towards redemption. The Jewish people anticipates the ultimate redemption of the world within the closed, communal life it forges out of its intimate experience of relation with the divine. Christianity advances the cause of the actualredemption of the world, by uniting the globe through its message of divine love. While Christianity thus takes up the historical task of guiding the world towards redemption, it would lose its way, according to Rosenzweig, if the Jewish people did not perpetually serve as reminder, through its own communal anticipation of redemption, of the kind of unity before the divine for which the world is to strive.
After presenting the course of relations between God, world, and the self as directed towards the ultimate unification of the “All”, then, Rosenzweig suggests that the ways in which Judaism and Christianity make it possible to anticipate the ultimate future unity of the “All” itself, serve to bring the systematic knowledge of the “All” that is possible for human beings to its completion. In the “Gate” section with which the Star ends, Rosenzweig depicts the vision of redemptive unity with which knowledge of the identity and difference of the “All” is completed, as a vision of the star of redemption, the same star Rosenzweig suggested was constructed geometrically out of the elemental God, world, and self as they stepped into the relations of creation, revelation, and redemption. In this image of a star, Rosenzweig identifies the face of God. But he suggests that seeing God's face at once directs those human beings who pursue knowledge of the “All” back into the domain of human faces, into that nexus of interpersonal relations through which the redemptive unity of the All is to be achieved in actuality.
Rosenzweig sends his readers out of the “Gate” at the end of the Star back “into life,” directing them to take on the redemptive task of unifying the “All” which the book itself describes. Rosenzweig thereby ascribes to human beings a noteworthy relationship to truth itself. The systematic truth revealed in the Star is not a thing that one might claim to know or to experience like other things in the world. Truth is the redemptive goal of a course in which human beings participate. As a result, human beings stand, according to Rosenzweig, in a relationship of “verification” to truth itself. Human beings verify the truth of the unity of the “All” by taking up the task of its realization. It is the task of the readers of the Star, Rosenzweig implies, to make the “everyday” context of their lives reflect and take part in this advance towards redemptive truth.
The ending of the Star also sends the reader back into life at a particular moment in history. Here one must note that Rosenzweig saw his time in history as particularly momentous. The culmination of the philosophical tradition in German Idealism, so Rosenzweig contended, coincided with the ending of the second epoch of the world's historical advance towards redemption under Christian auspices, and the beginning of its third and final historical epoch: the founding of the Church of John which Schelling foretold in his Philosophy of Revelation. Rosenzweig understood his own time to be that of the “Johanine completion” of historical temporality, and he even saw in the battles and revolutions through which he wrote the Star evidence of the advance of world history towards its ultimate redemption.
_____________________From: Pollock, Benjamin, "Franz Rosenzweig", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015.
