Rosenzweig and Postmodernism

Jay Michaelson
February 8, 1988

Rosenzweig by any other Name--
Particularity and the Postmodern

1. Introduction

"Love is as strong as death." At first, it seems like a cliche -- Love is as strong as death. It belongs with "Love will keep us alive," "Love will find a way," a hundred other throwaways of pop lyricism. But what could it mean? Translated into the reading I'm going to propose of Rosenzweig, the sentence from page 156 of the Star can suddenly be clothed in philosophical terms. A rewrite, then: "the revelation of the created uniqueness, and contingent particularity, of the Other is the corollary to and nemesis of the universalism-defeating reality of death."

I want to suggest that this sentence locates Franz Rosenzweig and The Star of Redemption at a unique moment in time; the birth of postmodernism. Now, postmodernism is a slippery term, and I am aware that the reader explicitly dismissed the very proposal I am making here -- that Rosenzweig may be understood as anticipating, or even articulating, concerns that become central in whatever it is that is known as postmodern philosophical discourse. I also want to say more. I want to argue that Rosenzweig's concerns are quintessentially Jewish ones, and that, if I can be afforded a few grand sweeps of generalization, we might better understand postmodernism if we better understand the Jewish-philosophical elements within it.

2. Particularity and anti-Totality in Rosenzweig

To begin, however, I need to back up and flesh out the lingo of my "rewrite" of Rosenzweig's dictum. But to do so in the way that will be useful to me here, I want to do so historically. Rosenzweig is part of the historical moment in continental philosophy at which Hegel's unificatory project had begun to fall under such devastating critique that not only Hegel but the whole modern project of a grand unifying theory of everything had become problematic.

Since that time, there have been a number of reasons for this mega-critique of modernism; the rejection of modern universalism/ triumphalism/ call-it-what-you-will did not come out of thin air. First, there were the continuing instabilities within Hegel's thought itself; without going into the details of the relevant arguments, there were many neo-Hegelians, Rosenzweig among them, who found Hegel's dialectic incapable of explaining what it was meant to explain. Second, there were those who found fault not in what a Hegelian system tried but failed to explain, but in what it did not even attempt to do. Rosenzweig in the early pages of the Star raises this point, that philosophy from Socrates to Hegel has sought to deny death, but has been unable or unwilling to account for the finitude of human life that motivates much of its existential crisis; a philosophy that cannot discuss metaethical concerns does not do philosophy's job adequately. Third, and here I think primarily of Levinas, the late Derrida, and latter-day multiculturalists, there arose an ethical critique of universalist philosophy -- that such metaphysical moves destroy the individuality of the Other and subsume the Other into the subject's own ego-loop. Whether explicit or implicit, a relationship might be said to exist between such worldviews and "real-world" evils such as totalitarianism and imperialism. In the wake of catastrophes of each (Auschwitz, the Gulag, the killing fields), better to "put ethics first" and not engage in any philosophical moves that reduce ("Totalize") the other to some set of supposedly universal terms which I can understand -- or rationally choose to destroy.

For whatever reason -- and it may well have simply been part of the zeitgeist rather than any of the three accounts above -- a certain set of issues moved to the forefront of continental thought in the first few decades of the twentieth century: the status of the 'other,' what to do about the particularity and difference of individuals, and the insufficiency of traditional philosophical discourse to answer these sorts of questions. The issues become central not just for Rosenzweig but for Heidegger, for Sartre, and later for Levinas and Derrida. In 1998, they are some of the core articles of faith, and I will return to them towards the end, but first I want to get back to Rosenzweig.

Rosenzweig responds to the perceived failure of the modern/Hegelian project by demanding that philosophy address the core concerns of human life. He does so by redefining the three terms of Jewish religious discourse -- creation, revelation, and redemption. In Part One of the Star, as I suggested in my earlier paper, Rosenzweig gets himself "permission" to speak of such matters by moving from the Nought we know about God to the "bubbling plenitude" that arises from God. Although this gains us no theological knowledge, it is enough to get the train moving, because it does gain us the understanding of creation which becomes critical for the Star's project.

Creation for a non-universalist has to be creation of particularity. If all of us are basically variants on a few essential terms, we might well understand ourselves as essentially identical. But we are not identical. We each have our own birthdate and deathdate, and, crucial for Rosenzweig, we each have our first and last names. Indeed, the politicized gripes against Rosenzweig lodged by some members of our own class fail to see that they are preaching to the choir; for Rosenzweig, precisely those elements that need not be present (oppression, subsuming of identity, etc.) are of utmost concern, because this contingency of our own existence is what is most important, not some non-existent essence which, but for some oppression or other, would emerge fully actualized. Beginning from existence rather than "essence," as existentialists later do, creation is first and foremost the creation of particularity.

Revelation is the revelation of this fact, the irreducible uniqueness of another person, in the form of love. Love is only of particulars: only this person, this "beloved," this "lover." A love that seeks to destroy the beloved is not love at all for Rosenzweig. It is inauthentic, in that it has no real object, and thus is, at best, narcissism. Love which recognizes the particularity of the other, however, has some unique features, because it is the revelation of God. To borrow from Buber, God as the eternal present -- not totalized past, not abstract future, but concrete present -- is revealed in the moment the infinity of the other is realized. This Truth (and Rosenzweig emphasizes at the end of the Star that God is Truth) is at once immanent and transcendent. Immanent because it inheres to this unique person. Transcendent because, as Walter Benjamin (but it may as well be Levinas or Heidegger) observed, "All nonidentity is infinite." (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Problem of Identity (1916) in Selected Writings (Belknap ed.) at 75.)

Redemption had long the most problematic of the troika for a critic of modern thought: inevitably, redemption involved some sort of unified new Christendom (Novalis) or forceful upheaval (Marx), all of which, in a post-Holocaust, post-Stalin world, gives one the chills. But Rosenzweig is working not from an integrative model of human freedom, which presumed universal applicability, but from a starting point that neither "integration" of all humanity nor actualization of some universal human "essence" makes any sense. As such, his revelation is not totalizing but infinitizing -- it is the spreading throughout the world of an infinite number of recognitions of infinity. With only a little hyperbole, one might identify this as the first non-totalitarian vision of redemption.

This brief recapitulation of Rosenzweig's basic thought should suffice for the present purposes. I will omit much of Part III's contribution, because it is the categories of Part II that interest me here, not the ways in which Christians and Jews exemplify different elements of the categories. I have deliberately flirted with postmodern referents in the last few pages -- calling Rosenzweig's redemption infinity rather than totality, and so on. But the similarity is more than wordplay. In fact, if I am right in my characterization of Rosenzweig in the previous few pages, he is a curiously positioned precursor to several dominant trends within postmodern thought.

3. Rosenzweig as a Postmodernist

Now, I know calling someone a postmodernist is about as kind as calling them a pantheist or pornographer in some circles. But I think that stems mainly from the caricature of the postmodernist as corrosively-ironic, jargon-spewing charlatan than any real treatment of postmodern thinking (not that a postmodern would object to being called a "charlatan," because at least that isn't a rationalistic totalizer, and may even be honest). Whatever postmodernism is, it seems to be concerned with a few basic issues. Among them, are the following few concerns, each of which builds on the previous one: (1) the issue of difference as opposed to identity, which wanders through art and (multicultural) politics, and finds its ultimate home in Derrida's non-concept of "differance," basically a place holder for the impossibility of transcendental meaning; (2) respecting the ontological and metaphysical status of the other and refusing to grant power to a totalizing discourse or set of terms (Foucault); (3) a sense of irony regarding the contingency of our existence and our lack of inner coherence (Rorty); (4) an interest in surface over "depth" and new criticism of culture as such (Frankfurt school to the present); (5) a mistrust of rational, logocentric thought processes (including those of reading and interpretation) and of their attempts to construct a grand narrative of any kind, particularly any narrative which involves hierarchical distinctions (such as "high" culture and "low," for instance); and (6) a resultant intellectual and aesthetic culture of pastiche and multiplicity.

Obviously, the foregoing is quite a laundry list, and some items are clearly less relevant for the present project than others, but Rosenzweig has not been forgotten. On the contrary, inasmuch as the issue of particularity disrupting a universalist metaphysics is at some level the core postmodern issue, he is right at the center. And how Rosenzweig treats the issue of the "other" is quite interesting -- his revelation of the created uniqueness of the other is quite similar to Levinas' revelatory encounter with the Other and Buber's I-Thou. And while Rosenzweig does not discuss his project in terms of power or expressly in terms of politics, we can certainly derive from his understanding of the love-relationship, and how it would manifest itself in redemption, such a conversation. It is also critical for a postmodern reading of Rosenzweig that he does not suggest that the revelation associated with love is a revelation of the "inner core" of someone else's essential being. There is no "inner core" apart from name -- "Name is in truth word and fire, not sound and fury as unbelief would have it." (Star 188) And name is precisely that which, as Rorty would put it, is contingent.

Moreover, particularity links up many of postmodernity's seemingly aesthetic concerns with the more philosophical issues associated with revelation and redemption. For example, returning to Benjamin for a moment, the work of art exists in the age of mechanical reproduction entirely because of its particularity, of its "differance." Art eventually triumphs over narratives of style -- even Benjamin's own, in the case of mechanically reproduced pop art -- precisely because narratives generally aim for the universal, but nonidentity cannot be so totalized. The "surface" world of signifiers as opposed to signified is precisely that realm of the particular, or, in other words, of the name.

What differentiates Rosenzweig from most postmodernists on the issue of particularity is the final phrase of the "rewrite" of Rosenzweig with which I began: that even as death ultimately demolishes the hope of a transcendent or universal philosophy, love in some way equals the ultimate contingency of death. Love for Rosenzweig is a form of eternal life, whereas Rorty sees the recognition of our own contingency as the beginning point for a project of self-ironization. Consequently, Rosenzweig's redemption effectively triumphs over the individual's contingency by recognizing and somehow matching it. Rorty's redemption comes when people, recognizing their own contingency, nonetheless gain a sense of "solidarity" based on shared deep-preferences, chiefly the desire to avoid cruelty. Rosenzweig can justify the equality of love and death by his theism: love is also God's love for each created being, and is ultimate. Rorty sees no divinity in the revelation of particularity.

Yet even Rosenzweig's interest in maintaining the transcendent is a postmodern transcendentalism. God, recall from Part I, is not "known" through negative theology -- which Derrida in particular finds an unsuitable postponement of what he calls "ontotheology" -- God is now known at all. We only work from the Primal Yes to understand creation. Moreover, the systemic character of Rosenzweig's work need not and cannot imply a closed metaphysical system. On the contrary, Rosenzweig's conception of transcendent revelation is precisely that which punctures the completed system. His "transcendent" is similar to Levinas's Infinity in this regard, not to Kant's noumenon; it is a rupture within the finite, whose "essence" is only its openness. Far from being a closed system of ultimates, what is transcendent in Rosenzweig is that which is generative of radical and particular ("Created") newness.

I think the basic homologies between Rosenzweig and some trends within postmodernism are, by now, fairly clear. Unfortunately, I cannot say whether this is a mere coincidence of the zeitgeist, or whether Heidegger plagiarized the Star of Redemption, or what. I must confess, as someone sympathetic to the substance of many postmodern arguments, that it would be comforting to have a postmodernism with Rosenzweig rather than the Naziphile Heidegger in the Karl Marx role. But let me leave these musings alone and turn to the final subject, which is oriented not towards Rosenzweig's future heirs but to some of his forebears: the question of Rosenzweig's, and by extension postmodernity's, distinctively Jewish modes of thought.

4. Rosenzweig as a Jewish Philosopher

That God can be named strikes me as a vastly underrated travesty of religious thought. Surely, the ineffable is that which is beyond names, words, even thought itself -- what, then, is the meaning of God's name? We must reject the convenient fact that God's name is today unpronounceable; it was, and will be in the messianic age, pronounced again -- and the time of that pronunciation, Yom Kippur, is critical for Part III of the Star.

Some Jewish texts have sought to return God to utter ineffability. The Shiur Komah, for example, sometimes seen as a travesty of anthropomorphism -- it appears to measure out the human limbs of God Itself -- may in fact be the ultimate anti-anthropomorphism. All the angels mentioned have cognitively significant names and comprehensible dimensions; God's "names" are unpronounceable strings of nonsense-letters, and God's dimensions are the 3rd century equivalent of "zillions and zillions." More familiarly, mysticism generally is sometimes seen as that which lies beyond linguistic cognition, the "spirit," not the letter.

Within Jewish thought, however, the opposite current often runs quite strongly: that there is no "spirit" behind the letter. It was Paul, after all, who set up the dichotomy in the New Testament's interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Today, it is difficult to conceive of a letter without a spirit -- in law, in literature, and in liturgy, we always expect there to be some meaning "behind the text."

But where is that meaning? Where does it lie? For a rationalist, it is clear where the ultimate meaning of the text lies: in its rational interpretation, of which there is ultimately only one. For a Kabbalist, meaning might reside in the symbolic referents encoded in the text. But for some, meaning stays right there in the text itself. Not Derrida but the 12th century Hasidei Ashkenaz wrote "mystical" interpretations of liturgy, which never depart from the literal language, including spelling and pronunciation, of the prayers they study. No symbolic structure, no meditative procedure, and certainly no Maimonidean "understanding" -- just the words, as they are written. Such an emphasis may result both from the Hebrew Bible's legal literalism -- the Hasidei Ashkenaz also viewed ethics as centrally about "surface," "literal" acts, rather than intents -- and from particular cosmological sources such as the Sefer Yetzira. But it is by no means confined to limited Jewish sects; arguably (though beyond the scope of this paper), it pervades Jewish hermeneutic and ethical thinking.

I have strayed somewhat from Rosenzweig, but perhaps not too far. Rosenzweig also returns to the name, to the letter, to those contingencies derided by modernity as "surface." Much of modernity concerned itself with understanding the nature of the modern subject, his autonomous spirit which lay underneath the agent in the world. Kant went so far as to claim that acts not done with morality in mind were not moral acts at all. Contrast Kant's position with the Talmudic opinion that charity given with the selfish intention of obtaining a reward is accorded the same merit as that given for its own sake.

It has been suggested that Rosenzweig is in part concerned with the Hermann-Cohen project of responding to Kant in defense of Jewish law. But I agree with Kant: the dominant Rabbinic conception of Jewish law is at odds with a subject- and intent-centered ethics. It is about acts, literal meanings, and particulars, not intent, deeper spirit-of-the-law meanings, and universals. Nor do I think it is possible to have a Rosenzweigian revelation of the universal categorical imperative, which knows no particular object and no particular circumstances. And if I am right about this last point, then Rosenzweig is much closer to postmodernity than modernity.

He might also be closer to Judaism than to Christianity. Of course, I don't suggest that either set of religious traditions can be essentialized. But perhaps we can draw a rough alliance between Judaism and the Letter, and Christianity and the Spirit, since after all it was Paul who set up the dichotomy to begin with, and the Talmud which focuses on legalism and excludes metaphysics. If we can pursue this rough train of thought, and if we next understand that the deep, underlying spirit is that which is shared and universal among human beings, while the letter governs surface behavior between persons who may share nothing across vast gulfs of particularity and contingency, then the basic linkage between this view of Judaism and the view of postmodernity raised earlier should become somewhat less obscure.

5. Conclusion

Rosenzweig is part of a historical moment that, within two decades, would be utterly extinguished by history itself. But before its culture was burned or exiled, it brought several issues into the foreground of philosophical conversation that had not been there before -- chief among them, in my view, the irreconcilability of the uniqueness of another individual human being with any form of master discourse, be it aesthetic, metaphysical, ethical, or political.

Perhaps it is just the foresight of this critique, anticipating an apocalyptic totalitarianism as a culmination of the Western project twenty years before it happened, that has caused its salient points to take on new life in the postwar era. Ironically, it was Heidegger, whose wartime activities were highly questionable at best, who more clearly stated the nature of the problem; Rosenzweig died apparently still believing that Christianity would spread the light of Judaism throughout the world. But even if we cannot recover Rosenzweig's optimism, or his belief in a stateless Jewry, we can at least see Rosenzweig as synthesizing radically different streams of religious-philosophical thought. Finally, in stealing postmodernism away from its Heideggerian skeletons in the closet, we might better appreciate its possibly ancient underpinnings, the history of which is far more subtle than its name suggests. The depth of the modern spirit was meant to gain us freedom from enslavement to the letter of the law, but it actually gave us essentialization and totalization. Rosenzweig's freedom springs not from what we share but what we do not share: our uniqueness, rooted not in intrinsic qualities but in our names, our lived contingent histories. However I may rename his ideas, or relocate them in some "prolepsis" of postmodernity, there cannot be a Franz Rosenzweig by any other name. Is that uniqueness not freedom as well?

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