Revision as of 11:07, 25 March 2023

Contextual Quote

"Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) is the lesser-known half of an intellectual tandem (bringing to mind Marx-Engels, Charbonneau-Ellul or Deleuze-Guattari) with Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who was induced to rediscover his Jewish faith by his friend’s attempt to convince him to convert to Protestantism, as he had done at a young age. Rosenzweig has often expressed his gratitude to Rosenstock for this pivotal July 7, 1913 Leipziger Nachtgespräch (“nocturnal conversation in Leipzig”) that was part of his introduction to the new “speech thinking” (Sprachdenken) his friend had formulated the previous year. They would both develop it in opposition to academic philosophy, remaining in close dialogue (true to an inherently dialogical stance) as existential religious thinkers of rival yet complementary faiths, as they saw it. If their correspondence on this issue remains a touchstone of ecumenical thinking, it is usually from this document of Rosenzweig’s biography that Rosenstock-Huessy is known, often cast in the unflattering role of the proselytizing assimilated Jew.3 His radical Christian existential thought has thus long failed to get the attention it deserves in its own right."

- Christian Roy [1]

Discussion

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's Speech Thinking

Wayne Cristaudo (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):

"The greater part of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work was devoted to demonstrating how speech/language, through its unpredictable fecundity, expands our powers and, through its inescapably historical forming character, also binds them. According to Rosenstock-Huessy, speech makes us collective masters of time and gives us the ability to overcome historical death by founding new, more expansive and fulfilling spaces of social-life. Rosenstock-Huessy also belonged to that post-Nietzschean revival of religious thought which included Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Barth, Leo Weismantel, Hans and Rudolf Ehrenberg, Viktor von Weizsäcker, Martin Buber, Lev Shestov, Hugo Bergmann, Florens Christian Rang, Nikolai Berdyaev, Margaret Susman, Werner Picht (all of whom were involved in the Patmos publishing house and its offshoot Die Kreatur) and Paul Tillich. Common to this group was the belief that religious speech, which they saw as distinctly not metaphysical, disclosed layers of experience and creativity (personal and socio-historical) which remain inaccessible to the metaphysics of naturalism."

(https://trivent-publishing.eu/img/cms/5-%20Christian%20Roy.pdf)