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)

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy on Oswald Spengler

Christian Roy:

"Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West was for Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy a paradigmatic example of the latter posture’s foreclosure of the most distinctive traits of human and specifically historical experience, so that, while admiring its scope and ambition as a historian, he positioned it as a foil to argue against time and again. If Rosenstock-Huessy developed his central insights as “inimical friends” with Rosenzweig, he ascribed a symmetrical role to Oswald Spengler as a kind of “intimate enemy.” If anything, as comes out mostly from his correspondence with Rosenstock’s wife Margrit Huessy while reading The Decline of the West in 1919, Rosenzweig was even more sympathetic to “evil genius” Oswald Spengler as an ally (like Martin Heidegger later on) of the anti-academic New Thinking, and at the same time a sobering reminder of what he risked becoming as a Hegel scholar before his turn to Judaism. Rosenzweig thought The Decline of the West could provide a fitting substitute for the first part of his Star of Redemption to lay out the “honest paganism” of closed cosmologies that was a necessary first step on the way to the world thinking opened by Biblical religion. All that needed to be added to The Decline of the West was iotas to harness it to the cause of the New Thinking. Indeed, it has been argued that Spengler’s own dialogical understanding of language as future-oriented Verantwortung or “response-ability” hardly differs from speech thinking5 (of which it may provide a legitimately “pagan” version, subsuming language under mastery as per Der Mensch und die Technik), despite Rosenstock’s critique of Spengler as stuck in the scientific posture of the detached observer even of speech phenomena. Coming from a fellow German world-historian, this critique remains a formidable one, highlighting deep-seated conflicts between pagan and Judaeo-Christian approaches to life and language, space and time, as I will show in this article based largely on a search for Spengler’s name in the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Digital Archive, turning up countless references.

..

This in a nutshell is Rosenstock-Huessy’s indictment of Spengler: that his “objective” diagnosis of The Decline of the West amounts to a prescription for the assisted suicide of Europe, i.e., of the eventful conversation of its many historical layers. The scientific posture of clinical detachment has its roots in the philosopher’s stance above the fray, both being epitomized by Spengler’s claim to observe the death of his own civilization like that of any other such organism. Alluding to it in a class about (actually against!) “Greek Philosophy,” Rosenstock-Huessy said he knew Spengler’s words to that effect by heart since the first and only time he read the Decline in 1918, modestly adding: “Well, I wrote such a wonderful review about it then that I don't have to reread it, […]. I know […] everything that is in it.” It is on “Der Selbstmord Europas” that I will first mainly dwell to follow Rosenstock-Huessy’s Christian rejoinder to Spengler as the Mephistophelean figure who tempts Faustian man away from Margaret’s religion, to fall for the deceptive Helena of natural philosophy as a pagan Greek seduction, related to war (via Troy, to borrow a further metaphor from Goethe’s Second Faust). Written under the twin impacts of Spengler’s work and the Great War, this text constitutes a call to Western man not to allow the owl of Minerva or the dove of Spirit to be confined within the surveyed outlines and crumbling battlements assigned to discrete cultures by world-weary depression under the guise of stoic pride, and to instead release their unpredictable flight into the wider world pried open in space and time by the historical workings of the Cross of Reality, bringing its four directions into conversation in fresh combinations. "

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