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."

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