Is Revelation in the World?

One of the most pivotal moments of Peter Eli Gordon's masterful Rosenzweig and Heidegger occurs when, late in its pages and at long last, he turns to the fact that its titular protagonists were not just Jew and German, artificially divided from one another by the vagaries of later history. They were also theist and atheist: one believed in God and the other did not. And each staked out his commitment for or against religion early in life in an event indissociably biographical and theoretical. Heidegger's adamant denial of God's existence and Rosenzweig's lifelong allegiance to the revelatory divine were bound up with the core purposes and program of each, undoubtedly driving life and work as fundamentally as any other single commitment. Gordon's text succeeds as well as it does—and there is no question about its overall success—by framing matters as if mainly ethnic, cultural, and political sympathies had led to the division unthinkingly inserted between his figures; this division's undoing is required by disinterested historical study that reveals the anachronism of those retrospective judgments. But what if the true rift between the figures were not imposed after the fact, a construction of later interpretation and ethnic demarcation, but one that a true measurement of resemblance and difference must place center stage?

So it is with considerable drama that Gordon finally turns to the apparently harsh reality that Heidegger disavowed God while Rosenzweig affirmed him. And his confrontation with it is both intriguing and misleading. Overall, Gordon wants to claim that Rosenzweig's concept of redemption as "redemption-in-the-world"—collective and historical in its parameters, holist and temporalized in its ontological basis, and structurally proleptic in its ultimate promise—in effect comes near to making Rosenzweig the very sort of atheistic theologian he began his career criticizing. Throughout his book, Gordon is most interested in those moments in Rosenzweig's corpus which allow him to be presented as a charter member of the German philosophical tradition, especially as understood, after Immanuel Kant, as a quest for a philosophy of the conditions of human experience of the world from the inside. The God of Rosenzweig's theism, for Gordon, must accommodate himself to these conditions, and therefore Rosenzweig verges on a philosophy that no traditional or sustainable God-concept can withstand. It is not so clear why the articulation of a new God-concept would verge on unbelief, but Gordon wants, nevertheless, to argue that as a result of its "Heideggerian" commitments Rosenzweig's thought "stood in uncomfortable proximity to the atheism it denied" (p. 234). Gordon already advertises in his introduction that if Rosenzweig's goal is to update theology no less than philosophy, in part by grounding theology in a new philosophy, then it is not evident that the "obvious prominence of theological materials" in his thought by itself wrecks a comparison with an equally novel atheism. Anyway, what if the prominence of Heidegger's atheism in fact obscures a raft of theological commitments encrypted in it? "It remains to be seen just how significant [the] contrast really is," Gordon therefore says (p. 37). And when he in the end comes to treat the problem frontally, he acknowledges that "any comparison that did not take cognizance of their disagreement concerning theism and atheism would be neglecting a crucial topic." The point once again, in nearly identical language, is "to understand what kind of disagreement it really is" (p. 232).

Yet Gordon's treatment of the question, tantalizing as it is, ends up ignoring the large body of evidence most revealing about and challenging to his overall comparison; and seeing how suggests a useful perspective from which to reread his book. For what is missing throughout the study is quite simply one of Rosenzweig's central themes: revelation. Put briefly, then, my claim is that with equal if potentially contradictory fervor, Rosenzweig also wanted to craft a theology of God's creation of the world and revelation to it from the outside. Restituting the post-idealist conditions of human interpretation and experience counts as only part of Rosenzweig's...