Three Questions for Peter Eli Gordon on his book: Introduction

Peter Gordon's Book Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy(now released in paperback by the University of California Press) has generated a good number of reviews noting his new contribution to Rosenzweig interpretation, modern Jewish intellectual history, and the history of modern philosophy. Whereas most of these reviews assumed that their audiences were not familiar with Gordon's book, the Jewish Quarterly Reviewhas assembled responses by three scholars who presuppose the important contribution of the book, but attempt to move toward a deeper level of criticism. All three of the assessments approach the book from the intersecting fields of modern intellectual history and modern philosophy. The author's response follows.

The sustained attention to Gordon's book owes to its striking juxtaposition of two thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger. This move eschews the post-Holocaust hagiography of Rosenzweig as an exclusively Jewish thinker and the concomitant condemnation of Heidegger as a Nazi. Gordon takes stock of the ways in which Heidegger and Rosenzweig construct anew the Western philosophic tradition only to set themselves in rebellious opposition to that canonical edifice. As for deeper affinities between these two German thinkers, Gordon takes his cue from Rosenzweig's own acknowledgment of Heidegger as a philosophical ally in their respective projects of "New Thinking." Rosenzweig articulated this view in one of his last published writings shortly after the legendary 1929 philosophical disputation between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos, Switzerland. While never denying Rosenzweig's importance for Jewish thought in particular, Gordon's interpretation of Rosenzweig draws on Heideggerian concepts and language for a fresh reading that attempts to return Rosenzweig into the larger stream of German philosophy, while simultaneously registering the specific Jewish concerns and inflections that make Rosenzweig's voice so distinctive within it. Despite any intellectual disagreement with Gordon's approach and formulation of a substantive connection between Rosenzweig and Heidegger, his elegant, original, and provocative interpretation has opened a new passageway to the subtle and shifting contours of Rosenzweig's philosophical corpus, a body of thought that remains at the nexus of two distinct yet inseparable streams of thought.