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  • What Is the Context?
  • Paul Franks (bio)

What is the context in which someone should be understood?

It makes a difference whom one wants to understand, as Franz Rosenzweig himself noted. In the conclusion of his doctoral dissertation, he wrote, "Just as [it is] with the life of Luther, so it is also with the life of Goethe: one only does it justice if one sees it in the context of a total intellectual history of the nation. Hegel should be grasped in narrower bounds—at least with respect to his national-historical significance, [even if] not with respect to his world-historical significance. In all regions of his impact . . . a leading idea of the German 19th century is expressed."1 This is hardly to belittle Hegel. Rosenzweig regarded Hegel as bound up with what he often referred to simply as "1800": "the epochal divide which stands for us as the classical moment of modern German intellectual history," and even "the precise moment when the knowledge of the All reaches a conclusion in itself."2

It also makes a difference who is trying to achieve understanding, and in what capacity. If, say, you are the official historian of the city of Württemberg, then you should not be criticized for the choice—which might rightly be called parochial—to place Hegel in just that context. This would be an odd choice, however, if you were, say, a philosopher considering the import of Hegel's teleology for contemporary philosophy of mind.

Peter Gordon argues "that one best understands Rosenzweig's philosophy when it is restored to its German philosophical context . . . that Rosenzweig is best understood within the context of Weimar philosophical modernism, within the transformation of ideas—from idealism to existential [End Page 387] ontology—more typically associated with the early work of Martin Heidegger" (pp. 4-5). Here Gordon contests a post-Holocaust tendency to detach Rosenzweig from his German context and to see him in purely Jewish terms, a tendency Gordon sees in the contemporary association of Rosenzweig with Levinas and the ethics of alterity. But does Rosenzweig's achievement fit Gordon's chosen context? And in what context does Gordon urge his choice upon his readers?

In its most general terms, Gordon's thesis is that we should understand Rosenzweig in the cultural and intellectual context of Weimar modernism. Gordon's useful sketch begins with an emphasis on "the idea of life as a holistic, temporal context of meaning," an idea whose influence he traces to Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work on Hegel's early development forms an essential part of the background to Rosenzweig's relation to Hegel, both in his dissertation and in The Star of Redemption. In the aftermath of the First World War, as Gordon notes, the emphasis on life, which had previously given rise to new developments within the Neo-Kantianism of the academic philosophical establishment, was caught up in a far more radical sense that philosophy—along with the Wilhelmine establishment in general—was in need of a revolutionary transformation that would put it back in touch with life-concerns. The result was a revival of metaphysical and theological themes that would have been regarded with suspicion by neo-Kantians—themes such as death, fallenness, revelation, and redemption—and, more generally, "a distinctive intellectual orientation poised between the religious nostalgia for origin and the modernist struggle to move beyond metaphysics" (p. xxviii).

All this is portrayed by Gordon in an extremely lucid and helpful way. But it already suggests to me that Rosenzweig—and Heidegger, for that matter—demands to be understood in the broader context of German philosophy since 1800: German idealism and its aftermath. After all, Dilthey claimed not to originate the idea of life but rather to find it in Hegel's early, posthumously published writings, and it was precisely with respect to Hegel that Rosenzweig chose to develop the politically oriented thought of his advisor, Meinecke, and to both inherit and contest Dilthey's legacy. As I have mentioned and will mention again, Rosenzweig himself typically emphasized 1800—not, say, 1918—as "the epochal divide" in relation to which current philosophy, including his Star, should be understood.

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