Response to My Critics

Three bracing commentaries, and three, quite varied perspectives, from three scholars whose work I deeply admire. I am grateful for their remarks. Who would want to risk even the appearance of ingratitude with correctives and counter-arguments? There is nothing less dignified than a wounded author—except, perhaps, a wounded author who hastens to defend his work against its most insightful critics. But, if scholarship thrives on disagreement, we can only hope ours will prove somehow instructive. Oscar Wilde said: "Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." To which I must add that, if I disagree with my critics, this hardly guarantees I am right.

Yet there is a certain force to the historical facts. Sometime in the summer of 1929, Franz Rosenzweig drafted a short commentary on the "Davos Encounter"—the famous exchange in Switzerland that pitted the established neo-Kantian philosopher of culture, Ernst Cassirer, against the rebellious phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger—and in this essay, entitled "Exchanged Fronts," Rosenzweig named Heidegger as an intellectual ally in the ecumenical movement of Weimar-era philosophy that Rosenzweig had some years earlier christened "the new thinking." In my book, I described this commentary as Rosenzweig's "intellectual epitaph," not only because it was one of the very last essays he ever wrote—he was to die in December 1929—but also because it seems so calculating in its ambition to situate the author's own philosophical achievements within the broader stream of contemporary thought. Rosenzweig discerns in Heidegger a kindred spirit, a theorist of "created" rather than "infinite" reason, and a partisan of an originally theological "leap into existence"—themes, Rosenzweig suggests, that were born from Hermann Cohen's "late" theological writings and the ambient crisis of early-1920s neo-idealist philosophy of religion.

Was Rosenzweig correct? What does it mean for a philosopher to identify the context for his own interpretation? Are readers of a later time bound by the philosopher's own directives? Paul Franks claims that Rosenzweig "typically" emphasized 1800 as the truly epochal divide, and he therefore concludes—as if in opposition to the aims of my book—that we should best dispense with Rosenzweig's contemporary setting and instead characterize the new thinking as a belated offspring of Jacobi's counter-idealist philosophy of revelation. The suggestion is intriguing and will no doubt cast new light on Rosenzweig's work. But I fail to see the conflict. The opening two chapters of my book aim to show just how "idealism"—both Kantian and Hegelian—was imagined by German philosophers in Rosenzweig's contemporary moment. The philosophical past is what philosophers in the present conceive it to be, and Rosenzweig's conception of "1800" was itself a creation of his own age.

Phenomenology has meant many things. In the summer semester of 1921, Martin Heidegger offered his Freiburg students a course, "Augustine and Neo-Platonism," under which title he laid out a so-called Phenomenological Interpretation of book 10 of Augustine's Confessions. Although these lectures—following up the winter-semester's "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion"—belong to what are conventionally termed Heidegger's "early" years and betray a sensibility still steeped in Christian piety, their connection with the themes of the later "existential" analysis in his 1927 masterwork Being and Time is unmistakable. Deciphering these notes is a challenge, as they interlace Augustine's confessional dialogue with Heidegger's own commentary:

For "in multa defluximus" [we are scattered into the many], we are dissolving into the manifold and are absorbed in the dispersion. You demand counter-movement against the dispersion, against the falling apart of life. "Per continentiam quippe colligimur et redigimur in unum [neccessarium—Deum?]" [By continence we are gathered together and brought into the One (the necessary One—God?)] . . . The "in multa defluere" [scattered, dissolution into the many] is an oriented being-pulled by and in delectatio; the life of the world in its manifold significance—multum has to be understood in this way—appeals to us. (Cf. above, p. 144: "cadunt" and the existential counter-movement.—Multum: the manifold, unum: the authentic [das Eigentliche] . . .).^1...