An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption

Chapter 5 Conclusions

CHAPTER 5 Conclusions In large measure, Baeck's theory ofromanticism fails the test of Schelling's The Philosophy ofArt. Redemption is not clearly the determinative category of Schelling's Kunstreligion, nor is it unambiguously subsumable under experience, feeling, or passivity. Ethics is not dismissed from The Philosophy ofArt, but receives two articulations there, one ancient, one modern. Darkness does not go unbalanced by light, and the seeming completion of the system is disrupted. Only Baeckian romantic inversion passes the test, though with two qualifications: what is inverted is not, as Baeck asserts, lost in the inversion; and the subject on whose behalf the inversion occurs is not us, but God. This is not to say that Baeck has not offered a viable picture of romanticism; but simply that the romantic amalgam he constructs must draw from a broader range of sources. Schelling belongs to the early period of German romanticism. Later romanticism did indeed advance more deeply into darkness, so much so that in popular literature today, the romantic is identified with, among other things, despondency, insanity, and the occult. In these permutations ofdarkness , the reaching may well be for a redemption that bypasses moral considerations, and the hope, for a completion that excludes all fissure . Indeed, if St. Paul is admitted to the ranks ofthe romantics, as Baeck proposes, then we can just as easily turn backward from die Fruehromantiker eighteen hundred years, as forward two hundred years, to find aching in abundance for a completed redemption.1 Baeck offers a broad, generally unnuanced picture ofromanticism that answers to some popular conceptions of it. It is as though Baeck and Schelling stand at opposite ends of the spectrum along which 265 266 An Episode ofJewish Romanticism romanticism has been conceived. Schelling, together with the other early German romantics, exemplifies the romanticism that is taken to continue, not disrupt, the rationalist projects ofthe Enlightenment. Irrationality , darkness, and feeling do not simply complete, but themselves take on the aspects of the opposites that ineluctably ground them, namely reason, thought, and light. Early romanticism longs for the very system it denies itself, and in the longing is the tribute to older Enlightenment ideals. Baeck, by contrast, has articulated some features ofthe romanticism that is taken to reject the Enlightenment sensibility in toto. The usefulness of the dichotomy between Baeck and Schelling is in the space between the poles they constitute, where the Star, so situated, may show its own romantic shades. As Baeck would predict of a romantic work, the Star is a star of redemption, and not ofthe revelation that centers the book; ethics in the Kantian sense, is set aside; darkness does frame the experiential center, in the form of chaos on one side and blinding light on the other; and inversion is the means by which redemption is secured. Ofcourse, the distortion in the fit is over the meaning ofredemption itself. What Baeck calls redemption is closer to what Rosenzweig means by revelation. For Rosenzweig's revelation participates with Baeck's redemption in the same family of ideas: experience, feeling, miracle, and passivity. The Baeckian romantic relation with God, cut offfrom the rest ofthe world, translates into the Star as the presupposition ofredemption, not its defining content. But against Baeckian romantic ideals of self-enclosed remove, the Star does not present itselfas a system in which the reader is invited to rest. Rather, Rosenzweig all too eagerly pushes the reader out of his book: he rushes us through a first part we can barely understand , past descriptions of experience he would rather we knew, firsthand, for ourselves, and on to a climactic vision from which we are summarily dismissed. Unlike the Phenomenology of Spirit, which progressively absorbs us, the Star behaves like what LacoueLabarthe and Nancy call an exergue: a structure that exists to deconstruct , in testament to something else. In that, the Star fails to meet the Baeckian romantic criterion of completion. But here is where Rosenzweig shows an affinity with the alternative romanticism that Schelling represents. In its movement toward self-destruction, the Star exemplifies the self-divisions that Schelling understood as definitively romantic or modern. In a characteristically romantic movement, the whole of The Philosophy of Art illustrates the modernity that part of it describes. Divided between ancient and modern, the work denies itselfthe construction of Conclusions 267 a future reconciliation. The Philosophy ofArt comes at the end ofthe first period of German romanticism...