Introduction
Since its publication, Franz Rosenzweig's magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, has remained a challenge to its readers and a source of wildly conflicting interpretations. It should be a matter of great consternation to Rosenzweig's readers that, shortly after his publication of the Star, he came to identify the work with common sense. This article traces the emergence of common sense within Rosenzweig's thought and undertakes a critical analysis of his use of the term. In contrast to other efforts to address this topic, I argue that Rosenzweig's belated appeal to common sense is a useful heuristic tool for understanding his account of God, the divine-human relationship, and the power and limits of theological language in the Star.
By all accounts the Star is a difficult work.Footnote 1 Rosenzweig's readers can take solace in the fact that even Rosenzweig's closest interlocutor, Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, required a guided tour of the main arguments of the Star.Footnote 2 In a letter Rosenzweig wrote to Rosenstock-Huessy on 12 February 1921, Rosenzweig asks in exasperation, “Must I now really explain to you the old book?” The question is purely rhetorical, as Rosenzweig knew quite well that he needed to explain the Star. Rosenzweig became so concerned about the Star's reception that he wrote a short book and an essay to help his readers navigate the complex philosophical system of the Star. The first of these works, which Rosenzweig refers to as a “prolegomena,” Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand, was written shortly after the Star came to press in 1921, but was first published posthumously in translation by Nahum Glatzer as Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.Footnote 3 The second work, the essay “The New Thinking,” appeared in the journal Der Morgen in 1925.Footnote 4 Despite his efforts to clarify the Star, scholars have produced an array of contradictory readings of Rosenzweig as a neo-Hegelian, a forerunner of postmodern thought, an ethical thinker akin to Levinas, a hermeneutic thinker with similarities to postliberal theology, a postmetaphysical thinker along the lines of Heidegger, the completer of Schelling's philosophy, an antitheoretical philosopher similar to Wittgenstein, and an apophatic thinker. The range of disparate views that scholars attribute to Rosenzweig indicates that his most basic philosophical and theological commitments remain opaque.Footnote 5
From the vantage point of the first pages of the Star, one would not anticipate the interpretive challenges that have accompanied the work. In the beginning of Part One–Book One, Rosenzweig states that his method is not a form of negative theology and that he intends to establish the “absolute factuality” or “positivity” of God, World, and the Human Person.Footnote 6 While Rosenzweig promises his readers a pellucid account of God and the divine-human relationship, the reception history of the Star suggests that he fell short of that goal. In my view, Rosenzweig did manage to establish God's “absolute factuality” as he understood it in the Star, but to see that this is so one must make use of his course notes, letters, and subsequent writings.Footnote 7 A persistent theme throughout this disparate body of literary material is Rosenzweig's perplexing and demoralizing claim that the basic philosophical position of the Star is a form of common sense. I suspect that many of Rosenzweig's readers have recoiled in indignation at the suggestion that the work they have labored to understand can be reduced to common sense, a term that occurs only once in the Star.Footnote 8 Rosenzweig's identification of the Star with common sense is, on the surface, so preposterous that scholars have largely ignored this interpretive clue to the work. Despite the justified misgivings, I intend to argue that the term “common sense” does capture important features of Rosenzweig's thought, particularly with respect to the referential capacity of theological language that is so central to the Star and its interest in God's absolute factuality.
Rosenzweig's Common Sense in Context
Rosenzweig's turn to common sense is not just perplexing. It is mysterious. His collected works provide little insight into how he became preoccupied with the idea of “common sense” and give no indication of how he understands the complex history of the term in Scottish and German philosophy. Since the eighteenth century, the term “common sense” has come to be identified with the Scottish school of philosophy that arose around the work of Thomas Reid. Nicholas Wolterstorff is surely correct that the designation of Reid's philosophy as “common sense,” what he calls Reid's “great misfortune,” has concealed the depth of Reid's philosophical program.Footnote 9 Reid's principle concern was to overthrow the “way of ideas,” the view that our knowledge is mediated by internal representations and thus does not extend into the world.Footnote 10 In Reid's view, the theory of ideas had culminated in both Berkeley's idealism and Hume's skepticism and was thus a threat to all philosophical and religious knowledge. In the dedication of his first major work, Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense, Reid says:
I thought it unreasonable, my Lord, upon the authority of philosophers to admit a hypothesis, which, in my opinion, overturns all philosophy, all religion and virtue, and all common sense: and finding that all the systems concerning the human understanding which I was acquainted with, were built upon this hypothesis, I resolved to inquire into this subject anew, without regard to any hypothesis.Footnote 11
Reid seeks to correct the way of ideas by arguing for a system of natural and artificial signs that are neither images nor representations of the world and which make possible knowledge of the world. Although these issues are central to Reid's philosophy, I can safely bracket them, as Rosenzweig never shows the slightest interest in these topics. Where Rosenzweig does draw close to Reid's philosophy is in Reid's answer to the skeptic (although Rosenzweig directs his arguments at philosophy in general). Reid argues that we have no alternative but to rely on our standard ways of forming beliefs. Philosophers who think they can either shore up our common belief forming practices or take leave of them are profoundly mistaken. Reid writes:
Poor untaught mortals believe undoubtedly, that there is a sun, moon, and stars; an earth, which we inhabit; country, friends, and relations, which we enjoy; land, houses, and moveables, which we possess. But philosophers, pitying the credulity of the vulgar, resolve to have no faith but what is founded upon reason. They apply to philosophy to furnish them with reasons for the belief of those things which all mankind have believed, without being able to give any reason for it.Footnote 12
Despite some striking points of similarity in their philosophical views and modes of argumentation, there is little evidence that Rosenzweig's appeal to common sense is the direct influence of Reid's thought. To my knowledge, Rosenzweig never mentions Reid. Even if there were a thread linking the two thinkers, that would not alleviate the fact that Rosenzweig is indifferent to the questions that motivated Reid's philosophy. If Rosenzweig's turn to common sense is best understood as an extension of Reid's thought, it is a superficial engagement with Reid's philosophy that deserves the scholarly neglect it has received.
As Manfred Kuehn pointed out nearly thirty years ago in his work, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, Reid's philosophy and that of his epigones, James Oswald and James Beattie, played an important role in German enlightenment philosophy.Footnote 13 Thus Mendelssohn and Kant are also potential sources for Rosenzweig's interest in common sense. In recent years, scholars have advanced Kuehn's pioneering work with numerous studies on the role of common sense in Mendelssohn's and Kant's philosophy.Footnote 14 I will forego an effort to survey this material for the same reasons that a detailed analysis of Reid's philosophy is unnecessary. As with Reid, Rosenzweig never explicitly links his notion of common sense with Mendelssohn or Kant nor does he engage the same philosophical questions that guide their discussions.Footnote 15 For instance, Bruce Rosenstock argues that Mendelssohn deploys common sense as a response to skepticism, a philosophical issue that Rosenzweig leaves untouched.Footnote 16 According to Mendelssohn, reason should not contradict common sense:
Whenever reason falls far behind our common sense, or even parts company with it entirely, and is thus in danger of falling into error, the philosopher cannot help but distrust reason. He is unwilling to follow it so far as to contradict common sense. He will rather impose a ban of silence upon reason if he finds that otherwise he would never succeed in returning to life's trodden path and catch up again with common sense.Footnote 17
As will become evident in my discussion of Rosenzweig's use of common sense, the relationship between common sense and reason is not simply a case of the former serving as a corrective to the latter.Footnote 18
As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Scottish common sense philosophy had a far greater impact on Kant than he indicates in his writings. Kuehn summarizes Kant's position by saying that “his critical philosophy was not meant to supersede common sense, but to strengthen it.”Footnote 19 Here, too, there is little continuity between Rosenzweig's approach to common sense and that of his eighteenth-century predecessors. The gap between Kant and Rosenzweig is perhaps most striking in their respective prolegomena, Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science and Rosenzweig's Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.Footnote 20 Kant's Prolegomena begins and ends with exceedingly sharp critiques of common sense philosophy. At the start of the Prolegomena, Kant says that Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and Priestly badly misconstrued Hume and consequently they pursued pointless lines of philosophical inquiry. Unable to follow Hume's arguments, they “found a more expedient means to be obstinate without any insight, namely, the appeal to ordinary common sense.”Footnote 21 At the end of the Prolegomena, Kant insists that metaphysics can make no appeal to common sense.Footnote 22 Rosenzweig in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy makes the very different claim that philosophy has become corrupted by its pursuit of essences and that a return to common sense is the only possible remedy. While I would argue that both Kant and Rosenzweig have nuanced conceptions of metaphysics and common sense, there is little overlap in how they understand the terms and the role they play in their larger philosophical programs.Footnote 23
If Rosenzweig neglects the principal philosophical issues that framed discussions of common sense, such as the way of ideas, skepticism, common sense as a criterion for restricting metaphysics, or the philosophical justification of common sense, then what compels him to identify his philosophy with common sense? Is his turn to common sense a move to step away from philosophy and to embrace the practical life? It seems unlikely that, at the precise moment the Star came to print, Rosenzweig would renounce the philosophical system he had just constructed—a system that Benjamin Pollock rightfully notes gave Rosenzweig a profound sense of personal accomplishment.Footnote 24 Although there are occasionally points of contact in Rosenzweig's discussion of common sense and those of Reid, Mendelssohn, and Kant, the connections are weak and they will not, by themselves, help us to understand Rosenzweig's claim that the philosophical system of the Star is best understood as common sense. Given Rosenzweig's silence on the provenance of the term “common sense,” the best approach to the topic is to begin by looking at how Rosenzweig uses the term and only after doing so to explore the question of how to situate “common sense” among his philosophical influences.Footnote 25
Rosenzweig's Turn to Common Sense
After completing the Star in 1919, Rosenzweig famously decided the following year against a career in academia and instead devoted himself to adult Jewish education as the director of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. It appears that Rosenzweig's preoccupation with common sense began as he was preparing his course for the second trimester of the second year of the Lehrhaus, which ran from January until March of 1921. In two letters to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy at the beginning of November 1920, Rosenzweig indicates that he plans to teach a course entitled “Introduction to the Use of Common Sense: Exodus from General Philosophy.”Footnote 26 In a later letter, he explains that he was forced to change the title of the course for reasons he does not disclose. In the end, the course was titled “Introduction to Jewish Thinking: An Exodus from General Philosophy,” but the first lecture retained the title “On the Use of Common Sense.”Footnote 27
It is evident from these course titles that the opposition between common sense and philosophy that would become central to Rosenzweig's arguments in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy and “The New Thinking” had already taken shape in his thought. At the beginning of the first lecture, Rosenzweig privileges common sense over philosophy on account of the fact that common sense is “universally human,” a state to which reason can only aspire. Rosenzweig also criticizes philosophy as a discipline on the grounds that it is engaged in a misguided search for essences that yields no truth. As he describes it in this context, truth is not an arcane entity; rather, it is accessible in a direct and intimate manner through common sense. Along these lines he says to his students: “The truth will be addressed just as directly, factually, and particularly as you—in possession of your common sense—speak with your neighbor.”Footnote 28 Rosenzweig continues:
Philosophy says: everything is essentially earthly-substance or heavenly-spirit or God or a priori. However, the truth surrenders only the straightforward in every “essentially” dispensing sentence. That which brings all of these possibilities together without making use of the “essential” is: “In the Beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Is that Jewish thinking? Indeed. And the opposite of that? Greek thinking, thinking about the essential.Footnote 29
At the outset of the course, Rosenzweig makes clear that he intends to introduce his students not to Jewish thought but, rather, to Jewish thinking. The key insight he seeks to convey about Jewish thinking is that it is a “philosophy of common sense.” While general philosophy pursues essences, Rosenzweig says that Jewish common sense seeks to “once again tie together the torn threads of the everyday and the holiday; to once again make the everyday—the entirely work-week thinking—into a preparation for Sabbath thinking.”Footnote 30 On the basis of his lecture notes, Rosenzweig perceives Judaism as a form of common sense in that it distinguishes between God, World, and the Human Person but also because Judaism seeks to draw these three realms together. Readers of the Star will detect in this understanding of common sense the main lines of Rosenzweig's argument in his magnum opus. As I will show, Rosenzweig's conception of common sense becomes increasingly entwined with his philosophical system. Rosenzweig did not begrudge his students their rightful consternation over his identification of Judaism and common sense. He tells them at the start of the course that while he promises to speak in a comprehensible manner, he admits that they will “often, if not always” be irritated by what he says.Footnote 31 I will say more about this irritation at the conclusion of the essay.
In July of 1921, at the request of a publisher for an accessible introduction to his thought, Rosenzweig wrote Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand, which he later withdrew prior to publication. The work was first published posthumously in a translation by Nahum Glatzer as Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. But, of course, gesunder Menschenverstand also means common sense. It is a peculiar philosophical work in that it adopts a highly stylized narrative form in order to mount a sharp critique of philosophy. Rosenzweig begins Understanding the Sick and the Healthy with two letters, an adversarial letter to the expert, who he expects will misunderstand the work, and one to the reader whom he addresses as an old friend.Footnote 32 He explains his collegiality to the reader on the basis of the fact that they were former classmates in the school of common sense. The significance of this fact becomes apparent when Rosenzweig opens his work with the claim that “common sense is in disrepute among philosophers.”Footnote 33 Rosenzweig then pathologizes philosophy along the lines already established in his course on Jewish thinking. Echoing statements by Plato and Aristotle that philosophy begins with wonder, he argues that, in their efforts to identify what an object actually is, philosophers become paralyzed by wonder. The philosopher's search for the true essence of things is, according to Rosenzweig, “a radical inversion of his normal functions.”Footnote 34 Rosenzweig gives comic expression to the philosophical life by imagining the challenge that the everyday task of buying butter would pose to such a philosopher.Footnote 35 Rosenzweig envisions a catatonic philosopher incapacitated by concerns about how his intention to buy butter connects to the actual butter that now lies before him in the case, how the word “butter” refers to this butter, and when the butter before him switched from being butter in general to being “this butter.”Footnote 36 He writes:
In practical life no one gives up his intention to buy butter merely because he is unable to prove that the butter he wishes to buy and the butter on sale are identical. The single exception to this is the philosopher, but even he carefully restricts his meditations to theory. When he goes shopping he is unwilling to have an empty stomach as a reward for his thoughts. In theory, of course, he cannot be refuted. As soon as he asks: ‘What is this actually?’ the butter disappears. As for the name—well, that is a matter of convention. Different languages have different names for one and the same thing. If a philosopher, however, should turn his back on our slab of butter, claiming it cannot be butter, because the French call it beurre, the proper place for him would be an institution accommodating philosophers exclusively.Footnote 37
Much of the remainder of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy develops this notion of a philosopher requiring institutionalization. Rosenzweig playfully constructs an account of a philosopher suffering from “Apoplexia Philosophica” who is sent to a sanitarium to recover common sense commitments about God, World, and the Human Person. Such treatment is necessary, as the corruption of the philosopher's belief-forming practices has drawn him away from the factuality of the world.Footnote 38 In contrast to philosophy, Rosenzweig says, “Common sense puts its faith in the strength of reality.”Footnote 39 One might surmise from this that Rosenzweig is adopting a realist position in which the objects of the world exist independently of our thinking about them, a position commonly associated with Thomas Reid. In typical fashion, Rosenzweig eludes such simple classification. He says: “Our enemy is not idealism as such; anti-idealism, irrationalism, realism, materialism, naturalism, and what not are equally harmful.”Footnote 40
If Rosenzweig's refusal to contextualize his understanding of common sense requires that we attend to his use of the term, then one of the most important functions of common sense is to secure the referential capacity of language. Where philosophy concerns itself with essences, common sense puts its trust in names. “Common sense,” according to Rosenzweig, “accepts the immutability of terms, be they words or personal names; it does not question the freedom of actions or things.”Footnote 41 This referential practice is ultimately secured by God as Rosenzweig says: “We are certain that our names are the names of things and that the name we bestow will be confirmed by God.”Footnote 42 But what about the objects of the world that we wish to pick out with our referential language? The answer to this question clarifies Rosenzweig's reluctance to embrace realism but also problematizes his notion of common sense. Regarding the world he writes: “The world as such does not exist. To speak of the world is to speak of a world which is ours and God's. It becomes the world as it becomes man's and God's world. Every word spoken within its confines furthers this end.”Footnote 43 This hardly seems like common sense understood generically or in its Reidian form with its concomitant realism. In fact, the idea that the world is in a state of becoming guided by divine and human action is a central element in the philosophical system of the Star. There, Rosenzweig describes the status of the world in the following terms:
We formulated the world as Becoming, in contrast to the God who became before all beginning, and to the self which became in the past. Thus we classified the world in its ‘becoming out of nought’ with the end of the world, and God in it with the dawning morning of the world, and the Self with the bright noon of the world. For the world, therefore, the world-morning of creation need not mean its becoming created.Footnote 44
Rosenzweig identifies the world with becoming as a result of his theological view that redemption is the human act of drawing God's presence into the world.Footnote 45 The idea that the world is dependent upon and guided by God's relationship with humanity is in radical opposition to the realism about the world that typically accompanies philosophical accounts of common sense.Footnote 46 One must then conclude that in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy Rosenzweig's common sense resembles his own philosophical system more than it does earlier discussions of the topic.
That Rosenzweig's notion of common sense in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy bears the marks of his philosophical system is also apparent in his discussion of theological language. He writes: “No sooner has the thought ‘God is Something’ occurred to common sense than the thought is left behind. Common sense expresses this thought and, as it does so, learns that God cannot be spoken of unless, at the very same moment, a bridge is constructed to man and the world.”Footnote 47 The reader of the Star will quickly perceive how this statement hints at the relationships between the three elements—God, World, and the Human Person—and the activation of these redemptive relationships in the liturgical communities of Judaism and Christianity—but, surely, there is nothing in this that is rightfully identified as common sense. Why was Rosenzweig so adamant in his lectures that Judaism was a form of common sense, and what made him extend that view in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy to depict his own highly complex philosophical system on such terms? At first blush, these are counterintuitive claims for which Rosenzweig offers less than persuasive arguments.
In his 1925 essay, “The New Thinking,” Rosenzweig again expands the scope of common sense. More than a synonym for Jewish thinking as in his course or a cognomen for his own philosophy as in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, here he describes common sense as the fundamental philosophical orientation of his entire intellectual community.Footnote 48 He says that in the Star he sought “to bring about the total renewal of thinking,” but he goes on to say, “I would not say this if I had to say it only of my book and not of the thinking, which I do not imagine myself to have invented or even to be its sole teacher in the present. Rather, common sense has always thought in this way, and among contemporary thinkers there are more who think in this manner than Überweg-Heinze can dream of.”Footnote 49 Some of Rosenzweig's discussion of common sense in “The New Thinking” reiterates points I have already touched upon, but one comment that significantly extends his account is the following: “In effect the new philosophy does nothing else but make the ‘method’ of common sense into the method of scientific thinking.”Footnote 50 Similar to the way in which common sense is a curative to philosophy's misguided search for essences, common sense can also remedy science's overemphasis on objective and necessary truths. The corrective that common sense brings to scientific thinking is a heightened awareness of the complex relationship between thinking, experience, and time; that is, common sense affirms the hermeneutic view that knowledge is conditioned by historicity. Despite the dichotomy between common sense and philosophy that propels Rosenzweig's thought, common sense, with its universal claims about experience and knowledge, remains a deeply philosophical position for Rosenzweig. How then are we to understand a notion of common sense that goes from being identified with Jewish thinking to being the banner for Rosenzweig's own philosophical system to being a broad-based philosophical movement that seeks to reorient all critical thought?
Rosenzweig's Common Sense Interpreted: Nathan Rotenstreich and Richard Cohen
Before presenting my own account of how common sense fits into Rosenzweig's philosophy, I would like to take note of two earlier efforts to address this subject. The first is Nathan Rotenstreich's 1967 essay, “Common Sense and Theological Experience on the Basis of Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophy,” which, to my mind, remains the most insightful discussion of Rosenzweig's views on common sense.Footnote 51 My approach to the topic shares much in common with Rotenstreich's analysis, not the least of which is the effort to link Rosenzweig's account of common sense with his references to “absolute factuality” and “positivity” in the Star.Footnote 52 According to Rotenstreich, Rosenzweig sought to construct a philosophical system that was open to “faith,” but a “basic anti-rationalistic trait” in his thought prevented him from making reason the foundation of his system. While Rosenzweig might have looked to revelation to secure his system, his non-cognitive account of revelation prevented him from doing so.Footnote 53 Rotenstreich suggests that common sense was a promising alternative to reason and revelation for Rosenzweig as it provides knowledge that is beyond both demonstration and criticism and at the same time renders access to its object as properly basic. Rosenzweig supplemented the traditional features of common sense philosophy with the view that the act of knowing is always conditioned by time. Rotenstreich argues that it is common sense understood on these terms that underlies Rosenzweig's account of the elements—God, World, and the Human Person. Rosenzweig then introduces the concept of theological experience to “complete the basic structure of common sense” by identifying the relationships of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption that unite the elements.Footnote 54 Common sense and theological experience become so inextricable in Rosenzweig's thought that Rotenstreich claims that they often appear to be “essentially synonymous.”Footnote 55
While common sense as a term is almost entirely absent from the Star, the critique of philosophy that motivates Rosenzweig's appeal to common sense is in full force from the first page of the work. Rosenzweig opens the Star with the criticism that philosophy seeks comprehensive knowledge of everything—“the All”—as a means of concealing its inability to come to terms with death. Later in the introduction, when Rosenzweig sets forth his plan to radically individuate God, World, and the Human Person, he says: “He who denies the totality of being, as we do, thus denies the unity of reasoning. He throws down the gauntlet to the whole honorable company of philosophers from Ionia to Jena.”Footnote 56 In trying to make sense of Rosenzweig's simultaneous criticism of and reliance upon the philosophical tradition, Rotenstreich leaves room for continued reflection on the role of common sense in Rosenzweig's thought.Footnote 57 In Rotenstreich's view, in constructing his philosophical system, Rosenzweig makes significant concessions that undermine his core philosophical commitments, particularly as they bear on common sense. Rotenstreich writes:
Hence, what appears here as ‘common sense’ is the result of Rosenzweig's systematic attempt to find a basis that was different from the traditional basis; the difference, however, turns out to be illusory. Rosenzweig's conception is nothing more than the crystallization of the philosophical tradition, cast in a mold which he believed constituted a devastating criticism of this very tradition. This is one of the interesting aspects of Rosenzweig's thought: he incorporated into his system many of the traditional elements to which he was opposed, and he was not prepared, for systematic reasons, to acknowledge this aspect of his thinking.Footnote 58
Rotenstreich rejects Rosenzweig's claims to having disavowed speculative philosophy. He says that in the Star “we find a highly speculative system erected for the purpose of impugning speculation itself.”Footnote 59 He concludes his essay by saying that what Rosenzweig “put forward as common sense absorbed the traditional content of what has been understood as reason. In the end the name does not matter; reason is victorious.”Footnote 60
More recently, Richard Cohen has argued that Rosenzweig's use of common sense has its source in the thought of Kant and Mendelssohn.Footnote 61 Similar to my own reading of Rosenzweig's oeuvre, Cohen argues that it is only after the completion of the Star that Rosenzweig comes to present it as a work of common sense. Cohen reads the Star as a synthesis of Kantian and Schellingian philosophy. Part One is informed by Kant's philosophy as evidenced by the extreme cognitive limits that Rosenzweig places on knowledge of God, the World, and the Human Person. Parts Two and Three of the Star are Rosenzweig's attempt to construct a “narrative philosophy” à la Schelling. According to Cohen, “like the romantic idealists who do not refute Kant but redefine reason, Rosenzweig, following Schelling, does not refute Kant but cuts the Gordian knot of the equation of reason and being in order to begin his thought elsewhere, beyond reason's totalizing if frustrated syntheses.”Footnote 62 In Cohen's view, the Schellingian trajectory of the Star robs the work of its philosophical character.Footnote 63 Cohen is unsparing in his negative assessment of the Star, calling it an “awkward and cumbersome ‘system of philosophy’” and stating that Rosenzweig's narrative philosophy requires that he abandon any attempt to provide arguments that lend support to his system.Footnote 64 According to Cohen, the Star “has nothing more to legitimize itself other than a subjective or social preference.”Footnote 65
Cohen holds that it was Rosenzweig's realization of the shortcomings of the Star that compelled him to recast the work as an expression of common sense. Abandoning the antirational commitments that shaped the Star, Rosenzweig adopts a common sense view formulated by Mendelssohn and endorsed by Kant.Footnote 66 Cohen, however, denies Rosenzweig the opportunity to refashion his magnum opus:
What I am proposing, then, is that while serving as expositor/commentator to his own book in “The New Thinking” article, Rosenzweig is unfortunately misleading his readers when he declares that the Star's ‘method of scientific thinking’ was based in healthy human understanding, or what we might also call ‘common sense.’ Unfortunately, and doubtlessly also to Rosenzweig's profound disappointment, the Star is based in nothing more compelling, as I have indicated, than a merely subjective speculation, really an aesthetic taste, even if that taste binds itself to Judaism and Christianity. For this reason, I claim the Star as a whole is a fatally flawed book and philosophy.Footnote 67
This is a grim assessment. Fortunately, I do not think we have to embrace Cohen's condemnation of the Star nor do we have to accept Rotenstreich's opposition between common sense and speculative reason. A more positive reading of the Star is possible and Rosenzweig's curious appeal to common sense can help lay out that position.
Rosenzweig's Common Sense and His Schellingian Program
Given Rosenzweig's refusal to situate his notion of common sense within the philosophical tradition, I have suggested that we have more to learn from how he uses the term than from our own efforts to give the term a pedigree that Rosenzweig himself eschewed.Footnote 68 In my view, Rosenzweig's use of common sense is best understood as an effort to explain and advance his Schellingian program.Footnote 69 This requires some explanation as it appears to defy well-regarded interpretations of German Idealism. Manfred Kuehn, for instance, has written:
The so-called idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and their followers, rejected Kant's understanding of philosophy as a clarification and justification of common sense and advocated the view that philosophy can only exist as the ‘inversion’ (Verkehrung) of it. For these idealists, philosophy is no longer justification and piecemeal revision of common sense, but a radical displacement of it.Footnote 70
Rotenstreich was highly attuned to Schelling's influence on Rosenzweig. It is likely that this well-known opposition between absolute idealism and common sense led Rotenstreich to construe Rosenzweig's appeal to common sense as an antirationalistic pose concealing his debt to speculative philosophy.
While Rosenzweig, to my knowledge, never indicates the source of his notion of common sense, in a journal entry from 30 June 1922, he makes surprisingly frank comments about the place of common sense within his system and what he believes its contribution to be. Amidst a discussion of Hegel's philosophy and how idealism compels Hegel to take the human person as his philosophical starting point, Rosenzweig characterizes his own starting point as an extension of kabbalistic theology in which God, World, and the Human Person are all transcendent in precisely the same manner.Footnote 71 He then draws a connection between kabbalistic theology and Schelling's theory of the potencies and asserts that “only through the pure ‘theory of potencies’ is it possible to justify the contradictory thoughts of real time (occurring [time] not self-unfolding [time]).” Footnote 72 He immediately follows this with the statement, “My harmonization with common sense relates to two points,” which he identifies as the “reality of space” and the “reality of time.” He continues, “The advantage for me with common sense is just that I bring together these mutually-opposing and contradictory points.” Through his appropriation of Schelling's theory of the potencies, Rosenzweig affirms two seemingly contradictory poles within God, God's transcendence and God's relationality. By embracing these two divine poles, Rosenzweig is also able to preserve two notions of time: time as eternal and time as occurring or processual. It is on this basis that Rosenzweig establishes a link between Schelling's theory of the potencies and common sense in that common sense holds the reality of time and space as indubitable. Rosenzweig's conception of common sense does not then have its roots in Schelling's philosophy; rather, Rosenzweig uses the concept of common sense to explicate and amplify his application of Schelling's thought.
There are several indications that Rosenzweig's concept of common sense is closely connected to the Schellingian elements within his philosophy. While Rosenzweig may have disavowed realism, as we have just seen, his account of common sense strongly affirms the reality of God, World, and the Human Person. Schelling, in his lectures on Philosophy of Revelation, shows a similar concern.Footnote 73 He depicts Kant as an Idealist who does not believe that things exist independently of our thinking about them.Footnote 74 In contrast to this, Schelling says “The positive philosophy is a priori empiricism. The experience [Erfahrung] that it moves toward is total experience. The positive philosophy is nothing more than the constantly progressing, constantly growing proof; just as reality is never concluded, neither is the proof.”Footnote 75 Like Rosenzweig's “absolute empiricism” in “The New Thinking,” Schelling also uses a neologistic phrase (“a priori empiricism”) to espouse a commitment to reality that has the distinctive features of arising out of a metaphysical system and possessing content similar to common sense.Footnote 76 In addition to the language of empiricism, Rosenzweig and Schelling also share the language of factuality. As I noted earlier, Rosenzweig states at the beginning of the Star that he seeks God, the World, and the Human Person in their “absolute factuality,” which he equates with the idea of “positivity.” In Schelling's lectures on Philosophy of Revelation, factuality is a crucial element in his description of Christianity. He says that “Christianity is first and most immediately a fact [Tatsache].” He goes on to say “Christianity should not be demonstrated; rather it is only possible as a fact, as an occurrence [Erscheinung].”Footnote 77 Going beyond demonstration to the lived experience of the fact is what Rosenzweig had in mind in his insistence on verification as when he says in “The New Thinking:” “Thus truth ceases to be what ‘is’ true and becomes that which has to be verified as true.”Footnote 78 Nahum Glatzer, in his introduction to Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, cites a letter that Rosenzweig wrote to his mother shortly after writing the work that connects common sense, here represented by the five senses, with factuality: “It is further proof that it does not depend on whether one believes in God, rather only whether one opens his five senses and sees the facts [die Tatsachen]—at the risk therein, that God will appear among those facts.”Footnote 79 Rosenzweig underscores the experiential elements of Schelling's thought by emphasizing that factuality—even the factuality of God—is accessible through our basic ways of forming beliefs that lie at the heart of common sense.
Two themes in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy provide additional indications that Rosenzweig had Schelling in mind as he was writing the work. When Rosenzweig's philosopher who suffers from “Apoplexia Philosophica” arrives at the sanitarium, the treatment he receives is a regimen of viewing three mountain peaks as they poke through the clouds from different angles. The goal of the treatment is for the philosopher to develop the ability to view the three peaks simultaneously as distinct but related facts. The treatment mirrors the philosophical system of the Star, which seeks to defend the irreducibility of the three elements—God, World, and the Human Person—and to chart the relations between them. The motif of a mountain poking through the clouds was not original to Understanding the Sick and the Healthy; Rosenzweig used this imagery in his first major work, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.”Footnote 80 In the essay, Rosenzweig analyzes a short manuscript that appeared to be from Hegel's hand but which Rosenzweig attributed to Schelling, declaring it the first attempt to outline the idea of system among German idealists. As Benjamin Pollock discusses in detail, one of Rosenzweig's chief concerns is to demonstrate that the manuscript contained the seeds of Schelling's later thought. Rosenzweig says, “If he [Schelling] constructed the philosophy of art as its conclusion, he still did not forget to permit there to appear beyond it, like a distant mountain, the outlook on the mythology of the future.”Footnote 81 A second point of connection between Rosenzweig's discussion of common sense and Schelling's thought is the topic of wonder, which Schelling also addresses in his lectures on revelation. Schelling, however, defends the place of wonder within philosophy and argues that a sense of astonishment can lead the philosopher beyond the negative philosophy, which is restricted to matters of logical necessity.Footnote 82 While the last two considerations are only suggestive, the connection between Rosenzweig's common sense and Schelling's philosophy becomes more compelling on the topic of theology and our capacity to speak about God.
I have, to this point, intentionally left the term “common sense” unanalyzed, and instead I have sought to highlight Rosenzweig's use of the term. One feature of common sense I would now like to draw attention to is that it is generally taken to be a very limited source of information. Nicholas Rescher, in his Aquinas lecture on common sense, says that “while common sense is solidly secure and powerfully resistant to denial or dismissal, it is, at the same time distinctly unexciting: trite, obvious, and firmly at the disposal of even an unsophisticated intellect.”Footnote 83 If that is the case, then what can common sense contribute to our knowledge of God? Rosenzweig addresses this point in a passage quoted above from Understanding the Sick and the Healthy where he claims that common sense knows that God is “Something” and that God's “Something” is neither the essence of God nor is it identical to the “Something” of the World or the Human Person.Footnote 84 If this were the full theological content of common sense, it would hardly seem worth the considerable attention that Rosenzweig devotes to it. I would like to suggest that the most persistent theologoumenon in Rosenzweig's discussion of common sense is the notion that God is both near and far. While this may seem to be an equally meager insight, it, in fact, leads back to God's absolute factuality and positivity and our ability to make truth claims about God.
In his 1929 essay, “Der Ewige,” Rosenzweig argues that the “central revelation” of the Hebrew Bible and the “essence of Judaism” is the unifying of tensions within God such as “far” and “near” or “universal” and “particular.”Footnote 85 This theological view is common to all of Rosenzweig's writings after the Star and represents his adaptation of Schelling's theory of the potencies to the Jewish context of his own philosophical system.Footnote 86 Schelling, in the Ages of the World, says, “The representation of a duality, lying beyond the trinity of persons, in a unity of the divine essence, the doctrine of an eternal presence and of an eternal (or eternally becoming) past, is interwoven into the innermost fibers of the language of the Old Testament.”Footnote 87 For Rosenzweig, this duality in God represents the far God as the divine being at rest in its perfection and aseity and the near God as the one who reaches out beyond God's self in the process of Creation, Revelation and Redemption. Rosenzweig concludes his course “Introduction to Jewish Thinking”—the course in which he identifies Jewish thinking with common sense—with an extended discussion of God as both far and near. Commenting on Ps 73:28, which says “But as for me, the nearness of God is my good (Ps 73:28 JPS),” Rosenzweig states that “The near can only become near because it is far.”Footnote 88 Jewish thinking (i.e., common sense) is the balancing of these two fundamental polarities within God.Footnote 89 Rosenzweig leaves his class with two additional biblical verses from Jeremiah. The first begins,“From afar the Lord appeared unto me (Jer 31:3),” and the second verse states, “Am I a God near at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? (Jer 23:23).” Turning once again to “The New Thinking,” following Rosenzweig's discussion of Schelling's notion of “narration” and preceding his comments on common sense and scientific method, Rosenzweig says “If, say, the old [thinking] addressed the problem whether God is transcendent or immanent, then the new [thinking] attempts to show how and when He turns from the distant into the near God, and again from the near into the distant.”Footnote 90 Like the Jewish thinking of his course, the common sense of the new thinking explores the oscillations of God's proximity and distance.
At the beginning of the article, I mentioned a letter in which Rosenzweig felt compelled to give his closest interlocutor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a guided tour of the Star. Rosenzweig wrote this letter as he was teaching his “Introduction to Jewish Thinking,” and in the letter he uses ideas as an interpretive map for the Star that in a few months’ time will become the basis for Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.Footnote 91 Rosenzweig identifies Part One of the Star with illness, Part Two with health, and Part Three with the patient's treatment. Leaving aside the unusual fact that health here precedes the treatment, what I find instructive is the indication that Rosenzweig's use of common sense is not a ploy to refashion the Star motivated by his disenchantment with the work; rather, common sense genuinely encapsulates his philosophical system even if it was not originally expressed in those terms. The conclusion that I believe this pushes us toward is that Rosenzweig's use of common sense is highly idiosyncratic. The question then becomes: How does it illuminate Rosenzweig's use of the term “common sense” to understand it as an expression of his systematic philosophy? To start with, I think we can set aside Rosenzweig's suggestions that common sense figures directly into the Star. We come to a better understanding of the Star and Rosenzweig's subsequent efforts to explain his work if we see his intensive focus on common sense as a retrospective interpretive effort. A second benefit of seeing common sense as reflective of Rosenzweig's philosophical system is that common sense and speculative philosophy are no longer in tension with one another as Rotenstreich had taken them to be. A skeptic might counter this suggestion by pointing to Rosenzweig's identification of Part One with illness in the aforementioned letter to Eugen. How is the designation of Part One as “illness” not a condemnation of speculative philosophy? In the letter, Rosenzweig does say that Part One is “Unhegel” and “Unkant,” but he repeats twice that Part One is just as true as Part Two. In pitting common sense against philosophy, Rosenzweig is only criticizing that cipher of Western philosophy that he excoriates at the beginning of the Star.Footnote 92 Here, Rosenzweig's affirmation of the truth of Part One is much like Schelling's persistent claims that the negative and positive philosophies are interdependent. What is gained from Part One is, he says, the realization that “reality is threefold, not single.” God, World, and the Human Person are the “irreducible elements” presupposed by common sense and confirmed by philosophy. Rosenzweig goes on to say that “whoever grasps this is actually already healthy.”
As for God, Rosenzweig's discussions of common sense give definition to God's absolute factuality and positivity through the claim that God is both far and near.Footnote 93 This motif of God's proximity and distance affirms the power of theological language while also acknowledging its limits. God's distance represents the power of reason to reflect on divine perfection, and God's proximity represents the possibility of experiential knowledge of God. This mirrors Schelling's view that the negative attributes are known a priori but that the positive attributes can only be known through experience.Footnote 94 Rosenzweig is equally concerned about the limits of theological language, and he also utilizes the symbols of far and near to express the fact that God—like the World and the Human Person—exceeds our cognitive grasp and that God is too close to us to be an object of cognition.Footnote 95 Our theological language then reflects the dichotomy that lies at the heart of the divine being itself. In a telling remark in his commentary on the poems of Judah Halevi Rosenzweig writes: “But just as we have to heed the limits of our knowledge, so too, and not less, the limits of our not-knowing. Beyond all our knowledge, God lives. But before our not-knowing begins, your God presents Himself to you, to your call, to your assent, to your readiness, to your glance, to your life.”Footnote 96 This brings me back to Rosenzweig's promise to his students to be intelligible but also frustrating. He returns to this matter in the penultimate lecture of his course and says “What is annoying you?. . . That I speak just as naturally of God as of the World and the Human Person.”Footnote 97 As I have endeavored to show, common sense allows Rosenzweig to speak of God but insists that he do so within clearly defined limits.
It is worth dwelling on why it matters that Rosenzweig uses the term common sense in the ways I am suggesting. Over the last several decades, there has been an explosion of interest in Rosenzweig's philosophy. Scholars, as I mentioned earlier, continue to produce an array of competing interpretations. One of the most contested areas of research has been the effort to lay out Rosenzweig's basic philosophical and theological commitments. Those who emphasize the limits that Rosenzweig places on philosophy and theology read him as a postliberal thinker advancing a non-propositional theology, or as a postmetaphysical theologian, or as an apophatic thinker. On these views, the power of reason and language to make truth claims about God is either very limited or nonexistent. Other lines of interpretation take a more positive stance on the possibility of theological reference on the basis of the systematic nature of Rosenzweig's thought, through analysis of his theological language, or his emphasis on experience. In fashioning a notion of common sense that is true to his philosophical system, Rosenzweig sought to emphasize this tension between the power and limits of theological language. In trying to hold these two positions in tension, Rosenzweig unwittingly created a situation in which whatever side of the interpretive divide you fall on, you get something important correct about his thought. This is not to promote a relativistic approach to Rosenzweig that is indifferent to fundamental questions regarding philosophical and theological language. In faithfulness to Rosenzweig and in support of a position that I believe has considerable merit, our goal in interpreting his work should be to acknowledge both the power and limits of theological language.
Conclusion
Despite the cognitive dissonance that erupts at Rosenzweig's suggestion that the Star is a form of common sense, I do think he provided his readers with a helpful key to his thought in this unexpected reframing of his work. Our intuitive knowledge of God, World, and the Human Person parallels the results of the “constructive derivation” of the elements in Part One.Footnote 98 In addition, common sense, as Rosenzweig uses the term, captures well the power and limit of theological language in the Star. In the end, Rosenzweig's position is one in which metaphysics and common sense are interdependent. Although Mendelssohn held an outwardly similar view, Rosenzweig's position is better understood as an advancement of Schelling's thought than as a return to the issues and thinkers Mendelssohn was addressing.Footnote 99
Two questions remain for further research. While I have sought to shed light on why Rosenzweig depicted Judaism and the Star as common sense, is it really the case as he claims in “The New Thinking” that the intellectual movement of which Rosenzweig was a part would accept this designation? It is a matter worth exploring as it may help us better understand the motivations behind Rosenzweig's belated presentation of the Star as a form of common sense. Although a survey of the literature will have to be the work of a different study, I do see tentative evidence in favor of Rosenzweig's claim in the editors’ forward to the journal Die Kreatur. The journal, founded in 1926 and edited by three of Rosenzweig's closest interlocutors, Martin Buber, Joseph Wittig, and Viktor von Weizsäcker—a Jew, a Catholic, and a Protestant—was a venue for wide-ranging theological discussions across religious traditions. In their forward the editors write: “What unites us three editors is an affirmation of the bonds of the created world, the world as a created being.”Footnote 100 While more work would need to be done to validate Rosenzweig's claim, this comment resonates deeply with Rosenzweig's notion of common sense and its commitment to reality.
Finally, and much too briefly, is the question about where Rosenzweig stands in relationship to contemporary developments in analytic philosophy of religion. Like Rosenzweig, Thomas Reid and his common sense philosophy have seen a profound resurgence over the last several decades. Philosophers of religion such as William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff have proposed externalist epistemologies that build on Reid's philosophy.Footnote 101 They argue that not only is it rational to rely on our common belief-forming practices—including religious belief-forming practices—but that we have no way of getting behind the sources of our beliefs in order to lend them independent support. Does Rosenzweig have a contribution to make to this discussion? As I have tried to show, Rosenzweig is not really giving an account of common sense; rather, he is using common sense as a way of explicating and furthering his work in the Star. Despite the fact that Rosenzweig then leaves common sense underdeveloped in many important respects, there are still perhaps points of connection. In particular, Rosenzweig's efforts to link both common sense and reason to the creation story of Gen 1 reveals a shared concern with the “reformed epistemology” inspired by Reid. Rosenzweig claims in the Star that the light that is the product of God's first creative act is an affirmation of reason, regarding which he says: “It is a darkness in which all qualities show the one gray color of the-waste-and-the-void until God intones his ‘let there be light’ into it. Light is no more a thing than darkness. It is itself a quality. It is to cognition what the ‘good!’ is to volition, the utterly affirming valuation.”Footnote 102 Going beyond Reid's defense of our standard belief forming practices, Rosenzweig argues that our reason is a divinely bestowed faculty that lies at the origins of reality.Footnote 103 Like his comments in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, Rosenzweig is genuinely concerned with restoring our “normal functions,” and to this extent, I would suggest, he does share the goals of Reid and his contemporary defenders.Footnote 104
