A World with Many Ends: Eschatology and Perspectivism

Mårten Björk

doi:10.3390/h11020031

Abstract

In this article, the relation between crisis, dying, and apocalypse is examined from the vantage point of Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy of revelation. Following Rosenzweig’s suggestion that truth—for finite and temporal beings like us—can only be found in time, the article suggests that there exists an intrinsic relation between truth and death. Truth is not only or even primarily logical or mathematical truth according to Rosenzweig. Truth is the reality of our finite lives and implies an eschatological understanding of death as that which gives life unity by eternalising it as that which it forever was in the past. Life, Rosenzweig argues, is polytheistic by entailing manifold perspectives and possibilities, while death is monotheistic by endowing living beings with the unity and completion they lack in life. All death, even the most horrid death, is, if not a completion, at least an end, which gives the living the possibility to judge and verify the meaning of the past once and for all. Yet, if we believe Rosenzweig, the dead are not gone in the past but rather the eternal ground that makes present and future time possible. The dead, by literally being the past, reveal that all time exists after itself, as something that already was, and that the world is nothing but a world with many ends by dying away into the “life outside life” that Rosenzweig called God.

Highlights

The German-Jewish soldier and philosopher of religion Franz Rosenzweig insisted that death is a crisis and an apocalypse; a judgment and an unveiling
The truth about ourselves and the world that we inhabit is revealed; but in what sense can death be understood as an apocalypse and a crisis? what does Rosenzweig’s religious thanatology imply in our crisis-ridden world, which seems foreign to the “logic of redemption” that Rosenzweig defended by insisting that death, as the closure of life, gives the world unity (Rosenzweig 2005, p. 256)? I shall answer these questions by arguing that Rosenzweig can help us move beyond the perspectivism of the modern era—
Eschatology is the theological doctrine of the critical decisions of a human life that is sealed by death, and death is related to our redemption, or what Rosenzweig enigmatically described as God’s own completion: “In the Redemption, that of the world through man and that of man through the world, God gives himself his own Redemption

Summary

Introduction

The German-Jewish soldier and philosopher of religion Franz Rosenzweig insisted that death is a crisis and an apocalypse; a judgment and an unveiling. Lies and illusions are rather the strange power of the irreal, which affects us and forms our human world into a domain of divergent and often contesting perspectives This is the world that lacks what Rosenzweig described as completion, since it is not “the All”. These bonds might certainly be established around lies or illusions, but if they verify a connection of goodness or humaneness—which for Rosenzweig entails a form of truth, namely, the truth of justice—they often do that to the cost of sacrifice in this world that is ruled by conflicts, injustices and tyranny This verificationism of human relations has, at least from the outset, not much in common with the logical positivists’ insistence that only empirically verifiable statements are cognitively meaningful. For Rosenzweig, every death, even the most horrific, or for that matter banal, death, is a martyrdom that gives witness to the state of the world

The Struggle for Existence

Learning How to Die

The Common Sense of Death

Beyond Perspectivism

Life beyond Life

Conclusions