European Revolutions and World War as Way Stations to Planetary Man: Rosenstock-Huessy’s Christian Rejoinder to Spengler’s The Decline of the West

Abstract

Along with Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) developed an existential Speech Thinking that he critically applied to Spengler’s Decline of the West, portraying it in an early essay as evidence of “The Suicide of Europe” through a Greek posture of objective detachment. He would return to it throughout his life as a foil to the narrative “We” of living memory unfolding in the historical sequence of European Revolutions he described in several books and lectures as the working-out of second-millennium Christianity, adumbrating a third-millennium Planetary Man born of world war.