Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy. By Benjamin Pollock

Abstract

In Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, Benjamin Pollock offers a close philosophical reading of Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption in which he argues that The Star should be read first and foremost as a post-Hegelian, post-Schelling system of philosophy, independent of any other external-to-philosophy motives. In Pollock's own words, My aim has been to show that in guiding his readers toward “knowledge of the All” in the Star Rosenzweig shows himself to be deeply and deliberately committed to the very systematic task of philosophy he has long held to have rejected. My reading of the Star as a system of philosophy suggests that there is good reason to understand Rosenzweig's philosophical commitments and, accordingly, Rosenzweig himself, differently than he has so often been portrayed in the scholarship of the last decades. The Franz Rosenzweig who emerges from my account is not an existentialist committed to articulating the authenticity of individual existence; he is not a harbinger of postmodernism who seeks to deconstruct philosophical totality and to celebrate difference or otherness; he is not a Jewish penitent invested in the return of his contemporary alienated Jews back to Jewish tradition; he is not a philosopher of dialogue. The Rosenzweig who emerges here is a systematic philosopher who recognizes, first and foremost, that one cannot live “everyday” life, and cannot ask the basic questions that emerge in everyday life, without inquiring into “the All” and one's place in it. (314)