Abstract
Abstract In this article I claim there is no contradiction involved in Franz Rosenzweig’s love of life and his apology for death: what he loves and wants us to love is the finite life, life offered in its finitude which should in the end appear as enough – that is, sufficient and fit for everything we could want from life, redemption included. The beyond toward which death as the end gestures is not a promise of immortality, offering a transcendence in temporal terms infinitely prolonged. The will “to stay, to live,” of which Rosenzweig speaks in the opening paragraph of The Star of Redemption, is the drive characteristic of another finitude: desiring and investing in life, without, at the same time, wishing to prolong itself into infinity.
Highlights
In this article I claim there is no contradiction involved in Franz Rosenzweig’s love of life and his apology for death: what he loves and wants us to love is the finite life, life offered in its finitude which should in the end appear as enough – that is, sufficient and fit for everything we could want from life, redemption included
At the end of the first part of The Star of Redemption, devoted to the concept of creation, Franz Rosenzweig famously states about death that, unlike other created things that are just good, death is very good and as such is the true crown and gem of the creaturely world: not something to be deplored as the sign of transience “reeking of decay,” but to be praised and cherished as the finishing touch to the enterprise of creation: Within the framework of the universal Yes of Creation which carries all the Singular on its broad back, a domain is delimited which receives a different Yes, a Yes qualified by “very,” different from everything else, something that, while in the Creation points beyond Creation
I would like to show that there is no contradiction involved in Rosenzweig’s love of life and his apology for death: what he loves and wants us to love is the finite life, life offered in its finitude which should in the end appear as enough – that is, sufficient and fit for everything we could want from life, redemption included
Summary
In his account of love as dynamic and plastic, all-reaching and all-binding connection, Rosenzweig relies heavily on German Romanticism: Hölderlin’s “bonds of love” (Liebesbände), Novalis, but most of all Goethe, who famously said that “love connects all” (Liebe verbindet alles) and that “if you want infinity, go in all directions of the finite.” We will find the same romantic wisdom in Novalis’s apothegm: Die Basis aller ewiger Verbindung ist eine absolute Tendenz nach allen Richtungen (The ground of all eternal connection is an absolute tendency in all directions).[27] Rosenzweig’s love is precisely such an attempt in all directions, the purpose of which is to turn – metamorphose – the monolith of being, organized hierarchically according to general categories, into a horizontal community of the “numberless singulars,” capable to relate to one another in the new way that is the “eternal connection.” It is not the singular essence of a thing that is capable of achieving eternity, but only a singularity entangled in the “bonds of love” with its neighbors, together forming a constellation that transforms the world, by pushing it toward metaphysical fulfilment, being at the same time full visibility: “God and man already are, the world is becoming.
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