Words and diagrams about Rosenstock-Huessy’s cross of reality

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is a systems theoretic examination of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘cross of reality’, a structure that fuses a spatial dyad of inner-outer and a temporal dyad of past-future into a space–time tetrad. This structure is compatible not only with the ‘human-centered’ point of view that Rosenstock-Huessy favours, but also with the ‘world-centered’ point of view inherent in science. The structure, based in his analysis of speech, is applied by him to a wide variety of individual and collective human phenomena, including language, religion, and social critique. To appropriate terminology used by physicists, the cross of reality could be viewed as Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘theory of everything’, a framework for the social sciences and humanities that can be used to model entities, events and processes. The cross diagrams some basic notions of systems theory. Rosenstock-Huessy’s critique of science is partially shared by systems thought, and the goal he posited for sociology of understanding and alleviating human suffering can gain support from systems ideas and methods.