\"Absolute Factuality, Common Sense, and Theological Reference in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig\"...

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HTR 109:3 (2016) 342–370

Absolute Factuality, Common Sense, and Theological Reference in the Thought of Franz RosenzweigCass FisherUniversity of South Florida

IntroductionSince its publication, Franz Rosenzweig’s magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, has remained a challenge to its readers and a source of wildly conflicting interpretations. It should be a matter of great consternation to Rosenzweig’s readers that, shortly after his publication of the Star, he came to identify the work with common sense. This article traces the emergence of common sense within Rosenzweig’s thought and undertakes a critical analysis of his use of the term. In contrast to other efforts to address this topic, I argue that Rosenzweig’s belated appeal to common sense is a useful heuristic tool for understanding his account of God, the divine-human relationship, and the power and limits of theological language in the Star.

By all accounts the Star is a difficult work.1 Rosenzweig’s readers can take solace in the fact that even Rosenzweig’s closest interlocutor, Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, required a guided tour of the main arguments of the Star.2 In a letter Rosenzweig wrote to Rosenstock-Huessy on 12 February 1921, Rosenzweig asks in exasperation, “Must I now really explain to you the old book?” The question

1 Der Stern der Erlösung is included in Rosenzweig’s collected works: Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und Sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften (4 vols.; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976 [henceforth GS]). There are two English translations of the Star: Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (trans. William Hallo; New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970) and Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (trans. Barbara E. Galli; Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). I will cite page numbers from the German edition and the Hallo translation and will quote from the latter.

2 Franz Rosenzweig, Die “Gritli”–Briefe: Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy (ed. Inken Rühle and Reinhold Mayer; Tübingen: Bilam, 2002) 729.

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is purely rhetorical, as Rosenzweig knew quite well that he needed to explain the Star. Rosenzweig became so concerned about the Star’s reception that he wrote a short book and an essay to help his readers navigate the complex philosophical system of the Star. The first of these works, which Rosenzweig refers to as a “prolegomena,” Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand, was written shortly after the Star came to press in 1921, but was first published posthumously in translation by Nahum Glatzer as Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.3 The second work, the essay “The New Thinking,” appeared in the journal Der Morgen in 1925.4 Despite his efforts to clarify the Star, scholars have produced an array of contradictory readings of Rosenzweig as a neo-Hegelian, a forerunner of postmodern thought, an ethical thinker akin to Levinas, a hermeneutic thinker with similarities to postliberal theology, a postmetaphysical thinker along the lines of Heidegger, the completer of Schelling’s philosophy, an antitheoretical philosopher similar to Wittgenstein, and an apophatic thinker. The range of disparate views that scholars attribute to Rosenzweig indicates that his most basic philosophical and theological commitments remain opaque.5

3 Franz Rosenzweig, Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand (Düsseldorf: Joseph Melzer, 1964) 24; Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God (trans. Nahum Glatzer; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) 36. On Understanding the Sick and the Healthy as a prolegomena, see Yehoyada Amir, “Rosenzweig’s Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand as a Prolegomena,” in Faith, Truth, and Reason: New Perspectives on Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption (ed. Yehoyada Amir, Yossi Turner, and Martin Brasser; Freiberg: Karl Alber, 2012) 37–60. Throughout his translation, Glatzer deftly captures Rosenzweig’s dual use of the term “gesunder Menschenverstand” as the German philosophical term “common sense” and as “healthy human understanding.” For an alternative view, see ibid., 49.

4 Franz Rosenzweig, “Das neue Denken,” GS 3, 139–61. There are two translations of “The New Thinking”: Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking” (ed. and trans. Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings (ed. and trans. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan; Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000). I quote in this essay from the translation by Franks and Morgan.

5 There are multiple reasons why Rosenzweig’s interpreters struggle to understand his thought. From Rosenzweig’s perspective, the readers’ difficulties stem from a failure to appreciate the systematic nature of the work. He impresses this point upon Rosenstock–Huessy in the letter cited above and again several years later in “The New Thinking.” Recently, Rosenzweig scholars have turned the tables and have suggested that it is Rosenzweig’s idiosyncratic method of argumentation that is principally responsible for the Star’s obscurity. While I see little point in faulting Rosenzweig’s philosophical method, I do think his writing frequently evinces a rhetorical element that can misdirect his reader. For instance, when Rosenzweig says in “The New Thinking” that Part One of the Star is a “reductio ad absurdum” of the old philosophy as well as its salvation, his readers have rightfully struggled to reconcile this diametrical assessment of the foundational part of the work in which the elements—God, World, and the Human Person—receive their distinctive forms. M. G. Piety discusses similar challenges in the work of Plato, Kierkegaard, and Leo Strauss. She suggests: “It is not necessary . . . to have precisely the same concerns as the author of a work one is trying to interpret in order properly, or at least productively, to identify what the author is trying to say. A

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From the vantage point of the first pages of the Star, one would not anticipate the interpretive challenges that have accompanied the work. In the beginning of Part One–Book One, Rosenzweig states that his method is not a form of negative theology and that he intends to establish the “absolute factuality” or “positivity” of God, World, and the Human Person.6 While Rosenzweig promises his readers a pellucid account of God and the divine-human relationship, the reception history of the Star suggests that he fell short of that goal. In my view, Rosenzweig did manage to establish God’s “absolute factuality” as he understood it in the Star, but to see that this is so one must make use of his course notes, letters, and subsequent writings.7 A persistent theme throughout this disparate body of literary material is Rosenzweig’s perplexing and demoralizing claim that the basic philosophical position of the Star is a form of common sense. I suspect that many of Rosenzweig’s readers have recoiled in indignation at the suggestion that the work they have labored to understand can be reduced to common sense, a term that occurs only once in the Star.8 Rosenzweig’s identification of the Star with common sense is, on the surface, so preposterous that scholars have largely ignored this interpretive clue to the work. Despite the justified misgivings, I intend to argue that the term “common sense” does capture important features of Rosenzweig’s thought, particularly with respect to the referential capacity of theological language that is so central to the Star and its interest in God’s absolute factuality.

certain sympathy with the author’s temperament—for example, an ability to recognize when he is being humorous—and concerns is all that is required” (M. G. Piety, “The Dangers of Indirection: Plato, Kierkegaard, and Leo Strauss,” in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard [ed. Edward F. Mooney; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008] 163–74, at 171).

6 Rosenzweig, Stern, 25/Star, 23.7 In an insightful essay on Rosenzweig’s notion of “factuality,” Benjamin Pollock writes: “while

Rosenzweig . . . makes the centrality of the concept of factuality in his thinking abundantly clear, he leaves the meaning of this most central of concepts unclear.” He goes on to say: “Facts and factuality . . . appear, disappear and reappear in the Star in the most manifold and contradictory of guises” (“ ‘Erst die Tatsache in sicher vor dem Rückfall ins Nichts’: Rosenzweig’s Concept of Factuality,” in Franz Rosenzweigs »neues Denken«: Internationaler Kongreß Kassel 2004 [ed. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik; 2 vols.; Munich: Karl Alber, 2006] 1:359–70, at 359 and 361).

8 The single occurrence can be found at the start of Book One–Part Three. Rosenzweig, Stern 67/Star 62. See n. 66 below for a discussion of the passage. Nahum Glatzer claims that “the term ‘common sense’ is much in evidence in The Star of Redemption, particularly in the polemics against German Idealism” (Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 22/Das Büchlein, 12). I am not certain what Glatzer is referring to here but I do see hints of common sense in Star 1:2, “The World and Its Meaning or Metalogic.” Rosenzweig begins that chapter with the following: “Now what do we know of the world? It appears to surround us. We are in it, but it exists within us too. It penetrates us, but with every breath and every stirring of our hands it also emanates from us. It is for us the self-evident quantity, as self-evident as our own self, more self-evident than God. It is the evident pure and simple, the one thing specifically suited and specially commissioned to be understood, to be evident from within itself, to be ‘self-evident’ ” (Stern, 44/Star, 41).

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Rosenzweig’s Common Sense in ContextRosenzweig’s turn to common sense is not just perplexing. It is mysterious. His collected works provide little insight into how he became preoccupied with the idea of “common sense” and give no indication of how he understands the complex history of the term in Scottish and German philosophy. Since the eighteenth century, the term “common sense” has come to be identified with the Scottish school of philosophy that arose around the work of Thomas Reid. Nicholas Wolterstorff is surely correct that the designation of Reid’s philosophy as “common sense,” what he calls Reid’s “great misfortune,” has concealed the depth of Reid’s philosophical program.9 Reid’s principle concern was to overthrow the “way of ideas,” the view that our knowledge is mediated by internal representations and thus does not extend into the world.10 In Reid’s view, the theory of ideas had culminated in both Berkeley’s idealism and Hume’s skepticism and was thus a threat to all philosophical and religious knowledge. In the dedication of his first major work, Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense, Reid says:

I thought it unreasonable, my Lord, upon the authority of philosophers to admit a hypothesis, which, in my opinion, overturns all philosophy, all religion and virtue, and all common sense: and finding that all the systems concerning the human understanding which I was acquainted with, were built upon this hypothesis, I resolved to inquire into this subject anew, without regard to any hypothesis.11

Reid seeks to correct the way of ideas by arguing for a system of natural and artificial signs that are neither images nor representations of the world and which make possible knowledge of the world. Although these issues are central to Reid’s philosophy, I can safely bracket them, as Rosenzweig never shows the slightest interest in these topics. Where Rosenzweig does draw close to Reid’s philosophy

9 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (Modern European Philosophy; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 215. Wolterstorff writes: “The one thing everyone knows about Reid is that his philosophy became known as Common Sense Philosophy. It acquired that name because the phenomenon Reid called ‘common sense’ played a prominent role in his thought. But it’s not what is deepest. And one lesson to be drawn from the fate of Reid’s thought is that if one tries to enter through the doorway of his views on Common Sense, one will never get far. The profundity of his thought will be blocked from view by that peculiar mindlessness that talk about common sense induces in readers” (Reid and the Story of Epistemology, 1). For an alternative assessment of the role of common sense in Reid’s thought, see Michael Pakaluk, “A Defence of Scottish Common Sense,” The Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2002) 564–81.

10 Wolterstorff summarizes the “way of ideas” thusly: “Assuming the tenability of the ontological distinction between mental entities and all others, the Way of Ideas held that, at any moment, that with which one has acquaintance consists at most of oneself, of one’s present mental acts and objects, and of those of one’s present mental states that one is then actively aware of—along with various facts, contingent and necessary, consisting of the interrelationships of these” (Reid and the Story of Epistemology, 24).

11 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense (ed. Derek R. Brookes; University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) 5.


is in Reid’s answer to the skeptic (although Rosenzweig directs his arguments at philosophy in general). Reid argues that we have no alternative but to rely on our standard ways of forming beliefs. Philosophers who think they can either shore up our common belief forming practices or take leave of them are profoundly mistaken. Reid writes:

Poor untaught mortals believe undoubtedly, that there is a sun, moon, and stars; an earth, which we inhabit; country, friends, and relations, which we enjoy; land, houses, and moveables, which we possess. But philosophers, pitying the credulity of the vulgar, resolve to have no faith but what is founded upon reason. They apply to philosophy to furnish them with reasons for the belief of those things which all mankind have believed, without being able to give any reason for it.12

Despite some striking points of similarity in their philosophical views and modes of argumentation, there is little evidence that Rosenzweig’s appeal to common sense is the direct influence of Reid’s thought. To my knowledge, Rosenzweig never mentions Reid. Even if there were a thread linking the two thinkers, that would not alleviate the fact that Rosenzweig is indifferent to the questions that motivated Reid’s philosophy. If Rosenzweig’s turn to common sense is best understood as an extension of Reid’s thought, it is a superficial engagement with Reid’s philosophy that deserves the scholarly neglect it has received.

As Manfred Kuehn pointed out nearly thirty years ago in his work, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, Reid’s philosophy and that of his epigones, James Oswald and James Beattie, played an important role in German enlightenment philosophy.13 Thus Mendelssohn and Kant are also potential sources for Rosenzweig’s interest in common sense. In recent years, scholars have advanced Kuehn’s pioneering work with numerous studies on the role of common sense in Mendelssohn’s and Kant’s philosophy.14 I will forego an effort to survey this material

12 Reid, Inquiry, 18. That we cannot get behind our traditional practices to analyze or defend them is evident from the following: “The evidence of sense, the evidence of memory, and the evidence of the necessary relations of things, are all distinct and original kinds of evidence, equally grounded on our constitution: none of them depends upon, or can be resolved into another. To reason against any of these kinds of evidence, is absurd; nay, to reason for them, is absurd. They are first principles; and such fall not within the province of Reason, but of Common Sense” (ibid., 32).

13 Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987).

14 On Kant and common sense, see Karl Ameriks, “A Commonsense Kant?” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2005) 19–45; Paul Guyer, “Kant on Common Sense and Scepticism,” Kantian Review 7 (2003) 1–37; Michael Morris, “The French Revolution and the New School of Europe: Towards a Political Interpretation of German Idealism,” European Journal of Philosophy 19 (2010) 532–60; Scott Stapleford, “Reid, Tetens, and Kant on the External World,” Idealistic Studies 37 (2007) 87–104; Emanuele Levi Mortera, “Stewart, Kant, and the Reworking of Common Sense,” History of European Ideas 38 (2012) 122–42; Kurt Mosser, “Kant and Wittgenstein: Common Sense, Therapy, and the Critical Philosophy,” Philosophia 37 (2009) 1–20; Etienne Brun–Rovet, “Reid, Kant and the Philosophy of Mind,” The Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2002) 495–510; Jennifer Kirchmyer Dobe, “Kant’s Common Sense and the Strategy for a Deduction,” Journal of

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for the same reasons that a detailed analysis of Reid’s philosophy is unnecessary. As with Reid, Rosenzweig never explicitly links his notion of common sense with Mendelssohn or Kant nor does he engage the same philosophical questions that guide their discussions.15 For instance, Bruce Rosenstock argues that Mendelssohn deploys common sense as a response to skepticism, a philosophical issue that Rosenzweig leaves untouched.16 According to Mendelssohn, reason should not contradict common sense:

Whenever reason falls far behind our common sense, or even parts company with it entirely, and is thus in danger of falling into error, the philosopher cannot help but distrust reason. He is unwilling to follow it so far as to con-tradict common sense. He will rather impose a ban of silence upon reason if he finds that otherwise he would never succeed in returning to life’s trodden path and catch up again with common sense.17

As will become evident in my discussion of Rosenzweig’s use of common sense, the relationship between common sense and reason is not simply a case of the former serving as a corrective to the latter.18

Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (2010) 47–60. On Mendelssohn and common sense, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Allan Arkush, Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (SUNY Series in Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion; Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994); Gideon Freudenthal, No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); Bruce Rosenstock, Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Beyond (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Micah Gottleib, Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological–Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); idem., Faith, Reason, and Politics: Essays on the History of Jewish Thought (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013); Moses Mendelssohn, Last Works (trans. Bruce Rosenstock; Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

15 Rosenzweig does, however, say this about Kant: “The indissoluble sediment of the world and the mystery of character have a ‘common obscure root.’ This surmise was clearly enunciated by Kant, though to be sure he could not, as Idealist, surmise its actual meaning” (Rosenzweig, Stern, 157/Star, 142).

16 Rosenstock, Philosophy and the Jewish Question, 30. Other than a single mention of reading Hume in a letter from his early years at university, Rosenzweig never refers to Hume throughout the rest of his writings. Benjamin Pollock has recently argued that Rosenzweig underwent a Marcionite phase in his early thought marked by a “world skepticism.” This, obviously, has nothing to do with Humean skepticism (Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions: World Denial and World Redemption [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014]).

17 Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, in Mendelssohn, Last Works, 71.18 Mendelssohn gives a more balanced picture of the relationship between reason and common

sense in his essay “To the Friends of Lessing”: “I assign to my philosophical speculation the task of correcting the claims of common sense and, as much as possible, turning them into rational knowledge. As long as both of them, speculation and common sense, remain on good terms, I gladly follow them wherever they lead me. But as soon as they have a falling out, I seek to orient myself and lead them both, if possible, to the point from which we started” (Moses Mendelssohn, “To the Friends of Lessing,” in Mendelssohn, Last Works, 158).


As recent scholarship has demonstrated, Scottish common sense philosophy had a far greater impact on Kant than he indicates in his writings. Kuehn summarizes Kant’s position by saying that “his critical philosophy was not meant to supersede common sense, but to strengthen it.”19 Here, too, there is little continuity between Rosenzweig’s approach to common sense and that of his eighteenth-century predecessors. The gap between Kant and Rosenzweig is perhaps most striking in their respective prolegomena, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science and Rosenzweig’s Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.20 Kant’s Prolegomena begins and ends with exceedingly sharp critiques of common sense philosophy. At the start of the Prolegomena, Kant says that Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and Priestly badly misconstrued Hume and consequently they pursued pointless lines of philosophical inquiry. Unable to follow Hume’s arguments, they “found a more expedient means to be obstinate without any insight, namely, the appeal to ordinary common sense.”21 At the end of the Prolegomena, Kant insists that metaphysics can make no appeal to common sense.22 Rosenzweig in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy makes the very different claim that philosophy has become corrupted by its pursuit of essences and that a return to common sense is the only possible remedy. While I would argue that both Kant and Rosenzweig have nuanced conceptions of metaphysics and common sense, there is little overlap in how they understand the terms and the role they play in their larger philosophical programs.23

If Rosenzweig neglects the principal philosophical issues that framed discussions of common sense, such as the way of ideas, skepticism, common sense as a criterion for restricting metaphysics, or the philosophical justification of common sense,

19 Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 191.20 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward

as Science, in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 (ed. Henry Allison and Peter Heath; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

21 Kant, Prolegomena, 56 [italics in original]. Kuehn argues that the true object of Kant’s attack is not Scottish common sense philosophy but its proponents among German enlightenment philosophers. Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 192. However that may be, I don’t think that has much bearing for Rosenzweig’s reading of Kant’s Prolegomena.

22 Kant, Prolegomena, 159. 23 Another reason to be skeptical about Rosenzweig’s borrowing his conception of common sense

from Kant is that common sense had fallen into desuetude by the time Rosenzweig engaged these topics and along with it any awareness of Kant’s debt, direct or indirect, to Reid and his disciples. When Rosenzweig begins Understanding the Sick and the Healthy by saying, “common sense is in disrepute with philosophers,” we can take him at his word. Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 39/Das Büchlein, 28. For a clear sense of what contemporary views on common sense looked like see Ernst Cassirer’s blistering criticism of Leonard Nelson’s work in Ernst Cassirer, Der kritische Idealismus und die Philosophie des ‘gesunden Menschenverstandes’ (Philosophische Arbeiten; Giessen, Germany: Alfred Töpelmann, 1906). Cassirer’s essay was the first to be published in the series Philosophische Arbeiten edited by Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp. If Rosenzweig read the essay, Cassirer’s attack on Nelson’s common sense would have come with an important approbation for him. On the quick demise of common sense philosophy after Kant, see Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 234–37.

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then what compels him to identify his philosophy with common sense? Is his turn to common sense a move to step away from philosophy and to embrace the practical life? It seems unlikely that, at the precise moment the Star came to print, Rosenzweig would renounce the philosophical system he had just constructed—a system that Benjamin Pollock rightfully notes gave Rosenzweig a profound sense of personal accomplishment.24 Although there are occasionally points of contact in Rosenzweig’s discussion of common sense and those of Reid, Mendelssohn, and Kant, the connections are weak and they will not, by themselves, help us to understand Rosenzweig’s claim that the philosophical system of the Star is best understood as common sense. Given Rosenzweig’s silence on the provenance of the term “common sense,” the best approach to the topic is to begin by looking at how Rosenzweig uses the term and only after doing so to explore the question of how to situate “common sense” among his philosophical influences.25

Rosenzweig’s Turn to Common SenseAfter completing the Star in 1919, Rosenzweig famously decided the following year against a career in academia and instead devoted himself to adult Jewish education as the director of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. It appears that Rosenzweig’s preoccupation with common sense began as he was preparing his course for the second trimester of the second year of the Lehrhaus, which ran from January until March of 1921. In two letters to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy at the beginning of November 1920, Rosenzweig indicates that he plans to teach a course entitled “Introduction to the Use of Common Sense: Exodus from General Philosophy.”26 In a later letter, he

24 Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task, 4–5, 118–19.25 Pollock concludes his analysis of the development of Rosenzweig’s concept of “system” prior

to the Star with the following observations: “that Rosenzweig’s designation of his own work as a ‘system of philosophy’ is not meaningless or accidental; that Rosenzweig does not throw such philosophical terms around at random; that Rosenzweig had in fact deliberated over the nature and significance of system with the utmost seriousness in the years before his writing of the Star” (ibid., 119). Common sense is an interesting test case for Pollock’s assertions about Rosenzweig’s philosophical language for two reasons. First, once one becomes attuned to the importance of system in Rosenzweig’s thought it can be seen throughout the Star; the same is not true with common sense, for which there is scant evidence in the Star. Second, while Rosenzweig devotes years of reflection and discussion to developing his conception of system, common sense does not receive the same treatment from Rosenzweig. While I hope my discussion will affirm Pollock’s claim that “Rosenzweig does not throw such philosophical terms around at random,” the challenges of establishing that fact with regard to Rosenzweig’s use of “common sense” are formidable.

26 1 November 1920 and 4 November 1920 in Rosenzweig, Die Gritli Briefe, 679–81. In the two letters, Rosenzweig gives slightly different titles to the course: “Einführung in den Gebrauch des gesunden Menschenverstands (Auszug aus der gesamten Philosophie)” and “Einführung in den gesunden Menschenverstand (Ein Auszug aus der gesamten Philosophie).”


explains that he was forced to change the title of the course for reasons he does not disclose. In the end, the course was titled “Introduction to Jewish Thinking: An Exodus from General Philosophy,” but the first lecture retained the title “On the Use of Common Sense.”27

It is evident from these course titles that the opposition between common sense and philosophy that would become central to Rosenzweig’s arguments in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy and “The New Thinking” had already taken shape in his thought. At the beginning of the first lecture, Rosenzweig privileges common sense over philosophy on account of the fact that common sense is “universally human,” a state to which reason can only aspire. Rosenzweig also criticizes philosophy as a discipline on the grounds that it is engaged in a misguided search for essences that yields no truth. As he describes it in this context, truth is not an arcane entity; rather, it is accessible in a direct and intimate manner through common sense. Along these lines he says to his students: “The truth will be addressed just as directly, factually, and particularly as you—in possession of your common sense—speak with your neighbor.”28 Rosenzweig continues:

Philosophy says: everything is essentially earthly-substance or heavenly-spirit or God or a priori. However, the truth surrenders only the straightforward in every “essentially” dispensing sentence. That which brings all of these possibilities together without making use of the “essential” is: “In the Begin-ning God created the heaven and the earth.” Is that Jewish thinking? Indeed. And the opposite of that? Greek thinking, thinking about the essential.29

At the outset of the course, Rosenzweig makes clear that he intends to introduce his students not to Jewish thought but, rather, to Jewish thinking. The key insight he seeks to convey about Jewish thinking is that it is a “philosophy of common sense.” While general philosophy pursues essences, Rosenzweig says that Jewish common sense seeks to “once again tie together the torn threads of the everyday and the holiday; to once again make the everyday—the entirely work-week thinking—into

27 Rosenzweig, GS 1:2, 693. Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer describe the course as “eine Hinführung zum Gebrauch des gesunden Menschenverstandes” (Rosenzweig, GS 3, XIV).

28 Rosenzweig, GS 3, 598. “For the world of redemption, absolute factuality derives from the fact that whoever be momentarily my neighbor represents all the world for me in full validity” (Rosenzweig, Stern, 263/Star, 236).

29 Rosenzweig, GS 3, 598. Benjamin Pollock has recently offered a new account of Rosenzweig’s near-conversion to Christianity. Whereas previous scholarship saw Rosenzweig’s near-conversion entailing a movement from relativism to faith, Pollock argues that what motivated Rosenzweig’s flirtation with Christianity was a transition from a world denying Marcionism to a philosophical and theological affirmation of the world. In Rosenzweig’s own reflections on this experience, he states that Gen 1:1 played a pivotal role in his decision to remain a Jew. See Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions, 58–59. Along these lines, one might then see Rosenzweig’s turn to common sense after the Star as the culmination of his embrace of the world and the human activity that guides it to redemption.

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a preparation for Sabbath thinking.”30 On the basis of his lecture notes, Rosenzweig perceives Judaism as a form of common sense in that it distinguishes between God, World, and the Human Person but also because Judaism seeks to draw these three realms together. Readers of the Star will detect in this understanding of common sense the main lines of Rosenzweig’s argument in his magnum opus. As I will show, Rosenzweig’s conception of common sense becomes increasingly entwined with his philosophical system. Rosenzweig did not begrudge his students their rightful consternation over his identification of Judaism and common sense. He tells them at the start of the course that while he promises to speak in a comprehensible manner, he admits that they will “often, if not always” be irritated by what he says.31 I will say more about this irritation at the conclusion of the essay.

In July of 1921, at the request of a publisher for an accessible introduction to his thought, Rosenzweig wrote Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand, which he later withdrew prior to publication. The work was first published posthumously in a translation by Nahum Glatzer as Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. But, of course, gesunder Menschenverstand also means common sense. It is a peculiar philosophical work in that it adopts a highly stylized narrative form in order to mount a sharp critique of philosophy. Rosenzweig begins Understanding the Sick and the Healthy with two letters, an adversarial letter to the expert, who he expects will misunderstand the work, and one to the reader whom he addresses as an old friend.32 He explains his collegiality to the reader on the basis of the fact that they were former classmates in the school of common sense. The significance of this fact becomes apparent when Rosenzweig opens his work with the claim that “common sense is in disrepute among philosophers.”33 Rosenzweig then pathologizes philosophy along the lines already established in his course on Jewish thinking. Echoing statements by Plato and Aristotle that philosophy begins with wonder, he argues that, in their efforts to identify what an object actually is, philosophers become paralyzed by wonder. The philosopher’s search for the true essence of things is, according to Rosenzweig, “a radical inversion of his normal

30 Rosenzweig, GS 3, 598. Mendelssohn also identifies Judaism with common sense in his “To the Friends of Lessing”: “When I speak of conviction based on reasonable evidence, and I assert that in Judaism such conviction is undoubtedly presupposed, I am not talking about the metaphysical arguments we are accustomed to carry on in books, nor about scholastic demonstrations that have stood the test of the most subtle refinements of critical probing, but about the dicta and the judgments of a simple common sense that looks things straight in the eye and calmly takes their measure” (Mendelssohn, “To the Friends of Lessing,” 157). See also Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism (trans. Allan Arkush; Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1983) 97.

31 Rosenzweig, GS 3, 598.32 As Yehoyada Amir points out, Rosenzweig’s and Kant’s prolegomena have much in common

in terms of the motivations which led their authors to produce accessible introductions to their philosophical views and in their efforts to specify who the intended readers of these prolegomena are (Amir, “Rosenzweig’s Büchlein,” 54f).

33 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 39/Das Büchlein, 28.


functions.”34 Rosenzweig gives comic expression to the philosophical life by imagining the challenge that the everyday task of buying butter would pose to such a philosopher.35 Rosenzweig envisions a catatonic philosopher incapacitated by concerns about how his intention to buy butter connects to the actual butter that now lies before him in the case, how the word “butter” refers to this butter, and when the butter before him switched from being butter in general to being “this butter.”36 He writes:

In practical life no one gives up his intention to buy butter merely because he is unable to prove that the butter he wishes to buy and the butter on sale are identical. The single exception to this is the philosopher, but even he carefully restricts his meditations to theory. When he goes shopping he is unwilling to have an empty stomach as a reward for his thoughts. In theory, of course, he cannot be refuted. As soon as he asks: ‘What is this actually?’ the butter disappears. As for the name—well, that is a matter of convention. Different languages have different names for one and the same thing. If a philosopher, however, should turn his back on our slab of butter, claiming it cannot be butter, because the French call it beurre, the proper place for him would be an institution accommodating philosophers exclusively.37

Much of the remainder of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy develops this notion of a philosopher requiring institutionalization. Rosenzweig playfully constructs an account of a philosopher suffering from “Apoplexia Philosophica” who is sent to a sanitarium to recover common sense commitments about God, World, and the Human Person. Such treatment is necessary, as the corruption of the philosopher’s belief-forming practices has drawn him away from the factuality

34 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 55/Das Büchlein, 50.35 Glatzer replaced Rosenzweig’s “cheese” for “butter,” a curious translation decision for 1950’s

America. 36 Hilary Putnam expands and updates Rosenzweig’s discussion to great comic effect in his

introduction to the most recent edition of Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (Hilary Putnam, “Introduction,” in Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 5).

37 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 52–3/Das Büchlein, 48. Rosenzweig shares more with Reid here than his reliance upon our common belief forming practices, he also shares the comic tone that Reid utilizes to undermine the philosophical positions of his opponents. There are countless examples of this in Reid’s works, for instance: “Therefore, as Plato required certain previous qualification of those who entered his school, I think it would be prudent for the doctors of this ideal philosophy to do the same, and to refuse admittance to every man who is so weak, as to imagine that he ought to have the same belief in solitude and in company, or that his principles ought to have any influence upon his practice: for this philosophy is like a hobby-horse, which a man in bad health may ride in his closet, without hurting his reputation; but if he should take him abroad with him to church, or to the exchange, or to the play-house, his heir would immediately call a jury, and seize his estate” (Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, 36). For an example of Reid’s humorous attacks on his opponents where his antagonist ends up in the sanitarium like Rosenzweig’s, see ibid., 170. On the philosophical contribution of humor in Reid’s thought, see Daniel M. Johnson and Adam C. Pelser, “Foundational Beliefs and Persuading with Humor: Reflections Inspired by Reid and Kierkegaard,” Faith and Philosophy 31 (2014) 267–85; Giovanni B. Grandi, “Reid on Ridicule and Common Sense,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 6 (2008) 71–90.

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of the world.38 In contrast to philosophy, Rosenzweig says, “Common sense puts its faith in the strength of reality.”39 One might surmise from this that Rosenzweig is adopting a realist position in which the objects of the world exist independently of our thinking about them, a position commonly associated with Thomas Reid. In typical fashion, Rosenzweig eludes such simple classification. He says: “Our enemy is not idealism as such; anti-idealism, irrationalism, realism, materialism, naturalism, and what not are equally harmful.”40

If Rosenzweig’s refusal to contextualize his understanding of common sense requires that we attend to his use of the term, then one of the most important functions of common sense is to secure the referential capacity of language. Where philosophy concerns itself with essences, common sense puts its trust in names. “Common sense,” according to Rosenzweig, “accepts the immutability of terms, be they words or personal names; it does not question the freedom of actions or things.”41 This referential practice is ultimately secured by God as Rosenzweig says: “We are certain that our names are the names of things and that the name we bestow will be confirmed by God.”42 But what about the objects of the world that we wish to pick out with our referential language? The answer to this question clarifies Rosenzweig’s reluctance to embrace realism but also problematizes his notion of common sense. Regarding the world he writes: “The world as such does not exist. To speak of the world is to speak of a world which is ours and God’s. It becomes the world as it becomes man’s and God’s world. Every word spoken within its confines furthers this end.”43 This hardly seems like common sense understood

38 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 55/Das Büchlein, 50. The following passage from Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours helps to distinguish Rosenzweig’s and Mendelssohn’s approaches to common sense: “For example, the more often we observe that an object, as far as what it looked like, how it felt, and how it tasted, resembled bread, and also on every occasion had the effect of nourishing our body, the more confident we become that we can expect this effect from any sensible object that resembles bread, even if we have not yet tested it with all our senses as in the previous cases” (Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, 14). Mendelssohn thus endorses the exact procedure that Rosenzweig finds ridiculous.

39 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 42/Das Büchlein, 32.40 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 57/Das Büchlein, 53. Rosenzweig

goes on to argue that these philosophical positions “neglect the fact of names. Consequently all these isms fail to conciliate thought and action, which is, after all, the one thing desired. They fail precisely because they are isms, whether ‘idealisms’ or ‘realisms’” (Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 57/Das Büchlein, 53).

41 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 53/Das Büchlein, 49. Nicholas Rescher says of common sense: “To use and construe words in their established meanings is of the very essence of common sense. If we cannot trust people in matters of language we cannot trust them at all” (Nicholas Rescher, Common-Sense: A New Look at an Old Philosophical Tradition [The Aquinas Lecture, 2005; Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005] 103).

42 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 74/Das Büchlein, 78.43 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 74/Das Büchlein, 77–78. Mendelssohn

makes a similar point in Morning Hours: “Without thinking beings, the world of bodies would be no world, would constitute no whole, but would consist of nothing more than isolated singularities” (Morning Hours, 99).


generically or in its Reidian form with its concomitant realism. In fact, the idea that the world is in a state of becoming guided by divine and human action is a central element in the philosophical system of the Star. There, Rosenzweig describes the status of the world in the following terms:

We formulated the world as Becoming, in contrast to the God who became before all beginning, and to the self which became in the past. Thus we clas-sified the world in its ‘becoming out of nought’ with the end of the world, and God in it with the dawning morning of the world, and the Self with the bright noon of the world. For the world, therefore, the world-morning of creation need not mean its becoming created.44

Rosenzweig identifies the world with becoming as a result of his theological view that redemption is the human act of drawing God’s presence into the world.45 The idea that the world is dependent upon and guided by God’s relationship with humanity is in radical opposition to the realism about the world that typically accompanies philosophical accounts of common sense.46 One must then conclude that in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy Rosenzweig’s common sense resembles his own philosophical system more than it does earlier discussions of the topic.

44 Rosenzweig, Stern, 132/Star, 119.45 On the status of the world as existence in need of being see Rosenzweig, Stern, 134/Star, 120.

Rosenzweig describes this process in the following terms: “We seek an infinite life, we find a finite one. The finite life that we find is thus simply the not-yet-infinite. The world must become wholly alive. It must become alive as a whole instead of becoming individual foci of life like so many raisins in a cake. Experience must be alive at all its points” (Rosenzweig, Stern, 249/Star, 223). Martin Kavka addresses these issues and states that “without an incomplete creation, the empirical motor of Rosenzweig’s thinking loses all of its power” (Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004] 143 [italics in original]).

46 To complicate matters, in “The New Thinking” Rosenzweig affirms the direct perception that is the hallmark of Reid’s common sense philosophy. Rosenzweig writes: “It is nothing but a prejudice of the last three hundred years that, in all knowing the ‘I’ must be present; thus that I could not see a tree unless ‘I’ saw it. In truth, my I is only present if it—is present; for instance, if I have to emphasize that I see the tree because someone else does not see it, then, certainly, the tree is in connection with me in my knowing. But in all other cases I know only of the tree and nothing else; and the usual philosophical assertion of the I’s omnipresence in all knowing distorts the content of this knowledge” (Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 120–1/GS 3, 147). Compare this to Reid: “When I look at the apple-tree which stands before my window, I perceive, at the first glance, its distance and magnitude, the roughness of its trunk, the disposition of its branches, the figure of its leaves and fruit. I seem to perceive all these things immediately. The visible appearance which presented them all to the mind, has entirely escaped me; I cannot, without great difficulty, and painful abstraction, attend to it, even when it stands before me” (Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, 167). For further discussion of Reid and his tree, see ibid., 168, 172, and 215. Mendelssohn also endorses direct perception of trees: “Here is a tree! We know this by means of our senses, and so it is a sensibly cognized truth: a tree actually exists here” (Mendelssohn, Morning Hours, 121).

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That Rosenzweig’s notion of common sense in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy bears the marks of his philosophical system is also apparent in his discussion of theological language. He writes: “No sooner has the thought ‘God is Something’ occurred to common sense than the thought is left behind. Common sense expresses this thought and, as it does so, learns that God cannot be spoken of unless, at the very same moment, a bridge is constructed to man and the world.”47 The reader of the Star will quickly perceive how this statement hints at the relationships between the three elements—God, World, and the Human Person—and the activation of these redemptive relationships in the liturgical communities of Judaism and Christianity—but, surely, there is nothing in this that is rightfully identified as common sense. Why was Rosenzweig so adamant in his lectures that Judaism was a form of common sense, and what made him extend that view in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy to depict his own highly complex philosophical system on such terms? At first blush, these are counterintuitive claims for which Rosenzweig offers less than persuasive arguments.

In his 1925 essay, “The New Thinking,” Rosenzweig again expands the scope of common sense. More than a synonym for Jewish thinking as in his course or a cognomen for his own philosophy as in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, here he describes common sense as the fundamental philosophical orientation of his entire intellectual community.48 He says that in the Star he sought “to bring about the total renewal of thinking,” but he goes on to say, “I would not say this if I had to say it only of my book and not of the thinking, which I do not imagine myself to have invented or even to be its sole teacher in the present. Rather, common sense has always thought in this way, and among contemporary thinkers there are more who think in this manner than Überweg-Heinze can dream of.”49 Some of Rosenzweig’s discussion of common sense in “The New Thinking” reiterates points I have already touched upon, but one comment that significantly extends his account is the following: “In effect the new philosophy does nothing else but make the ‘method’ of common sense into the method of scientific thinking.”50 Similar to the way in which common sense is a curative to philosophy’s misguided search for essences, common sense can also remedy science’s overemphasis on objective and

47 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 90/Das Büchlein, 100. 48 There is some precedence in Rosenzweig’s thought for his imprinting his systematic philosophy

onto generic terms. Consider how in the following comment about revelation Rosenzweig claims that revelation, properly understood, just is his philosophical system: “In the authentic idea of revelation, the three ‘actual’ elements of the All—God world man—emerge from themselves, belong to one another, and meet one another, and this idea is in the final analysis effective in opposing the assertion of the caprice of the Creator” (Stern, 127/Star, 115).

49 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 110/GS 3, 140. Rosezweig is here referring to the important history of philosophy written by Friedrich Überweg and updated by Max Heinze. The work testifies to Rosenzweig’s claim that common sense had fallen out of favor. See Friedrich Ueberweg, History of Philosophy from Thales to the Present Time (trans. George S. Morris; 2 vols.; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1874) 2:131.

50 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 123/GS 3, 149.


necessary truths. The corrective that common sense brings to scientific thinking is a heightened awareness of the complex relationship between thinking, experience, and time; that is, common sense affirms the hermeneutic view that knowledge is conditioned by historicity. Despite the dichotomy between common sense and philosophy that propels Rosenzweig’s thought, common sense, with its universal claims about experience and knowledge, remains a deeply philosophical position for Rosenzweig. How then are we to understand a notion of common sense that goes from being identified with Jewish thinking to being the banner for Rosenzweig’s own philosophical system to being a broad-based philosophical movement that seeks to reorient all critical thought?

Rosenzweig’s Common Sense Interpreted: Nathan Rotenstreich and Richard CohenBefore presenting my own account of how common sense fits into Rosenzweig’s philosophy, I would like to take note of two earlier efforts to address this subject. The first is Nathan Rotenstreich’s 1967 essay, “Common Sense and Theological Experience on the Basis of Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy,” which, to my mind, remains the most insightful discussion of Rosenzweig’s views on common sense.51 My approach to the topic shares much in common with Rotenstreich’s analysis, not the least of which is the effort to link Rosenzweig’s account of common sense with his references to “absolute factuality” and “positivity” in the Star.52 According to Rotenstreich, Rosenzweig sought to construct a philosophical system that was open to “faith,” but a “basic anti-rationalistic trait” in his thought prevented him from making reason the foundation of his system. While Rosenzweig might have looked to revelation to secure his system, his non-cognitive account of revelation prevented him from doing so.53 Rotenstreich suggests that common sense was a promising alternative to reason and revelation for Rosenzweig as it provides knowledge that is beyond both demonstration and criticism and at the same time renders access to its object as properly basic. Rosenzweig supplemented the traditional features of common sense philosophy with the view that the act of knowing is always conditioned by time. Rotenstreich argues that it is common sense understood on these terms that underlies Rosenzweig’s account of the elements—God, World, and the Human Person. Rosenzweig then introduces the concept of theological experience to “complete the basic structure of common

51 Nathan Rotenstreich, “Common Sense and Theological Experience on the Basis of Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 5 (1967) 353–60.

52 Ibid., 355. See also Nathan Rotenstreich, Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times: From Mendelssohn to Rosenzweig (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968) 175.

53 Rotenstreich, “Common Sense and Theological Experience,” 354.

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sense” by identifying the relationships of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption that unite the elements.54 Common sense and theological experience become so inextricable in Rosenzweig’s thought that Rotenstreich claims that they often appear to be “essentially synonymous.”55

While common sense as a term is almost entirely absent from the Star, the critique of philosophy that motivates Rosenzweig’s appeal to common sense is in full force from the first page of the work. Rosenzweig opens the Star with the criticism that philosophy seeks comprehensive knowledge of everything—“the All”—as a means of concealing its inability to come to terms with death. Later in the introduction, when Rosenzweig sets forth his plan to radically individuate God, World, and the Human Person, he says: “He who denies the totality of being, as we do, thus denies the unity of reasoning. He throws down the gauntlet to the whole honorable company of philosophers from Ionia to Jena.”56 In trying to make sense of Rosenzweig’s simultaneous criticism of and reliance upon the philosophical tradition, Rotenstreich leaves room for continued reflection on the role of common sense in Rosenzweig’s thought.57 In Rotenstreich’s view, in constructing his philosophical system, Rosenzweig makes significant concessions that undermine his core philosophical commitments, particularly as they bear on common sense. Rotenstreich writes:

54 “In short, we may say that if the purpose of common sense is to serve as a basis for a philosophical system, without the mediation of reason on the one hand or revelation on the other, then the understanding of the theological experience is to indicate the transition from the basis to the real contents of the system because this system rests on the idea of events or happenings” (Rotenstreich, “Common Sense and Theological Experience,” 357).

55 Ibid., 356. Rotenstreich gives the following account of why Rosenzweig sought to extend common sense by joining it to theological experience: “In this matter Rosenzweig wished to follow the Kantian or neo-Kantian line, that is, to rely not only on common sense that is safe from all criticism, but also on what may be called the autonomous province of a particular experience which qua experience is beyond criticism. Kantian critical philosophy is not based on experience; its purpose is rather to explain it. Along Kantian lines Rosenzweig established the nature of theological experience parallel to psychological and biological experience. He thus attempts to liberate his true subject matter from the coils of rational theology and to present a philosophical system capable of explaining theological experience and its basic assumptions by means of definite categories, such as creation, revelation and redemption.” It is important to note that Rotenstreich acknowledges the difficulties of interpreting Rosenzweig’s thought. The above quotation concludes with the duly humble admission, “This is one way of understanding Rosenzweig’s concept of theological experience” (ibid., 356).

56 Rosenzweig, Stern, 13/Star, 12.57 Rotenstreich, “Common Sense and Theological Experience,” 353. Rotenstreich begins to

address these issues by asking why it is that Rosenzweig sets God, World, and the Human Person as the content of common sense: “The first and most obvious answer to this question is that Rosenzweig, for systematic reasons altogether independent of his own methodological basis, was interested in establishing a secure foundation for these three contents and in using them to construct the framework as well as the inner content of his system. By means of formal assumptions as may be found in Kant, or material ones as may be found in Hegel, he attempted to give his system a methodological ad hoc basis” (ibid., 359).


Hence, what appears here as ‘common sense’ is the result of Rosenzweig’s systematic attempt to find a basis that was different from the traditional basis; the difference, however, turns out to be illusory. Rosenzweig’s conception is nothing more than the crystallization of the philosophical tradition, cast in a mold which he believed constituted a devastating criticism of this very tradition. This is one of the interesting aspects of Rosenzweig’s thought: he incorporated into his system many of the traditional elements to which he was opposed, and he was not prepared, for systematic reasons, to acknowledge this aspect of his thinking.58

Rotenstreich rejects Rosenzweig’s claims to having disavowed speculative philosophy. He says that in the Star “we find a highly speculative system erected for the purpose of impugning speculation itself.”59 He concludes his essay by saying that what Rosenzweig “put forward as common sense absorbed the traditional content of what has been understood as reason. In the end the name does not matter; reason is victorious.”60

More recently, Richard Cohen has argued that Rosenzweig’s use of common sense has its source in the thought of Kant and Mendelssohn.61 Similar to my own reading of Rosenzweig’s oeuvre, Cohen argues that it is only after the completion of the Star that Rosenzweig comes to present it as a work of common sense. Cohen reads the Star as a synthesis of Kantian and Schellingian philosophy. Part One is informed by Kant’s philosophy as evidenced by the extreme cognitive limits that Rosenzweig places on knowledge of God, the World, and the Human Person. Parts Two and Three of the Star are Rosenzweig’s attempt to construct a “narrative philosophy” à la Schelling. According to Cohen, “like the romantic idealists who do not refute Kant but redefine reason, Rosenzweig, following Schelling, does not refute Kant but cuts the Gordian knot of the equation of reason and being in order to begin his thought elsewhere, beyond reason’s totalizing if frustrated syntheses.”62 In Cohen’s view, the Schellingian trajectory of the Star robs the work of its philosophical character.63 Cohen is unsparing in his negative assessment of the

58 Ibid., 359.59 Ibid., 360.60 Ibid.61 Richard A. Cohen, “Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption and Kant,” The Philosophical Forum

41 (2010) 73–98. Bruce Rosenstock has also reflected on the relationship between Mendelssohn’s and Rosenzweig’s use of common sense. Rosenstock claims that Mendelssohn appeals to common sense as a response to skepticism. Common sense then has an antirational element for Rosenstock (Rosenstock, Philosophy and the Jewish Question, 30–1). This comes to bear on Rosenzweig when Rosenstock argues that Rosenzweig’s philosophical and religious views mirror Jacobi’s in the famous Pantheism Controversy (ibid., 132). See also Alin V. Bontas, Franz Rosenzweig’s Rational Subjective System: The Redemptive Turning Point in Philosophy and Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

62 Cohen, “Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption and Kant,” 80.63 Rosenzweig’s attempt to articulate God, the World, and the Human Person in their positivity

has the result that the book has its true beginning not in Part One but rather in Part Two “beyond philosophy” and “beyond reason” (ibid., 81).

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Star, calling it an “awkward and cumbersome ‘system of philosophy’ ” and stating that Rosenzweig’s narrative philosophy requires that he abandon any attempt to provide arguments that lend support to his system.64 According to Cohen, the Star “has nothing more to legitimize itself other than a subjective or social preference.”65

Cohen holds that it was Rosenzweig’s realization of the shortcomings of the Star that compelled him to recast the work as an expression of common sense. Abandoning the antirational commitments that shaped the Star, Rosenzweig adopts a common sense view formulated by Mendelssohn and endorsed by Kant.66 Cohen, however, denies Rosenzweig the opportunity to refashion his magnum opus:

What I am proposing, then, is that while serving as expositor/commentator to his own book in “The New Thinking” article, Rosenzweig is unfortunately misleading his readers when he declares that the Star’s ‘method of scientific thinking’ was based in healthy human understanding, or what we might also call ‘common sense.’ Unfortunately, and doubtlessly also to Rosenzweig’s profound disappointment, the Star is based in nothing more compelling, as I have indicated, than a merely subjective speculation, really an aesthetic taste, even if that taste binds itself to Judaism and Christianity. For this reason, I claim the Star as a whole is a fatally flawed book and philosophy.67

This is a grim assessment. Fortunately, I do not think we have to embrace Cohen’s condemnation of the Star nor do we have to accept Rotenstreich’s opposition between common sense and speculative reason. A more positive reading of the Star is possible and Rosenzweig’s curious appeal to common sense can help lay out that position.

64 Ibid., 86. “Rosenzweig has a ‘system,’ for which he claims the ‘method’ of ‘narration.’ Unfortunately narration is not phenomenology, not science, and lacks a legitimizing reason. That Rosenzweig lacks a phenomenology or something equivalent to a phenomenology, a legitimizing method, a science of some sort, means that the way he has packaged his thought, as it were, his alleged ‘system of philosophy’ with its double triads, distorts and ultimately undermines the best insights of his ‘new thinking’ ” (ibid., 90).

65 Ibid., 89.66 The suggestion that Rosenzweig is indebted to Kant for his turn to common sense is at odds

with Rosenzweig’s single reference to common sense in the Star. Rosenzweig writes: “Of man—do we really know nothing even of him? The knowledge by the self of itself, self-consciousness, has the reputation of being the most assured knowledge of all. And normal common sense bristles almost more vigorously yet than scientific consciousness if the foundation of knowledge, to him truly and literally ‘self’-evident, is to be pulled out from under him. And yet this occurred, albeit at a late date. It remains one of the most amazing achievements of Kant to have turned this most self-evident quantity, the I, into the most questionable object, into the problem par excellence” (Stern, 67/Star, 62). For a discussion of the passage, see Jörg Disse, “Die Philosophie Immanuel Kants im Stern der Erlösung: Ein Kommentar,” in Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der Erlösung” (ed. Martin Brasser; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004) 245–71, at 258–59.

67 Cohen, “Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption and Kant,” 92.


Rosenzweig’s Common Sense and His Schellingian ProgramGiven Rosenzweig’s refusal to situate his notion of common sense within the philosophical tradition, I have suggested that we have more to learn from how he uses the term than from our own efforts to give the term a pedigree that Rosenzweig himself eschewed.68 In my view, Rosenzweig’s use of common sense is best understood as an effort to explain and advance his Schellingian program.69 This requires some explanation as it appears to defy well-regarded interpretations of German Idealism. Manfred Kuehn, for instance, has written:

The so-called idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and their followers, re-jected Kant’s understanding of philosophy as a clarification and justification of common sense and advocated the view that philosophy can only exist as the ‘inversion’ (Verkehrung) of it. For these idealists, philosophy is no longer justification and piecemeal revision of common sense, but a radical displacement of it.70

68 Moshe Schwarcz suggests that the theologian Karl Heim was an influence on Rosenzweig’s views on common sense (Moshe Schwarcz, Language, Myth, Art [Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1966] 37, 42). While Schwarcz may well be correct, Rosenzweig’s discussion of Heim in his letters offers ambiguous support for Schwarcz’s conjecture. Rosenzweig praises Heim’s work in multiple letters, but at the same time he sees serious philosophical shortcomings in Heim’s thought. The most positive assertion is Rosenzweig’s claim in a letter to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy that from his reading of Heim “he brings to bear a deeper concept of truth” (15 December 1917, GS 1:1, 489). In a much later letter to Martin Buber, Rosenzweig says that “Heim is surely good, however philosophically burdened [belastet]” (31 July 1925, GS 1:2, 1056). Rosenzweig never mentions the term “common sense” in his discussions of Heim. For his part, Heim appears to only refer to common sense once in his work Glaubensgewißheit (Karl Heim, Glaubensgewißheit: eine Untersuchung über die Lebensfrage der Religion [Leipzig: J. C. Hinrischs’sche Buchhandlung, 1920] 62).

69 For an introduction to Schelling’s influence on Rosenzweig see Paul Franks’ and Michael Morgan’s introduction in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, 31–43. See also Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the German Philosophical Tradition,” in The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr; Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1988) 1-19; idem., “Franz Rosenzweig’s Concept of Philosophical Faith,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34 (1989) 357-69; Else-Rahel Freund, Franz Rosenzweig’s Philosophy of Existence: An Analysis of “The Star of Redemption” (ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr; trans. Stephen Weinstein and Robert Israel; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979); Moshe Schwarcz, From Myth to Revelation (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1978); Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig (trans. Catherine Tihanyi; Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992); Bernhard Casper, Religion der Erfahrung: Einführungen in das Denken Franz Rosenzweigs (Studies in Judaism and Christianity; Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004); Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Rosenzweig im Gespräch mit Ehrenberg, Cohen und Buber (Freiburg: Alber, 2006); Myriam Bienenstock, “Auf Schellings Spuren im ʻStern der Erlösung,ʼ ” in Rosenzweig als Leser (ed. Brasser), 273–90; Martin Fricke, Franz Rosenzweigs Philosophie der Offenbarung: Eine Interpretation des Sterns der Erlösung (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003); Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggermann, “Eine Wiedergeburt des Judentums aus dem Geist des Christentums: Schellings und Rosenzweigs spekulative Philologie der Unverfügbarkeit,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan et al.; 2 vols.; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013) 2:1307–34.

70 Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 12. See also ibid., 234. Mirroring Reid’s propensity for philosophical ridicule, Hegel says of common sense in the Phenomenology: “In place of the long

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Rotenstreich was highly attuned to Schelling’s influence on Rosenzweig. It is likely that this well-known opposition between absolute idealism and common sense led Rotenstreich to construe Rosenzweig’s appeal to common sense as an antirationalistic pose concealing his debt to speculative philosophy.

While Rosenzweig, to my knowledge, never indicates the source of his notion of common sense, in a journal entry from 30 June 1922, he makes surprisingly frank comments about the place of common sense within his system and what he believes its contribution to be. Amidst a discussion of Hegel’s philosophy and how idealism compels Hegel to take the human person as his philosophical starting point, Rosenzweig characterizes his own starting point as an extension of kabbalistic theology in which God, World, and the Human Person are all transcendent in precisely the same manner.71 He then draws a connection between kabbalistic theology and Schelling’s theory of the potencies and asserts that “only through the pure ‘theory of potencies’ is it possible to justify the contradictory thoughts of real time (occurring [time] not self-unfolding [time]).” 72 He immediately follows this with the statement, “My harmonization with common sense relates to two points,” which he identifies as the “reality of space” and the “reality of time.” He continues, “The advantage for me with common sense is just that I bring together these mutually-opposing and contradictory points.” Through his appropriation of Schelling’s theory of the potencies, Rosenzweig affirms two seemingly contradictory poles within God, God’s transcendence and God’s relationality. By embracing these

process of culture towards genuine philosophy, a movement as rich as it is profound, through which Spirit achieves knowledge, we are offered as quite equivalent either direct revelations from heaven, or the sound common sense that has never labored over, or informed itself regarding, other knowledge or genuine philosophy; and we are assured that these are quite as good substitutes as some claim chicory is for coffee. It is not a pleasant experience to see ignorance, and a crudity without form or taste, which cannot focus its thought on a single abstract proposition, still less on a connected chain of them” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit [trans. A.V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977] 42). For Hegel’s rejection of common sense see Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 160. For a nuanced discussion of Hegel’s views on common sense in his encounter with Jacobi, see Christoph Halbig, “The Philosopher as Polyphemus? Philosophy and Common Sense in Jacobi and Hegel,” International Yearbook of German Idealism 3 (2005) 261–82. John Laughland argues that Schelling turns to Aristotle to mount his critique of Hegel and that this imparted a realist sensibility to Schelling’s later thought that is compatible with the concerns of common sense philosophy (John Laughland, Schelling versus Hegel: From German Idealism to Christian Metaphysics [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007] 134–36).

71 30 June 1922, Rosenzweig, GS 1:2, 800. The diary entry is terse and requires some exegetical guesswork. For an alternative reading of the passage that emphasizes the kabbalistic elements rather than the topics of Schelling and common sense, see Rivka Horwitz, “From Hegelianism to a Revolutionary Understanding of Judaism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Attitude Toward Kabbala and Myth,” Modern Judaism 26 (2006) 31–54.

72 This may well be the only reference to Schelling’s “theory of the potencies” in Rosenzweig’s collected works. For Schelling’s view that a proper conception of time is only possible through the positive philosophy see Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 274. Schelling conceives time as a sequence that begins with creation but which allows connections between past, present, and future (ibid., 275). Similarly for Rosenzweig, true time is the proleptic experience of redemption in the present. See for instance Rosenzweig, Stern, 250/Star, 224.


two divine poles, Rosenzweig is also able to preserve two notions of time: time as eternal and time as occurring or processual. It is on this basis that Rosenzweig establishes a link between Schelling’s theory of the potencies and common sense in that common sense holds the reality of time and space as indubitable. Rosenzweig’s conception of common sense does not then have its roots in Schelling’s philosophy; rather, Rosenzweig uses the concept of common sense to explicate and amplify his application of Schelling’s thought.

There are several indications that Rosenzweig’s concept of common sense is closely connected to the Schellingian elements within his philosophy. While Rosenzweig may have disavowed realism, as we have just seen, his account of common sense strongly affirms the reality of God, World, and the Human Person. Schelling, in his lectures on Philosophy of Revelation, shows a similar concern.73 He depicts Kant as an Idealist who does not believe that things exist independently of our thinking about them.74 In contrast to this, Schelling says “The positive philosophy is a priori empiricism. The experience [Erfahrung] that it moves toward is total experience. The positive philosophy is nothing more than the constantly progressing, constantly growing proof; just as reality is never concluded, neither is the proof.”75 Like Rosenzweig’s “absolute empiricism” in “The New Thinking,” Schelling also uses a neologistic phrase (“a priori empiricism”) to espouse a commitment to reality that has the distinctive features of arising out of a metaphysical system and possessing content similar to common sense.76 In addition to the language of empiricism, Rosenzweig and Schelling also share the

73 The extent to which Rosenzweig was familiar with Schelling’s later works remains an open question. For Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik’s view that The Star of Redemption “without reference to Schelling’s late philosophy would be inconceivable,” see Schmied-Kowarzik, Rosenzweig im Gespräch, 50. See also, idem., “Hans Ehrenbergs Einfluß auf die Entstehung des Stern der Erlösung,” in Rosenzweig als Leser (ed. Brasser), 71–117, at 93–99. For a skeptical view see Myriam Bienenstock, “Auf Schellings Spuren im Stern,” 275 n. 8.

74 Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 119.75 Ibid., 147.76 Rosenzweig, GS3, 161. Rotenstreich’s comments on Rosenzweig’s “absolute empiricism”

also suggest a Schellingian interpretation: “In short, from the standpoint of system, Rosenzweig attempted to proceed in two parallel paths: What he called ‘absolute empricism’ is nothing more than an interpretation of the facts of consciousness and experience in order to find in them the seeds of religious faith. Rosenzweig’s purpose, as against religious or anti-religious constructionism, was to keep faith within definite limits by insisting on the given fact of religious experience as an ultimate fact from which there is no recourse. He considers the basis of faith as valid as any other creative sphere of human activity. The relationship of faith helps us understand that experience as bridging the gaps between things, and to the nature of religious experience as a living encounter; experience enables him to impart to the religious relationship an assurance derived from the given, hard fact that cannot be ignored” (Rotenstreich, Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times, 180). See also the helpful footnote on “absolute empiricism” by Paul Franks and Michael Morgan in their translation of Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking”: “Similarly, by ‘absolute empiricism,’ Rosenzweig means a philosophy that bases knowledge on experience but does not limit the objects of experience to the relative or conditioned objects of the senses, leaving room for the possibility of experience of the absolute, unconditioned, supersensible, or divine” (Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 138 n.48).

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language of factuality. As I noted earlier, Rosenzweig states at the beginning of the Star that he seeks God, the World, and the Human Person in their “absolute factuality,” which he equates with the idea of “positivity.” In Schelling’s lectures on Philosophy of Revelation, factuality is a crucial element in his description of Christianity. He says that “Christianity is first and most immediately a fact [Tatsache].” He goes on to say “Christianity should not be demonstrated; rather it is only possible as a fact, as an occurrence [Erscheinung].”77 Going beyond demonstration to the lived experience of the fact is what Rosenzweig had in mind in his insistence on verification as when he says in “The New Thinking:” “Thus truth ceases to be what ‘is’ true and becomes that which has to be verified as true.”78 Nahum Glatzer, in his introduction to Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, cites a letter that Rosenzweig wrote to his mother shortly after writing the work that connects common sense, here represented by the five senses, with factuality: “It is further proof that it does not depend on whether one believes in God, rather only whether one opens his five senses and sees the facts [die Tatsachen]—at the risk therein, that God will appear among those facts.”79 Rosenzweig underscores the experiential elements of Schelling’s thought by emphasizing that factuality—even the factuality of God—is accessible through our basic ways of forming beliefs that lie at the heart of common sense.

Two themes in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy provide additional indications that Rosenzweig had Schelling in mind as he was writing the work. When Rosenzweig’s philosopher who suffers from “Apoplexia Philosophica” arrives at the sanitarium, the treatment he receives is a regimen of viewing three mountain peaks as they poke through the clouds from different angles. The goal of the treatment is for the philosopher to develop the ability to view the three peaks simultaneously as distinct but related facts. The treatment mirrors the philosophical system of the Star, which seeks to defend the irreducibility of the three elements—God, World, and the Human Person—and to chart the relations between them. The motif of a mountain poking through the clouds was not original to Understanding the Sick and the Healthy; Rosenzweig used this imagery in his

77 Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 259. 78 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 135/GS 3, 158 [italics in original]. Rosenzweig continues:

“The concept of the verification of truth becomes the basic concept of this new epistemology, which takes the place of the old epistemology’s noncontradicoriness-theory and object-theory, and introduces, instead of the old static concept of objectivity, a dynamic concept” (“The New Thinking,” 135/GS 3, 158–59). On the connection between Rosenzweig’s notion of verification and Schelling, see Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Franz Rosenzweig: Existentielles Denken und gelebte Bewährung (Munich: Karl Alber, 1991) 61, 86-90, 113–20. For a critique of Rosenzweig’s views on verification, see Martin Kavka, “Verification (Bewährung) in Franz Rosenzweig,” in German-Jewish Thought Between Religion and Politics: Festschrift in Honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (ed. Christian Wiese and Martina Urban; Studia Judaica Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012) 167–83.

79 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 25/Das Büchlein, 16. 15 August 1921, GS 1:2, 717.


first major work, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.”80 In the essay, Rosenzweig analyzes a short manuscript that appeared to be from Hegel’s hand but which Rosenzweig attributed to Schelling, declaring it the first attempt to outline the idea of system among German idealists. As Benjamin Pollock discusses in detail, one of Rosenzweig’s chief concerns is to demonstrate that the manuscript contained the seeds of Schelling’s later thought. Rosenzweig says, “If he [Schelling] constructed the philosophy of art as its conclusion, he still did not forget to permit there to appear beyond it, like a distant mountain, the outlook on the mythology of the future.”81 A second point of connection between Rosenzweig’s discussion of common sense and Schelling’s thought is the topic of wonder, which Schelling also addresses in his lectures on revelation. Schelling, however, defends the place of wonder within philosophy and argues that a sense of astonishment can lead the philosopher beyond the negative philosophy, which is restricted to matters of logical necessity.82 While the last two considerations are only suggestive, the connection between Rosenzweig’s common sense and Schelling’s philosophy becomes more compelling on the topic of theology and our capacity to speak about God.

I have, to this point, intentionally left the term “common sense” unanalyzed, and instead I have sought to highlight Rosenzweig’s use of the term. One feature of common sense I would now like to draw attention to is that it is generally taken to be a very limited source of information. Nicholas Rescher, in his Aquinas lecture on common sense, says that “while common sense is solidly secure and powerfully resistant to denial or dismissal, it is, at the same time distinctly unexciting: trite, obvious, and firmly at the disposal of even an unsophisticated intellect.”83 If that is the case, then what can common sense contribute to our knowledge of God? Rosenzweig addresses this point in a passage quoted above from Understanding the Sick and the Healthy where he claims that common sense knows that God is “Something” and that God’s “Something” is neither the essence of God nor is it identical to the “Something” of the World or the Human Person.84 If this were the full theological content of common sense, it would hardly seem worth the considerable attention that Rosenzweig devotes to it. I would like to suggest that

80 Rosenzweig, GS 3, 3–44.81 Ibid., 34. I am here using Pollock’s translation of the passage (Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig

and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, 47).82 Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 254.83 Rescher, Common-Sense, 30. Hegel makes a similar point in the Phenomenology: “when

philosophizing by the light of nature flows along the more even course of sound common sense, it offers at its very best only a rhetoric of trivial truths” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 42).

84 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 90/Das Büchlein, 100. Rosenzweig’s “common sense” view is closely connected to his establishing the elements—God, World, Human Person—as irrational objects. Stern, 21/Star, 19.

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the most persistent theologoumenon in Rosenzweig’s discussion of common sense is the notion that God is both near and far. While this may seem to be an equally meager insight, it, in fact, leads back to God’s absolute factuality and positivity and our ability to make truth claims about God.

In his 1929 essay, “Der Ewige,” Rosenzweig argues that the “central revelation” of the Hebrew Bible and the “essence of Judaism” is the unifying of tensions within God such as “far” and “near” or “universal” and “particular.”85 This theological view is common to all of Rosenzweig’s writings after the Star and represents his adaptation of Schelling’s theory of the potencies to the Jewish context of his own philosophical system.86 Schelling, in the Ages of the World, says, “The representation of a duality, lying beyond the trinity of persons, in a unity of the divine essence, the doctrine of an eternal presence and of an eternal (or eternally becoming) past, is interwoven into the innermost fibers of the language of the Old Testament.”87 For Rosenzweig, this duality in God represents the far God as the divine being at rest in its perfection and aseity and the near God as the one who reaches out beyond God’s self in the process of Creation, Revelation and Redemption. Rosenzweig concludes his course “Introduction to Jewish Thinking”—the course in which he identifies Jewish thinking with common sense—with an extended discussion of God as both far and near. Commenting on Ps 73:28, which says “But as for me, the nearness of God is my good (Ps 73:28 JPS),” Rosenzweig states that “The near can only become near because it is far.”88 Jewish thinking (i.e., common sense) is

85 Rosenzweig, GS 3, 810. In his translation and commentary on the poems of Judah Halevi, Rosenzweig says this: “But it is the last thought that human thinking can grasp, and the first that Jewish thinking grasps: that the faraway God is none other than the near God, the unknown God none other than the revealed one, the Creator none other than the Redeemer” (Barbara Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, and Translators [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995] 204/GS 4:1, 69).

86 See Cass Fisher, “Divine Perfections at the Center of the Star: Reassessing Rosenzweig’s Theological Language,” Modern Judaism 31 (2011) 188–212; idem., “Speaking Metaphysically of a Metaphysical God: Rosenzweig, Schelling, and the Metaphysical Divide,” in German-Jewish Thought Between Religion and Politics (ed. Christian Wiese and Martina Urban) 151–66; idem., Contemplative Nation: A Philosophical Account of Jewish Theological Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) 192–95.

87 Schelling, The Ages of the World (fragment) from the Handwritten remains Third Version (c. 1815) (trans. Jason M. Wirth; Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2000) 53. In his lectures on Philosophy of Revelation, Schelling states that “The Old Testament revelation postulates a perpetual tension. The entire religious system substantiates the acknowledgment of the reality of contrary principles” (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 279). And slightly further on he adds “The successive positions of the potencies is the certain key for the ideas of the Old Testament” (ibid., 281).

88 The biblical translations in this paragraph are from the 1917 JPS edition. Rosenzweig, GS 3:617.


the balancing of these two fundamental polarities within God.89 Rosenzweig leaves his class with two additional biblical verses from Jeremiah. The first begins,“From afar the Lord appeared unto me (Jer 31:3),” and the second verse states, “Am I a God near at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? (Jer 23:23).” Turning once again to “The New Thinking,” following Rosenzweig’s discussion of Schelling’s notion of “narration” and preceding his comments on common sense and scientific method, Rosenzweig says “If, say, the old [thinking] addressed the problem whether God is transcendent or immanent, then the new [thinking] attempts to show how and when He turns from the distant into the near God, and again from the near into the distant.”90 Like the Jewish thinking of his course, the common sense of the new thinking explores the oscillations of God’s proximity and distance.

At the beginning of the article, I mentioned a letter in which Rosenzweig felt compelled to give his closest interlocutor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a guided tour of the Star. Rosenzweig wrote this letter as he was teaching his “Introduction to Jewish Thinking,” and in the letter he uses ideas as an interpretive map for the Star that in a few months’ time will become the basis for Understanding the Sick and the Healthy.91 Rosenzweig identifies Part One of the Star with illness, Part Two with health, and Part Three with the patient’s treatment. Leaving aside the unusual fact that health here precedes the treatment, what I find instructive is the indication that Rosenzweig’s use of common sense is not a ploy to refashion the Star motivated by his disenchantment with the work; rather, common sense genuinely encapsulates his philosophical system even if it was not originally expressed in those terms. The conclusion that I believe this pushes us toward is that Rosenzweig’s use of common sense is highly idiosyncratic. The question then becomes: How does it illuminate Rosenzweig’s use of the term “common sense” to understand it as an expression of his systematic philosophy? To start with, I think we can set aside Rosenzweig’s suggestions that common sense figures directly into the Star. We come to a better understanding of the Star and Rosenzweig’s subsequent efforts to explain his work if we see his intensive focus on common sense as a retrospective interpretive effort. A second benefit of seeing common sense as reflective of Rosenzweig’s philosophical system is that common sense and speculative philosophy are no longer in tension with one another as Rotenstreich had taken them to be. A skeptic might counter this suggestion by pointing to Rosenzweig’s identification of Part

89 In the Star, Rosenzweig speaks of these opposing elements within the divine and argues that Jewish religious life “smelts the blazing, flashing contradictions more and more into a unitary, still glow.” Rosenzweig, Stern, 448/Star, 403. In a course entitled “Science of God” that Rosenzweig taught in the winter of 1921 he attributes to Jewish law the power to unify God: “The Law is the road on which the world, hurled out in the Creation, finds its way back and God can be united again with Himself” (Franz Rosenzweig, God, Man, and the World: Lectures and Essays (ed. and trans. Barbara Galli; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998) 51/GS 3, 627). For Schelling’s views on the human task of unifying God see Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 200f.

90 Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 122/GS 3, 148–49.91 12 February 1921, Rosenzweig, Die “Gritli”–Briefe, 729–32.

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One with illness in the aforementioned letter to Eugen. How is the designation of Part One as “illness” not a condemnation of speculative philosophy? In the letter, Rosenzweig does say that Part One is “Unhegel” and “Unkant,” but he repeats twice that Part One is just as true as Part Two. In pitting common sense against philosophy, Rosenzweig is only criticizing that cipher of Western philosophy that he excoriates at the beginning of the Star.92 Here, Rosenzweig’s affirmation of the truth of Part One is much like Schelling’s persistent claims that the negative and positive philosophies are interdependent. What is gained from Part One is, he says, the realization that “reality is threefold, not single.” God, World, and the Human Person are the “irreducible elements” presupposed by common sense and confirmed by philosophy. Rosenzweig goes on to say that “whoever grasps this is actually already healthy.”

As for God, Rosenzweig’s discussions of common sense give definition to God’s absolute factuality and positivity through the claim that God is both far and near.93 This motif of God’s proximity and distance affirms the power of theological language while also acknowledging its limits. God’s distance represents the power of reason to reflect on divine perfection, and God’s proximity represents the possibility of experiential knowledge of God. This mirrors Schelling’s view that the negative attributes are known a priori but that the positive attributes can only be known through experience.94 Rosenzweig is equally concerned about the limits of theological language, and he also utilizes the symbols of far and near to express the fact that God—like the World and the Human Person—exceeds our cognitive grasp and that God is too close to us to be an object of cognition.95 Our theological language then reflects the dichotomy that lies at the heart of the divine being itself. In a telling remark in his commentary on the poems of Judah Halevi Rosenzweig writes: “But just as we have to heed the limits of our knowledge, so too, and not less, the limits of our not-knowing. Beyond all our knowledge, God lives. But before our not-knowing begins, your God presents Himself to you, to

92 On Rosenzweig’s critique of philosophy in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy see Michele Del Prete, “Über die Wahrheit des gesunden Menschenverstandes: Zu Rosenzweigs theologia naturalis,” in Faith, Truth, and Reason (ed. Yehoyada Amir, Yossi Turner, and Martin Brasser) 481–92.

93 Rosenzweig says in the Star: “The mystery of the elements cannot be brought out into the open except by and at the curvature of the orbit. Only this curvature leads out of the merely hypothetical of the elements into the categorical of visible reality. And if the elements were more than mere ‘hypotheses,’ it remains for their capacity for constructing a visible orbit to prove as much” (Stern, 91/Star, 83).

94 Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, 136 and 251. Rotenstreich makes a similar point: “The remote God may even be subject to demonstrative proof, but the indwelling God is the object of faith and concepts do not apply to Him. Revelation, then, may be regarded as the mediating latch or bolt of faith” (Rotenstreich, Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times, 193).

95 Rosenzweig, Stern, 424/Star, 381. It is important to balance this seemingly apophatic claim with Rosenzweig’s claim in “The New Thinking” that God, World, and Human are equally transcendent (“The New Thinking,” 118/GS 3, 145).


your call, to your assent, to your readiness, to your glance, to your life.”96 This brings me back to Rosenzweig’s promise to his students to be intelligible but also frustrating. He returns to this matter in the penultimate lecture of his course and says “What is annoying you? . . . That I speak just as naturally of God as of the World and the Human Person.”97 As I have endeavored to show, common sense allows Rosenzweig to speak of God but insists that he do so within clearly defined limits.

It is worth dwelling on why it matters that Rosenzweig uses the term common sense in the ways I am suggesting. Over the last several decades, there has been an explosion of interest in Rosenzweig’s philosophy. Scholars, as I mentioned earlier, continue to produce an array of competing interpretations. One of the most contested areas of research has been the effort to lay out Rosenzweig’s basic philosophical and theological commitments. Those who emphasize the limits that Rosenzweig places on philosophy and theology read him as a postliberal thinker advancing a non-propositional theology, or as a postmetaphysical theologian, or as an apophatic thinker. On these views, the power of reason and language to make truth claims about God is either very limited or nonexistent. Other lines of interpretation take a more positive stance on the possibility of theological reference on the basis of the systematic nature of Rosenzweig’s thought, through analysis of his theological language, or his emphasis on experience. In fashioning a notion of common sense that is true to his philosophical system, Rosenzweig sought to emphasize this tension between the power and limits of theological language. In trying to hold these two positions in tension, Rosenzweig unwittingly created a situation in which whatever side of the interpretive divide you fall on, you get something important correct about his thought. This is not to promote a relativistic approach to Rosenzweig that is indifferent to fundamental questions regarding philosophical and theological language. In faithfulness to Rosenzweig and in support of a position that I believe has considerable merit, our goal in interpreting his work should be to acknowledge both the power and limits of theological language.

ConclusionDespite the cognitive dissonance that erupts at Rosenzweig’s suggestion that the Star is a form of common sense, I do think he provided his readers with a helpful key to his thought in this unexpected reframing of his work. Our intuitive knowledge of God, World, and the Human Person parallels the results of the “constructive derivation” of the elements in Part One.98 In addition, common sense, as Rosenzweig uses the term, captures well the power and limit of theological language in the Star. In the end, Rosenzweig’s position is one in which metaphysics and common

96 Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi, 200/GS 4:1, 57–58.97 Rosenzweig, GS 3, 615.98 Fricke, Franz Rosenzweigs Philosophie der Offenbarung, 162.

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sense are interdependent. Although Mendelssohn held an outwardly similar view, Rosenzweig’s position is better understood as an advancement of Schelling’s thought than as a return to the issues and thinkers Mendelssohn was addressing.99

Two questions remain for further research. While I have sought to shed light on why Rosenzweig depicted Judaism and the Star as common sense, is it really the case as he claims in “The New Thinking” that the intellectual movement of which Rosenzweig was a part would accept this designation? It is a matter worth exploring as it may help us better understand the motivations behind Rosenzweig’s belated presentation of the Star as a form of common sense. Although a survey of the literature will have to be the work of a different study, I do see tentative evidence in favor of Rosenzweig’s claim in the editors’ forward to the journal Die Kreatur. The journal, founded in 1926 and edited by three of Rosenzweig’s closest interlocutors, Martin Buber, Joseph Wittig, and Viktor von Weizsäcker—a Jew, a Catholic, and a Protestant—was a venue for wide-ranging theological discussions across religious traditions. In their forward the editors write: “What unites us three editors is an affirmation of the bonds of the created world, the world as a created being.”100 While more work would need to be done to validate Rosenzweig’s claim, this comment resonates deeply with Rosenzweig’s notion of common sense and its commitment to reality.

Finally, and much too briefly, is the question about where Rosenzweig stands in relationship to contemporary developments in analytic philosophy of religion. Like Rosenzweig, Thomas Reid and his common sense philosophy have seen a profound resurgence over the last several decades. Philosophers of religion such as William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff have proposed externalist epistemologies that build on Reid’s philosophy.101 They argue that not only is it rational to rely on our common belief-forming practices—including religious belief-forming practices—but that we have no way of getting behind the sources of our beliefs in order to lend them independent support. Does Rosenzweig have a contribution to make to this discussion? As I have tried to show, Rosenzweig is

99 Bruce Rosenstock agues: “Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Wittgenstein share a faith in the common practices of a linguistic community to restore the health of a reason sickened with skepticism, frustrated in its quest for unattainable epistemological and metaphysical certitudes” (Rosenstock, Philosophy and the Jewish Question, 31). I don’t think this view properly captures the systematic nature of Rosenzweig’s thought. Gideon Freudenthal offers an alternative reading of Mendelssohn such that “it is sound reason that determines truth; metaphysics is called upon only to further buttress the judgments of common sense” (Freudenthal, No Religion without Idolatry, 13). Given the fact that much of what Rosenzweig identifies as common sense originates in his metaphysical system, I don’t think Freudenthal’s reading of Mendelssohn could be extended to Rosenzweig.

100 Rosenzweig, GS 1:2, 1091f.101 William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1991); Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); idem., Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Nicholas Wolterstorff, Practices of Belief: Selected Essays, Vol. 2 (ed. Terence Cuneo; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).


not really giving an account of common sense; rather, he is using common sense as a way of explicating and furthering his work in the Star. Despite the fact that Rosenzweig then leaves common sense underdeveloped in many important respects, there are still perhaps points of connection. In particular, Rosenzweig’s efforts to link both common sense and reason to the creation story of Gen 1 reveals a shared concern with the “reformed epistemology” inspired by Reid. Rosenzweig claims in the Star that the light that is the product of God’s first creative act is an affirmation of reason, regarding which he says: “It is a darkness in which all qualities show the one gray color of the-waste-and-the-void until God intones his ‘let there be light’ into it. Light is no more a thing than darkness. It is itself a quality. It is to cognition what the ‘good!’ is to volition, the utterly affirming valuation.”102 Going beyond Reid’s defense of our standard belief forming practices, Rosenzweig argues that our reason is a divinely bestowed faculty that lies at the origins of reality.103 Like his comments in Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, Rosenzweig is genuinely concerned with restoring our “normal functions,” and to this extent, I would suggest, he does share the goals of Reid and his contemporary defenders.104

102 Rosenzweig, Stern, 170/Star, 153.103 Elsewhere he says that God’s creation via the word is “the great justification of common

sense.” Rosenzweig, GS 1:2, 1041. See Rotenstreich, Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times, 176. 104 Rosenzweig’s brief but suggestive comments on perception in “The New Thinking” also

resonate with contemporary appropriations of Reid’s work by analytic philosophers. See n.46 above.

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