Franz Rosenzweig

A philosopher of religion, Franz Rosenzweig (b. 1886–d. 1929) is most prominently associated with the renaissance of Jewish religious thought that took place in Germany in the years just prior to and especially in the wake of the First World War. Both his life and his thought mark the passage from a studied assimilation to a reaffirmation of a distinctive Jewish cultural and religious identity, a process that entailed a reevaluation of the presuppositions of modern German philosophy. This intensive review of the sources of genuine knowledge yielded what Rosenzweig called a “New Thinking,” which restores to the center of the quest for truth the living God, manifest through revelation. Grounded in a belief in divine revelation as a historical event, whose underlying experience of God’s address is a continuous existential possibility, the New Thinking accordingly conceives of the speech act as the principal organon of truth. Whereas Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the present has been guided by reason as the preeminent means to gain access to timeless and universal truth, the New Thinking regards truth, both divine and human, to be revealed through an intersubjective dialogue that takes place in the matrix of concrete time and place in which individuals—specific individuals, each with unique biographies—live their lives. This radical revision of Western thought was accompanied by and refracted through Rosenzweig’s revisiting his ancestral religious tradition, which his family had largely abandoned. The resulting revalorization of Judaism as quintessentially embodied in its liturgical calendar, traditional ritual practice, and sacramental study of religious texts also led Rosenzweig to affirm the Christian Church as born of a covenant equally valid to that which God made with the People of Israel. Indeed, the two covenants complement one another in working to realize God’s Heilsplan, the unfolding of redemption through human history.