Jeffrey Hart on Prof. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

By Jeffrey Hart | Monday, August 11, 2008

On July 11-12 a symposium on the life and thought of Dartmouth Professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was held at Dartmouth. The symposium was well attended and featured important contributions that included presentations on “The Social Construction of Time,” as well as “Liturgical Thinking” by Prof. Donald Pease.

At the present time, thirty-five years after his death, serious interest in Rosenstock-Huessy seems to be reaching critical mass, though he has long been the focus of thought for such important presences as Paul Tillich, Harvey Cox, and W.H. Auden. This year an important contribution to the interpretation of his thought has appeared in Clinton C. Gardner’s Beyond Belief: Discovering Christianity’s New Paradigm. Under consideration is the establishment in Baker-Berry Library of a Rosenstock-Huessy archive, which would make his published works and papers conveniently available. Clearly what is needed now is a scholarly biography on the order of Rudiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. This would be a demanding task because of the complexity of Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought and the extent of his published work, much of it in German, the Baker-Berry catalogue listing 53 titles.

ii.

During my two years as an undergraduate at Dartmouth the more thoughtful students were excited by Professor of Philosophy Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Many members of the Dartmouth philosophy department did not consider him a philosopher at all. What you got from them was mostly logical positivism, pragmatism, with some touches of Freud.

One effect of Rosenstock’s teaching on me was to complicate my naturalism. I don’t mean my interest in animals of all sorts—which I developed early, fascination with their radical differences from us, yet creatures with consciousness and an unknowable view of the world. The naturalism Rosenstock undermined was a philosophy that held the natural world to be all that there is, nature of all kinds including the human as a part of nature. There is no actuality beyond that, no metaphysics.

A refugee from Hitler, before coming to Dartmouth he had taught at Harvard, and during 1947 and 1948 Rosenstock’s classroom was on the second floor of Dartmouth Hall, a white colonial building that at one time had constituted the entire college. Rosenstock, that is what we called him, looked like the former German soldier he had been, of medium height, muscular build, erect and vigorous. His hair was white, and with his very German face he was, there is no other word, beautiful. He frequently brought into his lectures—discussions, really, with him the only speaker—thoughts about his experiences on the Western Front during the World War.

In particular, he stressed the formative encounter of his experience during the murderous battle of Verdun, a historic French fortress that the French army refused to yield no matter the cost. During a lull in the battle, Rosenstock had ventured out into no-man’s land, when suddenly both sides opened up with thunderous artillery. Rosenstock took refuge in a shell crater. He felt a panic that had nothing to do with danger. He felt, he said, like a “naked worm.” He was cut off from the army, cut off from history, radically alone in the universe. Meaningless.

Karl Jaspers once defined existentialism as philosophizing “where you stand.” Where Rosentstock stood, or lay, was in that foxhole out in no man’s land between the lines at Verdun. From that nadir, meaning had to be created, or re-created. “History must be told,” he said repeatedly. History is to civilization what memory is to an individual, the source of identity, the constituting of a soul.

iii.

Often Rosenstock began a class by citing some item from the day’s news. Or from history, American history or the history of Dartmouth College. “Gentlemen,” he would say with his German accent, “Gentlemen, Dartmouth College in 1847 was not Dartmouth College in 1900, and neither of those was Dartmouth College in 1947. Many acts of creativity went into the re-creation of the College, the College, gentlemen, of which you are a part today. And you, gentlemen, are part of the creation of the Dartmouth of tomorrow.”

I have said that he undermined my assumption of naturalism. An empirical demonstration confirms what has already happened. Naturalism and empiricism are in the past tense. The future is always possibility, good or bad. “In an experiment,” he said, “science repeats its readings several times. It follows that science lets only what is repeatable affect its statements. All unique processes are basically unsuitable for scientific observation.” He sometimes quoted Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth . . .

“That man, gentlemen, does not know the result of the choice he must make. He cannot check on the result that hasn’t yet happened. Our choices project us forward in our own histories. We make judgments, we may be prudent, but we act on faith. We create actualities that did not exist before.” His citing Robert Frost was particularly effective, because about fifty yards to the north of where we sat was Wentworth Hall where Frost had lived during his abbreviated freshman year, and the thought of Robert Frost reminded us of what that man, once a freshman here, had himself created. He had not always been Robert Frost, the great poet, national and—indeed—world figure. Faith is the future, a projection. He would say, “Even a man who believes in nothing needs a girl who believes in him.” That one, in particular, hit home with us.

Nietzsche was important to Rosenstock, and in more than one way. By 1947, certainly 1948, the tensions with the Soviet Union were approaching a critical intensity. Rosenstock saw Nietzsche as a prophet we could oppose to Marx. Both had foreseen our epoch of revolutions and upheavals. “If Marx had been the only prophet,” he said, “then Communism might well triumph. But Nietzsche also saw what was coming. And so we do not need to become Communists.” Rosenstock’s idea of prophecy was not guesswork or magic, but the intellect and imagination that enabled such prophets as Marx and Nietzsche to understand the total experience of an epoch at its beginning. As against Christ, Rosenstock said, Marx tried to found a Church on bread alone. He also saw Nietzsche as the prophet of individual creation as contrasted with Marxist collectivism, the superior individual as the result of heroic imagination.

iv.

We had two texts for this course, both by Rosenstock, The Multiformity of Man (1936) and The Christian Future: Or, The Modern Mind Outrun (1946). I did not know it at the time, but Rosenstock-Huessy was Jewish, the son of a prominent German banking family, and became a Christian as a young man. This was regarded as apostasy, and with no little bitterness, as I learned from a professor of religion at Brown, who was also a rabbi. Yet the nature and basis of Rosenstock’s Christianity is not easy to pin down.

St. Paul put the issue of Christianity clearly in 1 Corinthians 15: 1-15:

The chief message I handed on to you, as it was handed on to me, was that Christ, as the scriptures had foretold, died for our sins; that he was buried, and then, as the scriptures had foretold, rose again on the third day. That he was seen by Cephas, then by the eleven apostles, and afterwards by more than five hundred of the brethren, most of whom are alive at this day, though some have gone to their rest. Then he was seen by James . . . and if Christ has not risen, then our preaching is groundless, and your faith, too, is groundless.

Paul could hardly have made the case for the Resurrection, and therefore the case for Christianity, more clearly. While alluding to scriptural prophecy, he is also empirical, adducing more than 500 witnesses, most of whom were still alive and could, if they wished, have refuted him.

Christianity is based upon claims to truth in a way Judaism is not. Judaism is monotheism, the Law, the Jewish people, and Feast Days commemorating events in the history of ancient Israel.

Neither in class nor in one of the books we were using, The Christian Future: Or the Modern Mind Outrun, did Rosenstock discuss the Resurrection in Paul’s historical and empirical terms, though we can hardly suppose that he did not know these passages from the bible. He does affirm, however, his belief that the Resurrection did actually happen in history. He does so in a single paragraph that appears in a section of The Christian Future called “The Divinity of Christ” which does not consider the ancient testimony at all:

Perhaps a personal confession is permissible here. I had always hoped to be a Christian. But twenty years ago I felt that I was undergoing a real crucifixion. I was deprived of all my powers, virtually paralyzed, yet I came to life again, a changed man. What saved me was that I could look back to the supreme of Jesus’ life and recognize my small eclipse in his great suffering. That enabled me to wait in complete faith for resurrection to follow crucifixion in my own experience. Ever since then it has seemed foolish to doubt the historical reality of the original Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Never in class did anyone challenge the non-sequitur that links the final sentence of that paragraph to the sentences that precede it. This probably was because that paragraph was swallowed up in and forgotten what seemed far more central to the course and to the overall shape of Rosenstock’s teaching: the activity of the martyrs, including Jesus, in our living speech and in history. For Rosenstock, God was not an object of speculation, not a metaphysical reality, but a “You” addressed by an “I” who is changed by this act of speech.

In class as in his writings Rosenstock crystallized his thought in aphorisms, many collected by George Morgan in his excellent book. Some of his crystallized thoughts from Morgan provide a sense of his thinking:

Every value in human history is first set on high by one single event which lends its name and gives meaning to later events. We have seen many movements called ‘crusades,’ but they derive their name, if it is properly given from the first Crusade. Crucifixion and Resurrection would not be known as everyday occurrences in our lives if they had not happened once for all.

And:

Without speech man would have no time, but merely be immersed in time. Animals are time’s toys. Men conquered time when they began to speak.

Or from The Christian Future:

The faithlessness of modern men, clergy included [who] do not see the blood of millions that must be shed to place certain values on the throne of life. They use words to propagandize and advertise, and do not say “Thank you” to the martyrs who lifted these words as sacred values above the crowd.

And many more. Rosenstock understands that we live in a stream of both history and words. Speech is active and creative, changing us as we speak to each other, and speech is part of history and created by it, while itself creating history. In that sense, Christ is real in our history/speech, real and acting in it. And that was Rosenstock’s focus.

By 1948 Eliot’s Four Quartets were complete, and some of us were reading them with great excitement. Each quartet had as its subject for reflection what can be called a metaphysical moment. In the first quartet, “Burnt Norton,” we read:

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of the heart of light.

That was the first moment “in and out of time” with three others to follow in subsequent quartets. Eliot called the moment in and out of time “Incarnation.” That is, Jesus had a metaphysical dimension, living both in and beyond time, that is, in eternity. I don’t remember that this ever came up in class, despite the excitement of some of us about Eliot’s poem. I didn’t know about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1921) at that time, though Rosenstock must have been aware of it. That Tractatus, moves toward, but not quite into, metaphysics. Using the method of logical empirical analysis familiar in Carnap and A.J. Ayer, Wittgenstein pushes it as far as it can go, reaching the furthest margin of the empirically knowable—and knows that there is more, in fact much more, which he called das Mystiche, Höheres.

Nor would he have been interested in, for example, Stephen Neill’s Interpretation of the New Testament (1861-1986). There we find that, for all the German “higher criticism” of the text—Matthew Arnold’s “all the science of Tübingen”—and despite Rudolf Bultmann’s reductive “de-mythologizing”—Rosenstock must have been aware of that; such issues never came up in class.

That was, I think, because all of it was alien to Rosenstock’s focus on God and Christ as known in speech and individual crisis, existentialism, Existenzphilosophie. It was there, not in metaphysics, not in historical analysis and dispute, which, indeed might be a serious barrier to knowing. For him God and Christ were known in history and in personal experience.

vi.

Rosensock was breathtaking in his ability to locate individuals who were creative forces within history, moving from the ancient world through the present, and seeing the history of Christianity in sweeping terms and definitions. The monastery at Cluny and its abbot Odillo would be brought in to make a point, Gregory VII, the Concordat of Worms, Pope Innocent III, the emperor Sigismund, St. Francis of Assissi who was reborn as Abraham Lincoln entering Richmond on foot behind the Union armies. Rosenstock regarded the Old Testament as the period of God the Father, the period Anno Domini following as that of God the Son, and our present era as that of God as Holy Spirit, the final unification of humanity, the Many becoming One. That oneness seemed much less likely in 1947 and 1948 than it does now, as the world is becoming interdependent economically (see, for example, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat) as well as in communications and intercontinental travel. Part of Rosenstock’s power in class was his erudition, deployed in historical sweeps, part in the sense of mystery that inhered in his occasionally oracular utterances. There were many more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in this sophomore’s naturalism.

In 2001 I published a book called Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe (Yale University Press) about education and Western Civilization based on the paradigm Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy/science and spiritual aspiration, most recently emphasized by Leo Strauss. The book began:

In 1947 and 1948, when an undergraduate at Dartmouth, I studied with a professor of philosophy named Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a refugee from the Nazis. During World War I, as a soldier in the German Army, he had fought at Verdun. On one occasion, during a lull in the bombardment, he wandered out into the pitted and scarred no-man’s land. Suddenly the artillery on both sides began firing again and he took refuge in a crater. He experienced disconnectedness and negation. “I was a naked worm,” he told the students in his classroom . . . meaningless, wandering on the moon. In consequence he had thought long and hard about education, his masters becoming Friedrich Nietzsche and William

James, both of whom sought to bring meaning out of despair. He would say, “History must be told.” He explained in various ways that history is to an individual what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.

Yes, in 2001 Rosenstock-Huessy was still very much present to me.

Jeffrey Hart on Prof. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

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