Notes on B. Galli & Rosenzweig II

The term happens is important to Rosenzweig. His primary philosophical question is not "What is the essence of a thing?" but instead "What happens? What story is being told? What world story is unfolding?"-B. Galli

I think this should be contrasted to what was laid out by Heidegger in "Was ist das - die Philosophie?". The cycle of Kafka's "The Castle" is not unresembling of Rosenzweig system: The World, man, God equated to the village, K. and the Castle. Kafka even though keeps the sight of man from the outside universe, the redeemed world of Adorno, he is aware of Steiner's divorce between word and world, and this inescapable situation becomes Rosenzweig's main concern. At this point I owe to mention what I wrote in my diary a couple of months ago: It seems to me Kafka opposed the ontological freedom of Heidegger, because he found it to be extremely difficult in a world whose reality is entirely unreal instead of surreal, since it is not an attempt at a representation of any sort but the presentation itself, in a way so cruel that one needs to engage in some sort of poetization, and by means of poetization we can find the only channels available to re-unmake the world and make it anew; here I'm not speaking of deconstruction, because it isn't an experiment from within the possibilities of language and readerships, it's a multi-layered quest for relationships and events.

In these chains of relationships from within the critique one owes to return to Husserl, and more specifically to Edith Stein, not the one who wrote the philosophy of the human person based on Aristotle and Aquinas (time by which she already entered the sphere of ontological freedom) but the doctoral dissertation on "empathy" improving upon the second volume of Husserl's Logic Investigations; particularly her concept of relationships within the field of experience. Most of her philosophy is of little use for us particularly in the light of the "Spaetere Schriften" of Husserl when he tuned up with Cassirer on a philosophy of the cultural sciences, but it is worthwhile having a glimpse into Stein's "Philosophy of Psychology and the Cultural Sciences", the idea of the I in relationship to the human body might have been improved upon by Merleau-Ponty who stands already outside my field of inquiry and obviously far beyond the tradition I'm willingly diving into, that after WWII might have been taken up by nobody except Levinas and by detour (that is accidentally) by Hannah Arendt.

Unwittingly I keep return with Galli to the Critique of Auschwitz (that has somehow come to the fore of my hermeneutic questions in the disguise of a quest for a continental philosophy of language, or rather for a philosophy of language based on human culture finding a kernel out of the Western dialectic process through continental philosophy into the provenance of "thinking", an "Ausgang" that shall be parallel to an "Ingang" which lies beyond analytical and critical analysis). The post-Auschwitz world brings me closer to Hannah Arendt again, to the need not for a philosophy or for a philosophical language, but for a "common" language that will permit us once again to navigate in our traditions anew:

"Hence the possible advantage of our situation following the demise of metaphysics and philosophy would be two-fold. It would permit us to look on the past with new eyes, unburdened and unguided by any traditions, and thus to dispose of a tremendous wealth of raw experience without being bound by any prescriptions as how to deal with those treasures. Our inheritance comes to us by no will-and-testament. The advantage would be even greater had it not been accompanied almost inevitably, by a growing inability to move, on no matter what level; in the realm of the invisible; or to put it in another way, had it not been accompanied by the disrepute into which everything that isn't visible, tangible, palpable, has fallen, so that we're in danger of losing the past itself with our traditions." (R&J)

This text obviously goes in hand with a poem of W.H. Auden, to whom the essay "Moral & Thinking Considerations" was addressed:

"All words like peace and love
All sane affirmative speech
Had been soiled, profaned, debased
To a horrid mechanical screech"

Sinning in being a modernist Auden can but show us how impossible the language of man has become, so that a prior de-poetization of the world with a stoppover in reality is necessary in order to become anew. This phenomenon isn't unique to Auden, I believe Kafka was the precursor following the poets of the late 19th century France (symbolism and thereinafter), followed by others as Joyce, Elliot, Nelly Sachs, Grass and the literature of Eastern Europe along the lines of Utopian and Dystopian thought, for an example we obviously have the historical philosophy of Patocka (heavily influenced by Arendt's readings of history) and the writings of Milan Kundera that by close rub their elbows with Kafka but unearthing the world of unreality and portraying it swiftly with those petty obsessions of everyday life that inform the minds of the contemporary readers, since the contemporary speakers have been lost along the way.

Kundera is essentially important in this process: [Quotation to be found]

At this stage before turning to the philosophers I need look into Galli's essay once again:

"The difference brought along by WWII is the difference of an arguably absolutely unprecedented event: the Holocaust. No linguistic reference points seemed to exist in the resources of language for the survivors, for witnesses, for those others of us who have learned and are learning of an event involving six million Jews, in an aim of the total eradication of a people on earth, and involving as well another five million murders, of gypsies, of homosexuals, of Nazi dissenters (Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an illuminating example of the poetics of exile from a non-Jewish eye, this note is mine)."

"Thus for the post-WWII thinkers, the affirmation of language was an agonizing task burdened with a painful process of impossibilities that in their hands was made possible".

From the impossibility of language we step into revelation, which seems to be the point in which Rosenzweig and Arendt weren't simply concerned, but pained and bewildered in their readings of Kafka, for entirely different purposes. Galli expounds the prophetic power of language when attempting to build relationships, namely of bridging that gap between the word and the world.

"Neither Rosenzweig or Benjamin experienced WWII. Those who inquired into language before the second great and terrible World War that raged in Europe -too dreadful anywhere- in important ways can be claimed to be foreseers, through language, of impending further dangers in Europe. There were to occur unless contemporary philosophical errors were addressed". We'll look at some insights on language from Kafka, Rosenzweig and Benjamin through Hannah Arendt.

The wrong sentences lie in wait about my pen, twine themselves around its point, and are dragged along into the letters. I am not of the opinion that one can ever lack the power to express perfectly what one wants to write or say. Observations on the weakness of language, and comparisons between the limitations of words, and the infinity of feelings, are quite fallacious. The infinite feeling continues to be as infinite in words as it was in the heart. What is clear within is bound to become so in words as well. This is why one need never worry about language, but at sight of words one might often worry about himself. After all, who knows within himself how things really are with him? This tempestuous or floundering or morasslike inner self is what we really are, but by the secret process by which words are forced out of us, our self-knowledge is brought to light, and though it may be still veiled, yet it is there before us, wonderful or terrible to behold. -Kafka to Felizia, 1913

"Inadequacy of language, "limitation of thought", "our sensory experience", finally as a highlight the "God" formed by man in his image -this is how a theological problem is solved today! Even if we grant the soundness of these theoretical-knowledge imperfections (I frankly do not understand with which language, which thought, which experience we can compare our language, our thought, which experience in order to be permitted to confer upon them the grade of unsatisfactory). Even if we do grant that, in which other science is it permitted to put "theoretical-knowledge" lamentations in the place of honest striving after the understanding of the facts themselves. Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften

Thus there is "a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate secrets which all thought is concerned with" and this is "the true language" whose existence we assume unthinkingly as soon as we translate from one language into another. That is why Benjamin places at the center of his essay... the quotation from Mallarme in which the spoken languages in their multiplicity and diversity suffocate, as it were, by virtue of their Babel-like tumult, the "immortelle parole", which cannot even be thought, ... and thus prevent the voice of truth from being heard on earth with the force of material, tangible evidence. Whatever theoretical revisions Benjamin may subsequently have made in these theological-metaphysical convictions, his basic approach, decisive for all his literary studies, remained unchanged: not to investigate the utilitarian or communicative functions of linguistic creations, but to understand them in their crystallized and thus ultimately fragmentary utterances of a "world essence". What else does this mean that he understood language as an essentially poetic phenomenon? And this is precisely what the last sentence of the Mallarme aphorism, which he does not quote, says in unequivocal clarity: ... all this were true poetry if poetry did not exist, the poem that philosophically makes good the defect of languages, is their superior complement. -H. Arendt, footnote on her English edition of Benjamin's Illuminations

At this point we confront of a totally different perspective which unfortunately leaves the works of most of the exile thinkers allegedly incomplete, and calls for a reinterpretation of language. Perfunctorily we need to return to Gillian Rose, who in not belonging to the continental tradition and living in the world of post-Auschwitz bleeds with more information that we are able to digest. We will proceed to examine the cultural criticism of Auschwitz in light of the Athens & Jerusalem paradox, before proceeding onto the cultural writings of Rosenzweig. Thanks are due to B. Galli for her excellent introduction that engages us in the thematic discussion on language, which is by the force of necessity the first step back into the world of Kafka and Rosenzweig.