Putnam on Rosenzweig: Could Rosenzweig really have supposed that the average German Jew of his time was in danger of becoming a convert to Hegelian metaphysics? But the answer is not really so hard to find. What philosophy represents here is not a technical subject at all, but a temptation to which all who think of themselves as religious may be subject at one time or another: the temptation to substitute words, especially words which have no religious content because they have no internal relation to a genuine religious life, for that kind of life.
Note: What Rosenzweig calls “the name” is perhaps that very notion which Benjamin posited as “giving names to things”; both of which might have influenced Arendt´s worldliness
Wittgenstein on Religion: It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it´s belief, it´s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It´s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in a religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference. It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it.
Rosenzweig: We have wrestled with the fear to live, with the desire to step outside the current; now we may discover that reason´s illness was merely an attempt to elude death. Man, chilled in the full current of life, sees, like that famous Indian prince, death waiting for him. So he steps outside of life. If living means dying, he prefers not to live… It would be necessary (for the person who has succeeded in saying “nothing Jewish is alien to me”) to free himself from those stupid claims that would impose Juda-ism on him as a canon of definite, circumscribed “Jewish duties” (vulgar orthodoxy), or “Jewish tasks” (vulgar Zionism), or –God forbid- “Jewish ideas” (vulgar liberalism).
Putnam on Hegel/Rosenzweig: In “The Star of Redemption”, however, there is another aspect, one which disappears in the present book and, indeed, in almost all of Rosenzweig´s later writings. This aspect is far more Hegelian than Rosenzweig acknowledges; it seems to me to be the remnant of his former Hegelianism. It is the idea that two and only two religions –Judaism and Christianity- have genuine significance. Indeed, one may say that he grants these two religions metaphysical significance. The most unfortunate aspects of “The Star of Redemption” are, in fact, its polemical remarks about religions other than these two –its scorn for Islam, for Hinduism, and so on. What Rosenzweig does in the Star is retain the Hegelian idea of a “world historic” religion, arguing that Christianity is the world historic religion par excellence, the one fated to bring pagan mankind to theism, and invent a new and contrasting metaphysical dignity for Judaism –the dignity of being the only ahistoric religion, not ahistoric in the sense of never changing, but ahistoric in the sense that, in some metaphysical way, the changes are not real changes. In effect, it is as if there were an essence of Judaism which did not change, much as Rosenzweig would object to that formulation. In effect, the world-historic religion, Christianity, is a witness to the truth of the ahistoric Judaism.
Putnam on Rosenzweig: The dissolution of the world of experience in the process of consciousness (Idealism in general), the deduction of everything from thought and the ego (Fichte), the treatment of the thinking subject as something abstract (Kant), the disappearance of the unhappy consciousness in the dialectic of Reason (Hegel), are not viewed by Rosenzweig as merely philosophical errors but as a sickness of the whole man.
“Jewish” in Rosenzweig´s estimation: Insistence on the concrete situation; the importance of the spoken word and the dialogue; the experience of time and its rhythm and, in connection with it, the ability to wait; finally the profound significance of the name, human and divine.
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