I am again fascinated with Rosenzweig, or actually I am fascinated by him for the first time really not only because of being both more and less ignorant about philosophy in general but because now I see him in a context much larger than that of the so-called Jewish Thinking, whatever that means. I feel inebriated no less than intoxicated by what philosophy might present us now, and I certainly know now that philosophy is not literature and also that metaphysics is not exactly what we might call philosophy today; at least not the kind of philosophy for which we all have been trained in our days. The fascination overlaps with frustration and fear; frustration at not living up to the demands of the discipline as a way of life and fear at the danger inherent to such an unmediated encounter with philosophy. There´re the universities and the classes, the professors and the academic papers – their office is rather priestly, not only they decipher the age-old encrypted glyphs of philosophy for us but they also produce the environment noise necessary to distract us from the concerns of the philosopher itself, making out of them an academic preparation or exercise for whenever we shall be faced and contrasted with the so-called higher truths that might never arrive. In my situation, sitting in this miser home without changing my clothes for days and without any other pretense than the deliberate possession of my own life, the study of metaphysics might be something much more dangerous than I had expected. I just hope I get the Jerusalem fellowship, then I wouldn´t feel so lonely in this crazy risky project of philosophy and then there would also the environment noise that would protect me from the merciless unmediated reality of thinking through. I remember when I read Rosenzweig back then in 2006, I think that I understood nothing so far, and I read the whole book even before I had actually met Eveline, I think while I was still at the yeshiva, lying on bed and avoiding by all means the bullshit non sense of the Talmudic digressions that only now I happen to appreciate but not too much understand. Perhaps the fact that I was so young and inexperienced with intellectual material protected me then from the great destructive and constructive potential of Rosenzweig´s work and now it becomes perfectly clear why someone like Sandra could have got so emotionally hurt by a prolonged reading of the Star; I am at the same risk if not higher now, but I can´t stop, I must go through all this, to do it alone and see where it goes from here.
Aristotle never called the “Metaphysics” by that name, for him it was either the principles of first philosophy or theology. The Christian danger becomes really so early, so much earlier than I had thought. This is going to hurt, to hurt to the core of the bone until it is strip of all the flesh and then the blazing and scorching is likely to continue for a while more. The coining of the word theology however hearkens back to Plato:
Hannah Arendt (What is Authority?) “No doubt Plato relied on popular beliefs, perhaps on Orphic and Pythagorean traditions, for his descriptions of an afterlife, just as the Church, almost a thousand years later, could choose freely which of the then prevalent beliefs and speculations she wanted to lay down as dogma and which to declare heretical. The distinction between Plato and his predecessors, whoever they may have been, was that he was the first to become aware of the enormous, strictly political potentiality inherent in such beliefs, just as the distinction between Augustine´s elaborate teachings about hell, purgatory, and paradise and the speculations of Origen or Clement of Alexandria was that he (and perhaps Tertullian before him) understood to what an extent these doctrines could be used as threats in this world, quite apart from their speculative value about a future life Nothing, indeed, is more suggestive in this context than that it was Plato who coined the word “theology”, for the passage in which the new world is used occurs again in a strictly political discussion, namely in The Republic, when the dialogue deals with the founding of cities. This new theological god is neither a living God nor the god of the philosophers nor a pagan divinity; he is a political device, “the measurement of measurements”, that is, the standard according to which cities may be founded and rules of behavior laid down for the multitude. Theology, moreover, teaches how to enforce these standards absolutely, even in cases when human justice seems at a loss, that is, in the case of crimes which escape punishment as well as in the case of those for which even the death sentence would not be adequate. For “the main thing” about the hereafter is, as Plato says explicitly, that “for every wrong men had done to anyone they suffered tenfold”. To be sure, Plato had no inkling of theology as we understand it, as the interpretation of God´s word whose sacrosanct text is the Bible; theology to him was part and parcel of “political sciences,” and specifically that part which taught the very few how to rule the many.
Plan for an appropriation of Rosenzweig in order to demonstrate the ambiguous nature of the so-called Jewish method of the Star (however theologically resilient and politically dangerous): The same structure of the Star – Element, Course and Configuration – the Elements are the empty conceptual notions of analytical philosophy to posit the problems of God, World and Man in the terms of classical metaphysics, not with the same terminology, but with the same independence of the mind from the world that most recent metaphysicians have begun to abhor; the Course is the historical excursus of the problem of Islam in Western thought all the day down to Hegel´s philosophy of history and therefore Rosenzweig´s and lastly The Configuration is the hardcore philosophical examination of Rosenzweig´s thought in relation to two very different interpretative positions, those of Benjamin (historical materialism) and Schmitt (political existentialism). What I don´t know is whether the final result is positive or negative as a matter of opinion, but my intuition tells me it´s going to be highly ambiguous.
From the Koran: Allah is in control of all events and can do anything that logically possible (Logic is a restriction Allah has placed upon himself to make the universe coherent)
In the Koran man and women were created, but they are not created in the likeness of God. Allah is not a Father.
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