Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption ranks as one of the most original and innovative works of the modern period. Thinkers as diverse as Buber, Benjamin, Levinas, Strauss and Derrida have all acknowledged its influence. Yet, there has not been any consensus on the book’s main objective or agenda. Some interpret it through a Hegelian lens. Since Rosenzweig began his career as a Hegel scholar, they view the Star as a reworking of Hegel’s system. Others read him as a precursor to Levinas. Levinas, one of the earliest readers of the Star, regarded Totality and Infinity as the continuation of Rosenzweig’s project because he believed Rosenzweig aimed to destroy totalizing systems that reduced or distorted the “other.” My dissertation aims to create a new framework in which to study the Star. I contend that neither the Hegelian nor Levinasian frameworks provide a complete picture because Rosenzweig did not understand his project in black and white terms. Rather, it is both/and; he used the idealist system to strengthen his narrative of redemptive love. Despite the traumas of World War One, he felt his readers could feel secure in the knowledge that God’s redemptive plan was true—that it was an actual fact versus a fanciful desire—because it operated according to the rules of an objective and coherent system. To bolster my argument, my dissertation draws from two previously untapped resources. First, I compare the Star with the works of the other New Thinkers. Rosenzweig, along with his cousins the biologist Rudolf Ehrenberg and Lutheran minister Hans Ehrenberg, the Christian sociologist Eugen Rosenstock and the physician Viktor von Weizsäcker, formed an intellectual community that became known as the New Thinkers. They wanted to revitalize the spiritual life of postwar society through the restoration of its Judeo-Christian roots. By tracking down these sources, I explain how Rosenzweig followed a prearranged script; the New Thinkers used the same language to describe the nature of love and its function in epistemology, ontology and logic. Second, I read the Star as Rosenzweig wished it to be read: as his autobiography. I draw from his letters and journal entries to show how his personal relationships with the Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, Eugen Rosenstock and Eugen’s wife Margrit Rosenstock served as the corner stones of his system; they were the ones who taught him what it meant it to trust God and love Him above all things.

Creator

• Brenzel, Stephanie Faith

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-f6et-0019

Subject

• Judaic studies
• Philosophy of Religion

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_660990
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14595

Keyword

• The Star of Redemption
• Franz Rosenzweig

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright