Okay, let's unpack this. Today we are tackling something, well, truly monumental. A deep dive into the intellectual world of two giants of the 20th century, Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger. And we're doing this through the lens of a really fantastic academic study by Peter Eli Gordon. called Rosenzweig and Heidegger, between Judaism and German philosophy. Right. And it's ambitious because you have to start by acknowledging the huge ethical problem here. You absolutely do. We're connecting Rosenzweig, who is one of the most important figures in modern Jewish thought, and who died in 1929. So just before. The catastrophe. Exactly. Spared that historical horror. And we're connecting him with Heidegger, whose philosophy shaped a generation, but whose name is, well, it's forever linked to his support for national socialism. The tension there is just, it's inescapable. It's a whole backdrop to this conversation. Rosenzweig is gone. Heidegger embraces the regime. I mean, to even compare them feels controversial, maybe even wrong to some. It does. And Gordon doesn't shy away from that. But his whole... argument, his thesis, is that despite their life paths ending up on opposite sides of a moral universe, they're intellectual projects. They converged. They converged in this really profound way. How so? I mean, it wasn't like they were in dialogue, right? Not directly, no. They were aware of each other, moved in similar circles, but it's more that they were reacting to the same thing. They were both responding to the total collapse of the Weimar intellectual world. The exhaustion of a certain kind of philosophy. The exhaustion of neo -Kantian idealism, specifically. They were both products of that same philosophical pressure cooker in Germany after World War I. Gordon actually gives this shared ground a name, which I think is so helpful. He calls it philosophical expressionism. Yeah, that's a key term for him. So what does that mean exactly? It's not a term you hear every day. Well, think of it as a philosophy that does two things at once. On one hand... It's deeply archaic. It wants to go back to some kind of perceived origin, some primal truth, whether that's in religion or language or myth. A return to the source. A return to the source. But on the other hand, it's aggressively modernist in its style and its form. And both of them, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, they share this relentless focus on the same themes. Finitude, you know, being limited in time, isolation, and this shared mission to get beyond. Traditional metaphysics. So it's like a philosophy born from trauma looking backward and forward at the same time. That's a perfect way to put it. So that's our mission today. We're tracing this shared intellectual DNA, this common ground born out of a crisis that links these two figures who history placed on opposite sides of an abyss. And to do that, we have to start with what they were rejecting, the whole system they were trying to tear down. And that means we have to understand the philosophical world before the First World War, the Wilhelmine period. Because back then, academic philosophy in Germany was just completely dominated by one thing. Neocontianism. Neocontianism. Specifically, the Marburg School, led by figures like Herman Cohen and Paul Natorp. And you have to understand, this is not the kind of, you know, angsty existentialism we think of from the 20s. This was a very dry, critical kind of philosophy. Oh, absolutely. Its main job was to establish the logical foundations for natural science. It was anti -metaphysical, anti -speculation. And the key figure here is Cohen. He makes this huge move with one of Kant's most famous ideas, the Dingensitsch, the thing in itself. Right. So for Kant, that was the ultimate reality that exists outside of our minds, but we can never, ever truly know it. It's the world as it is, not just as it appears to us. Exactly. And Cohen comes along and says, you know what? That's just metaphysical speculation. It's nonsense. For him, the ding and sitch is not some mysterious entity out there. What is it, then? He redefines it completely. It becomes a regulative idea. Or even better, a Grinsberg, a boundary concept. Okay, a boundary concept. So it's not an object. It's more like a function, a job description. Precisely. It's the infinite task that science is always pursuing but never reaches. It's the horizon of knowledge that's always receding. By making it an unreachable limit, Cohen basically guaranteed that the work of science, and by extension philosophy, would never, ever end. So he secures philosophy's job for all time. He does. And this focus on method, on thought creating its own tasks, leads to his most extreme claim. It's called pan -methodism. And this is where it gets really interesting. And you can see why the next generation would rebel. He has an analogy for it, right? From math. He does. The infinitesimal. In calculus, the infinitesimal is this quantity that's always approaching zero. It's basically a concept of nothingness, of nixine. And Cohen argues that this is how thought works. It starts with this concept of nothing, and then through pure logic, through its own method, it generates all of reality. That's a pretty wild idea. He's saying that being, that reality itself, isn't something we discover. It's something the mind creates spontaneously, starting from zero. Yes. And if that's true... You can see the consequence. You don't need metaphysics anymore. You don't need to study being as some external thing. Being is just a premise of method. The mind is king. And this radical idealism, this idea that you can just think your way out of messy, real, time -bound existence. That is precisely what Rosenzweig and Heidegger are going to spend their entire careers trying to reverse. They saw that whole tradition from the ancient Greeks all the way to Cohen as a kind of flight, a way for philosophers to trick themselves into thinking they're immortal by living in this timeless realm of concept. To escape death, basically. And their whole project becomes about starting philosophy, not from a method, but from the raw fact of existence, of being stuck in the world with all its limits. But the irony, and this is what Gordon points out so well, is that the seeds of this revolution were actually sown by Cohen himself. late in his life right in his final big work religion of reason out of the sources of judaism it's like he opens a crack in his own perfect idealist system he creates what the book calls an uneasy truce between his ethics and this new turn toward religion that's right because in his ethical system the individual person is just absorbed into the universal The all height. You're just a symbol for all of humanity. Universal reason, universal morality. The individual doesn't really matter. Only the universal law. But then Cohen realizes his system can't really account for a specific, unique person who feels guilt. The Einzelmensch. Religion, he sees, has to speak to that person in their moment of failure, in their sin, in their remorse. So the individual, the one who messes up, who feels things. That person becomes the remainder that this perfect rational system can't quite process or digest. And that was a huge deal for Rosenzweig. He was Cohen's student, and he saw this as Cohen accidentally pointing the way out of idealism. Cohen showed the system's limit. It breaks when it meets a real, finite, sinning person. Which explains that incredible quote Rosenzweig used later about the Davos debate. The schoolchildren die, together with their schoolteacher, the master lives. Exactly. The schoolchildren are the neocantians who just kept repeating the old formulas. But Cohen, the master, in his final work, he glimpsed something new. He saw the need for a new kind of thinking rooted in the particularity of the individual. And that's what paved the way for both Rosenzweig and Heidegger. This departure from idealism brings us to Rosenzweig's own early work, his massive doctoral thesis, Hegel and the State, which came out in 1920. And you have to remember the timing. This is written right in the shadow of World War I. He is deeply, deeply disillusioned with German nationalism and with the very idealist philosophy that had been used to glorify the German state. His book fits right into this Hegel Renaissance that was happening at the time. Scholars were turning away from the Hegel of pure reason and the system. And going back to his early so -called theological writings. And in those writings, you find a very different Hegel. A Hegel who's obsessed with religion, with division, and with this really powerful concept of Schicksal, fate. And for the young Hegel, the Jewish people were the prime example of a people trapped by fate. He saw their belief in a transcendent, abstract God as something that separated them from the world, that kept them in a state of training or separation. Unlike the Greeks or Christians, who he thought achieved a kind of synthesis or unity with the world. Right. Now... Rosenzweig reads all this, but his focus is on what Hegel says about the state. He points out that for Hegel, the state is supposed to be the great achievement of freedom. It's the living actualization of human freedom. The moment where reason becomes real in history. The end goal. Yes. But Rosenzweig sees the terrifying paradox in that. The state, in trying to overcome all division and reconcile everything, it becomes this sublime total power that just crushes the individual will. So the very thing that was supposed to conquer fate, it becomes fate. A historical machine that you can't fight against. Precisely. And he calls this the eclipse of the political. After the disaster of World War I, Rosenzweig concludes that the state's claim to be the final meaning of history is just. It's con. It's a lie. The real meaning of life has to be found somewhere else. And you can see this change in his thinking so clearly in the published version of the book. He adds a second epigraph from the poet Holderlin. The first epigraph is very optimistic, very idealist. It's about ideas bearing golden fruit in history, you know, progress. But the second one? The second one is pure post -war disillusionment. It contrasts how narrowly bound human life is with the endless years of the nations. It's a statement about human finitude. It sets up the whole game. Our lives are short, the state, history, these things seem immortal. But any philosophy that asks us to sacrifice our short real life for that immortal abstraction. It is a flight from the truth. And that insight, that insistence, that meaning must be found within our temporal limits. That's the absolute foundational stone that Rosenzweig and Heidegger build their philosophies on. Which brings us to Rosenzweig's masterpiece, The Star of Redemption from 1921. And this book is, I mean, it's famous for being incredibly difficult. The structure, the style. It really is that philosophical expressionism we were talking about. The structure itself is a kind of argument. It's this complex, six -pointed star, a geometrical layout tracing everything from the primal elements, God, man, and world, all the way to redemption. Gordon even notes that it's weirdly similar to the six -part structure of Heidegger's later post -being and time work. And the style isn't academic prose. It's lyrical. It's poetic. The source says he was really influenced by Schelling's idea that philosophy had to get back to the original poetry of humanity, back to myth. Yeah, he wasn't interested in just making logical arguments. He wanted a philosophy that spoke to you, that had the power of myth. He saw myths not as lies, but as these deep, sedimented understandings of reality. And he's very clear from the start. This is not a philosophy of religion. Right. He hated that kind of academic pigeonholing. He argued that Judaism, which he called a historical fact, and Christianity, an event, they weren't originally religions in our modern sense. They only became these closed off specialized things by retreating from the world. He wanted to talk about religious truth without any of that baggage. That desire to strip away tradition to get to an original truth. I mean, that sounds an awful lot like Heidegger's project of the destruction of metaphysics. It's the same impulse. And you see it on the very first page of the star. the famous opening allegory of the soldier in the trenches it's one of the most powerful openings in all of 20th century philosophy he doesn't start with an abstract principle he starts with a person a soldier in the mud terrified of dying and then comes that line from death from the fear of death begins all knowledge of the all death is the starting point and that is a direct attack on all of traditional philosophy because Rosenzweig says idealism's whole game is to help you escape that fear, to escape the fact that you as a singular individual are going to die. It does that by offering you this sham constellation of immortality and thought. You'll live on in the timeless world of concepts. It's the ultimate self -deception for Mistich. And to really drive the point home, he takes the great rallying cry of idealism that Schiller, quote, cast off the fear of the earthly and he turns it on its head. He says that command, that tradition, is a ruinous, anonymous tradition. It's a flight from reality. So just like Nietzsche proclaimed God is dead, Rosenzweig is saying traditional metaphysics is dead. But he's not a nihilist. He's trying to figure out how to speak about religious truth after that death. Which is why he has to start from scratch. And he starts not with unity, like Hegel, but with radical disunity. He posits three primal elements, God, man, and the world. and they are completely isolated from one another. What keeps them from being sucked into some kind of system? Their irrationality. And he doesn't mean they're illogical. He means they resist being completely understood or reduced to a concept. They're opaque. So God. God is the metaphysical, but he's not some abstract principle. He remains separate, mysterious. You can't just define him and be done with it. And man? Man is defined by the absolute singularity of his soul, which is only revealed in his own unique relationship to his own death. He's not just an example of humanity. And the world. The world in its unredeemed state is just raw existence. Dasein. It's just there standing against you. Gegensand. It's not yet meaningful. This sounds like a philosophy built on separation. It is. This is his disunity thesis. He insists against the entire Western tradition from Parmenides to Hegel that thinking and being are not the same. He prefers the messy disunity of real existence to the clean, totalizing unity of a philosophical system. And that preference for disunity for antagonism. That's where you see the deep affinity with Heidegger, who would later talk about the belonging together of antagonisms. For both of them, you have to start by affirming the separation. Unity is the great danger. So if everything starts in disunity, the new thinking has to be about how these elements relate to each other over time. This is what Rosenzweig calls Leben, or life, facticity. Yes, and that is their shared ground. Life, or facticity, is the absolute horizon of thought. You can't get behind it. It's the same move Heidegger makes with Dasein, being in the world. And they both see the old philosophy with its search for a timeless, eternal truth as a kind of paralysis. A total paralysis of experience. Rosenzweig insists that even God can't be rescued from temporality. Time is real. It's the only stage where anything happens. So redemption, then, can't be about escaping time. No. It has to be an infusion of eternity into time. He calls it the eternity in the moment, ewigkeit im Augenblick. The present isn't just a point between past and future. It becomes a bridge that gathers all of time and unites all of humanity, the primal we, in a moment of gratitude. That focus on the we, on the community, is really interesting. And it puts him in sharp contrast with later Jewish thinkers, especially someone like Emmanuel Levinas. Oh, a massive contrast. Rosenzweig's vision is very holistic. He thinks that ethical failure, that sin that Cohen couldn't figure out, is what pushes the individual back into the community. The we comes before the I. Whereas for Levinas, it's all about the face of the other person, the single other. who places this infinite demand on you. It's a very individual, one -on -one responsibility. It is. Levinas is about that infinite, almost insomniac sense of responsibility to the other. Roosevelt is much more focused on the collective, the shared reality of the community. But how that community gets formed is one of the most troubling parts of his philosophy. You're talking about the dreadful decision. The dreadful decision. Yeah. He says the community, the we, is formed by this terrible, unprecedented act of decision. And this decision separates the we from the you. And who are the you? The enemies of God. And they are cast out into the cold dread of the nothing. That's incredibly harsh language. And it sounds... dangerously close to the political theology of someone like Carl Schmitt. The sovereign is the one who decides on the enemy. It really does. And Gordon points out that even though Rosenzweig meant for this to be a kind of pre -political ontological act, it's operating in that same space that Carl Schmitt describes. It's a decision that happens in the void left by the retreat of the old god of metaphysics. It shows how easily these concepts, forged in this really intense post -war climate, can slip from ontology into a kind of brutal political logic. It's a real danger. And it leads us to maybe the most controversial concept in the whole book. The community of blood. Gemeinschaft des Bluts. Okay, we need to be really careful here. Given the historical context, that phrase is obviously loaded. Extremely. But we have to understand how Rosenzweig is using it. He defines it ontologically, not racially. For him, blood is the thing that allows the Jewish people to experience eternity within time. How does that work? What does he mean by that? He argues that the Jewish people have a unique, self -sufficient relationship to time. The blood community... gives them a kind of permanence, a rootedness in one's own self that other nations who rely on land or a state don't have. So their continuity through generations, the bloodline, is what grounds their identity, not a piece of territory. Exactly. It makes them independent of the cycles of history that destroy nations and states. It's a state of rooted unrootedness. Exile becomes their natural self -grounded state of being. Their eternity is internal. And this idea of an internal self -sustaining temporality, this brings us right back to the core connection with Heidegger. We're comparing Rosenzweig's redemption with Heidegger's authenticity. And structurally, they are almost identical. They are both exceptional ways of being human that are revealed to you in a moment of crisis. For Rosenzweig, it's the Angst des Erischen, the fear of earthly things. For Heidegger, it's just angst. Anxiety. And both of these states reveal a fundamental condition of being unheimlich uncanny or not at home in the world. Homeless. And for both, the way out is not to escape, but to lean into it. Yes. Both argue that an authentic life, a redeemed life, only happens when you fully accept your finitude. That acceptance allows you to take ownership of your past, your heritage, and project it forward into your own most being, your das eigenste. In a way, Heidegger's authenticity is just redemption with the theological language stripped out. It's the same structure. If finitude was the common ground, then language was the shared battlefield. Which brings us to the Buber -Rosenzweig Bible translation they started in 1926. This wasn't just about finding better words. It was a philosophical act. A deeply philosophical act. Their goal was to shatter the tradition of Martin Luther's German Bible. They felt Luther had smoothed over the text, imposed a Western narrative logic on it. Buber and Rosenzweig wanted to get back to a primordial sense of revelation. So they use all these weird, archaic words and neologisms. The goal was literally to speak Hebrew and German, to make the German language itself feel foreign, dislocated. They wanted to shock the reader, to make you feel the raw power and otherness of the original text, to force you to confront its claims directly, without the comfort of familiar language. And there's no better example of this than how they translated God's name in Exodus 3 .14. This verse was a huge deal for German philosophy. Absolutely. How you translated it showed your whole philosophical hand. Luther went with a future tense, easy by design, I will be. The philosopher Mendelssohn gave the classic idealist translation, I am the essence that is eternal. He used the word sign. Being, capital B, pure, abstract, timeless essence. The god of Plato and Aristotle. The god of the philosophers. And that is exactly the god that Rosenzweig and Buber wanted to destroy. That concept of God as static, eternal sign was the enemy of the new thinking. So their choice was? Ich bin da. I am there or I am existing. And they use the word da as in da sign. The philosophical explosion in that choice is immense. By using da sign being there in a specific time and place, they are ripping God out of the abstract heavens and planting him directly in the immediate, factical human moment. My now as Rosenzweig called it. They're emphasizing that God's revelation is an event. a happening, not a static truth. And by using the word Dessin, they're bringing the Bible directly into conversation with Heidegger. The central term of Jewish revelation becomes the central term of German existentialism. It's a stunning convergence. It shows that both traditions, in their attempts to break with idealism, landed on the very same conceptual territory. God is no longer abstract being. God happens in relation to our concrete temporal existence. And this shared obsession with language led them to a similar theory of translation itself. Yeah, they both basically argue that all language is already a form of translation. The moment you try to put a thought into words, you're translating it and something is always lost. There's an inner opacity. But they both kind of cheated on that theory, didn't they? They held on to this idea of a perfect original language. They did. It's a kind of romantic, nostalgic fantasy. For Rosenzweig, it was a pure, untranslated Hebrew. For Heidegger, it was pre -Socratic Greek. It shows that for all their modernism, there was still this archaic longing for an original truth that existed before philosophy went wrong. This whole intellectual revolution finally comes to a head in public in 1929, just before Rosenzweig's death, the famous Davos Disputation. Yes, this public debate between Ernst Kasserer, who was the great heir of neocanteanism, and Martin Heidegger, the new voice of existential ontology. And everyone at the time saw it for what it was, an encounter between two ages. The old guard versus the new. Kasserer defends the power of the human mind, the ability to rise above our messy existence into a world of pure form, of freedom. And when Heidegger brings up anxiety and finitude, Kasserer pulls out the classic idealist trump card. He quotes Schiller. Cast off the fear of the earthly. The answer to existential dread is to philosophize your way above it. And Heidegger's response is basically, no. Absolutely not. He calls that metaphysical evasion. He insists that true freedom isn't escaping your finitude. It's becoming free for the finitude of dashing. He says you have to be thrown back into the hardness of his fate. You have to embrace your own nothingness. It sounds so bleak, embrace your nothingness. It is. But for Heidegger, it's the only path to an authentic life. He's replacing the old norm of transcendence with a new norm of authenticity, which you only achieve by confronting the void. It's a philosophy that demands you stare into the abyss. And watching all of this from afar is Rosenzweig. And he writes this final, incredible essay called Exchanged Fronts. He sees Heidegger's victory at Davos as the ultimate proof that the revolution he had been describing was real. And the irony he points out is just perfect. He argues that Heidegger, this outsider, this Catholic scholastic, is the true heir of the last Cohen, the master who lived. The Cohen who had already seen the importance of finitude and the individual soul. Exactly. Whereas Casserer, Cohen's most brilliant and loyal student, was defending a tradition that was already dead. The philosophical fronts had been swapped. The person who looked like the enemy was actually the ally, and the heir was defending a corpse. So Rosenzweig saw his own project being confirmed by Heidegger, just in a different non -theological language. What were the specific connections he drew between that late Cohen and the early Heidegger? Gordon lays them out really clearly. First, both of them see man as a specifically finite being who can't be saved by some consolation of eternity. Second, both of them see reason not as the master creative force, but as something derivative, something that comes out of existence, not the other way around. Existence comes. Before essence. That's the core of it. Third, they both junk the old idealist language and pull new concepts out of religious sources. Cohen's idea of correlation between God and man, Heidegger's Dasein. And finally, and this is crucial, they both say that any kind of ethical going beyond has to happen with infinitude. For Rosenzweig, it's about the concrete commandment in the here and now. For Heidegger, it's about confronting nothingness. So at the end of the day, Heidegger's victory at Davos was the public announcement that the new thinking had won. Philosophy was no longer about transcendence. It was about practice, about time, about being stuck in the world. It was a huge moment of validation for Rosenzweig. It showed that his work wasn't just some niche Jewish philosophy. It was a central response to the crisis of European modernity. And it proved that the fundamental questions of the age were being asked in parallel across these seemingly separate, intellectual worlds. This has been such a journey through some really difficult but really fascinating intellectual history. We started with the ethical problem of even putting Rosenzweig and Heidegger in the same sentence. And that problem doesn't go away. It doesn't. But after going through Gordon's analysis, you can't deny the core conceptual bond, this shared absolute commitment to finitude, this joint project of rejecting metaphysics as a flight from time and from death. The template is the same. You strive for an exceptional state of being. Call it redemption. Call it authenticity. It's revealed to you through anxiety. And it depends on a radical acceptance of your own earthly limits. Heidegger's project really does feel like Rosenzweig's theological structure, just translated into the language of ontology. And it's so striking that both of them claimed their work was apolitical. Rosenzweig makes his theological turn right after writing about the state. And Heidegger always claimed philosophy was above politics. Yeah, you can see how that played out. Rosenzweig's insistence on separating his community of blood from the state might have kept him from seeing the dangerous political implications of his own ideas. Yeah. And Heidegger, well, he let his philosophical ideas about fate and destiny bleed directly and catastrophically into his political reality. So we're left with this. deeply uncomfortable fact, that two lives that ended in such morally opposite places shared an almost identical philosophical blueprint, a blueprint drawn up in the ruins of Weimar Germany. And it leaves you, it leaves all of us with a really difficult question to think about. If a philosophy is built on being radically honest about our existence, about time, about our finitude, and that's the truth at the heart of both of their projects, does that pursuit of truth necessarily risk a kind of detachment from ethical and historical responsibility? The brilliance of the philosophical insight versus the potential for political blindness. That tension is the legacy of this entire generation of thinkers, and it's a reminder that we always have to connect the abstract idea to the concrete historical reality.