Franz Rosenzweig and the systematic task of philosophy

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Benjamin Pollock argues that Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption is devoted to a singularly ambitious philosophical grasping “the All” – the whole of what is – in the form of a system. In asserting Rosenzweig’s abiding commitment to a systematic conception of philosophy often identified with German Idealism, this book breaks rank with the assumptions about Rosenzweig’s thought that have dominated the scholarship of the last decades. Indeed, the Star’s importance is often claimed to lie precisely in the way it opposes philosophy’s traditional drive for systematic knowledge and upholds instead a “new thinking” attentive to the existential concerns, the alterity, and even the revelatory dimension of concrete human life. Pollock shows that these very innovations in Rosenzweig’s thought are in fact to be understood as part and parcel of The Star’s systematic program. But this is only the case, Pollock claims, because Rosenzweig approaches philosophy’s traditional task of system in a radically original manner. For the Star not only seeks to guide its readers on the path toward knowing “the All” of which all beings are a part; it at once directs them toward realizing the redemptive unity of that very “All” through the actions, decisions, and relations of concrete human life.