Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM REVISITED 209
with one another’s work, but rather deriving from das neue
Denken, “the new thinking,” Rosenzweig’s term for this reaction
against the Cartesian and German Idealism of the time.
While in the trenches of Macedonia during World War I, witnessing
the daily death of his companions, Rosenzweig wrote
his major work, The Star of Redemption, in which he made his
break with philosophical Idealism. 8 At the heart of this shift, Idealism
could not provide Rosenzweig with an explanation for the
carnage of war with its death, loneliness and hate. He came to
see Idealist optimism as merely utopian and instead found authentic
reality in the nearness of concrete beings, and in particular,
in the profound mystery of living relationships between persons.
His system requires one to start from experience, to recognize
speech as the entrance to the essence of being, and the rejection
of a monism that would deny reality. Thus it hinges on
concrete dialogue in relationship rather than solitary, abstract
thought.
There is a threefold reality of Man-World-God, which is not
known by rational deduction and which is beyond our rational
understanding – a threefold working of God, prior to reason, of
creation, revelation and redemption. While God is beyond human
knowledge, the believer experiences God’s working by being
receptive to it; he encounters God by being God’s trusted
child. For Rosenzweig, creation is a dialogical process: it begins
with God’s address to man, which is the source of dialogue between
God and humans. Thus, a key element of God’s creation
as a dialogical process is his gift of speech which is, “the creator’s
morning gift to mankind, and yet at the same time it is the
common property of all the children of men, in which each has
his particular share and, finally, it is the seal of humanity in
man.” 9
The better known Martin Buber sums up the core of dialogical
philosophy right in the title of his seminal work, I and
8 FRANZ ROSENZWEIG, The Star of Redemption (Stern der Erlösung), trans.
William W. Hallo of 2nd edition, 1930 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1971).
9 ROSENZWEIG, The Star of Redemption, 110.