Abstract

The ideas of Franz Rosenzweig have had relatively little impact outside of the circle of contemporary liberal Jewish thinkers. It is even more unlikely that his name would be found in any of the countless volumes an ethical theory. I argue that the ethical theory implied in his primary philosophical work, The Star of Redemption, is compelling and worth sustained and serious study by a wider audience. ;Rosenzweig rejects an Hegelian totalitarian ontological framework for ethics, in favor of a relational ethics that is based on the immediate demands of a concretely contingent other. I construct the epistemological foundations for such an ethics out of his work, by drawing on an analogy from the new science of chaos and Rosenzweig's avowed reliance on Hermann Cohen's differential calculus of infinitesimals. ;In addition to considering the mathematical symbolic logic that serves to structure his epistemology, I consider how aesthetics plays a role in his ethical theory. I contrast essential elements of Rosenzweig's philosophy with those of Martin Heidegger's in order to specify why these two contemporaries have been so closely associated and why they should be more clearly distinguished from each other. Besides the obvious cultural parameters, what makes them similar is not only their univocal departure from a Western metaphysics of substance, but also a common concern to locate human beings in the vitally relational way that we exist in the world. Their differences are most clearly defined in how each respectively appropriates language and aesthetics in that locative process. ;For Heidegger, art as the way of language par excellence becomes the medium by which a human being becomes aware of his/her own solitary and finite existence through bringing one face-to-face with the ultimate nature of one's own death. For Rosenzweig, that same awareness is countered by his introduction of the revelatory experience of responsible love of one human being for an other, and which he analogically models on a dialogical encounter with God. I argue that the ultimate difference between these two thinkers, then, is that with Rosenzweig we are provided with the tools to develop an ethical theory that has contemporary relevance for responsible relationships, while with Heidegger, who openly rejects ethics as the context for a discourse on human authenticity, we are left with next to nothing