XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Life and activity

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was born in 1888 in Berlin in the famous Jewish family of a wealthy banker. In 1906, he graduated from high school and enrolled in law at the University of Zurich, but at the age of 18 he survived spiritual catharsis and was baptized, becoming a parishioner of the evangelical Baptist church, and all his further activities were associated with the formation of a new philosophical concept of Christianity and its connection with ancient Judaism.

In 1912, Rosenstock became a private assistant professor at the University of Leipzig. Having started his academic career early and successfully, Rosenstock-Huessy gradually moved away from pure theorizing, combining theoretical research with purely practical and organizational issues.

Eugen Rosenstock-Hüssy was a member of the First World War, he was a combat officer. In 1914, Rosenstock-Huessy married Swiss Protestant Margaret Hüssy and adopted the double surname Rosenstock- Huessy, their son Hans was born in 1921 and was given the surname Huessy. And soon after his marriage, Rosenstock was called up for war, where he participated in hostilities, including under Verdun. The years spent in the war as an officer had a great influence on the formation of his worldview. In 1918, the Minister of the Interior of the Weimar Republic, Breitscheid, offered him the post of Secretary of State for the development of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. But Rosenstock-Huessy chose the modest position of editor-in-chief of a factory newspaper at the Daimler-Benz factories in Stuttgart, focusing on formulating his socio-theological ideas. When this newspaper was closed in 1920, Rosenstock-Huessy set about organizing the Labor Academy, which, under his leadership, was opened at the University of Frankfurt.

In 1924, his first conceptual book, Applied Ghosting, was published. In the same year, he assumed the post of president of the World Association of Adult Education, and until 1933 he organized labor camps, in which, according to his ideas, new skills and connections of workers, artisans, students, and the unemployed should be formed. The Nazis who came to power did not need this. To say the least, and Rosenstock in November 1933 went to the United States, where since 1934 he became a professor at Harvard University and began to form the ideology of the American establishment. With the support of President Roosevelt, he organized the William James Camp in Vermont in 1940, where he continues to develop and implement the ideas of his social labor camps for the unemployed and students, and the American Peace Corps grew from this movement. From 1936 until his retirement in 1957, Rosenstock served as professor at Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire).

World War II interrupted his activities, and after its end, Rosenstock-Huessy remained in the USA, leading the life of a typical professor. He taught students at the privileged Dartmouth College, and was invited as a “guest professor” to various universities and evangelical academies in Germany, including receiving the title of Honorary Doctor of the Department of Evangelical Theology of the University of Münster. Former President of the World Council of Churches, J. Oldge, called him one of the “most remarkable people of our time.”

Philosophy

The philosophy created by Rosenstock-Huessy has as its main component the concept of “dialogic thinking”, expressed by him together with the famous Jewish philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Rosenzweig said of his conceptual book “The Star of Salvation” that he wrote it under the influence of his manuscript “Applied Ghosting,” which Rosenstock-Huessy introduced to him. However, not fundamentally at odds with the Zionists, Rosenstock-Huessy does not want to accept their paths of advancement, and is building his own, Christianized version of the concept of world order, based on principles common to them.

The theory of “new thinking” developed by them is based on the “dialogical principle”, which considers thinking not as a function of intelligence, but as “speaking”, that is, their “speech thinking” is the operation of word-symbols with some necessary meaning, and this thinking is dialogical all human behavior is reduced according to Rosenzweig and Rosenstok-Huessy, and the “higher power" that makes a person speak is God. At the same time, the very concept of thinking is not eliminated, but is retained as an atavistic attribute of barbarism, while “thinking with the tongue” acquires the meaning of a higher psychic function leading to salvation in God: “the power of the tongue believes, and the power of thinking buryes” - this basic Rosenstock-Huessy formulates principle.

The contribution of Rosenstock-Huessy to this methodology of thinking consists in the careful formulation of the so-called “excrement of the spirit”: if Marx, on the basis of neglect of God, builds his methodology on the logic of the contradictory, then Rosenstock-Huessy, on the contrary, takes God as the basis, builds his methodology on the logic of what is desired that is prompted by god. His method of reasoning and proof consists in combining words in their various grammatical conjugations and combinations expressing motives expelled from consciousness, and similar manipulations of terms and words to obtain the desired combination of words with a suitable meaning.

However, this theory was not accepted by most scholars and theologians, being subjected to legitimate criticism, including on the principle of “people are not judged by themselves,” and has survived more as a specific theory of thinking in the manuscripts of Rosenstock-Huessy and his minions. But not all of his manuscripts were published, so that Rosenstock-Huessy with his concepts is still an "underground thinker", little known to the general public. An extensive part of his legacy is also made up of his lectures, recorded by students on a tape recorder, and a lot of work is currently being done in the USA to decipher and print his texts.

Many books and articles have been written by him for his life, and it is difficult to single out the most recognizable. The most significant, undoubtedly, are “European Revolutions and the Character of Nations” (1931), “Sociology” (in two volumes, 1956–1958), as well as a two-volume collection of landmark articles for all the time of active creative activity - “Language of the human race "(1963-1964). In addition, many of Rosenstock-Hussie's lectures at Dartmouth College were recorded by his students on magnetic tape and are now available in the West both in the form of phonograms and in the form of texts printed on paper. After retiring in 1957, Rosenstock-Hüssy continued to form and develop his ideology, and died in 1973 at his Four Wells estate near Norwich (Vermont).

References:

Гарднер К. «Розеншток-Хюсси О. «Речь и действительность»», М, Лабиринт, 1994

Молодов Е. А. «Формальный и неформальный языки в философской концепции Ойгена Розенштока-Хюсси»

[Электронныйресурс] Appreciations of Rosenstock-Huessy, ссылка: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rosenstock-huessy/

[Электронныйресурс] Encyclopedia Britannica, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a Brief Biography, ссылка: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eugen-Rosenstock-Huessy