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Abstract
A human life is not made up of measurable equal increments. There are crises, setbacks and advances, obstacles and pathways, highs and lows. The prevailing methods for the study of significant lives, insofar as there is any interest at all in the subject, are hampered by scientism and materialism. The means for understanding how we progress as individuals in relation to society and to the future of humankind cannot be found in the standard disciplines of psychology or sociology, which are looking for measurable results and are dominated by the quest for objectivity. Guided primarily by the thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, we observe here the patterns in the life of two pioneering physicians, centuries apart, Theophrastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, and Sigmund Freud. Inspiration, revelation, conversion, orientation, grace are at the center, but none of these terms is reducible to material measurement. A new approach is suggested that better informs us about what makes the world go ‘round, the grammatical imperative, which subsumes even love.
Notes
* This article was originally published with an error. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2017.1306354
1. Aside from specific citations below, for some general reading on Rosenstock-Huessy in English, see Bryant, ed., Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy; Cristaudo, Religion, Redemption; Morgan, Speech and Society; Van der Molen, Guide to the Works; and “Recent Publications,” at www.erhsociety.org/publications. Recordings of hundreds of hours of Rosenstock-Huessy’s vibrant lectures, with transcriptions, can be found at www.erhfund.org.
2. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Teaching Too Late”: “The time has come to build up a science of timing... its Novum Organum will be the timing of teaching and learning, because they are its basic phenomena” (91–92).
3. Cristaudo, ed., The Cross and the Star, 18–19.
4. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Teaching Too Late,” 108.
5. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Soul of William James,” 2. Much of Rosenstock-Huessy’s understanding of James came from Perry, Thought and Character. Perry wrote: “That Renouvier was the greatest single influence upon the development of James’s thought cannot be doubted” (633).
6. It is possible that I am making Rosenstock-Huessy too much of an Emersonian here. It remains a question, despite his avowals, what kind of Christian Rosenstock-Huessy was. See Löwith’s review of Rosenstock-Huessy’s The Christian Future. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Fruit of Lips gives a quite different impression of the depth and orthodoxy of his faith than The Christian Future does.
7. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Die Umwandlung,” 15. From an unpublished translation by Raymond Huessy.
8. Rosenstock-Huessy was hardly alone in his concern about the disastrous overreach of the “scientific method” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cf. McKnight, “Voegelin’s New Science of History.” On a deeper level, arguing against the introduction of the spatial category of measurement to the internal human experience of duration, see Bergson, Time.
9. The essay on Paracelsus may be found in the informal publication, Rosenstock-Huessy Papers, vol. 1, under the title “A Classic and a Founder.”
10. Kuhn, The Structure. For the scientist as first of all a person, see Rosenstock-Huessy’s 1939 essay, “Modern Man’s Disintegration”: “The scientist must hold to the faith that every person that decides to become a scientist does so not as a scientist but as a human being who harkens to his deepest calling” (49–50). There is a similar argument in Weil’s “Science in Modern Culture,” but I doubt that Weil and Rosenstock-Huessy were aware of each other.
11. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Classic and a Founder,” 20. Sir William Dampier (d. 1952) wrote extensively on the history of science. Rosenstock-Huessy is probably referring to Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Science (1924).
12. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Classic and a Founder,” 27–42.
13. Ibid., 47.
14. As we will see below, Rosenstock-Huessy said the same of Freud: “That Freuds are able to exist is more important than psychoanalysis” (Soziologie, vol. 1, 305).
15. It is hard to resist the thought that Rosenstock-Huessy, consciously or unconsciously, is in some general way identifying with Paracelsus. He says of Paracelsus that what he has to offer must be “acceptable to God,” whether or not it is accepted by man. This is a heroic challenge because the devil, the “tempter, whispers, of course, smiling: Neither man nor god is interested in your craziness. Under the spur of this inner temptation and the external disaster, the child of genius is turned into the fighting apostle” (46).
16. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Classic and a Founder,” 43–51, passim.
17. The quotation is from Browning, “Paracelsus,” vol. 1, lines 366–67 (“Be sure that God / Ne’er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart”) in the definitive edition of this long dramatic poem. Browning did a considerable amount of research on Paracelsus, and the poem was to some degree influenced by Goethe’s Faust.
18. In Practical Knowledge of the Soul, Rosenstock-Huessy assigns soul, body, and spirit each a place in mundane human experience that is indisputable.
19. Martin E. Marty, longtime editor of the Christian Century and a prolific author, in various contexts has called attention to Rosenstock-Huessy’s emphasis on grace as the center of life. Rosenstock-Huessy wrote extensively on speech, and on no other subject, other than perhaps his writing on the subject of time, is his work more illuminating and original. In a world supposedly disenchanted by materialism and positivistic science, the wonder of our capacity for speech (by which he meant more than just talk or “communication”) brings back a great deal of the mystery without a hint of the occult. See, e.g., his Origin of Speech and Speech and Reality. See also Ong, “Spiritual Meaning.”
20. See Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought, 97–104.
21. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Classic and a Founder,” 48.
22. It is a wasted effort, I believe, to try to reconcile variant versions of Rosenstock-Huessy’s fundamental ideas. Variations are not the same as inconsistencies. He was rarely starkly inconsistent. But it is exactly in accordance with who he was and what he taught that at different times he would see similar phenomena somewhat differently.
23. For these comments on Freud, I have relied on a translation by Susan Solomon of pages 303–12 in Rosenstock-Huessy’s Soziologie. Much of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work on time is not yet available in English. One recent commentary is Leithart, “The Social Articulation of Time.” See also the insightful piece by Stünkel, “Nations as Times.”
24. Jones, Life and Work of Freud, vol. 1, 75.
25. Gay, Freud, 91–92.
26. Rosenstock-Huessy, “Classic and a Founder,” 50.
27. Jones, Life and Work of Freud, 231–32, 236, 249.
28. There is a growing literature on the predominance of the visual in modern culture, to the detriment of the aural. Decades before this phenomenon became a frequent subject of scholarly commentary, Rosenstock-Huessy had written about it as a deleterious imbalance and explained its origins. Ong, long an admirer of Rosenstock-Huessy, chose as the epigraph to his major book, The Presence of the Word (1967), the following quotation from Rosenstock-Huessy’s Soziologie: “Erfahrungen ersten Grades, ersten Ranges, warden nicht durch das Auge gemacht” [Experiences of the first order, of the first rank, are not realized through the eye].
29. Axelrod, Studies in Breakthrough, 51–55.
30. For Rosenstock-Huessy’s disagreements with Buber, see his important note in Judaism Despite Christianity, 69–70. See also, Rome, Philosophical, 31–35.
31. Axelrod, Studies in Breakthrough, 12, 22.
32. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 73–90.
33. Kroesen, Planetary Responsibilities, called to my attention the overlap in our common understanding of revelation, grace, inspiration, conversion, and love.
34. See n. 19, above.
35. Maslow, Religions, Values, 3.
36. See Rosenstock-Huessy, Planetary Service. A renowned contemporary example of the great benefits that may spring from one man’s determined initiative is Paul Farmer’s medical and health project in Haiti, described in the best-selling work by Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains.