Words and diagrams about Rosenstock-Huessy’s cross of reality

ABSTRACT

This paper is a systems theoretic examination of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘cross of reality’, a structure that fuses a spatial dyad of inner-outer and a temporal dyad of past-future into a space–time tetrad. This structure is compatible not only with the ‘human-centered’ point of view that Rosenstock-Huessy favours, but also with the ‘world-centered’ point of view inherent in science. The structure, based in his analysis of speech, is applied by him to a wide variety of individual and collective human phenomena, including language, religion, and social critique. To appropriate terminology used by physicists, the cross of reality could be viewed as Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘theory of everything’, a framework for the social sciences and humanities that can be used to model entities, events and processes. The cross diagrams some basic notions of systems theory. Rosenstock-Huessy’s critique of science is partially shared by systems thought, and the goal he posited for sociology of understanding and alleviating human suffering can gain support from systems ideas and methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
• cross of reality
• tetrad
• systems theory
• inner-outer-past-future

Acknowledgments

I thank Michael Gormann-Thellen for planting the seed for this inquiry and for his reflections on an early draft and Wayne Cristaudo for assisting the launch of this project. I owe special thanks to Andreas Leutzsch for his many helpful comments on the work of Rosenstock-Huessy and on my systems theoretic interpretation of this work. I also thank two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped me refine several points made in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A preliminary look at the cross of reality and Bennett’s and Parsons’ tetrads shows some interesting similarities and differences but a systematic comparison of these diagrams is beyond the scope of this study. See (Zwick 2021a), a presentation of an early version of this paper, for some other tetrads that might or might not be related to Rosenstock-Huessy’s cross.

2 Cristaudo (2012, 127) writes that ‘Rosenzweig got the very idea of coming up with a symbol for his system from Rosenstock-Huessy’s “cross of reality”’.

3 Rosenzweig’s triadic view of time, namely past-present-future, appears to differ from Rosenstock-Huessy’s dyadic view, namely past-future. But the central point in the cross – or the whole cross – can be understood to represent the present, relative to which past and future are apprehended, so these two authors may not really differ on this. Rosenstock-Huessy (1993, 14) also wrote of ‘the tremendous triplicity of dimensions that time contains.’

4 Rosenzweig spoke of three elements: God, World and Human. The polarity here between human-centeredness and world-centeredness omits the third element, God. Neither Rosenzweig nor Rosenstock-Huessy would have found this acceptable.

5 The subjective and objective views of ‘reality’ are expressed in German as Wirklichkeit and Realität. Rosenstock-Huessy’s structure is a cross of Wirklichkeit, which encompasses Realität as one of its four components.

6 Chrysalis (2016) describes the consequences of hypertrophy of a single term as follows: ‘What Walter Benjamin describes as ‘self-alienation’ (and what is hubris in that sense also) is travelling too far along only one arm of the cross of reality. Too much in any one direction of the cross of reality invokes enantiodromia [reactive movement to the opposite] and Nemesis [punishment for unwarranted excess].’

7 Rosenstock-Huessy’s characterization of science as myth-making was shared by the Marxist critical theorist Adorno, who also regarded science as a source of modern myth (Bielik-Robson 2007).

8 However, the status of Jesus is privileged as central when the cross of reality is used to represent Christian eschatology.

9 In Chinese philosophy, expansion is yang and concentration is yin; as Zhou Dunyi (Wang 2005) asserts, ‘Heaven uses yang to produce the myriad things and uses yin to complete the myriad things.’

10 He writes, ‘I have survived decades of study and teaching in scholastic and academic sciences. Every one of their venerable scholars mistook me for the intellectual type which he most despised. The atheist wanted me to disappear into Divinity, the theologians into sociology, the sociologists into history, the historians into journalism, the journalists into metaphysics, the philoso­phers into law, and – need I say it? – the lawyers into hell, which as a member of our present world, I never had left’ (1969, 758). This poignant lament will resonate with the experience of most systems theorists.

11 One might argue that Rosenstock-Huessy’s speech thinking is reductionist because it draws conclusions about the macro social order from the fact that social systems are composed of human beings whose primary interactions are linguistic. But, to use the distinction made by Saussure (Chandler 2002), langue (language) is indeed a macro phenomenon and its correlation with parole (speech), language as employed by individuals, is not reductionist.

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Martin Zwick

Martin Zwick is a Professor of Systems Science at Portland State University. His first professional position was in the Department of Biophysics and Theoretical Biology at the University of Chicago. In the 1970's his interests shifted to systems theory and methodology. Since 1976 he has been on the faculty of the Systems Science Program and during the years 1984-1989 was the program head. In 2009, he was awarded the Branford Price Millar award for faculty excellence. His research interests are in data modeling, theoretical biology and systems theory and philosophy. Scientifically, his focus is on applying systems ideas and methods to the natural and social sciences. Philosophically, his focus is on how systems ideas relate to classical and contemporary philosophy and how they help us understand and address societal problems. His book, Elements and Relations, a synthesis of systems theory and philosophy, will be published by Springer in 2023.