Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

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Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) was a social philosopher, who taught at Dartmouth College from 1935 to 1957. He was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of a Jewish banker.

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[edit] Overview

At 16 years old, he converted to Christianity, and remained a devout Christian for the rest of his life. He taught law at Leipzig University from 1912 to 1914. In 1914, he married Margrit Huessy, and according to Swiss custom, added her surname to his own. He may be best known as the close friend and correspondent of Franz Rosenzweig. Their exchange of letters is considered by social scholars to be indispensable in the study of the modern encounter of Jews with Christianity. He was a German army officer during World War I, serving at the front, near Verdun. His experience during the war had a profound impact on him and was a decisive influence on much of his later work.

After the war, he did not return to the university, and instead went to work for Daimler-Benz at the Stuttgart automobile assembly plant. He became the first editor of the factory magazine, which he founded in 1919; and he served as its editor until 1921. He founded, and for a year served as the director, of an adult education program in Frankfurt, called The Academy of Labor. In 1923, he became a professor of law at the University of Breslau, and there published Angewandte Seelenkunde ("An Applied Science of the Soul"), which proposed a method based upon language and speech, for the study of social sciences. He spent the remainder of his career elaborating on this grammatical method, dubbed metanomics.

In 1933 he fled to the United States to escape national socialism. There, he taught first at Harvard University and then, from 1935 until retirement in 1957, he was at Dartmouth. While at Dartmouth College, in 1940 he presented a request to US President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and was granted approval to organize a youth training program for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Camp William James was founded as a prototype for a national peacetime volunteer labor service, in Vermont, which in conception anticipated the Peace Corps by more than two decades, but was broken off together with all other CCC programs, in 1941, by the entrance of the United States into World War II.

[edit] Out of Revolution

An interdisciplinary scholar, Rosenstock-Huessy was admired in his own lifetime by some of the most influential intellectuals of the day, and exposure to his work continues to elicit expressions of regret that it is not more widely known. He himself indicated that popularity for his work is as unlikely in the future as it was while he lived. He writes near the close of his best known book of history, called Out of Revolution:

"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 theologian 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." (pg. 758; Epilogue, "The Metanomics of Society"; Chapter 19, "The Survival Value of Humor")

The book, although deemed by peers to be thoroughly credible in its report of historical fact, records history in terms of the impressions made by events upon social life through the experience of having escaped social death. Its pages are filled with Rosenstock-Huessy's lessons to be gleaned from having survived the horrors of the great revolutions of the past. The work originated in his experience as a soldier during World War I, through which he was forced to realize "that war was one thing to the soldiers of all nations and another thing to the people at home." His intention in writing, he says, is to "bequeath a lasting memory" of this experience to the next generations, with the design of overcoming a particular kind of inertia, a tendency to regard the sanity-shattering upheavals by which new epochs are initiated as though these only append a new chapter to the end of events that have passed. This tendency to analyze without sympathy the events even of one's own lifetime, Rosenstock-Huessy depicts as a willful and tragic forgetfulness. We must experience the rewriting of history in our lifetime, he said, because "the world's history is our own history"; otherwise, "it would be nothing but a hopeless library of dust". (Quotes from Chapter 1, "A Post-war preface").

If Out of Revolution had been written only five years later, it would perhaps join countless other books that have been written since, as a strangely elliptical reflection on history in light of the Holocaust under the Nazis. But, it was penned in America, completed early in 1938, written by a pre-Holocaust refugee, a German-American Christian convert from Judaism; and for all these reasons, it stands alone. The truthfulness of its thesis appears to its admirers to have been vindicated in a deeply disturbing way, by the gigantic events which quickly followed its publication: that certain lessons morally demand a tireless effort never to forget them (and what those lessons are, is likely to be realized too late).

[edit] I am an impure thinker

"Whatever he may have to say about God, Man, the World, Time, etc, Rosenstock-Huessy always starts from his own experience as a human being, who must pass through successive stages between birth and death, learning something essential from each of them" W. H. Auden

"I am an impure thinker. I am hurt, swayed, shaken, elated, disillusioned, shocked, comforted, and I have to transmit my mental experiences lest I die. And although I may die. To write a book is no luxury. It is a means of survival." Rosenstock-Huessy, I am an Impure Thinker, ch 1: Farewell to Descartes

[edit] Partial bibliography

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