345 - Die Sprache Des Menschengeschlechts & Speech and Reality

Die Sprache Des Menschengeschlechts
By Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.
2 volumes, 1712 pp. Heidelberg, Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1963. $20.00.

Speech and Reality
By Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
201 pp. Norwich, Vermont, Argo Books, 1970. $3.50.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy is a man who excites the passions because he thinks in wholes. His work may either turn you on or turn you off, but once encountered it can scarcely be ignored. He gives the impression that he would "flunk" a Rorschach test because he interpreted the background rather than the blot, since the former is obviously more important to the total picture. In his distinguished career he has published extensively on jurisprudence, sociology, history, theology, church history, and contemporary culture. But his self-attested preoccupation has always been the "sweet wine of speech," the central concern of the works under consideration here.

Rosenstock-Huessy has never attracted a wide following, either in this country or in his native Germany, although something of a revival is now beginning to get underway. Recent months have seen the publication or announcement of his correspondence with Franz Rosenzweig (Judaism Despite Christianity, University of Alabama Press, 1969), a new issue of Out of Revolution (Argo Books, 1969), I Am an Impure Thinker (Argo), and his two volume Sociology (University of Alabama). It is unfortunate that he has been overlooked, for his influence on the thought of other, better known figures such as Rosenzweig and Buber has been significant.

Part of the reason for general American ignorance of Rosenstock-Huessy is the fact that most of his considerable corpus is in German. Also the range of his interests disinclines specialists to take him seriously. But beyond that, the major reason seems to be that he has labored under two consistent "disadvantages": He has usually been far ahead of his time and his paradigms defy academic conventions. As Clinton Gardner's introduction to Speech and Reality has it, "The entrenched theologians, philosophers and sociologists will not touch this man. He threatens the very basis of their existence, for all his writing and teaching is, in effect, a storming of the academic trenches."

Rosenstock-Huessy stands in a long tradition of Christian thinkers who have concerned themselves with the issues of hermeneutics, religious language, secularization, and the recovery of the transcendent. He has been influenced by J. G. Hamann, Jacob Grimm, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich von Schlegel and William James.

Neither Speech and Reality nor Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts

346 - Die Sprache Des Menschengeschlechts & Speech and Reality

is a single work. Both are collections of essays, some previously published, written during half a century. Taken together the essays are highly repetitive in thematic content, although the illustrative material ranges from Egyptology to nuclear physics. Both works have a common concern, namely, the centrality of speech to the human enterprise, both as a principle of organization and as a principle of transformation. For Rosenstock-Huessy these are theological principles, for "God is the power who makes us speak." Although language has been explored by Heidegger and other existentialists as part of the mystery of being, and has been investigated by Wittgenstein and the British linguistic philosophers, Rosenstock-Huessy has elevated speech and its own principle of organization, grammar, to an "Organon of all social research." Thus, speech is for him not merely a cultural artifact; its constitutive elements display a method which may be used to discover the unity and the totality of human experience in the face of its overwhelming plurality. It is a way of overcoming the false dichotomy of human experience which has dominated Western thought since Descartes; it is a means to establishing social relations. His "speech-thinking" has as its two salient components the Cross of Reality, which structures reality, and the grammatical method, which explains it.

For Rosenstock-Huessy, reality is cruciform, and speech occurs at the midpoint of the axes of the Cross of Reality (S and R, pp. 6 f., 54 ff., 63 ff.; DSDM, I, pp. 319 ff.). The axes of the Cross are time and space, orienting the person toward four fronts: backward toward the past, forward into the future, inward among ourselves, our feelings, hopes, and dreams, and outward against that with which we must struggle to achieve and maintain social unity. These are not merely abstract definitions of the social order. They are "open to unanimous experience and an identical consciousness of all human beings. They are universally valid . . ." (S and R, p. 13), a "basic structure to our own being" (DSDM, I, p. 120).

Each front has an evil which threatens its proper function. Thus the evil which threatens the backward, trajective front of history is decadence, because it implies the inability to convert the next generation to the goals of the present one, an inability to reach the future. The corrective of decadence is faith, which is not a belief in the past but in the future. The evil which threatens the forward, "prejective" front of man's destiny is revolution, because it is a denial of the past and a violation of the existing order. The antidote for revolution is respect, a loyalty to the past which enables a future to be created. The evil which threatens the inward front is anarchy, the inability to forge meaningful social connections. The good which cures this ill is unanimity, i.e., the different agents in space functioning as one body. The evil on the outward front

347 - Die Sprache Des Menschengeschlechts & Speech and Reality

is war, which is the disorganization of power in external space. The good which counteracts it is government, the efficient organization of territory.

Language, human speech, is the weapon of society against these four evils. Each has its counterpart in speech. Thus rational, scientific speech combats the irrationalities and mysteries of the external world while poetry and song fight against the fissiparous tendencies of the human community; political language and preaching carry men into the future while historians (story-tellers) protect the past against decadence. "The circulation of articulated speech is the lifeblood of society. Through speech society sustains its time and space axes . . . . Grammar is the self-consciousness of language, just as logic is the self-consciousness of thinking" (S and R, pp. 16, 18). The grammatical method, therefore, is the attempt to understand social reality by understanding the relationship between reality and the ways we speak about it and within it.

What Rosenstock-Huessy calls "Alexandrian grammar" must be rejected in favor of "higher grammar," social grammar, which takes the space-time axes seriously and thus speaks of different levels of relationship. The basic grammatical terms are not derived from a paradigm which follows the classical "amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant" progression, because all relationships here are conceived at the same level. Rather a "crucial grammar" takes as its main terms "ama" (love!), "amem" (that I may love!), "amamus" (we love), "amavimus" (we have loved).¹ Amo, amas, amat are worlds apart in their social emphasis. Grammatical thinking orients the person to the four fronts of his existence. He is oriented toward the future by the imperative (ama), toward the past by the historical (amavimus), inward by the optative (amem), and outward by the indicative (amamus).

Insofar as Rosenstock-Huessy presents the Cross of Reality and the grammatical method as a universal hermeneutic, that effort is both the greatest accomplishment and the greatest defect of the present works. One is haunted by the doubt that this is all too neat, that he has stuffed material into the categories as much as the categories fit the material. Some very real questions remain. Can the multiplicity of social reality be contained in a single theoretical structure? How are we to test Rosenstock-Huessy's insights independently of his categories, and thus avoid circular argumentation? It is not clear whether social reality is unified because the Cross of Reality and the grammatical method show it to be, or whether they create that unity, or both.

Despite these questions it is clear that Rosenstock-Huessy deserves further reading and deeper study, particularly in an age when we seem

¹ It is not the content of the verb forms which is at stake here but the concept of relationships as revealed by grammar. Any other verbs would do for illustrations, e.g., work, think, come, go, speak, listen.

348 - Die Sprache Des Menschengeschlechts & Speech and Reality

to be losing the ability to speak meaningfully. His view of man as a creature who is, in his root nature, addressed, is different from Barth's but quite as engaging. His often wild but always provocative generalizations could keep both social scientists and theologians busy for generations to come. His discussions of revolution and eschatology elsewhere will especially provide grist for the mills of theologians of revolution and hope. At a time when speech and the written word are under attack from the McLuhanites on one Rank and the analysts on the other, it is refreshing and stimulating to "speech-think" with one who, as he says of John the Apostle, is "overwhelmed by the spokenness of all meaningful happening."

Bruce O. Boston
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey