God as the Condition of Speech: An Interpretation of Eugen Rosenstock‐Huessy's and Franz Rosenzweig's New Thinking

Abstract

The article offers an interpretation of the New Thinking of Rosenstock‐Huessy and Rosenzweig. It first explains the New Thinking in juxtaposition with a philosophical tradition that views reality as a problem of knowledge and conceptualizes the I's relation to reality as accomplished primarily through thought. The New Thinking is defined by its effort to understand the human being's relation to reality as constitutively shaped by speech, and speech not as means of knowing or representing things but as means of establishing relations among speakers. The article then reconstructs an argument central to the New Thinking that begins with the analysis of the structure of speech in order to discover the relations between the human being, the world, and God that are the conditions without which speech would not accomplish what it always already accomplishes, namely, to establish relations among speakers. The idea that emerges from this analysis is that prior to, and presupposed by, our capacity to know reality objectively, our very encounter with reality in speech and time is inescapably a response to God's address. For the New Thinking, God is not an object of knowledge or experience, but the perpetual address that is the condition of speech.