Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God, With a New Introduction by Hilary Putnam

• Publisher:   Harvard University Press
• Number Of Pages:   128
• Publication Date:   1999-05-01
• ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0674921194
• ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780674921191

Franz Rosenzweig, one of the century's great Jewish thinkers, wrote his gem of a book in 1921 as a more accessible prcis of his famous Star of Redemption. An elegant introduction to Rosenzweig's "new thinking," Understanding the Sick and the Healthy was written for a lay audience and takes the form of an ironic narrative about convalescence. With superb simplicity and beauty, it puts forth an important critique of the nineteenth-century German Idealist philosophical tradition and expresses a powerful vision of Jewish religion. Harvard's Hilary Putnam provides a new introduction to this classic work for a contemporary audience.

This is a very difficult read! We can understand why the author withdrew the manuscript's publication during his life time (1886-1929), first published in 1992 after the author's prophetic thought became a source for the seminal endeavors of others, mostly notably that of Emmanuel Levinas. I will not attempt to comment directly on the author's own language, translated from German into English. Instead I point to a person who, twice during the past year, would have profited immensely had he practiced its wisdom. I mean Pope Benedict XVI in his comments on Islam at the Unversity of Regensburg in September 2006 and his address to Latin American bishops in Brazil in May 2007. While the pope, as Joseph Ratzinger, is well known for his reference to a dictatorship of relativism, what is at stake here is his own dictatorship of philosophical categories. Idolizing Platonic forms, Benedict has assaulted and insulted the religious faith of both Moslems and the indigenous peoples of Latin America. For the sake of a Christianity articulated in the categories of Greek philosophy, the pope has forsaken the historic experience of other peoples, seemingly blind to their otherness. Mindful of a postmodernist deconstruction of historical articulations, we live in an epoch with an ethical imperative to recognize and acknowledge that to conceptualize experience is to falsify reality. With the subtitle of Rosenzweig's manuscript, "A View of World, Man, and God," we must realize, both as an ideation and in actuation, that world, man and God are analytical abstractions. It is their relationality that is really real, thus immune to the rationalizations of the human ego. While we marvel that something exists, rather then nothing, we must not idolize these somethings into an Everything. Our lives are not absolved from radical contingency. The momentous momentum of human life is embedded in multifarious antecedents having multifarious consequences. In the spirit of Franz Rosenzweig, each day of our lives we think anew, the categories of our thought constantly renewed.

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