Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) was a German and Jewish philosopher and theologian contemporary with Martin Buber. They shared many intellectual interests and collaborated on a translation of the Torah from Hebrew into German. Nonetheless, they disagreed in their philosophies, and looking briefly at Rosenzweig’s helps to illuminate Buber’s.
Rosenzweig’s most important work, The Star of Redemption, was published in 1921, just two years before I and Thou. There, he analyzed the relationship between humans and God, as well as between humans. Like Buber, he thought that human subjects are constituted from outside. That means there is no “I” that pre-exists and then observes the world, but rather, the “I” is formed in response to the world. In particular, the I is “called” by the voice of some Other, including the “Absolute other,” which, like Buber’s “eternal You,” is a name for God. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, Rosenzweig offered a “philosophy of dialogue which traces the awakening of selfhood through an I-You relation into which the self is called by the Absolute other.” For Rosenzweig, however, there was only this awakening of the self through the call of the Other. He therefore disagreed with Buber’s second category of the I-It. There can be no It that calls a subject into being, because the I only respond to the call of the You.
More recent “political theologists”—philosophers who, like Buber and Rosenzweig, used the resources of religious teachings in newly secular and political ways—have considered this “calling” of the subject to provide a way out of what the Marxist political philosopher Louis Althusser called “interpellation.” In interpellation, subjects are similarly constituted in response to a call, except this time, the call is from state power. When a police officer calls or, in Althusser’s language, “hails” you on the street, and you turn to respond, you are constituted as a subject of the police power, responsive and submissive to its demands. To break free from this interpellation, Eric Santner, following Rosenzweig, argues the we ought to attend to the call from some Other beyond state power. This call, according to Santner, is a “miracle,” a sudden break from the chains of power through a calling from beyond it, which forms the subject differently. For Santner, such a miracle can open up new subjectivities and possibilities for our relationships with others and the Other.
Although they disagree on the I-It, because Rosenzweig does not think it possible to be called by a voiceless object, both Rosenzweig and Buber emphasize the political importance of a philosophy of dialogue. Both were interested in forming communities based on relations and the revelation, in particular, of a relation between human beings and the eternal You or God. Their work is all the more important as systems of power harden and civilizations make it harder and harder for people to sustain fulfilling relations.
