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Franz Rosenzweig's "Oldest System-Program"Author(s): Benjamin PollockSource: New German Critique, No. 111 (Fall 2010), pp. 59-95Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40926572Accessed: 29-06-2016 11:21 UTC

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Franz Rosenzweig's "Oldest System-Program"

Benjamin Pollock

In March 1913 the Liepmannssohn auction house offered up for sale a two- page manuscript, a "slightly discolored" but "very interesting treatise about

'An Ethics,'" handwritten by none other than "Hegel (G.W.Fr.), the great phi-

losopher (1770-1831)."1 The Prussian State Library in Berlin purchased the manuscript, and Franz Rosenzweig found it at the library the following year

while conducting research for his book Hegel und der Staat (Hegel and the State, 1920). After comparing this apparent fragment of a Hegelian essay with other groundbreaking writings of early German idealism, as well as with the

myriad Hegelian manuscripts amid which he was immersed at the time, Rosenzweig arrived at two conclusions about the character and the authorship

of the short text, conclusions that had dramatic consequences both for the fate

of the text itself and for the way that the development of German idealism came to be understood in its light.

Rosenzweig's first conclusion was that while the manuscript was unques-

tionably written in Hegel's hand, most likely in the early summer months of 1796, neither the ideas presented in the text nor its cavalier style seemed to fit

what was known about the melancholic, intellectually uncertain Hegel of the

mid-1790s. "Only one person in the philosophical Germany of 1796 possessed

1. Auction entry announcement cited by Dieter Henrich, "Aufklärung der Herkunft des Manu- skriptes 'Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,'" in Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegel's "älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus," ed. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 145-46.

New German Critique 111, Vol. 37, No. 3, Fall 2010

DOI 10. 1215/0094033X-2010-015 Revised from the original chapter in Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task

of Philosophy, by Benjamin Pollock. © 2009 Benjamin Pollock. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge Uni- versity Press.

59


60 Rosenzweig' s "Oldest System- Program"

this youthful-victorious tone" that pervades the text fragment, Rosenzweig

determined, and that person was Hegel's friend and former fellow student at the

Tübinger Stift, F. W. J. Schelling.2 In all likelihood, surmised Rosenzweig, Schelling had sent or shown an original version of the text to Hegel, who, in turn,

had copied it over for future perusal. With the loss of the original, only Hegel's

copy remained. Since the existing copy was in Hegel's handwriting, Rosenzweig

concluded, the text had been mistakenly assigned to Hegel himself.3

Rosenzweig's analysis also led him to reach a second bold conclusion: not only should the text's assumed authorship be revised, the text's received

name should be replaced as well. The designation of the text as "An Ethics,"

Rosenzweig deduced, was a mistake resulting from the fact that the text's "first

two words- unfortunately underlined- were taken for a title" and not recog-

nized instead as the last two words of a "sentence beginning on a lost preced-

ing page." Once this false assumption is removed, Rosenzweig asserted, the text's definitive character can be identified. The text is not a "'treatise about "an

Ethics'" but a complete system-program," one that precedes by two or three

years "the work which up to now has been considered ... the first systematic

attempt of the idealist movement, and in a certain sense the first attempt in the

whole history of philosophy, to bound the whole philosophical world between

the covers of a book, Schelling's Transcendental Idealism."4 As a result, Rosen-

zweig concluded, the text must be recognized for what it is: "The Oldest System-

Program of German Idealism." In his 1917 essay by this name, Rosenzweig published the two-page text

itself, together with a demonstration of his own conclusions and a determination

of the position the text might be said to occupy in Schelling's early writings.5

Rosenzweig's interpretation earned high praise from its initial reviewers- Georg Lasson, Richard Kroner, Ernst Cassirer, Arthur Liebert, and Heinrich Scholz among them6- and his account of the "Oldest System-Program" still

2. Franz Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus," in Zweistrom- land: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold Mayer and Annemarie Mayer, vol. 3 of Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1984), 10.

3. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 8-10. 4. Ibid., 7.

5. First published as "Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus: Ein handschrift- licher Fund," Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch- historisch Klasse, 5 (1917).

6. Georg Lasson's words of praise are reprinted in Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher I, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann with Bernhard Casper, vol. 1.1 of Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979), 434; Richard Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921), 21-23; Ernst Cassirer, "Hölderlin und der deutsche Idealismus," Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur 7 (1918): 279-80; Arthur Liebert, review of "Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus," Kant-Studien 22 (1918):


Benjamin Pollock 61

held considerable authority among scholars well into the 1960s.7 But with Otto

Pöggeler's powerfully argued assertion, in 1965, that it was in fact Hegel all

along who should have been recognized as the real source of this two-page text,

Schelling's monopoly over the text's authorship and Rosenzweig's reputation as

the text's first interpreter were significantly undermined.8 Indeed, provoked by

what now appeared to be Rosenzweig's questionable pilfering of this text from

out of the hands of its rightful author- an act that seemed all the more question-

able in the light of Rosenzweig's self-declared affinity to Schelling and antipa-

thy to Hegel9- scholars and even whole institutions came out of the woodwork

in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, each asserting a different author for the text

and hence for the original insights that ushered in the golden age of German

philosophy.10 In the heated scholarly debate over the two-page manuscript, "not

a negligible number of the participants in the discussion are induced to attribute

the authorship to their respective 'favorites.'"11 Indeed, it has generally- if not

exclusively- been the case that Schelling scholars have advocated Schelling as

the text's author while representatives of the Hegel-Archiv in Bochum have led

460-63; and Heinrich Scholz, review of "Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus," Theologische Literaturzeitung 9-10 (1919): 107-8.

7. With the exception of a few proposals suggesting that Friedrich Hölderlin, Hegel, or even an unknown "fourth" representative of the early idealists or Romantics might have composed the text,

the vast majority of scholars well into the 1960s followed Rosenzweig in attributing the text to Schell-

ing. See the helpful charts in Peter-Frank Hansen, "Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus": Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), 86, 173-74.

8. See Otto Pöggeler, "Hegel, der Verfasser ders ältesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Ideal- ismus," in Hegel-Tage Urbino 1965, rpt. in Jamme and Schneider, Mythologie der Vernunft, 126-42.

9. Cf. Rosenzweig to his mother, April 15, 1918, in Briefe und Tagebücher I, 538. 10. Besides prominent claims that Hegel, Schelling, or Hölderlin is the text's true author, it has

even been proposed that Friedrich Schlegel or Johann Erich von Berger composed it. See Martin Oesch, "Neues über das Systemprogramm? Johann Erich von Berger und Friedrich von Schlegel als dessen Urheber?" Perspektiven der Philosophie: Neues Jahrbuch 14 (1988): 141-63; and Oesch, "'Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus': Ein Fragment Friedrich Schlegels?" Perspektiven der Philosophie: Neues Jahrbuch 21 (1995): 293-313. Eckhart Förster, "To Lend Wings to Physics Once Again': Hölderlin and the 'Oldest System-Programme of German Ideal- ism,'" European Journal of Philosophy 3 (1995): 175, suggests that "it is perhaps fair to say that the authorship is still undecided."

11. Hansen, Rezeptionsgeschichte, 15. Hansen asserts that "since 1969 ... in place of those scholars who, up through the 1950s, thought and wrote with relative independence from one another, there stepped

'interest groups,' so to speak, as whose representatives . . . the discussants from now on published as a rule" (14). Responding to the interest-laden discourse surrounding the program, Bernhard Dinkel has complained that "the text should not be examined and the decision should not be made according to sympathies for this one or for that" ("Neuere Diskussionen um das sog: 'Älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,'" Philosophisches Jahrbuch 94 [1987]: 360). H. S. Harris, while convinced that Hegel is the text's author, concedes that "consideration of some of the arguments put forward against

Hegel will soon teach one to be cautious in assessing counterclaims made by the champions of Hegel against other candidates" (review of Hege l-Tage Villigst I969, Hegel-Studien 10 [1975]: 299).


62 Rosenzweig' s "Oldest System-Program"

the charge on Hegel's behalf.12 The text now appears in the respective collected

works of each of the three key figures of German idealism: Hegel, Schelling, and Friedrich Hölderlin.

In the context of such polemical arguments over the origins of the "Old-

est System-Program," scholars have not shied away from assigning Rosen- zweig particularly dubious motives in his original attribution of the text to

Schelling or from offering a range of psychological explanations for Rosen-

zweig's controversial conclusions about the text. Thus it is asserted that Rosen-

zweig's intention was "to rehabilitate Schelling . . . with the help of this manu-

script,"13 and that Rosenzweig produced his account "out of personal bias for

Schelling and dislike for Hegel."14 We are informed that, because of both per-

sonal crises and the generational existential crisis of the world war period, "Franz Rosenzweig, a young man out of a rich German-Jewish home assumed

that every young man must . . . pass through years of radical alienation from

his time, and that Hegel passed through these years in Frankfurt" and thus

could not have composed the program in the year it was written down.15 It

is surmised, finally, that "Rosenzweig, out of a rich Jewish house in Kassel,"

found "something in the ... 'narrative' philosophy of Schelling's Weltalter that

Hegel didn't provide. It is for this reason that Rosenzweig believed he heard the

genius Schelling, and not Hegel, speak out of the system program."16

Now, the question of who wrote the "Oldest System-Program" remains

important for the study of the history of early German idealism. Unfortunately,

the polemical, seemingly interest-laden discourse that characterizes the battle

over this authorship paints a rather unflattering picture of scholarship in the field. We find ourselves asking: Is Rosenzweig's first publication and interpre-

tation of the two-page text rooted solely in his own emotional crises or in his

preference for Schelling? Are we likewise to conclude that representatives of the Hegel-Archiv assert Hegel's authorship just because the archive is a cen-

ter for Hegel scholarship today? Is the history of philosophy little more than a

playing field on whose sidelines scholars stand, using the ideas and texts at their disposal to cheer on their favorite teams or players?

12. E.g., Tilliette and Fuhrmans as representatives of the Schelling camp, Pöggeler and Jamme as representatives of the Hegel-Archiv.

13. Hansen, Rezeptionsgeschichte, 7. 14. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider, "Einleitung der Herausgeber," in Jamme and

Schneider, Mythologie der Vernunft, 43. 15. Pöggeler, "Hegel, der Verfasser," 140-41. 16. Otto Pöggeler, "Das Menschenwerk des Staates, in Jamme and Schneider, Mythologie der

Vernunft, 178.


Benjamin Pollock 63

We would like to answer no to these questions- and there is no doubt something askew in the assumptions made, through such accusations and polemically charged explanations, about the intentions of scholars who study

the history of philosophy. At the same time, however, there is no doubt that

each of us comes to the ideas and texts from the history of philosophy with

something ahead of time that shapes the horizon of interpretations a given text

or thinker might elicit from us, a horizon that may well be different for each

scholar. What exactly is this "something"? What is it that led Rosenzweig to

hear what and whom he heard in the "Oldest System-Program"? Is it anything

more than an affinity for one thinker over another, an allegiance to one's favorite team?

In what follows I seek to offer a kind of philosophical apology for Rosen-

zweig's original account of the oldest system-program of German idealism. But rather than defend Rosenzweig, I propose the philosophical horizon on which his scholarly account of the oldest system-program may best be under-

stood. His essay seeks to revive the task of systematic philosophy for Rosen-

zweig's own time that Hegel and Schelling (and for a time Hölderlin) shared in their own. To make this claim, I first sketch out the intellectual context in

which Rosenzweig believed himself to be writing his essay, a context deter-

mined partly by the philosophical project of Rosenzweig's cousin and "teacher

in philosophy," Hans Ehrenberg. I then examine the meaning of the task of

"system" that Rosenzweig distilled from the "Oldest System-Program" itself

and revisit the moment in early German idealism in which Rosenzweig sees

this task as having emerged. Noting the system-program's glaringly unsystem-

atic form, I devote considerable attention to the name Rosenzweig assigned to

the text he found. If Rosenzweig sees fit to rename this two-page text "The

Oldest System-Program of German Idealism," he implies that we have in this recovered, fragmentary manuscript nothing less than the first articulation of

the idea of system, the first identification of system as the task of philosophy in

German idealism and, "in a certain sense," in the entire history of philosophy.

At the same time, however, the impact of such a recovery of the first expression

of system on Rosenzweig's own time will depend not only on how his title sug-

gests the text projects the idea of system but, equally, on the way that this title

shows that idea of system to be missing from the text: the manuscript is, after

all, not a "system" but merely a "system-program"; it presents not the "original" concept of system but only the "oldest" system-program, and a mere copy

of this system-program at that. At the end of my discussion, I glance forward

to The Star of Redemption, the "system of philosophy" that Rosenzweig himself wrote a scant two years after he published this essay.



I hope to be able to show that Rosenzweig's "Oldest System-Program" may be most fruitfully understood as his attempt to appropriate the philo-

sophical task of German idealism- the task of system- for his own time and,

particularly, for himself. Along the way, I hope to raise some questions about

the relationship between scholarship in the history of philosophy and that pur-

suit of truth whose history such scholarship records.

System and the Philosophy of Rosenzweig's Time At first glance, no question seems more foreign to the philosophical mood of

Rosenzweig's time than that of system. If anything unites the disparate philo-

sophical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries- positivism and psychologism, neo-Kantianism, historicism, the various phi-

losophies of life and of Weltanschauung- it would seem to be precisely the struggle against system.17 Everywhere, it seemed, the particular was held up

against the presumptuous totality of the Hegelian system, whether that particular was the particular empirical results of scientific research, the particu-

lar rigors of method as divorced from the imprecise claims of metaphysics as

a whole, the particular value of any given historical era, or, simply, the unique

irreducible life perspective of the particular human being. This struggle against

the unity of the system, moreover, often pitted one particular fragment of the

system against the other: life philosophers and Weltanschauung philosophers

accused positivists and neo-Kantians of losing sight of the basic questions of human existence in their insistence on the rigors of method and research; positivists and neo-Kantians accused life philosophers and Weltanschauung philosophers of being romantic enthusiasts and not philosophers. Thus not only had the absolute subject-object totality of Hegel's system broken apart

by the beginning of the twentieth century, but subject and object themselves had broken up into numerous mutually opposed subjects and objects, each declaring the subject matter and the practice of philosophy to be something different.18

Into this fragmented state of philosophical affairs Rosenzweig makes the following surprising claim. "Outlasting the overthrow of the Hegelian system," he asserts toward the end of his "Oldest System-Program" essay, "was the

17. On the change in attitude toward the task of system among philosophers as a result of develop-

ments in the empirical sciences, see the chapter "Science" in Herbert Schnaedelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831-1933, trans. Eric Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 66-108.

18. On the turn-of-the-century "identity-crisis" in philosophy, see Charles R. Bambach, Hei- degger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 21-30.


Benjamin Pollock 65

common conviction formed in it that it is the task of philosophy somehow to

come to a system."19 Rosenzweig's claim about the persistence of the idea of

system seems most curious when weighed against the prevailing trends of his time. If we examine the claim closely, however, it does much to illuminate

the kind of philosophical baggage that Rosenzweig believed his time had inherited from the idealists. According to Rosenzweig, what lives on after the period of German idealism is not a specific completed system, for instance,

the Hegelian- to be accepted or discarded- but the conviction that system is "the task of philosophy." Strangely enough, Rosenzweig implies, what lies

behind the diverse contemporary attempts to overthrow Hegel's system, indeed, what may in fact justify such an overthrow, is a tacit agreement with

Hegel that it is philosophy's task somehow to become system.

As Rosenzweig goes on to show, however, while contemporary philoso-

phy continues to reflect the conviction that philosophy must become system, it

does so only in the most confused, fragmented way. Only in this current situa-

tion in which the completed system of Hegel has been overthrown yet the task

of system has been preserved, Rosenzweig claims,

could ideas gain credence such as that it is incumbent on philosophy to do

nothing but grasp together the "results of the individual sciences." Even the

call "back to Kant," which became audible with the overthrow of the Hege-

lian system, was accompanied by assurances that a new, better-secured sys-

tem would be attained through critical consciousness again in the future. And only since then have the philosophical individual-investigations become

accustomed to finding their own justification in that somehow- be it still far

away- they "prepare" the future system; indeed, the doubt is raised whether

individual investigations as such are scientifically admissible in philosophy.

Now, this whole notion of system as the task of philosophy that lies at the

ground of these different views is, as said, nothing self-evident, but rather a

discovery of German idealism.20

If the state of contemporary philosophy presents a confused picture, Rosenzweig suggests, a common ground rests beneath its myriad views: the

"notion of system as the task of philosophy," the task "discovered" by German

idealism. But as Rosenzweig describes in this passage, the relationship of contemporary philosophy to this ground is itself vague and ambivalent. Positivism

debases the majestic if presumptuous idea that system is philosophy's task by

19. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 41. 20. Ibid.



claiming that the only job left for philosophy is to hold together the different

branches of empirical science.21 Neo-Kantianism, on the other hand, does assert the need to attain a more secure and methodologically sound system than Hegel's; indeed, neo-Kantians find the justification for their "return" to

Kantian "critical consciousness" on the very grounds of the quest for system.

But neo-Kantianism pushes this system off into the future, losing the sense of

the immediacy of this philosophical task beyond the horizon of epistemo- logical questions raised for the present.22 Finally, the idea of system remains

present- but only vaguely so- as the bogeyman for all those who philosophize

from out of the individual standpoint, haunting their consciences with the fear

that their thoughts are not philosophically sound, leading them to justify their

philosophizing through the claim that they "prepare" some future system, remote as it may be.23

Rosenzweig implies that all these philosophical movements share the notion that system is philosophy's proper task, and they all share an unclear

representation of or relation to this ground of their view of philosophy. A sharp

critique of contemporary philosophy can thus be elicited from Rosenzweig's words: in its repeated attempts to overthrow the Hegelian system, contempo-

21. Cf. the ending of Wilhelm Windelband's Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie (Tübin- gen: Mohr, 1903), 552: "[Philosophy] can live on only as the doctrine of universally valid values. It will no longer force itself into the work of the individual sciences. ... It has neither the ambition to want to know once again from its side what these have known, nor the desire to patch together a most

universal structure out of the 'more universal individual results' of the particular disciplines."

22. Rosenzweig is likely alluding here to the editors' introduction to the inaugural volume of the neo-Kantian journal for the philosophy of culture, Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Phi- losophie der Kultur 1 (1910): v: "Our time does not stand under the rule of a system of philosophy; rather, it has its meaning more in the manifoldness and subtlety of philosophical minute work, which, however, reveal their ultimate meaning only in the formation of a system. As preparation and

underpinning for this, there is required a philosophical penetration of the most different realms of culture." Edmund Husserl's classic "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft," which appeared in that first volume of Logos, likewise expressed the need to articulate his conviction that philosophy must become rigorous science "precisely in this place, in the beginnings of Logos, which . . . wants to prepare the ground for the future 'system' of philosophy" (291).

23. I have taken Rosenzweig's reference to "philosophical individual investigations" to mean something akin to the philosophizing out of the individual standpoint popular in his time in the form

of the philosophy of life or of worldview. I am unsure of this interpretation. It is supported both by Rosenzweig's comment at the very end of the "Oldest System-Program" to the effect that the notion of

system stamps "all enthusiastic philosophizing on that side, and all aphoristic philosophizing on this side as in principle unscientific" ("Das älteste Systemprogramm," 44), and by the fact that in the Star Rosenzweig identifies the central problem facing the worldview philosophy embodied by Nietzsche to be its questionable scientific character. But Rosenzweig may also intend to point here simply to the contemporary philosophical vogue of abandoning the attempt to achieve system in philosophy in favor of specialized philosophical investigations, exemplified in the editorial introduction to Logos.


Benjamin Pollock 67

rary philosophy has not freed itself from the basic view of the task of philoso-

phy that Hegel put forth; rather, it has only obscured the nature of that task.

Philosophy in Rosenzweig's time is still grounded in the same fundamental conviction that pervaded German idealism: that system is its task. But con-

temporary philosophy no longer understands the meaning of this task and cer-

tainly no longer dares to fulfill it. Instead, Rosenzweig suggests, the task of

system in his time is either projected far into the future or reduced, in the pres-

ent, to the menial job of holding the sciences together.

Now, as Rosenzweig well knew, in the very years that he discovered and

published the "Oldest System-Program," a growing number of scholars and students in Germany were calling for a reconsideration of the German idealist

philosophy that had been rejected by the philosophers of the fin de siècle. Wil-

helm Windelband's classic lecture of 1910, "Die Erneuerung des Hegelianis- mus" ("The Renewal of Hegelianism"), acknowledged the "amazement" with which his generation took in this revival of interest in Hegel among the young

and sought to explain this revival as a reaction to "the poverty of positivism

and desolation of materialism" in his time. The more the younger generation "seeks to raise itself out of the overwhelming mass of what is individual and

external to a sense-of-the -whole of all reality," Windelband reflected, "the

more fascination is effected by the impressive unity and the grandiose closed-

ness of systematic composition in which the Hegelian panlogism presents itself."24

One member of that younger generation who sought to attain a "sense-

of-the-whole of all reality" was Windelband's own student- and Rosenzweig's cousin- Hans Ehrenberg. In the early 1910s Ehrenberg was a Privatdozent at

the University of Heidelberg, teaching courses on German idealism, theology, and systematic philosophy. During these years he composed several works whose explicit goal was to revive the task of system.25 Although Rosenzweig's stature as a thinker would later overshadow that of his older cousin, Rosen-

zweig long considered Ehrenberg "my real teacher in philosophy,"26 and at the

time of his publication of the "Oldest System-Program," he intended to dedi-

cate the essay to Ehrenberg. Writing to Ehrenberg of his plans to do so, on

24. Wilhelm Windelband, "Die Erneuerung des Hegelianismus," in Präludien I (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921), 278.

25. For a list of courses that Ehrenberg taught during this period, see Günter Brakelmann, Hans Ehrenberg: Ein judenchristliches Schicksal in Deutschland (Waltrop: Spenner, 1997), 31-32.

26. Rosenzweig to Ernst Simon, August 1922, Briefe und Tagebücher II, ed. Rachel Rosen- zweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann with Bernhard Casper, vol. 1.2 of Der Mensch und sein Werk, 809.


68 Rosenzweig's "Oldest System-Program"

March 2, 1917, Rosenzweig said, "The dedication must still be made. . . . I've

perhaps never done anything where it belongs as much as here. Indeed, I learned the concept 'System' from you, in all these years."27

Rosenzweig's expression of debt to Ehrenberg grants us some insight into the context in which Rosenzweig saw himself writing. For in Ehrenberg,

Rosenzweig had a mentor in philosophical matters who was determined to revive the project of systematic philosophy at a time when the meaning of that

project had become vague. Indeed, in his "Kants Kategorientafel und der systematische Begriff der Philosophie" ("Kant's Table of Categories and the Systematic Concept of Philosophy"), published in the 1909 volume of Kant- Studien, Ehrenberg declared that "philosophy is nothing without system" and

attempted to develop the full range of philosophical concepts dialectically from one another- beginning with freedom, passing through theoretical phi-

losophy and aesthetics, and culminating in the absolute- according to the schema of Immanuel Kant's table of categories. Ehrenberg viewed this attempt

as merely experimental but nevertheless concluded his article with the bold assertion that "here, for the first time, philosophy once more appears con-

sciously systematic and no longer the luggage-carrier of the empirical sciences.

It at once shows it is possible and is time to unify Kant and Hegel."28

In his 191 1 Parteiung der Philosophie: Studien wider Hegel und die Kant-

ianer {The Factioning of Philosophy: Studies against Hegel and the Kantians),

Ehrenberg took further steps toward a "preparation for the system" by synthe-

sizing the philosophical standpoints of Hegel and the neo-Kantians. Parteiung is an ambitious work that seeks to overcome what it depicts as the mirror-

image limitations of neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism- the neo-Kantian rejec- tion of the absolute and the lapsing back into positivism it courts as a result

versus the Hegelian subordination of the particular disciplines of science to the

overpowering unity of logic- in a theologically grounded account of philosophy in which philosophy, while grasping the whole in itself, at once grasps

itself as a mere part of the whole of reality. "The possibility of system depends,"

Ehrenberg declares, "on philosophy grasping itself as a part of the whole that is, i.e., of the Absolute."29

If Rosenzweig expressed a debt to Ehrenberg for "the concept of 'Sys- tem'" that was central to Ehrenberg's writings at the time, a shared interest in

27. Rosenzweig to Ehrenberg, March 2, 1917, in Briefe und Tagebücher /, 357. 28. Hans Ehrenberg, "Kants Kategorientafel und der systematische Begntt der Philosophie,

Kant-Studien 14 (1909): 436, 437-38. 29. Hans Ehrenberg, Die Parteiung der Philosophie: òtudien wider Hegel una die Kantianer

(Leipzig: Meiner, 1911), 127-28, rpt. (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 1998), 100.


Benjamin Pollock 69

this notion of system seems to have directed both Ehrenberg and Rosenzweig

to inquire into the origins of that notion, to seek out the "oldest" or "first" his-

torical moment in which the project of system became manifest. It cannot be

coincidental that in precisely those months of 1914 in which Rosenzweig was

completing his "Oldest System-Program," Ehrenberg was preparing for its first

publication Hegel's so-called Jena system, with his own introductory essay, under the title Hegels erstes System (Hegel's First System).30 In his dating of

the "Oldest System-Program," Rosenzweig thus determines that his manuscript was composed "three or four years before Hegel's own first attempt in

the direction of system, the Jena system which Ehrenberg edited."31

Rosenzweig's relation to Ehrenberg's project, as well as his own reflec-

tions on contemporary philosophy in the "Oldest System-Program" essay, sheds

significant light on the impact that a discovery of an oldest system-program would have on the state of philosophy in Rosenzweig's time. If contemporary philosophy is determined by the task of system; if it suffers in part from

an unclear understanding of this task; if it also is marked by isolated attempts

to revive such a task; then the discovery of the earliest expression of this task

in the short program written in Hegel's hand would be more than a simple

scholarly find: it would represent the discovery of the source of the very con-

ception of philosophy that vaguely governs Rosenzweig's own time and that isolated thinkers like Rosenzwieg's cousin have taken up explicitly for them-

selves. It would thereby offer the possibility of clarifying and recovering the

meaning of the philosophical task that lies hidden at the ground of the differ-

ent contemporary views of philosophy.

The very question about the meaning of system that seemed, at first glance, to be least relevant to the philosophical mood of Rosenzweig's time,

we find, is in fact most vital. A reacquaintance with the original meaning of

system as philosophy's task demands a return to the beginnings of German

idealism, for it is here that "the task of philosophy was fixed in a new way."

Yet, Rosenzweig claims, this fixing of philosophy's task anew is carried out by German idealism "in connection with . . . the whole development" of the history of philosophy "up until then."32 Indeed, as I noted earlier, Rosenzweig asserts that the "notion of system as the task of philosophy" is the ''discovery of German Idealism." It neither invents this task out of nowhere nor inherits it

from the past; rather, the idealists are the first to uncover the task of philosophy

30. Hans Ehrenberg and Herbert Link, eds., Hegels erstes System (Heidelberg: Winter, 1915). 31. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 7. 32. Ibid., 44.



that has always been implicit in the history of philosophy. Thus, Rosenzweig

asserts, "only here the idea attained form which, according to its first design, is

hidden in that short statement which stands at the beginning of western intel-

lectual history: that 'All' 'is' water."33

The notion that system is philosophy's task stands in the very first utter-

ance of ancient philosophy, but it stands there hidden, according to Rosen-

zweig, and it remains hidden until the German idealists discover and articulate

it some twenty-five hundred years later. If this is the case, then the document in

which the discovery of the task of system is first recorded, "The Oldest Sys-

tem-Program of German Idealism," would represent not merely the first artic-

ulation of a new conception of philosophy's task inaugurated by the idealists

but- remarkably- the first articulation of philosophy's most original task. The

"Oldest System-Program" represented for Rosenzweig that moment in the his-

tory of philosophy in which the meaning of the entire philosophical tradition

comes to light. Given the amount of time it took philosophy to attain clarity

regarding its true task, it is perhaps no surprise that the decades following the

decline of the popularity of idealism returned this task to obscurity. But the

discovery of a hitherto unknown "oldest" system-program by Rosenzweig makes a recovery of this moment of clarity possible. System as task of philoso-

phy can become clear once again, if Rosenzweig can discover the meaning of

system anew in the "Oldest System-Program" itself.

The "One and All"

Rosenzweig first defines the notion of system explicitly at the very end of his

"Oldest System-Program" essay, after he has presented the system-program itself and his conclusions about its authorship and its position in Schilling's

early works. But the entire essay may be said to be guided by a certain vague, conventional sense of system, evoked in a passage at the beginning of the article

that I have already cited. Before Rosenzweig has even questioned the text's authorship, he suggests that the character and the dating of the manuscript in

Hegel's handwriting imply that herein lies "a program for a system" written two

to three years before the work that has been considered up to now as "the first

systematic attempt of the Idealist movement ... to bound the whole philosophical world between the covers of one book, Schelling's Transcendental Ideal-

ismi4 Here Rosenzweig points playfully to the most generally accepted sense

of the aim and scope of systems of philosophy: they seek to grasp everything!

33. Ibid., 41. 34. Ibid., 7.


Benjamin Pollock 71

Systems presume to collect and to order all knowledge, "the whole of the phil-

osophical world." Whether one praises systematic philosophy as the only "sci-

entifically admissible" philosophy or indicts it on charges of swallowing up

particularity and diversity in its totalizing walls, both the merit and the dan-

gers assigned to philosophical systems seem to rest on just this claim to unity

and comprehensiveness. Systems seek to unify the "whole" of philosophy, they

articulate knowledge both as a totality or an "All" ("whole of the philosophical

world") and as something singular ("one book"), as "One." Such is the vague,

but playfully accessible, meaning of system that Rosenzweig articulates at the

beginning of his essay.

That this vague meaning of system already points to the true, more precise meaning of system in German idealism becomes clear only in the essay's closing section, when Rosenzweig reflects on the very historical significance of the system-program that we observed above:

So we really grasp in our program the moment in the history of philosophy

where for the first time knowledge of the ultimate truth grew together with

knowledge of the whole reality. Being [das Sein] and that which is [das Seiende] become one united-single problem, stamping all enthusiastic philosophizing on that side, and all aphoristic philosophizing on this side as in principle equally unscientific.35

Rosenzweig here reiterates both the significance of the oldest system-program in relation to the history of philosophy that precedes it and the way that

the notion of system still haunts contemporary forms of philosophy- the "enthusiastic" and "aphoristic" philosophies of life and of Weltanschauung- with doubts as to their scientific character. But Rosenzweig also sets forth, in this passage, a definition of the idea of system itself. He formulates the mean-

ing of system in two ways. The moment in which system is revealed as phi-

losophy's task is, according to Rosenzweig, the moment in which knowledge of the ultimate truth grows together with knowledge of the whole of reality or,

alternatively, the moment in which Being (das Sein) and that which is (das Seiende) become one united philosophical problem.

To explain Rosenzweig's definition, we might begin by noting what this more precise definition shares with the vague sense of system with which

Rosenzweig begins his essay: in both cases, system seeks to grasp the whole. In

our present passage, the whole is the "whole reality" that has "grown together"

35. Ibid., 44.



with the most traditional object of the philosophical quest, the ultimate truth.

Rosenzweig thus suggests that what distinguishes the task of systematic phi-

losophy over against prior conceptions of philosophy is, first of all, its view

of the relationship between truth and reality. The notion that system is phi-

losophy's proper task implies that truth is not something transcendent to reality; it is not to be pursued by negating the world or springboarding away from the real to a realm of ideas. Truth is to be grasped, rather, only in its

interconnection with the whole of reality.

What this unification of the "ultimate truth" and the "whole of reality"

implies is further disclosed in Rosenzweig's second formulation of the mean-

ing of system above. According to this formulation, Rosenzweig suggests that systematic philosophy is not content to inquire solely into the problem of

Being, it seeks not merely the single all-embracing concept that encompasses

and is common to everything that "is" but also the particular that is as such

(das Seiende) as well, and to grasp this particularity together with the unity

of the concept of Being. The notion of system thus implies, according to this second formulation, not only the unification of the question of Being but also

the question of the diversity of particular beings. System aims to articulate

the unity that holds between the Being that is identical for all that is and the

unique difference inherent to each particular being.

Thus, emerging from Rosenzweig's two concise formulations is in fact

a rather precise notion of the system's task. System seeks to grasp the ulti-

mate truth of being together with the "whole" of reality, and this whole is itself

not something singular but a complete collection of particular beings. What discloses itself in the framework of system is the interconnectedness of the one

truth with all the particulars of reality. A system of philosophy is hence noth-

ing less than knowledge of the "One and All" as such and in their interconnection, the philosophical unification of the conceptual identity common to all

that is together with the unique difference of each particular in reality: system

is the unity of the One and All, of identity and difference.36

When we recognize Rosenzweig's determination of the meaning of sys-

tem as knowledge of the One and All, then we can also recognize how this

36. For an alternative interpretation of these lines from the "Oldest System-Program," see Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig's "Star of Redemption" (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 24. See also Ulrich Bieberich, Wenn die Geschichte göttlich wäre: Rosenzweigs Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1990), 60-61; and Myriam Bienenstock, "Auf Schellings Spuren im Stern der Erlösung? in Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum "Stern der Erlösung," ed. Martin Brasser (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 277.


Benjamin Pollock 73

meaning was already foreshadowed in Rosenzweig's first loose depiction of system as the attempt to fit the "whole philosophical world" into "one book,"

for here, already, one recognizes the task of system indistinctly as the unity of

the whole and one. Rosenzweig's account of the meaning of system likewise

recalls Windelband's account of the quest among students of his day for a "sense-of-the-whole of all reality," and it recalls Ehrenberg's systematic attempt

to reconcile the unity of the absolute with the diversity of philosophical disci-

plines in his Parteiung. More important, when we identify system as knowl-

edge of the One and All, we can also understand how Rosenzweig finds the notion of system embedded in the philosophical tradition, ever present yet "undiscovered" since its first utterance. In a passage that I examined as sepa-

rate statements earlier, Rosenzweig points to the presence of this notion stretching all the way back to the pre-Socratics:

Now, this whole notion of system as the task of philosophy that lies at the

ground of these different views is, as said, nothing self-evident, but rather a

discovery of German Idealism. Only here the idea attained form which had

been hidden, since its first design, in that short sentence which stands at the

beginning of Western intellectual history: that "all" "is" water. Since then,

the task of all philosophy has been not just to express the unity of the whole

Being [Sein] but rather to determine it somehow through intertwining with that which is [mit dem Seienden].31

The task of system, Rosenzweig asserts here, is "hidden" in the short

sentence that begins the history of philosophy, for Thaïes of Miletus's state-

ment already suggests the fundamental connection ("is") between the "unity of

the whole Being," that is, "all," and something particular in reality, that is, water,

and it already thereby declares philosophy's task to be the grasping of this con-

nection. But Rosenzweig is careful to point out that this task is only hidden in

Thales's statement. Thaïes does not posit the unification and interconnection of the One Being with All particulars, but instead declares All of what is to be determinable by one particular being. The multiplicity of the All under-

goes a transformation over the course of Thales's statement through the singular "is": once All is determined as something that is, it represents no longer the multiplicity of beings or the complete collection of all particulars but the

all-embracing name for the one whole Being, which Thaïes then declares equivalent to water. Thaïes thus projects the idea of system insofar as he asserts

that the truth about being can be grasped only as the union of a conceptual

37. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 41.



unity and the particularity of reality. But he hides it insofar as he determines

All being to be one thing to the exclusion of "all" others, by declaring that All

is water. According to Rosenzweig's account, as I have shown, it was only twenty-five hundred years later that German idealism "discovered" the task

of system in earnest.

Schelling's Path to the Absolute Standpoint The snapshot Rosenzweig's essay gives us of Schelling in early 1796, at the time of the "discovery" of the task of system, catches Schelling "striving somehow to bring Fichte and Spinoza into agreement."38 Though Schelling is committed to the Fichtean notion that it is solely in the free act of the self-

positing "I" that we possess a principle of knowledge that is both uncondi- tioned and immediately accessible,39 he is already beginning to harbor inter-

ests in grasping the real, natural world as something more than simply the

"not-I," which Fichte had claimed the "I" generates out of itself. While study-

ing physics, mathematics, and chemistry in Leipzig that summer, Schelling

eventually came to mock Fichte's "construction of light and air as necessities

for the moral subject."40 Yet if Baruch Spinoza represented, for the Roman-

tics, the ideal of a thinker willing to give himself over to the whole of nature,

the idea of system in German idealism emerged specifically, Rosenzweig asserts, in Schelling's attempt to oppose the most fundamental tenet of Spi-

noza's thought: that all particular entities must be grasped as "modes" or manifestations of a single infinite substance. Reading Spinoza in the wake of

the pantheism controversy, Schelling had to contend with Friedrich Heinrich

Jacobi's claim that Spinoza's "attempt to sketch an image of one world grow-

ing forth out of one root"41 amounts to both a fatalistic elimination of human

freedom and a kind of nihilistic reduction to nothingness of everything we take to be real or meaningful. For insofar as Spinoza grasps all particular beings as "modes" of the one substance, Jacobi took him to be denying being

to particular entities qua particulars: such particulars "are" only insofar as they express the "absolute being" of the one substance. Summarizing Spi- noza's position, Jacobi thus wrote, "Individual things ... so far as they only

38. Ibid., 10. 39. Cf. J. G. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. J. H. Fichte, vol. 1 (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 95-100,

trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs in Science of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 96-100.

40. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 13, 15. 41. Ibid., 42.


Benjamin Pollock 75

exist in a certain determinate mode, are non-entia, the indeterminate infinite

being is the one single true ens reale."42

If Fichte's grounding of all knowledge in the free self thus seemed to

deny the basic independent reality of the natural world, Jacobi's critique of

Spinoza in effect questioned the very possibility of grasping the unity of all that is without thereby both denying the freedom of human selfhood and reducing to nothing the difference inherent to particular entities. According to

Rosenzweig, Schelling arrived at the first idealist conception of system as the

task of grasping all that is both in its identity and in its difference, when he

began to move toward an absolute idealist position beyond the two one-sided

alternatives of Spinoza and Fichte, by reconceiving the Spinozistic "absolute

being" of substance along Fichtean lines. Thus Rosenzweig writes, "Schelling,

who was the first within the Idealistic Movement to grasp the idea of system,

thought to set up a counterpart to Spinoza's Ethics. The intent was to allow the

whole philosophical cosmos to come into being out of the concept of the abso-

lute act, as Spinoza had out of the concept of absolute being. Both Kant and Fichte were necessary assumptions of this idea."43

In the "Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism," the text that, according to Rosenzweig's estimation, was written immediately before

the "Oldest System-Program" itself, Schelling had indeed stressed the impos-

sibility of grasping the freedom and particularity of individual beings as such

so long as the divine is grasped dogmatically, that is, as "absolute being" or

substance.44 Drawing on Fichte's notion of the self-positing "I," Schelling radically reformulated Kant's primacy of the practical. If Kant had presented God- and the immortality of the soul- as postulates of practical reason, as objects that reason had to assume to reconcile the fact of the moral law, and

the freedom it implied, with that natural world known through experience,

Schelling conceived of God as the singular Absolute Reason that posits (or postulates) itself through the whole manifold of particulars in the world.45 In

42. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, "Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn," in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel "Allwill" (Montreal: McGill- Queens, 1994), 220. See Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, "From 1914 to 1917," in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), 32-33, on how the pantheism controversy spurred Schelling toward developmental monism and on how this position influenced Rosenzweig.

43. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 42. 44. F. W. J. Schelling, "Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus," in Sämmt-

liche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), 290-91. 45. Schelling, "Philosophische Briefe," 293-98, 334-35.



Schelling's "Philosophical Letters" God is not "absolute being," not substance,

but the single "absolute act" realizing itself over all time through both our

own free subjectivity and the natural world we experience objectively. When- ever we act out of freedom, Schelling suggests, we realize a moment of the

absolute act through which God becomes.46 Even the synthetic judgments that Kant had identified as the building blocks of theoretical knowledge are

to be understood as acts whereby the manifold of particulars are shown to reveal a shared unity.47 Thus, Rosenzweig explains, summarizing Schelling's

position, Kant is right to posit God as a rational postulate; he errs only in that

he "misjudges the universal postulate character of the whole of criticism, which sets out from one postulate and only comes to postulates."48

The absolute of Schelling's "Philosophical Letters" already suggests itself as a "counterpart" to the substance of Spinoza's Ethics and thereby points

Schelling to the unity of all that is without reducing particular beings to noth-

ing. Since the absolute here is grasped as "eternally becoming" through all par-

ticular subjects and objects, these particulars may be said to regain a certain

standing as particulars that they did not have as modes of the infinite substance.

The absolute unity of all that is cannot be said to be fully realized as some-

thing that "is" at any particular moment. For reason "has been transformed from theoretical to practical-creative," and thus its task is now "no longer 'to find' firm land"- that is, the "absolute being" that would ground all that is-

"but is rather to 'bring it forth.' "49

Rosenzweig is careful to clarify that the "Philosophical Letters" still stand before Schelling's advance to that absolute standpoint he would occupy

most unwaveringly in his identity philosophy. In 1796, Rosenzweig suggests,

Schelling still hovers between a practical "counterpart to Spinoza," in which Schelling remained limited to "the Fichtean alternative" to Spinoza and the absolute standpoint itself. "The last pages of the '[Philosophical] Letters,'" Rosenzweig writes, "designated this position of the 'absolute' beyond the two opposed system possibilities" suggested by Spinoza and Fichte.50 But this standpoint is intimated only problematically in the "Philosophical Let- ters," according to Rosenzweig. System has not been attained; rather, Schel-

ling articulates the task of system in the form of a question, one "problem of

46. Ibid., 335. 47. Ibid., 294.

48. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 12. 49. Ibid., 11-12, quoting Schelling, "Philosophische Briefe," 311. 50. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm, 43.


Benjamin Pollock 77

all philosophy," which will accompany him during his whole career, a ques-

tion whose answer, according to Rosenzweig, would yield nothing less than

a "finished, closed system": the question of "how the Absolute can go out of

itself and set up a world over against itself."51

According to Rosenzweig, it is with a distinct sense of an imminent solu-

tion to this "problem of all philosophy," and of the fulfillment of the task of

system such a solution would yield, that Schelling wrote the "Oldest System-

Program" soon after the "Philosophical Letters." Bearing in mind how Rosen-

zweig came to identify system as the knowledge of the One and All that would

be made possible by attaining the absolute standpoint, we can imagine the great excitement with which he must have read the first lines of the two-page

fragment he found:

An Ethics. That the whole metaphysics will rest in the future in morality,

of which Kant has only given an example with his two practical postulates,

and has exhausted nothing, so this Ethics is nothing other than a complete system of all ideas, or what is the same, of all practical postulates. The first idea is naturally the representation of myself as an absolutely free

being. With the free self-conscious being there steps forth at once a whole

world- forth out of Nothing- the single true and thinkable creation out of

Nothing.52

Having traversed some of the ground between Spinoza, Fichte, and Schelling, we can begin to make sense of what Rosenzweig saw in the program's opening lines. Indicated here is the grounding of system in the practical to which Kant alluded and which Fichte first carried out in his "I," the identifi-

cation of "ethics" with "a complete system of all ideas." Moreover, as a com-

plete system of all ideas that recognizes such ideas at once as "practical postulates," the program's opening announces itself as "an Ethics" in the true sense,

as a "counterpart to Spinoza's Ethics" which had denied its own name by remaining mired in a substantial conception of the absolute. Yet here, too, we seem to glimpse the move beyond Fichte's practical position. For while the self-consciousness of "myself" may be my first idea, according to the program,

the text's author immediately declares that this consciousness brings with it "at

once" the consciousness of a world outside the self. And if both myself and the

world "step forth at once," then both self and world are perhaps grounded in

something higher, that is, an absolute, which freely posits both. Precisely this

51. Ibid., 37, 12. See Schelling, "Philosophische Briefe," 310. 52. Rosenzweig, Das älteste Systemprogramm, 5.



free positing on the part of the absolute would be the "only true and thinkable

creation out of Nothing." Thus God, world, and the self, nature and freedom,

emerge from the opening lines of this fragment individually and in their mutual

connection.53 It is no wonder that in reading these lines Rosenzweig identified

this text as the first concise articulation of "a complete system of all ideas,"

which offered the possibility of grasping One and All as such and in their interconnection without reducing the All to one substance or subject.

The System-Program's Lack of Systematicity The problems begin with the fact that these lines are not all that Rosenzweig

reads in the text fragment. And the first impression one receives on continuing

past these first lines is the lack of cohesion of the whole, the apparent indeci-

siveness regarding first principles, and the multiple possibilities the text offers

for combining and grouping the compelling ideas presented in it. It is true that

the idea of system as task, the sense that the One and All must be grasped philosophically, and the sense that the fulfillment of this task is imminent

seem to permeate every line. To this extent, one would have to concur with Rosenzweig that the text could not be understood without a prior conception

of the very idea of system that Rosenzweig articulates as knowledge of the One and All. But it is not clear how, if at all, the different ideas of the system-

program themselves fit together systematically. Even if we grant that the system-

program assumes the idea of system as the task of philosophy, it is hardly

irrelevant to the question of the text's systematicity that it does not construct a

system, or even an outline for a system, on the grounds of this idea of system.

Instead, every few paragraphs offer a different possibility for grasping the One

and All. If the text appears to begin from the perspective suggested at the end

53. This is not the only possible interpretation of the first lines of the system-program. Indeed, while Pöggeler highlights how the text "lets the free self-conscious T and the world spring out at once in a creation out of nothing" ("Hegel, der Verfasser," 133), as do Jamme and Schneider ("Einlei-

tung der Herausgeber," 54), Henrich seems to understand the world to spring out of the "I" itself- and

not together with the "I" as the result of the absolute self-creation out of nothing- insofar as he claims

that "only out of the T is such creation thinkable" and stresses "the dependence of the world on the T" in the program ("Systemprogramm? Vorfragen zum Zurechnungsproblem," in Das älteste Sys- temprogramm: Studien zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen Idealismus, ed. Rüdiger Bubner [Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1973], 1 1). Rosenzweig seems to hover between both interpretations in his essay, just as he sees Schelling hovering between a practically weighted standpoint and the absolute standpoint throughout the system-program as a whole. I have inclined toward the "absolute" reading of the program's opening, because it best highlights what would be new (or "oldest") about the standpoint Rosenzweig sees becoming manifest in the program.


Benjamin Pollock 79

of the "Philosophical Letters," in which world and self, nature and freedom,

are grasped as evenly balanced poles grounded in a higher absolute standpoint,

then it seems to fall back, only a few lines later, into a practically weighted

system by asking, "How must a world be created for a moral being?"54 No sooner has the text fallen back thus into the practical, then it suddenly presents

a model of a world-centered system. Indeed, prescient of attempts in Rosen-

zweig's own time to unify the pure principles of philosophy with the manifold

data of empirical research, the text suggests that "if philosophy gives the ideas

and experience gives the data, we could finally get a physics whose greatness I

expected in later times."55 When the text then moves from the objects of phys-

ics to those of history, it asserts that contemporary political ideas such as Kant's "Perpetual Peace" are "only subordinate ideas of a higher idea." The text doesn't bother to tell us, however, what this "higher idea" is; before we

assume, based on the beginning of the fragment, that it is freedom, we should

follow the text a few lines farther to the "idea of beauty" that is the "highest act of reason," which "includes all ideas" and "unifies them all," insofar as "truth

and goodness are only siblings in beauty."56 If we then acclimate to the notion

of transforming the ethical system of the fragment's beginning into an aes-

thetically intuited One and All, the text suddenly turns us toward a religious

One and All. "Monotheism of reason and of the heart, polytheism of the imag-

ination is what we need," the text declares, and it then suggests that only a "new mythology," a "mythology of reason" that combines the sensible nature

of reality with the purity of philosophy will permit the "enlightened and unen-

lightened [to] hold out their hands to one another." Such a fusion of myth and

reason in a "new religion," the text concludes, will lead to an educational trans-

formation of the whole of humanity into a One and All in which the One and All completeness of each individual will coincide with the One and All com-

pleteness of all individuals together. "Only then," the text states, nearing its

54. Cf. Rosenzweig's diary entry of June 3, 1914, regarding this line: "The ground idea with which he [Schelling] still approached 'Physics' at that time (how must a world be created for a moral

being) is, however, still Fichtean. The writings of [17]97 then already appear- if Metzger is right- to overcome this construction out of the moral T and to [re]place it with the theoretical [T]" (Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001/C 1155 [Diary 6 in Box 1, Series 2, Subseries 1], Leo Baeck Insti- tute, Center for Jewish History, New York).

55. Cf. Rosenzweig's diary entry of June 3, 1914, included in Briefe und Tagebücher /, 155: "What

is characteristically Schellingian in the climbing down to physics is that he does it not simply for the sake of philosophy but also for the sake of physics

become here the 'theoretician of knowledge' from out of the 'moralist.'" 56. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 6.



conclusion, "is there expected for us equal instruction of all faculties, of [i.e., in] the individual, as well as of all individuals."57

The so-called system-program thus in no way constructs an outline for

a system; instead, it bombards us with conflicting glimpses of possible paths

for attaining the One and All.58 Now, having declared this text to be the old-

est system-program of German idealism, one would expect Rosenzweig to devote his essay to demonstrating the systematicity of the text itself, to rec-

onciling for his readers the different reflections of the problem of system in

the text. But Rosenzweig does nothing of the sort. On the contrary, Rosen-

zweig uses his essay to emphasize precisely the plurality of system possibili-

ties that Schelling seemed to be toying with both before and after the system-

program. Here Rosenzweig reiterates how Schelling took "'autonomy' for a long time as the point where theoretical and practical philosophy connect,"59

but then he presents the possibility that "Schelling believed for a while, in

1795, to have the completing-concept of philosophy in the concept of the organism."60 Yet already in that same year, Rosenzweig shows, Schelling suggested that it is rather aesthetics that "'first shows the entry into the whole

of philosophy, because only through it can be explained what philosophical spirit is.' "6I Rosenzweig recalls, furthermore, that 1795 also marked the time

when Schelling began to conceive of history as the framework for realizing

the "principle of unity" inherent to humanity.62 And in 1800, when Schelling

did spell out the systematic connection between ethics and aesthetics, Rosen-

zweig claims that Schelling had already begun to see a different systematic task: "Even when he wrote the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling

57. Ibid., 7. In his diary of May 26, 1914, Rosenzweig reacts with excitement to this last line of the system-program: '"of the individual, as well as of all individuals' (out of the System of 1796)- Schiller's concept of 'Totality' and the revolution's concept of Universality in one!" (Franz Rosenzweig Collection, AR 3001/C 1155 [Diary 6 in Box 1, Series 2, Subseries 1], Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History, New York).

58. There are ways to group together some of these different glimpses of the One and All presented in the program. To give one example: emphasis on the "idea of beauty" precisely as an act of reason offers the possibility of both holding on to the program's practical bent and of transcending the freedom of the self in an intellectual-aesthetic intuition of the absolute that grounds that freedom. But

what is not explained in this attempt to unify the program is why the philosopher would then need a "mythology of reason" to make his thought "sensible." That is, it is unclear what the relation is between aesthetics, mythology, and religion, each of which seems, separately, to provide the glue that

holds a system together.

59. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 14. 60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 22. 62. Ibid., 17.


Benjamin Pollock 81

had seen another realm, beyond art, where philosophy, in itself incapable of

'universal validity,' would become a matter for all: through mythology."63

The troublesome fact that the very text that Rosenzweig declares to be

the oldest system-program is itself not systematically constructed has not escaped the attention of scholars. Rüdiger Bubner rightly suggests that it is

largely "because a compelling ordering" of the program's content "into a sys-

tematic outline has not yet been achieved" that "the struggle over the author-

ship of the text has not come to rest";64 that is, precisely the multiplicity of

possible connections between the ideas of the system-program makes it attrib-

utable to different authors at once. For this reason Rosenzweig himself has

been criticized by many for misleading generations of scholars regarding not only the author but also the genre of the text. Dieter Henrich declares that "if

one takes the system-program philosophically-theoretically at its word . . . then

it cannot be made consistent

est of German Idealism,' and in the strict sense is not a system-program at

all."65 Echoing Henrich's conclusion, Pöggeler points to the "inappropriate title" that Rosenzweig gave to the text.66 In an essay whose title- "System- Program? Preliminary Questions towards the Problem of Attribution"- emphasizes the very confusion surrounding the questionable systematicity of

the system-program, Henrich writes, "The title which Rosenzweig gave an anonymous and title-less page suggests a misunderstanding: it suggests the opinion that one would have at hand the original form of a system-outline in

which the theory of Idealism, which was later called 'Absolute,' is conceptual-

ized for the first time."67 Henrich claims, to the contrary, that the text is "at

least as much a program of agitation as it is a sketch of a system."68

Now, what is odd about Rosenzweig's own essay, as I have noted, is that

it in no way seeks to demonstrate the program's systematicity- as it sought

to prove Schelling's authorship- only to be refuted by later scholars. Rather,

Rosenzweig's designation of the text as a system-program and his own recog-

nition of the text's lack of systematicity seem to coexist quite unproblemati- cally in his essay. Rosenzweig takes great pains, at the end of his essay, to explain the idea of system that lies embedded in the program and that came to

63. Ibid., 23.

64. Rüdiger Bubner, "Einleitung," in Bubner, Das älteste Systemprogramm, 1. 65. Henrich, "Aufklärung der Herkunft," 158, 160.

66. Pöggeler, "Das Menschenwerk des Staates," 177. 67. Henrich, "Systemprogramm?" 5. 68. Ibid., 11.



light in idealism as the task of philosophy. At the same time, however, Rosen-

zweig devotes most of the essay to showing how all of the different possi-

bilities for system that Schelling entertains over his career lie implicit in this

program. Rosenzweig wishes to reform the "image which we had up to now of Schelling" as the "'Proteus of Idealism'" who, Hegel claimed, "carried out his development before the public."69 Rosenzweig suggests that the system-

program shows, on the contrary, that even if, in the years after the program

the interest in philosophy of nature ruled, then the interest in philosophy of

art, and finally the interest in philosophy of religion, still all three forced

themselves upon him at the same time and with the same force from the beginning of his breakthrough through the "magic circle." His system was

never quintessentially that of a philosophy of nature. If he constructed the

philosophy of art as its conclusion, he still did not forget to permit there to

appear beyond it, like a distant mountain, the outlook on the mythology of the

future. And from that moment of "breakthrough" on, he recognized in the

new religion revealed by a higher spirit "from heaven"- in which the idealis-

tic philosophy would surround itself with the clothing of a new mythology-

the "last great work of humanity."70

According to Rosenzweig, we see, even if Schelling's philosophical work

"developed" over his career, the ideas that mark the guideposts of that devel-

opment came to Schelling all at once, at the beginning. In the program, as in

Schelling's later development, the philosophy of nature already points to a more fundamental systematic framework in which it functions, and in the pro-

gram, as in Schelling's later development, the aesthetic unification of the sys-

tem already points beyond itself to a realm of myth, a "new religion" appear-

ing "like a distant mountain." Thus what is remarkable about Rosenzweig's analysis of the system-

program is that Rosenzweig is just as careful to point to the different systems

implicit in the program- and to how each system possibility already seems to culminate in the appearance, on the horizon, of a new system possibility- as he is careful to define the idea of system that underlies them all. The aware-

ness with which Rosenzweig holds together his claims that the system-program

contains both the origin of the idea of system and a multiplicity of system possibilities leads us to the realization that the obvious lack of systematicity in the

program, noted by subsequent scholars, does nothing to deter Rosenzweig

69. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 33. 70. Ibid., 34.


Benjamin Pollock 83

from asserting the program's systematic nature. What Rosenzweig understands

by the notion of system as the task of philosophy must therefore be compatible

with the text's lack of systematicity or, rather, with the fact that it presents a

multiplicity of system possibilities.71 To explain this connection between the

notion of system as task of philosophy and the program's multiplicity of sys-

tem possibilities, we must arrive at a more precise understanding of the title

Rosenzweig gives to the text he found. We must understand how Rosenzweig's

title denies the very systematicity that it at once assigns it.

System as Philosophical Program By attributing the oldest system-program to Schelling, Rosenzweig is led to

a curious conclusion: the very idealist who "first grasped the idea of system"

never arrived at a "finished system" himself. The irony of this conclusion is not

lost on Rosenzweig. He points to the fact that the very "problem of all philoso-

phy," which he finds implicit in the opening of the system-program, the ques-

tion "of the Absolute's going out of itself,"

is the problem with which [Schelling] never really came to an end, and that

prevented him from ever fulfilling that promise given in his first great phil-

osophical text: to set up a "counterpart to Spinoza's Ethics." The new 1809 edition of [On the I] had to confess that he had not yet constructed such a

"finished, closed system," and he was never able to withdraw this confes-

sion either. Thus, as strange as it may sound, the "system" most balanced in

71. Ibid., 23. In a diary entry of June 29, 1914, Briefe und Tagebücher I, 166-67, written while he

was composing his "Oldest System-Program" essay, Rosenzweig jots down notes on a transcript from a lecture course titled "Schelling's Identity-Philosophy," which his cousin, Hans Ehrenberg, had given in 1912-13. In the third lecture Ehrenberg suggests that the difficulty of Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism stems in part from the fact that "three systems . . . cross through one another

in Schelling's thinking in 1800": one begins with Fichte's "I," passes over into the philosophy of nature, and then concludes with a kind of philosophy of spirit; a second recounts how the "absolute . . . divides itself into two thoroughly equal justified parts," that is, philosophy of nature and transcendental idealism; and a third shows theoretical and practical consciousness to find their unity in aesthetic consciousness ("Vorlesungen über Schelling: Identitätsphilosophie," Hans Ehrenberg Archiv, Ev. Kirche von Westfalen Landeskirchliches Archiv, 3:17-II/X, Lecture 3, 7-1 1). Rosenzweig's notes show that he is particularly interested in the relations among these three concepts, and at the end

of his diary entry he lists them together with a fourth possibility: "I. I-Nature-Spirit. III. Theoretical-

Practical-Aesthetic. II. Absolutism < Nature/Spirit. IV. Absolute-Mythology-Revelation." To this list he adds the following conclusion: "And this now indeed already prefigured in 1796." Rosenzweig's notes suggest not only that he saw grounds to add an additional system form- one assignable to the "late Schelling"- to Ehrenberg 's list of system forms confronting Schelling in 1800 but that the "Old-

est System-Program" suggested to him that all these system possibilities were already present for Schelling, struggling for supremacy, in 1796 when he wrote his program.



itself that did emerge from him, that short program of 1796, which indeed

never arrived before the public, really remained testament to that first moment where he overlooked his future kingdom with one glance. He never

attained that inner certainty of the ultimate standpoint, which would have

enabled him to take full possession of the claimed inheritance. He remained

all his life the pretender, or, to resume the previously dared comparison, the Wunderkind who, promising all, keeping much, still never came to the

last resolute simplicity of a man but remained his whole life, in a certain sense, what he was at the beginning: a genius kid.72

Schelling never does attain a "finished, closed system," Rosenzweig explains, and as a result his youthful promise goes unfulfilled. The closest Schelling comes to "system" is the system-program itself, a program that ironically- given Schelling's reputation- never arrived before the public! Yet

those participants in the ongoing debate over the authorship of the "Oldest

System-Program" who attributed to Rosenzweig the agenda of "rehabilitating

Schelling," of promoting Schelling as his "favorite," seem not to have consid-

ered very closely the full picture of Schelling that Rosenzweig's essay offers

us. Rosenzweig does see good reason to question Hegel's famous taunt that Schelling carried out his philosophical education before the public. But in sug-

gesting that the opposite is the case, Rosenzweig hardly offers Schelling praise:

in Rosenzweig's account, Schelling's philosophical genius never becomes public, for it is never properly realized. According to Rosenzweig, Schelling never advances past the position from which he "overlooks his future kingdom

with one glance"; he never enters that land of promise himself. Schelling fails to attain the "last resolute simplicity of a man," remaining his whole life the

Wunderkind capable of glimpsing system as philosophy's task but not capable of fulfilling it.

Such a strange combination of genius and apparent failure in the same

thinker gives us cause to reflect. Why does Schelling fail to attain the very system that he is the first to recognize as the task of philosophy? The answer seems to lie in the very first line of the passage cited above: it is the problem

of system that, according to Rosenzweig's account, prevents Schelling from ever attaining the goal of system. Schelling never does "come to an end" on how the absolute emerges from itself to posit a world over against itself, the

very same question that allowed Schelling to formulate the task of system in the first place. It is as if Rosenzweig believed that Schelling saw the problem



Benjamin Pollock 85

of system too clearly, understood too well both the necessity and the funda-

mental difficulty- if not impossibility- of grasping the One and All in their

interconnection to complete such an undertaking.73 Indeed, it seems to be this

very perpetual presence of the problem of system before Schelling's eyes in

Rosenzweig's account that is revealed in the system-program itself: no sooner

is one system possibility suggested than something appears "like a distant mountain" behind it, pointing to the need to formulate system anew. Each new possibility points to the limitations inherent in the others: the question of

"how the world must be created for a moral being" is shown to be one-sided

by the possibility of a perspective beyond that moral being, of a perspective

that grasps the self and world as emerging together "at once" in "a complete

system of all ideas, or what is the same, of all practical postulates." The "idea

of beauty" then suddenly usurps this higher perspective, claiming aesthetics,

and not ethics, as the realm in which ideas and practical postulates, truth and

goodness, are unified. The notion of a "new religion," a "mythology of rea-

son," points to the need and the possibility of unifying the rational and the

sensible, the enlightened and the unenlightened, in a way that even aesthetics cannot attain.

The problem of system thus constantly breaks up the unity posited in

each system possibility of the system-program and thereby constantly breaks

up the unity of the majestic human being Schelling promised to become through it. With his failure to complete his promise, however, Schelling's life

does, strangely enough, attain a kind of unity. It is not the unity of the com-

pleted system that holds Schelling's life together, according to Rosenzweig, but

the unity of the problem of system. As Rosenzweig tells us, "At the end of his

life, Schelling himself only saw the meaning of the task differently, and not the

task itself, from the way he first knew it in early 1796."74 The idea that unifies

Schelling's life, Rosenzweig suggests, is precisely the idea that Schelling first

73. Cf. Martin Heidegger's assessment of Schelling's awareness of the magnitude of the problem of system in Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 21: "Schelling's efforts [were] . . . dedicated to the foundation, the building of the system of freedom in a formed work

It got stranded because of essential inner difficulties which Schelling himself saw so clearly." 74. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 44. Of interest in this regard is Rosenzweig's

own reflection on the program years later, prompted by Wilhelm Böhm's article claiming that Hölderlin was the true author: "At that time, I had read the program only as a program of a life, of a

life's work. If one reads it, with Böhm, as a program for a journal article, it no longer seems absolutely

Schellingian. . . . But as to whether it can be thought of as a program for a journal article, I cannot say so affirmatively" (letter to Ludwig Strauss, Briefe und Tagebücher 11, 1 102). Please see the discussion of the meaning of program below.


86 Rosenzweig9 s "Oldest System-Program"

discovers and articulates in the system-program itself: the idea that system is

the task of philosophy?5

We arrive, thereby, at a curious conclusion. System, Rosenzweig has taught us, is knowledge of the unity of the One and All as such and in their interconnection. Schelling is the first, according to Rosenzweig, to grasp this

notion of system as the task of philosophy, and the first to glimpse the absolute

standpoint out of which this task may be fulfilled, articulating what he sees

in the "System-Program." But Schelling does not fulfill this task. Through-

out his life, system remains a possibility to be actualized, something promised to be fulfilled in the future, a promise that is fulfilled, in fact, by some-

one else. Noting the future tense of much of the program, Rosenzweig writes,

"Logic, indeed, the 'complete system of all ideas,' and the philosophy of his-

tory too appear here within metaphysics and ethics, their overarching regions,

under the powerful sign of the future. Here too he sees tasks, tasks indeed which afterwards he himself only groping, and which first another carried

out in great style."76

Schelling sees tasks, tasks, and more tasks, systems, systems, and more

systems. He does so, Rosenzweig suggests, because his thinking remains "under the powerful sign of the future." He "gropes" for the completion of the

system, but it is left to another to carry out this task "in great style." This other,

as the very next line reveals, is of course the same Hegel who, Rosenzweig suggests, copied down a version of the system-program in his own handwrit-

ing and thereby preserved it for posterity. For Rosenzweig, the oldest system-

program is thus the defining moment, the starting point, of two paths in Ger-

man idealism, both of which grasp system as the task of philosophy. It is the

defining moment for Schelling's own path, whereby his whole life is unified in advance by the notion of system as task. But it is also the starting point of a path leading toward fulfilling this task, toward completing the task of sys-

75. In his valuable account of the development of Schelling's philosophy of mythology and of Schelling's influence on Rosenzweig's own philosophical project, From Myth to Revelation (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Bar-Ilan University and Kibbutz Hameuchad, 1978), Moshe Schwarz claims that Rosenzweig identifies in the system-program the "unified basic direction" of Schelling's whole lifework: the systematic construction of a "new mythology" (e.g., 211-12). While there is no doubt that the idea of a new mythology is present in the system-program and that this idea fascinated Schelling over much of his career, I cannot agree with Schwarz that Rosenzweig saw in the idea of a new mythology the unifying idea of Schelling's lifework. The idea of mythology is one form of the problem of system- that is, mythology as a way to unify the idealism of the philosophers with the sensible realism of common people- but hardly the ruling form ofthat problem.



Benjamin Pollock 87

tem, the path of Hegel.77 It is Hegel, according to Rosenzweig, who truly does

become "the philosophical conqueror of the actual world," while Schelling remains "pretender" to that throne.78 If, as Rosenzweig has already told us, "we

grasp in our program the moment in the history of philosophy where for the

first time knowledge of the ultimate truth grew together with knowledge of

the whole reality," then this moment points directly to Hegel's accomplish-

ments. "Already here" in the system-program, Rosenzweig continues, "the task

was seen, without the 'how' of the solution becoming clear, which Hegel later

undertook to fulfill through the concept of dialectical method."79

The task of system is grasped in the "Oldest System-Program," Rosen-

zweig suggests, without the solution to that task being clear. Only the grasping

of system as task of philosophy makes Hegel's "solution" possible, but the task

itself is not the solution/What crystallizes in the system-program is the possi-

bility of system, the demand that system be carried out. Its actuality, however,

has to await Hegel's "dialectical method."80

The enduring significance that Rosenzweig assigns to the notion of sys-

tem for philosophy in his own time raises a remarkable point. According to

Rosenzweig, it is not Hegel's solution to the problem of system that still gov-

erns philosophy in Rosenzweig's own time, but precisely the notion of system

as task that the system-program first presents. "Outlasting the overthrow of the

Hegelian system," Rosenzweig claims, "was the common conviction formed in

it that it is the task of philosophy somehow to come to a system"; this "task,"

furthermore, "has not been forsaken, even today."81 If Rosenzweig's own time

77. See Reinhold Mayer, Franz Rosenzweig: Eine Philosophie der dialogischen Erfahrung (Munich: Kaiser, 1973), 19, where Mayer also highlights the system-program as a double starting point in German idealism: "Dieses Programm . . . erkannte Rosenzweig sowohl als den Kern Schellingscher als auch als den Ausgangspunkt Hegelscher Philosophie."

78. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 39, 37. 79. Ibid., 44.

80. Here, too, Rosenzweig may well be alluding to Ehrenberg's work. In his introduction to Hegels erstes System, Ehrenberg claimed that the Jena system shows how Hegel's dialectical method developed out of the need to overcome the finitude of Fichte's position and the divorce between abso-

lute and finite in Schelling's philosophy of identity. See, e.g., "If Fichte awoke Hegel's refutation in the concept of the absolute, Schelling awoke his refutation in the treatment of the individual stations

of the system. He finds Schelling here too immediately directed to the absolute" (xvi); and "through dialectic, Hegel escapes the Fichtean bad infinity and the Schellingian leveling of finite distinctions and sails unharmed between the destruction of the individual stations of the system and the pressing down of the absolute; the great task is solved" (xx). Ehrenberg suggests thereby that only dialectical method allows Hegel to complete the task of system, reconciling the absolute through it with the manifold of finite particulars.

81. Rosenzweig, "Das älteste Systemprogramm," 41, 44.



has inherited a notion of system, Rosenzweig suggests, it is not the system

solution that Hegel completes, but the system task of the program. This is not

to say that Schelling somehow "outlasts" Hegel. For it is only in Hegel's com-

pleted system that the notion of system as task of philosophy becomes a "com-

mon conviction"; only by being fulfilled does the task of system become uni-

versally accepted as the task of philosophy. At the same time, however, the completion of a system by Hegel obscures

an essential aspect of the nature of system. It obscures just that notion of sys-

tem as task, as the goal toward which philosophy must "grope." After Hegel,

system is taken to be a "solution," an orderly collection of answers that are

accepted or rejected as the case may be. After Hegel, system is taken to be the

organization of the "whole philosophical world between the covers of one book." What is lost, thereby, is the sense of urgency that accompanies the notion

of system as task, the sense that the philosopher is called on to unify truth and

reality, the One and All in her thinking. What is lost is the sense that philoso-

phy is not a collection of answers but a possibility to be actualized. If Rosenzweig claims that the notion of system as philosophy's task

stands obscurely in the background of all contemporary attempts to philoso-

phize, we can now suggest that the cause of the obscurity of this task is not

only the fall away from system after Hegel but also the very completion of the

task of system in Hegel's own work. But Rosenzweig's recovery of an oldest

system-program offers the possibility of bringing this notion of system as task

back into the light, of tearing it free from both the solution character of Hegel's

complete system and from the subsequent breakup of that solution before Rosenzweig's time. His discovery offers the possibility of recovering that moment when system was task and not solution, the possibility, we might say,

of recovering that first moment when system was a program. We recall the criticism leveled at Rosenzweig by subsequent scholars for

assigning a misleading title to the manuscript he found written in Hegel's hand.

The system-program, one readily sees, is not systematically constructed, offer-

ing no outline for a system, but presents, one after the next, many possibilities

for system. In doing so, it assumes system as its task, it assumes that philoso-

phy seeks to grasp the One and All as such and in their interconnection. It is indecisive, only, regarding the proper path to accomplish this task. It posits the

task of system before its readers as a demand for the immediate future and in

the form of multiple possibilities.

Yet Rosenzweig's designation of the two-page text he found as a system-

program is not at all arbitrary. Rosenzweig does not call the text an "outline" or a "presentation" of a system- terms with which Schelling characterizes


Benjamin Pollock 89

some of his own texts- but recognizes this text as a system-program. What

does the term program mean? The Greek programma is built from the term

gramma, something written down, and the préfixera, meaning "before," in

either a temporal or spatial sense. Out of its Greek origins, one can point to

two distinct meanings that the term program takes on in modern usage. Pro-

gram has come to mean a public notice, that is, something "written" that is set

"before" the public, but program has also come to mean something akin to a

prospectus, something written beforehand to give a glimpse of what is to fol-

low. This second meaning also contains a third, closely related meaning: pro-

gram as manifesto, as a declaration of what is to be done, of a task to be carried out.82

The relation of the different meanings of program to the "Oldest System-

Program" itself is striking. Insofar as Rosenzweig explicitly aims to overturn Schilling's reputation as one who has "made his development before the pub-

lic," he directs us to understand program according to the second or third meanings above. These definitions, moreover, offer an extremely precise des-

ignation of what Rosenzweig sees in this text. The system-program is not an outline of a system but a written document that sets the notion of system forth

as task into the future, a written document that sets before philosophers the

notion that system is the task of philosophy.83

If we take Rosenzweig to intend his designation of the text as a system-

program in the sense that we have uncovered, we can then recognize the "unsys-

tematic" nature of the system-program to which later scholars have pointed

and of which Rosenzweig was well aware, but we can also recognize Rosen- zweig's own designation as pointing precisely to how that system is set forth

as a task in the "program" without being fulfilled, how it demands the carry-

ing out of the task of system without specifying a single possible path that will lead to this goal.

82. See H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. H. S. Jones and Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), 2:1473, 1465, 1:358; Brockhaus Wahrig Deutsches Woerterbuch, ed. Gerhard Wahrig, Hildegard Kraemer, and Harald Zimmermann (Stutt- gart: Brockhaus, 1983), 5:215. See also The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 8:1438-39.

83. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy's and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's comments about the oldest system- program in the introduction to The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Roman- ticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 33: "A will to System is visible from the first paragraphs of the text forward. ... It is indicated, finally, by its announcement in the future, by the announcement of the 'programmatic' fact according to which the System is envisaged in the name and in the form of an exigency, a desire, or a will;

the System is not there (does not exist). It is 'to do' (the goal is 'practical' as well), but only as the last thing to do, the last task and the last work of humanity."


90 Rosenzweig* s "Oldest System-Program"

Rosenzweig's Recovery of System as Philosophical Task On the righthand margin of one of the last pages of the handwritten draft of

his "Oldest System-Program" essay, Rosenzweig added a note that includes the following reflection: "The relationship of Absolute and disciplines taken

up in the system-program shows ... a pre-connection (1) with Hegel, (2) but with late Schelling, and thereby (3) with all future philosophy insofar as it is

only possible and will only be possible on the assumption of the Idealist movement that has completed itself and overturned itself."84

Rosenzweig's comment identifies three different moments in the history

of philosophy that stretch between the date he assigned to the "Oldest System-

Program" and his own time: the moment of Hegel, the moment of the late

Schelling, and "all future philosophy," of Rosenzweig's own time and of the

future. Future philosophy is possible, Rosenzweig suggests here, only on the

assumption of the completion and overturning of the idealist movement, per- sonified, we might surmise, in Hegel and the late Schelling, respectively. But

underlying the differences between these three discrete moments is a common

identity, a "preconnection" (Vorzusammenhang) that Rosenzweig sees present

in the "Oldest System-Program" itself. Rosenzweig cites the "relationship of

the Absolute and the disciplines," the very terms with which Ehrenberg des-

ignated the One and All in his own attempt to revive the task of system. And

Rosenzweig suggests that this very question of the relation between the abso-

lute and the disciplines, the One and All, taken up through the task of system, both unites his own time with the time of German idealism and determines the

task of philosophy for the future.

There can be no doubt that by claiming the "Oldest System-Program" to

have been composed by Schelling, "Rosenzweig burdened scholarship with the problem- often inseparable from polemical interests- of who really initi- ated the genesis of the philosophy of German Idealism."85 Nevertheless, my claim has been that the important shift Rosenzweig intends to carry out in his

"Oldest System-Program" essay is not the shiftyrom Hegel to Schelling but the

shift from the dominant trends of contemporary thought back to the con-

ception of the task of philosophy that Hegel and Schelling shared. It is this

84. "Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus" (1914), Franz Rosenzweig Col- lection, AR 3001 (manuscript in Series 2, Subseries 3, Box 2, Folder 29), Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History, New York.

85. Hans-Jürgen Ciawoll, Das Verschwinden des Unginals- apropos neuerer rorscnungen zum sogenannten 'ältesten Systemprogramm' des deutschen Idealismus," Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 46 (1992): 413.


Benjamin Pollock 91

shared vision of system as the task of philosophy, I suggest, that Rosenzweig-

following Ehrenberg- wishes to retrieve for his own time. In presenting system as a task first glimpsed by Schelling but only fulfilled by Hegel, it seems to me, Rosenzweig tempers that tendency prevalent in the scholarly debate over the "Oldest System-Program"- and certainly present in his own

article- to assign ownership to ideas and conceptions of truth that arise in the history of philosophy. In retrieving the task of system for his own time,

Rosenzweig clearly owes a philosophical debt to both Hegel and Schelling. He owes them precisely because in his account these two thinkers make the

notion of system as the task of philosophy clear for the first time: Schelling insofar as he is the first to glimpse this task, and Hegel insofar as he is the

first to carry it out to completion and thereby the first to transform the notion

of system as philosophy's task into a "common conviction." But the notion of system as philosophy's task does not belong to Hegel or to Schelling; it is

not Hegelian or Schellingian. Hegel and Schelling point out the demand for and the possibility of system for philosophy, but the task of system transcends their work.

Rosenzweig recognizes the determination of system as the task of phi-

losophy in German idealism to be neither an invention nor something inher-

ited from the philosophical past but the discovery of something hidden since

the inception of philosophy. Rosenzweig suggests thereby that ever since human beings began to reflect on the nature of things, the idea of system has

been present for them, even if it has taken the discovery of system in German

idealism to make them aware of it. We might ask: What is this original idea of

system? What is the significance of the fact that an original notion of system

seems to be present, according to Rosenzweig, wherever human beings reflect?

Where did human beings get the idea of system in the first place?

If we seek to understand the relation of the system-program to an "origi-

nal" idea of system, then we must attempt to grasp Rosenzweig's designation

of this system-program as the "oldest" of its kind with the same degree of precision that we demanded of his designation of the text as a "program." We understood the fact that the text is a system-program to suggest that it is a writ-

ten text (gramma) that sets forth into the future (pro) the notion of system as

task of philosophy. One cannot help but notice, in this connection, the "writ-

ten" character of any program. It is curious, therefore, that it is precisely on account of the written character of the system-program that Rosenzweig raises

doubts concerning its origins. One recalls Socrates' Phaedrus to the effect that "written [discourse] can be fairly called an image" of "the living, breathing



discourse of the man who knows," a mere "image" that cannot "yield results

that are clear or certain."86 The system-program is in fact a mere "image" in

multiple ways. It is, first of all, a handwritten record of the "discovery" of the

notion of system that has remained present but hidden for human beings since

they began to reflect. But it is also a mere image insofar as it is a "copy" of

that text in which the discovery of system was actually announced, a copy, Rosenzweig asserts, written down by someone other than its author. The orig-

inal program is lost- and we have access to its ideas only insofar as we pos-

sess a copy.

A remarkable parallel emerges between Rosenzweig's claim for the discovery of the notion of system and his claim for the originality of the hand-

written program itself. The system-program is the text in which the notion of

system that has accompanied philosophy since its inception- hidden as it may

have been- is first copied down in writing. The handwritten manuscript itself

is likewise a copy of a lost- or hidden- original. Henrich has pointed out that

Rosenzweig's attribution of the system-program to Schelling depends almost

exclusively on the absence of the original text, and he questions whether Rosen-

zweig, who claimed that the Liepmannssohn auction house "could give no information regarding the origin of the handwritten text," truly carried out a

thorough investigation in this regard.87

Whether or not we question the sincerity of Rosenzweig's investigations

into the text's origin, Rosenzweig does seem to take multiple steps to problema-

tize the originality of the system-program. Indeed, despite the great pains taken

to demonstrate the position of the program in Schelling's early works, Rosen-

zweig's most significant scholarly move seems to be the way that he undermines

the attribution of the program to Hegel. In so doing, Rosenzweig transforms what was thought to be an original into a copy. And he would have known that

so long as the "original" program is not found, or so long as the manuscript itself is considered a copy, no one can claim with certainty that Schelling or

Hegel or Hölderlin or anyone else is its true author.

Rosenzweig problematizes the attribution of an original notion of system to any particular idealist philosopher in one additional way. In his discussion of the first line of the "Oldest System-Program," Rosenzweig makes an

astounding insinuation. We recall that Rosenzweig interprets the text's open-

86. Plato, "Phaedrus," trans. Alexander Nehamas, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 275c-276b.

87. Henrich, "Aufklärung der Herkunft, 144-46. Cf. Rosenzweig, Das älteste Systempro- gramm," 3.


Benjamin Pollock 93

ing words, "an Ethics," not as a title but as the continuation of a previous page

or set of pages. What might this previous set of pages have contained? Rosen-

zweig suggests that "the last previous part may indeed have contained a gen-

eral preparatory remark on the system of philosophy. The preparatory remark

was perhaps totally comprehensive and the short program of the system itself

added to it only as a crowning conclusion. Indeed, there is an almost unlimited

field left here for speculation."88

Rosenzweig's innocent "speculation" here should not be taken lightly. We recall the strange manner in which Rosenzweig balances the multiplicity

of system possibilities present in the program together with the specific notion

of system as task that these possibilities assume. In this unsystematic system-

program, Rosenzweig identifies the "oldest" expression of the notion of system as the task of knowing the One and All, made possible by attaining the

absolute standpoint. But in the lines just cited Rosenzweig makes a suggestion

that, in a sense, undermines the very authority that he assigns to the system-

program vis-à-vis this notion of system. For Rosenzweig suggests here that a

"totally comprehensive . . . remark on the system of philosophy" may have pre-

ceded the fragment that remains of the program. If this is the case, not only does the original manuscript, of which Hegel's is a copy, remain lost, but what

may be lost with it is nothing less than a comprehensive account of the notion

of system. This lost section, and it alone, would then be the original idealistic account of system, of which the existing program is merely a "crowning conclusion."

In the very act of recovering the task of system from obscurity, of return-

ing to the defining moment in which system is discovered, Rosenzweig insists

on the enduring hiddenness of the true notion of system. Thus how Rosen-

zweig problematizes both the originality of the manuscript in Hegel's hand-

writing and the originality of the notion of system presented in the remaining

fragment has everything to do with his recovery of system as the task of phi-

losophy for his own time. Rosenzweig reveals the meaning of system as task- and not as solution- precisely by tearing the first discovery of system as philosophy's task out of the hands of the thinker who fulfilled that task. In so

doing, he not only revives for philosophy the sense of urgency that accompanied the notion of system as task in idealism; he also raises questions about the originality of the very notion of system written down in the texts of idealism.

He makes it possible, thereby, to question the clarity with which even the




idealists grasped the original notion of system. After all, the idealists only

"discovered" system; an original idea of system has lain hidden before human

beings all along. This means, furthermore, that the philosopher who takes on

the task of system in Rosenzweig's time must aspire not to copy the copy of

this notion of system in idealism but to grasp the notion of system toward

which both Schelling and Hegel point, to grasp it, if possible, even more clearly

than did Schelling and Hegel themselves. The manner in which Rosenzweig insists on the problematic character of

the system-program's originality is itself implied in the very title Rosenzweig

assigns to the text. Rosenzweig calls the text the "oldest" system-program and

thereby grants the text a dubious attribute: old age. Rosenzweig does not call the text the "original" system-program or even the "first" system-program,

both of which would express, in a far less equivocal manner, the primacy of

the program's notion of system. As I have shown, however, Rosenzweig seems

just as intent on making the originality of this text- and its notion of system-

questionable as he does on granting it authority. By giving the text the name he

does, Rosenzweig can imply that the text is old, very old, even the "oldest"

articulation of the notion of system, and at the same time that it is not original

but remains, even in its old age, a mere copy. Even as it would represent the most authoritative written record of the origins of the task of system, such a

text could at most point philosophers of later times toward the original, unwrit-

ten notion of system of which it is a copy.

By returning to the "oldest" expression of system as the task of philoso-

phy, I have claimed, Rosenzweig recovers the possibility of system as task for

the philosophy of his own time. He thereby recovers it not merely for "his time," as if this were an abstract, impersonal category, but for the particular

philosophers of his time and, indeed, for one of those philosophers in particular.

In the "Oldest System-Program," that is, Rosenzweig recovers the task of system for himself. He says as much in a letter to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy from

June 19, 1919. Commenting on the last part of his "Oldest System-Program"

essay, Rosenzweig writes that "it contains my own 'System-program.'"89 He thereby implies that in that very closing section of his essay that both defined

system as knowledge of the One and All and offered an account of the signifi-

cance of the discovery of the task of system for the history of philosophy, he

had projected system as his own future philosophical task.

89. Franz Rosenzweig, Gridi- Briefe: Briefe an Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Inken Rühle and Reinhold Mayer (Tübingen: Bilam, 2002), 335.


Benjamin Pollock 95

When Rosenzweig made this comment, a scant two years had elapsed since his publication of the "Oldest System-Program." During this time, however, he had already written the book for which he is best known today,

The Star of Redemption. Scholars have often tried to claim that the goal of the

Star is to affirm "the breakup of totality . . . against Hegel," to show that exis-

tence is "irreducible to any totalizing thought."90 Rosenzweig himself, how-

ever, never tired of insisting that the Star would be understood only when it

was grasped as a "system of philosophy."91

90. Emmanuel Levinas, foreword to Stéphane Moses, System and Revelation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 19; Moses, System and Revelation, 97.

91. See, e.g., Franz Rosenzweig, "Das neue Denken," in Zweistromland, 140, trans. Paul Franks and Michael Morgan as "The New Thinking," in Philosophical and Theological Writings (India- napolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), 110. See also Rosenzweig to Margrit Rosenstock, November 22, 1920, in Gritli-Briefe, 686, in which Rosenzweig writes that "system of philosophy" is what "I always give now as answer to inquiries" regarding "the * of Redemption."


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