ABSTRACT
Franz Rosenzweig’s life-long attempt to create a new thinking might be understood in Nietzschean terms as an attempt to philosophize with a star: a child of a stormy marriage between philosophy and Judaism. He, who was born in 1886 in Kassel in a Jewish assimilated family that preserved only minimal connection to the synagogal life, began his intellectual career as a scholar of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to whom he devoted his doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Freiburg, Hegel und der Staat. It is easy to see why Nietzsche should be an important precursor for Rosenzweig, for it was indeed his “hammer philosophy” that first gave voice to the singular living subject, by violently breaking the systematic wholes and separating the self from any gregarious sense of belonging. Rosenzweig, who knew thoroughly the whole tradition of German Idealism, follows Hegel’s adversary, Friedrich Schelling, who, rebelling against the former’s systematic obsessions, postulated a more open-ended and dynamic “narrative philosophy”.
