I am an Impure Thinker

by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, W H Auden (Foreword by)

Overview

The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund
For four decades, the Fund operated a publishing wing, Argo Books, which published many of Rosenstock-Huessy's English-language works and unpublished manuscripts as books. (The German Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Gesellschaft undertook similar efforts with the German-language works; the Dutch group Respondeo published a number of translations into Dutch.) The Fund recently decided to pass on responsibility for Rosenstock-Huessy's works to another publisher, and his English-language works are now available on Amazon, sold by Wipf and Stock of Eugene, OR, who also publish Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow.)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620324455
Publisher:	Argo Books
Publication date:	04/08/2013
Series:	Argo Book
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) was a sociologist and social philosopher who, along with his close friend Franz Rosenzweig, and Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber, was a major exponent of speech thinking or dialogicism. The central insight of speech thinking is that speech or language is not merely, or even primarily, a descriptive act, but a responsive and creative act, which is the basis of our social existence. The greater part of Rosenstock-Huessy's work was devoted to demonstrating how speech/language, through its unpredictable fecundity, expands our powers and, through its inescapably historical forming character, also binds them. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non-observant Jewish family, he converted to Christianity in his late teens. He met and married Margrit Hussy in 1914. Rosenstock-Huessy served as an officer in the German army during World War I. He then pursued an academic career in Germany as a specialist in medieval law, which was disrupted by the rise of Nazism. In 1933, after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he immigrated to the United States where he began a new academic career, initially at Harvard University and then at Dartmouth College, where he taught from 1935 to 1957.

Table of Contents

Foreword W.H. Auden 1

Editors' Introduction iii

1 Farewell to Descartes 1

2 The Soul of William James 20

3 Modern Man's Disintegration and the Egyptian Ka 35

4 The Four Phases of Speech 53

5 The Quadrilateral of Human Logic 65

6 The Twelve Tones of the Spirit 69

7 Heraclitus to Parmenides 77

8 Teaching Too Late, Learning Too Early 91

9 When the Four Gospels Were Written 115

10 Tribalism 120

11 Polybius, or the Reproduction of Government 136

12 Immigration of the Spirit 165

13 Metanoia: To Think Anew 182

Appendix

Biography of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy 195

Available Works 203

Index 211

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The historical nature of man is the aspect of reality about which we have been basically and emphatically instructed in the epoch of thought beginning with Hegel . . . Rosenstock-Huessy has concretized this teaching in so living a way as no other teacher before him has done."
Martin Buber

"Rosenstock-Huessy continually astonishes one by his dazzling and unique insights."
WH.Auden

"He was a thinker of startling power and originality in my view an authentic genius of whom no age produces more than a handful."
Page Smith

"Rosenstock-Huessy's is a powerful and original mind. What is most important in his work is the understanding of the relevance of traditional value to a civilization still undergoing revolutionary transformations; and this contribution will gain rather than lose significance in the future."
Lewis Mumford

Editorial Reviews

""The historical nature of man is the aspect of reality about which we have been basically and emphatically instructed in the epoch of thought beginning with Hegel . . . Rosenstock-Huessy has concretized this teaching in so living a way as no other teacher before him has done."" Martin Buber ""Rosenstock-Huessy continually astonishes one by his dazzling and unique insights."" WH.Auden ""He was a thinker of startling power and originality in my view an authentic genius of whom no age produces more than a handful."" Page Smith ""Rosenstock-Huessy's is a powerful and original mind. What is most important in his work is the understanding of the relevance of traditional value to a civilization still undergoing revolutionary transformations; and this contribution will gain rather than lose significance in the future."" Lewis Mumford

From the Publisher