Franz Rosenzweig
(
December 25
,
1886
?
December 10
,
1929
) was a German Jewish theologian and philosopher.
- Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting.
- The Star of Redemption
(1921), p. 3.
- Cognition is autonomous; it refuses to have any
answers
foisted on it from the outside. Yet it suffers without protest having certain
questions
prescribed to it from the outside (and it is here that my heresy regarding the unwritten law of the university originates). Not every question seems to me worth asking. Scientific curiosity and omnivorous aesthetic appetite mean equally little to me today, though I was once under the spell of both, particularly the latter. Now I only inquire when I find myself
inquired of
. Inquired of, that is, by
men
rather than by scholars. There is a man in each scholar, a man who inquires and stands in need of answers. I am anxious to answer the scholar
qua
man but not the representative of a certain discipline, that insatiable, ever inquisitive phantom which like a vampire drains whom it possesses of his humanity.
- in
Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought
(1961/1998), p. 97