Our defense of grammar is provoked by the obvious fact that this organon, this matrix form of thinking, is not used as a universal method, hitherto….The originality of social research hinges on the existence of a method that is neither stolen from theology nor from natural science. —Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Just as Franz Rosenzweig helped me introduce the themes of Chapter 3, so his good friend Martin Buber will help me introduce the themes of this chapter.
As I noted in the Acknowledgments, in 1963 I began an ecumenical church discussion group, one intended to provide a forum for discussing thinkers like Eugen and Franz, Buber, Tillich, and Bonhoeffer, all of whom made important contributions to Christianity’s new paradigm. Early in 1965, we turned to Buber’s well-known little book I and Thou.
Fortunately, I was able to get Buber’s leading US interpreter to address one of our sessions. Professor Maurice Friedman drove up from Sarah Lawrence College and stayed at our house. It was poignant to meet Maury, as I soon called him, since his 1955 book, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue had accomplished for Buber something I and other students had so far failed to accomplish for Eugen. Soon after that book’s publication, Buber was being widely read and discussed on campuses and in study groups like ours.
I’ll never forget the revealing discussion our group had with Maury. “A third Copernican revolution” was how he described Buber’s thought, a revolution as momentous as Immanuel Kant’s had been. Kant, Maury reminded us, had reoriented Western thought with his assertion that the individual mind itself has an inner order (presumably in the way our brain is made) which determines the order it perceives in the world outside it. Now Buber went beyond Kant with his “social conception of knowledge.” The isolated individual mind cannot even begin to perceive external order until it has entered into social, dialogical relationships. The feral child, brought up by wolves, unspoken to, is speechless and hardly human.
Over a nightcap with Maury after that meeting, I had to watch myself. In his talk he’d generously acknowledged that Eugen, Franz, and others had been cofounders of “dialogical thinking.” I couldn’t be so rude as to tell my new friend that I thought this third “Copernican revolution” had really been begun by Eugen, who had more profound insights than Buber into the ways we are shaped by speech, not only personally but also historically.
Still, I managed to tell Maury what I thought was the great difference between Buber and Eugen. Buber says that any person, an independent I, can choose to have either warm dialogical I-thou relationships or cold objectifying I-it relationships, with others or with God. One does not become a fully-realized person until one chooses the I-thou relationship. As Buber puts his key insight, “as I become I, I say thou.”
Eugen, by contrast, says that there is no such thing as an independent I. One becomes an I only as one is addressed by others, and by God, as thou. The proper grammatical order is thou-I, not I-thou. It is when we hear imperatives, when we hear ourselves addressed personally as thou, that we enter into the human story. As Eugen put it, “The first form and the permanent form under which a man can recognize himself and the unity of his existence is the Imperative. We are called a Man and we are summoned by our name long before we are aware of ourselves as an Ego.”
By further contrast with Buber, Eugen says that, after hearing oneself addressed imperatively (or vocatively) as thou, and then realizing oneself as I, one then goes on to become two further grammatical persons: we and he (or she). In other words, Eugen describes us as living in a four-fold reality, a Cross of Reality, while Buber describes only a two-fold reality.
A great deal depends on whether we see our speech universe as two-fold or four-fold. As I told Maury, Eugen addressed this issue by contrasting what he called Buber’s “concept” with his “method.” And a great deal depends on whether we see the beginning of speech as I-thou or thou-I. Their order relates not only to our understanding of language but also to our understanding of God. As Eugen put it, “God can never communicate something to me as long as I think of myself as an I. God recognizes me only as a thou.”
I was afraid that Maury might be offended by my making a sharp distinction between the two thinkers but he was not. He seemed pleased that a layman would take such pains to address issues in his own world of professional scholarship.
While Eugen and Buber had their differences, Buber was quite generous in acknowledging Eugen’s work. When I started Argo Books, on our back jackets I put this strong endorsement by Buber:
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 thinker before him has done.
One of Eugen’s students, Marshall Meyer, lived at Four Wells during 1952, when he was a Dartmouth undergraduate. Marshall, who went on to become a prominent Rabbi in Buenos Aires and then New York, once told me how he drove Eugen to the train station in White River Junction, Vermont to pick up Buber when the great man came to visit Eugen in 1952. Marshall described his feelings when he watched their warm embrace on the platform. Their arms seemed to reach back to the early 1920s—to include Franz Rosenzweig, who collaborated with both of them during those postwar years.
Speech and Reality
My first published effort at describing Eugen’s work was when I wrote an introduction to Argo’s Speech and Reality, which we brought out in 1970. Eugen’s lead essay in the book, “In Defense of the Grammatical Method,” made a strong claim for his envisioned unifying science, his metanomics, contrasting its basic assumptions with those of theology and natural science. In my introduction, I myself made large claims for the author, saying that the book’s purpose was to “dethrone the Cartesian method as the basis of all science.” Reviewing the book in Commonweal magazine, the theologian John Macquarrie took me to task for claiming too much when I said that Eugen had “made an epoch-making discovery for the future of man’s knowledge about himself.” Still, Macquarrie’s appreciation of the book is evident in the clarity with which he summed up its main point:
The author believes…that the social sciences suffer from being forced into the methodological mold of the natural sciences. Anyone acquainted with the kind of psychology and sociology commonly taught in the United States today could hardly fail to agree….But where do we look for a better method? Rosenstock-Huessy suggests that we look to language. Speech is the basic social reality. Grammar, in turn, is the science which describes and analyzes the structures of language. Hence, grammar is the foundation for developing a methodology for the social sciences.
Applying the Dialogical Method
Just what would that methodology look like? Eugen made such diverse approaches to presenting his “grammatical method” that it takes a close reading to understand him. Thus, rather than quote the source, the following will be my own brief formulation.
The dialogical method, based as it is on the Cross of Reality, assumes that all the four forms of speech—imperative, subjective, narrative, and objective—are equally important and are interdependent. It follows that, in applying this method, we should attempt to understand and answer any human question in terms of its four speech-created orientations.
First, the most general way of applying the method is to examine any human question in terms of its relation: 1. To the past, to history and tradition, to its narrative. 2. To the future, to the imperatives involved. 3. To the subjective inner feelings and convictions of the participants. 4. To the objective facts—and the action now needed in the world.
Second, we can examine any question in terms of the four stages in any significant human experience. Specifically, any problem, from the collapse of a nation’s economy to an individual’s nervous breakdown, can be examined: 1. First, in relation to the future-oriented imperative(s) which set it in motion. 2. Then, how it entered a subjective phase, within the society or person. 3. Third, how it became institutionalized in historical time. 4. Finally, how it played out, objectively, in the outer world.
Third, we might ask which of these four orientations has become dominant in an individual, group or nation. Which consciousness is most evident? Is the person or group experiencing themselves as a thou, an I, a we or a they?
One is likely to find that all three of these ways of applying the dialogical method are relevant in a given situation. In any case, it is attention to all four of our speech-created orientations, and especially to their interrelation, which makes the method different from what is generally taken as the scientific method today. That method, the approach enthroned by natural science and today’s academic mind, is simply one step in the more all-embracing dialogical method. Its prized objectivity overlooks, ignores or denigrates the significance of the other three steps.
A New Method for Psychology
For a good example of applying the dialogical method, I’ll now turn to my brother-in-law, Eugen’s son Hans Huessy, who described this application in a paper he wrote in 1965—for the first public seminar on his father’s work, an event which was convened by Harvey Cox. A psychiatrist, Hans shows how the Cross of Reality would provide the key to a new method for both psychiatry and psychology.
In the first section of his paper, Hans points out that modern psychology began by imitating the natural sciences. It constructed its pyramid of knowledge by starting with the most elementary building stones, the most trivial, objective raw data. This approach puts all the emphasis on the physiological level of human functioning: seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, and sex. While much can be learned by studying our behavior on this objective or outer front, the dialogical method posits that there are three other fronts of equal importance. For example, in our prejective orientation, as we attempt to create the future, we live at the level of love and self-sacrifice. Hans says that most psychological and psychiatric theory ignores these higher levels of human performance or “explains them away as pathology.” Thus, psychoanalysis is likely to think of our personal and subjective “artistic creations as a compensation for neurotic complexes." Similarly, "heroic deeds are explained as defenses against psychopathology.”
Hans then shows how the Cross of Reality reveals the normal and desirable sequence of any human experience. Emotional disturbance may be described as getting stuck in one particular phase or the result of an attempt to skip one. The dialogical method reveals four basic phases in any significant experience: 1. Inspiration 2. Communication 3. Institutionalization, finally, 4. History. We see this sequence when we fall in love and get married. Our falling in love cannot be an objective or logical experience. We must be swept off our feet, inspired. Then we enter a subjective phase in which we must communicate our new relationship through love letters, singing, and talking. In the third phase, institutionalization, when we marry before witnesses, our experience has begun to enter recorded history. Finally, usually after our first child is born, we experience ourselves as an objective family unit. In each phase we had new and different emotions.
Hans says, “I would view these meaningful experiences as tying up considerable emotional energy, to borrow from psychoanalytic theory, and I think it is essential for us to see these experiences through all four stages so that this emotional energy becomes freed and available for new experiences.” As we go through any important experience, the movement from one phase to the next always involves some change, and change is usually accompanied by pain or “psychiatric symptoms.” But such symptoms are not necessarily indicators of pathology. Psychiatrists may do positive harm by mistaking the symptoms of healthy change for psychiatric illness.
Finally, Hans challenges Freudian psychology’s assumption that one begins with the ego or I and then works out to include additional members of the social group. The I, he says, is not the first form in which we come to consciousness of ourselves. As a child, and even later in life, we become a subjective I only after having first been addressed vocatively as thou. “One might say that children are spoken into membership in the human race. They are not born into such membership.” In other words, our ego does not produce itself. It is produced by the vocative or imperative address of our parents, our society, and our tradition. Since Hans’s specialty is child psychiatry, he is able to document these points. Children, he says, learn the pronoun I last. Autistic children do not learn to use I until very late in their development.
The Four Breakdowns of Society
Turning now from the individual to society as a whole, the Cross of Reality becomes increasingly understandable as a method when we realize that peace in society is constantly threatened by a breakdown on one of the four fronts created by our speech orientations. To be specific, an analysis of society reveals that it always faces four speech-related threats:
1. Revolution–A breakdown on the future front; loss of respect for the past; expressed as an excess of imperative or future speech. The antidote for revolution is to create respect, a loyalty to the past which enables a future to be created.
2. Anarchy–A breakdown on the inner front; loss of respect for objective, exterior order; an excess of inward or subjective speech. The good which cures this ill is unanimity, unity or harmony.
3. Decadence–A breakdown on the past front; loss of faith in the future; an excess of backward-looking speech related to the past. As I’ve said above, decadence is the inability of one generation to communicate future imperatives to the next. The corrective for decadence is faith, which is not a belief in the past but in the future.
4. War–A breakdown on the outer front; loss of any interior agreement; an excess of speech which objectifies the other. The good which counteracts it is government, the efficient organization of territory.
It follows that a new discipline employing the dialogical method would see the creation of peace on these four fronts of life as its necessary purpose. Thus, this higher sociology, this metanomics, would not be objective. It would break free of Cartesian rationalism, the isolated and doubting I coldly observing the it. It would correlate and interpret our poignant relationships with future and past times as well as with our inward and outward spaces.
The Lamina Quadrigemina
Thus far, I’ve said that that the dialogical method derives from the patterns of speech. Now I’d like to suggest that these patterns are likely caused by different functions within the human brain. Earlier I discussed Pascal’s question: how can a body be united to a spirit? That question will surface again in what I’m about to say about the lamina quadrigemina, a small structure within the human brain. Eugen had no problem with imagining that this structure might be the physical part of the brain that sorted out the four basic kinds of speech, thus making us conscious of the Cross of Reality.
I recall how Eugen told us about the lamina quadrigemina in a lecture. It was 1947 and he’d recently received a letter from an old friend, the doctor Richard Koch, who was Franz Rosenzweig’s doctor. In his letter, Koch said that his wartime operations on soldiers with damage to their brains had suggested to him that the lamina quadrigemina, a four-part organ at the base of the brain, might act as a brake and sorting center for our reception of speech. This primitive organ is found in all vertebrates—and its function has never been clear. Koch suggested that the quadrigemina might provide the anatomical proof for the Cross of Reality. As Eugen reported all this, in great detail and with great enthusiasm, it truly sank in on me—how grounded in matter Eugen perceived both speech and spirit to be. He was willing to imagine a particular physical organ as the place where a body can be united to a spirit! To borrow Gary Zukav’s term, that organ would be “the seat of the soul.”
Whether or not the lamina quadrigemina are proven to be the place where the four forms of speech are sorted, I think it’s almost certain that brain studies will eventually determine that particular parts of the brain enable us to perform that critical function.
The Language Instinct
Noam Chomsky and his MIT colleague Stephen Pinker (now at Harvard) have written widely-read books which suggest that our brains do, indeed, contain something like those sorting organs, with the corollary that the patterns of grammar are built into us. Actually, I discussed Eugen’s work, and the lamina quadrigemina specifically, with Chomsky when he came to Dartmouth in 1972—to give a talk against the war in Vietnam. Chomsky’s widely-accepted thesis that the patterns of grammar were hard-wired into us had obvious similarities to Eugen’s ideas. Chomsky seemed quite interested, gave me his address, and I fired off a copy of Speech and Reality to him. I wasn’t too surprised when I heard nothing further. I’m afraid Eugen loses most academics the moment he mentions God.
In his 1994 book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Pinker reconfirms Chomsky’s thesis and supports some of the points I’ve been making here—about the universality of grammar and how it shapes the patterns of our thought. He’s more interesting than those anthropologists who think of language simply as a tool, but there’s not a hint that he sees beyond the technical aspects of his subject. That speech has anything to do with spirit—or, God forbid, the Holy Spirit—is not the kind of thinking that flies at MIT.
Ten Theses on Language
Since we’re at the end of the first four chapters, all aimed at introducing the dialogical thinking embodied in the Cross of Reality, I’ll now sum up their points as ten theses on language:
1. There are four basic kinds of speech: 1. Imperative 2. Subjective 3. Narrative, and 4. Objective.
2. In any significant human experience we experience those kinds of speech in that order.
3. Each kind of speech relates to a different personal or group orientation toward times and spaces: imperative toward the future; subjective toward our “inner space,” narrative toward the past, and objective to the outside world.
4. Each kind of speech also relates to a particular person of grammar: the imperative to thou; the subjective to I; the narrative to we; the objective to he, she or they.
5. When we examine the pattern of those speech orientations and grammatical persons, we see that they form what might be called a “Cross of Reality,” at the center of which any person or group finds themselves.
6. A corollary to the axiom of the cross is that its future orientation is the most important; as we hear vocatives or imperatives, we are moved to respond.
7. What we call the human psyche, or soul, is formed as it lives through the “crucial” speech experience posited by the Cross of Reality.
8. When we realize that the Cross of Reality shows the essential patterns of language in the human mind, we can also perceive that it makes visible a dialogical method for the human sciences. It tells us that any question should be examined in the light of all four orientations and especially we should take into account the tensions between each.
9. The Cross of Reality depicts the action of high speech in any person or group; such speech establishes relations with others, creates peace, and tells the truth. And such speech can be recognized as the way spirit is present and active in human beings. Thus, we can call speech the body of the spirit.
10. In religious terms, we can come to see that high speech is the embodiment of what Christians call the Holy Spirit. It follows that the Trinitarian God is not something in which we need to believe; that God is already within us, as the very source of our humanity. To be specific, the theological categories of Father (Creation), Son (Redemption), and Spirit (Revelation) relate, respectively, to three kinds of speech and their related grammatical persons. Thus, Father relates to narrative speech of the past and we; Son relates to subjective speech of the inner person and I; Spirit relates to imperative speech toward the future and thou.
I submit that all ten of those theses, when taken together, establish the dialogical method as a fundamentally new way of thinking about the human reality. From elementary observations about language and grammar, the inner person and the outer world, they proceed to the realization that high speech is the embodiment of the Holy Spirit. If we embody that Spirit, it follows that we also embody the Trinitarian God.
Those theses reveal the Cross of Reality as an image of how the Spirit works in us and how God speaks in us. Thus, it’s a thoroughly panentheistic image, one that reinforces Christianity’s new paradigm, as described early on by Bonhoeffer and Tillich—and more recently by Borg and Spong.
In the next chapter, we’ll hear Eugen’s voice in Out of Revolution. That book, as it describes how new kinds of inspired and impassioned speech have formed and reformed us over a millennium, enables us to see how the Holy Spirit is at work in our history.
To continue, click: Chapter 5 The Revolutions of the Christian Era