Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy on the Body, Soul, and Spirit
Discussion
Peter Leithart:
"Soul is not mind also because, for Rosenstock, the mind is timeless while the soul is thoroughly embedded in time.
Contrary to much of the Christian tradition, and particularly to popular piety, Rosenstock-Huessy insists that the soul is not fuzzily “supernatural.” The term “soul” applies to “everything about men and women that has to do with the total duration and unity of their existence,” including “destiny, profession, marriage, children, honor, fame, disappointment, suffering, sacrifice, personal names.” Soul contrasts not only with mind, but with body and spirit. Bodily needs arise and are met within a brief span of life. We get hungry, and relieve our hunger by working so that we can buy food. Desire masters us, and we relieve ourselves in sexual encounters. These bodily needs, even when we fulfill them repeatedly over a lifetime, do not constitute a unified life-story: “No matter how many daily wages are added together, they will not equal the course of a life; no matter how many sexual acts, they will not equal a marriage.”
Concerns of the “spirit,” by contrast, “go above and beyond the time limits of souls.” Spirit unites souls together, whether in space or time. Spirit is what unites fathers to sons, and what unites my family to another: “We should understand all matters of the spirit as an inherited succession of souls.” Spirit is a “structure that reaches out” beyond the individual, to which an individual must yield if his life is going to transcend the material demands of the body. Spirit can grip a single person, but it does so “only in order to reach others through him.”Body and spirit differ in their time-spans. Bodily time-spans are short, and the time-spans of the spirit are inter-generational, and ultimately, in Rosenstock-Huessy’s Christian framework, the time-span of the Spirit stretches from creation to eschaton, forming human history into a single story. Soul is in between, uniting the time-span of the individual life. The Spirit is changeless, working to unite changing humanity and a changing world. But the soul that responds to the Spirit “must remain open to change. Obedience to the appeals of the spirit is the life of the soul.”
On Rosenstock-Huessy’s account, then, it is clear that “soul” is not “Ego.” Soul is inherently responsive, not the self-standing “I” of Descartes. Souls don’t exist in an empty landscape, but are formed in encounters with others. Souls are called forth by names, and the life of the soul has a grammatical structure. Souls are awakened first by being addressed from the outside, in the second person, as a “thou.” Only over time do souls come to speak of themselves in the first person. In the world of human souls the grammatical first person is not first in human development. Psychologically and socially, the first person is the grammatical second, the “you” addressed from the moment of birth when parents say, “You are John” or “You are Mary.” To be a soul is to say, in Rosenstock-Huessy’s counter-Cartesian formula, respondeo, etsi mutabor – “I respond, although I shall be changed.
”Speech shapes the soul, and the soul also comes to expression in speech. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the speech of the soul is not idle chit-chat or detached speculation. Speech is proclamation, command, memory, song, poetry, self-committing oaths in which the speaker is accountable for his utterance. In part, these forms of speech are squeezed out by life on the Cross, as the pressures of the Cross force speech from our souls, lest the Cross tear us apart. In part, these forms of speech are the soul’s means for achieving integrated life when all the forces of the world are tearing it in shreds. We speak in response in the agony of our suffering in order to find common life with other souls, in order to cast a line in hope to the future and to the outside.
Above all, the soul is the human capacity to survive death. A soul is born in being named and addressed, but takes shape and comes to fruition in the experience of suffering on the Cross of Reality. A soul, Rosenstock-Huessy says, “is born through the growing pains of suffering in action.” The soul is that in human beings which enables us to suffer the partial deaths inherent in life, and to rise again to a new future. Soul enables the single man to die to singleness and be reborn as a husband; it’s the power Father Zossima talks of that enables a woman to lose a child and yet love the remaining children; it’s the power that makes it possible for a student to leave playtime behind and enter the world of work and politics; it’s what makes it possible for a woman to retire from active life without bitterness or desperation. The Christian soul in particular is the soul that believes the Christian gospel, which announces that the deaths of the Cross are always gateways to new life. As it knits together the deaths and rebirths that constitute a life, soul molds what could be a fragmented life into a unified body of time."
(https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/the-soul-of-rosenstock-huessy/)