Before they were both internationally renowned philosophers, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig were young German soldiers fighting in World War I corresponding by letter and forming the foundation of their deep intellectual friendship. Collected here, this correspondence provides an intimate portrait of their views on history, philosophy, rhetoric, and religion as well as on their writings and professors. Most centrally, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig discuss, frankly but respectfully, the differences between Judaism and Chiristianity and the reasons they have chosen their...

Endorsements: ""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....

""When Thomas Paine exclaimed: These are the times that try mens souls,"" Rosenstock-Huessy noted, Paine ""did not mean mens bodies or mens minds. And we know it."" In this book devoted to knowledge of that mysterious entity, ""soul,"" which neither philosophers nor psychologists will have anything to do with, Rosenstock-Huessy gives soul essential, practical meaning. Without recourse to anything mystical or transcendental or merely poetic, he assures us of the reality of the individual soul for healthy human beings, and connects it to his larger work on an entirely new grammar that elevates...