One Flesh

Rosenzweig (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 115) says that “Only what belongs to both man and woman belongs to all men, and everything else has only sectional interest.”

Rosenstock agrees, and elaborates: “The lawyer is the perfect type of male understanding that with the help of an analogy can docket night as a particular case of day, and so . . . eventually reduce the world of phenomena to something so like a reflection of himself that the sun, moon, and stars themselves can be related to him.” For Rosenstock, the “male” intellect “embraces the most different of things” through comparison and analogy, while “woman through fashion makes what is everlastingly the same into the most different” (120).

They are two halves of humanity. Each by itself is lame, but “by limping on both sides . . . its method of progress is almost a human one” (120).