~Franz Rosenzweig
It is, of course, necessary that man step out one day in his life; he must one day devoutly fetch down the precious vial; in his dreadful poverty, he must have felt at some time lonely and adrift from the whole world, standing for a night facing the nothing. But the earth wants him back. He may not drink up the brown juice that night.
For him, there is reserved another exit from the impasse of the nothing than this fall into the yawning of the abyss. Man should not cast aside from him the fear of the earthly; in his fear of death he should—stay. He should stay.
He should therefore do nothing other than what he already wants: to stay. The fear of the earthly should be removed from him only with the earthly itself. But as long as he lives on earth, he should also remain in fear of the earthly. And philosophy dupes him of this should when around the earthly it weaves the thick blue haze of its idea of the All.
For clearly: an All would not die, and in the All, nothing would die. Only that which is singular can die, and everything that is mortal is solitary. This, the fact that philosophy must exclude from the world that which is singular, this exclusion of the something is also the reason why it has to be idealistic.
For, with its denial of all that separates the single from the All, “idealism” is the tool with which philosophy works the obstinate material until it no longer puts up resistance against the fog that envelops it with the concept of the One and the All.
Once all things are enveloped in this fog, death would for certain be swallowed up, if not in eternal victory, then at least in the one and universal night of the nothing. And here lies the ultimate conclusion of this wisdom: death would be—nothing. But actually, this is not an ultimate conclusion, but a first beginning, and death is truly not what it seems, not nothing, but a pitiless something that cannot be excluded.
Even from out of the fog with which philosophy envelops it, its harsh cry resounds unremittingly; philosophy would have liked to swallow it into the night of the nothing, but it could not break off its poisonous sting; and the fear man feels, trembling before this sting, always cruelly belies the compassionate lie of philosophy.