 A core element of Rosenstock-Huessy’s social philosophy, which emerged directly from his experience of the War and his subsequent ‘vision’ of the meaning of a thousand years of European wars and revolutions and political legacies, was that suffering was a fundamental component of human learning. For the most part, and particularly socially, truth was something imprinted on us by pain and trauma rather than something merely learnt by candlelight. As he said bluntly in one public lecture: ‘suffering is the only source of wisdom, and not my brain here ’ (1967, Microfilm 656, Reel 18). He develops this idea in ‘The Secret of the University’ in a manner which suggests we should be much more attentive to the catastrophic conditions under which any new philosophy emerges if we wish to see it in its proper light— philosophy being but one response to a social catastrophe which requires a great redirection of energies for either society’s survival or its complete overthrow and the establishment of a new type.