  Rosenzweig understands the task of system to entail grasping and articulating “the All”—the whole of what is—in its identity and difference, that is, as both a single unity and as the most comprehensive diversity of particulars. While he sees the quest for knowledge of the All as rooted in the early questions of the pre-Socratics, he identifies the German Idealists as those who “discovered” system as the explicit overarching task of philosophy. Committed as Rosenzweig remains, in the Star, to this systematic task, he breaks from German Idealism perhaps most dramatically in the standpoint out of which he insists systematic knowledge is to be attained. In the systems of German Idealism, the philosopher seeks to attain the standpoint of the Absolute—the very Absolute out of which all particular beings are understood to have unfolded dialectically. According to Rosenzweig, such Absolute Idealism fails to grasp particulars in their particularity, because it assumes the fundamental unity of all particulars within the Absolute from the start. In contrast, Rosenzweig seeks to grasp the “All”, in the Star, not from an Absolute standpoint, but rather from the standpoint of the finite individual human being whom he finds situated in the middle of the course of the All, a course Rosenzweig understands as beginning in particularity, and advancing through the relations between particulars to an ultimate redemptive realization of unity. One may read the very first sentence of the Star—“All knowing of the All begins in death, the fear of death”—as a programmatic announcement of Rosenzweig’s basic quarrel with German Idealism over the standpoint out of which systematic knowledge may be attained: an Absolute standpoint that claims to overcome the limits of human finitude will not yield true knowledge of the All. Only a proper recognition of the unique character of the individual mortal human being holds the promise for systematic knowledge.