 But unlike Karl Barth or Paul Tillich, for example, who saw themselves as fusing philosophy and theology, Rosenstock-Huessy refused to see himself primarily as a philosopher or theologian—though when the term philosopher was qualified by the preceding ‘social’, he was more willing to accept that  designation.[2]  His criticisms of theology and philosophy were numerous, varied in content and highly nuanced—and hence unable to receive full treatment here. Generally, though, he thought both were, what he called, ‘second order activities’, or products of the reflective mind at ‘play’. Philosophical and theological speech trailed behind and were dependent upon the more urgent and creative acts of ‘founding’, that is, those acts which emerge out of life’s exigencies, which are epoch making ‘events’ and which are at the source of human institutions and new forms of life, and which cannot be separated from the vocabulary, or, more specifically, the shared names and foci of orientation which connect us across space and over  time.[3]  In the most philosophical of all his works, the first volume of his Soziologie, when contrasting the respective limits of theology with philosophy, he says that theology is guilty of reducing us to sinners and angels and thus not adequately accounting for our being flesh and blood, while philosophers tend to reduce us to objects and things in the dead space of the universe and ‘to mirror the objective world in their subjective world’ (1956, 286). ‘Religion,’ he says in that same section, ‘is unjust against nature and the human spirit (Geist)’; while philosophy is blind to ‘the time-endowing forces’ (‘die zeitstiftenden  Gewalten’).[4] 