  There are two exceptions to Rosenzweig’s turn away from philosophy proper. In 1925, Rosenzweig wrote an essay, “The New Thinking,” that offered an overview of the systematic structure and insights of the Star and which situated the book within the movement of the “new thinking” to which Rosenzweig understood himself to have contributed. Moreover, in the summer of 1921, the year the Star was published, Rosenzweig was commissioned by the Frommann Publishing House to write a popular introduction to his philosophy. He produced “The Little Book of Healthy and Sick Human Understanding,” a title which puns on the German term for “common sense,” “gesunder Menschenverstand,” in order to imply that philosophy becomes sick when it deviates from the insights of common sense. Rosenzweig ended up so dissatisfied with the book that he refused to have it published, but Nahum Glatzer edited and published the book some forty years after it was written, first in an English translation and subsequently in the German original. The “little book” is noteworthy for the story it tells about a person who becomes paralyzed by philosophical questioning: he cannot walk for fear there is no real “ground”; his eyes won’t see for fear all is a dream; his hands won’t grasp for lack of any ultimate reason to do so.  Rosenzweig explains this paralysis as a result of an unhealthy reaction—characteristic of philosophy—to the human experience of wonder. In moments of awareness of ourselves, of others, of the world, we may be struck by wonder in the midst of life. When we allow life to unfold in time, Rosenzweig suggests, such wonder is resolved on its own: those relations which are the source of our wonder become part and parcel of the actual life we live. But philosophy, Rosenzweig claims, cannot wait for wonder to resolve itself in the course of life.  Moreover, in the way that it questions the source of its wonder—“what is this x?”—philosophy ends up removing itself, and the source of its wonder, from the flow of life.  Any answers it thereby receives for its questions no longer correspond to the very course of actual life in which alone they would be meaningful.