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Hermann Cohen - Kant Among the Prophets1 The Journal ofJewish Thought and Philosphy, Vol. 2, pp. 185-199 © 1993 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by licence only Hermann Cohen - Kant among the Prophets1 Gillian Rose University of Warwick, UK The selective reception by general philosophy and social scientific methodology in the European tradition of the mode of neo- Kantianism founded by Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) has con- tributed to the widespread undermining of conceptual thinking in favour of the hermeneutics of reading. To assess Cohen's thought as a reading and re-originating of the Jewish tradition involves a predicament of circularity: for the question of reading and origin is not neutral but derives from the partial reception of the object addressed. The task of reassessment changes from a methodologi- cally independent survey to a challenge posed by current thought, unsure of its modernity or post-modernity, to re-establish contact with a formative but long-forgotten part of itself. No longer solely academic, this exercise will have to confront two especially difficult aspects of Cohen's thought. First, he did not "read" Kant, he destroyed the Kantian philosophy. In its place, he founded a "neo- Kantianism" on the basis of a logic of origin, dif- ference and repetition. As a logic of validity, this neo-Kantian math- esis is often at stake when its practitioners prefer to acknowledge 1 This paper was originally prepared for the Symposium, "The Playground of Textuality: Modern Jewish Intellectuals and the Horizon of Interpretation," First Annual Wayne State University Press Jewish Symposium, held in Detroit, 20-22 March, 1988. Each of the eight participants elected to reassess an individual thinker by focussing on that thinker as a reader of the tradition - ancient and modern. In addition, we were asked to consider the following issues: 1. What is the contribution of Jewish intellectuals/writers to what is characteristically modern and post-modern in how we read texts? 2. How have Jewish intellectuals/writers in the twentieth century created new ways of thinking and employed new ways of reading? 3. How has this new way of reading re-originated what it means to be a Jew in the modern and post-modern world? 4. Have these Jewish thinkers and writ- ers - some at the centre and others at the margin of Judaism - created a new modern Jewish hermeneutic theory and tradition? 185 186 Gillian Rose themselves as the progeny of Nietzsche, Heidegger or Benjamin.2 Second, as I hope to demonstrate in this paper, Cohen's logic is inseparable from his ethics and his philosophy of Judaism. This implies that, since Cohen, the connection between the philosophy of Judaism and general philosophy has been fundamental, in a sense that has not hitherto been imagined or explored. Moses Mendelssohn - so Altmann, his biographer, relates - eventually managed to write a letter to Kant, and tell him that he could not fathom the Critique of Pure Reason.3 In Morgenstunden (1785), however, Mendelssohn refers to "the all crushing Kant [der alles zermalmende Kant]," and implores him to rebuild, "with the same spirit with which he had torn down."4 Hermann Cohen renews Mendelssohn's Judaic Enlightenment by embracing Kant's destructive method, but, paradoxically, he employs it against the critical philosophy itself. Although Cohen's invention of a philoso- phy of Being as "productive origin," developed in his three part System, remains largely unknown and is not available in English translation,5 its panlogism has released, and continues to release generations of thinkers who remain beholden to Kant from the criti- cal philosophy as such, as well as from engagement with any of the forms of critique which succeeded it.6 If, as I hope to show, Cohen's 2 In his comment "Vertaiischte Fronten,"" on the Davos Disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in March, 1929, Rosenzweig himself argued that Heidegger, successor to Cohen's chair at Marburg, furthered the spirit of Cohen's thought more than Cassirer, the more orthodox neo-Kantian (op.cit. May, 1929, in Zweistromland, GesammeIte Schriften, 3 (Dordrecht, Nijhoff, 1984), 235-7; for an English translation of the Davos Disputation, see "Appendices"" to Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 169-85). 3 Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study, London, Routledge, 1973, pp. 705,629. 4 Ibid., p. 673 trans. amended; see Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen iiber das Dasein Gottes, Dominique Bourel (ed.), Stuttgart, Reclam, pp. 5, 7. 5 For Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902), see Gillian Rose, Hegel contra Sociology, London, Athlone, 1981, pp. 1-47; for Ethik des reinen Willens (1904), see Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law, Blackwells, Oxford, 1984, pp. 25-51. The third part of Cohen's System is Asthetik des reinen Gefiihls, 1,2,1912. 6 Compare the discussion of Cohen and Marburg, neo-Kantianism by Steven S. Schwarzschild, "Authority and Reason contra Gadamer," 1981, in Studies in Jewish Philosophy: Collected Essays of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy" 1980-1985, Norbert M. Samuelson (ed.), Lanham, University Press of America, 1987, pp. 161-90; and the remarks on Cohen and jurisprudence by the same author in "An Agenda for Jewish Philosophy in the 1980s," 1980, in ibid., p. 106..
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