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HERMANN COHEN and LEO STRAUSS Leora Batnitzky

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HERMANN COHEN and LEO STRAUSS Leora Batnitzky JJTP_addnl_186-213 4/26/06 4:00 PM Page 187 HERMANN COHEN AND LEO STRAUSS Leora Batnitzky Princeton University Introduction Leo Strauss concluded both his first and last major works with ref- erence to Hermann Cohen.1 The arguments of Strauss’s first pub- lished book—Spinoza’s Critique of Religion—are rooted in Strauss’s initial work on Cohen’s interpretation of Spinoza. Strauss’s second book— Philosophy and Law—begins and ends by declaring that Cohen is right that the philosophy of Maimonides represents “true rationalism” and more particularly that Maimonides is better understood as a Platonist than as an Aristotelian. Strauss’s last published work, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, published posthumously, ends with an essay on Cohen, which was also the introduction to the English translation of Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. Interestingly, though this essay on Cohen is the final essay in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, it doesn’t have much to say about Plato. Although Strauss claims in this essay not have read Religion of Reason for forty years, those familiar with Strauss’s project will recognize that it is from an engagement with Cohen that Strauss forms his basic reading of Maimonides and then Plato. These readings changed in emphasis throughout Strauss’s career but they nevertheless remained funda- mental to his philosophical program. In this essay, I explore Strauss’s philosophical relation to Cohen. It is not an overstatement to suggest that Cohen is responsible for Leo Strauss’s turn to medieval Jewish philosophy. The focus of this essay, however, is not primarily on the details of Cohen and Strauss’s Presented at “Hermann Cohen’s Ethics,” the University of Toronto, August 2001. The essay is part of a larger work, Leo Strauss and Emannuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, Cambridge University Press, 2006. 1 See Alan Udoff ’s introductory essay on Strauss’s relation to Cohen in Leo Strauss’s Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, edited by Alan Udoff (Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, 1991). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 JJTP 13 JJTP_addnl_186-213 4/26/06 4:00 PM Page 188 188 leora batnitzky respective readings of Maimonides.2 Instead, I would like to explore the broader hermeneutical questions involved in Strauss’s reading of Cohen. I will suggest that Cohen’s readings of Maimonides and Spinoza before him shape the hermeneutical issues that are at the very heart of Strauss’s own hermeneutical approach both in their content and in their methodological presuppositions. In a theme that connects Strauss’s concerns about Plato, Maimonides, and “contemporary” politics and ethics with Cohen’s concerns about these same issues, Strauss argues that Cohen’s thought provides pro- found insight into a number of fundamental issues. Yet Strauss argues that Cohen is right for the wrong reasons and in fact almost despite himself. I will suggest that Strauss performs his own prescription for how to read classical Jewish texts to Cohen and in so doing reverses the parameters of Cohen’s philosophical program. In this connection, the argument of this essay is two fold. First, Leo Strauss couldn’t have been Leo Strauss without Hermann Cohen. And second, in becoming Leo Strauss, Strauss has reshaped, if not possibly destroyed, the possibility of Hermann Cohen’s very project, thus bearing witness to Strauss’s claim, which he quotes from and then turns against Cohen, that “it is a question of whether such reshaping is not the best form of annihilation.”3 The relationship between Cohen and Strauss is important not only for appreciating Cohen’s enduring legacy, but also for contemplating Cohen’s cen- tral question, which subsequently became Strauss’s central question, a question that concerns the fundamental relationship between his- tory and truth. Part One: The Crisis of Historicism For Strauss, as for Cohen, the fundamental hermeneutical issue is the relation between historical interpretation and philosophy. Although they diverge significantly on the definition of “philosophy,” Strauss shares with Cohen the task of preserving an autonomous realm for 2 For a fascinating discussion of Cohen’s essay see Almuth Bruckstein’s Ethics of Maimonides (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 3 I discuss the significance of this quotation in section four. .
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