Reverberations of Hermann Cohen in Contemporary Jewish Philosophy
Second annual panel of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy
at the
American Philosophical Association
Atlanta, Dec. 1996
Michael Zank
©1996
Abstract
Among the most outstanding recent works by American authors on Jewish philosophy are the books God of Abraham by Lenn E. Goodman (Vanderbilt University), The Election of Israel by David Novak (University of Toronto), and Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation by Norbert Samuelson (Temple University).1
The work of these thinkers can be related, each in his own way, to the work of Hermann Cohen, a philosopher whose writings reinvigorated Jewish philosophy as an independent discipline and as an intellectual challenge at the turn of the 20th century. This relation can be one of an intellectual influence, as explicitly recognized by Samuelson and implied by Goodman, or one in which Cohen becomes the major position with which to disagree as in the case of Novak. This pride of place of a somewhat obscure German neo-Kantian among the inspirations for contemporary American Jewish philosophers invites some reflection. It seems advised to highlight just how it is possible that such diverse thinkers can draw on the same source. We need to clarify how Cohen is understood by these authors, as well as consider why he has come back into fashion after an eclipse of three quarters of a century. I shall argue that, as often in the case of philosophical reappropriations, Novak, Samuelson, and Goodman are less interested in Cohen-scholarship rather than in picking up a few of the threads disrupted by certain events and developments in political and intellectual history. Thus, Novak misreads Cohen as a Kantian and fails to represent the systematic intentions of Cohen's philosophy accurately. Still, he has a clear understanding of Cohen's religious thought including some of its limitations. Samuelson's claim to apply a Cohenian "method" to the exposition of the idea of creation in Jewish thought likewise seems to force a mold onto Cohen which is not necessarily borne out by the text. Yet he applies Cohenian ideas quite creatively and often in a congenial way to the philosophical liberty of his master. Finally, Lenn Goodman's work reintroduces in a contemporary idiom Cohen's defense of "ethical monotheism" without having to repristinate his source.
Some of the dialectics of traditionalism and innovation within the context of the construction of contemporary Jewish thought will be brought out in this analysis.
Introduction
When Hecat¾us of Abdera called the Jews a "race of philosophers" he could not possibly have known how apt a characterization he was giving. Hebrew tradition associates "love of wisdom" with the fear and love of God, a God who is known primarily through the words of his prophets, as recorded in Scripture. Just as the prophets presented God viva voce, Scripture in Judaism is cantillated in the tune determined by the masoretic tradition and varied according to local custom. There is no dead letter here, no letter without aspiration and musical feeling, only a perpetual song which has no purpose other than praise of the holy name.
Jewish philosophy is not a folktune, but rather a blend of Greco-European and Byzantian, Irano-Babylonian, Hispano-Muslim and Christian-European traditions with the prophetic and rabbinic heritage that gives this pursuit its distinctive features. Harking back to its origins, Jewish philosophy plays variations on a single cantus firmus: God, a single God, who reigns supreme, ho hypsistos, as heard by the ancient Greek listener, the LORD of All.
At the end of the twentieth century, no less than in the past, Jewish philosophy, the "love of wisdom" has no lesser task than assembling the best musical repertoire available, representing, to the best of the ability of each individual thinker, the most compelling logic, esthetic, and esthetic principles to be amalgamated into a new philosophical song of praise. Jewish philosophy, as Norbert Samuelson succinctly put it, is a commandment. The philosopher is, hence, Beethoven as a Levite, a virtuoso in service of liturgy, in the sense of leiturgia, meaning an offering of gratitude.
Not every composition is successful in the sense that it will enter into a canon of Psalms and compositions that will captivate the imagination of the next generation or even the masses. Yet every serious work of Jewish philosophy deserves to be recognized as an expression of faith: a philosophical faith in the perennial value of the idea of God discovered by the Hebrew prophets.
We are in good company, then, when we gather around to argue about and discuss three new songs that praise the God of Creation, the God of Abraham, and the God of Israel, respectively. Since the subjects of these works differ it may be useful to juxtapose them with a fourth Jewish philosophy, a Kontrapunkt so to speak, which will aid us in giving our discussion a certain historical point of reference. The fourth position, as indicated before, is the Jewish philosophy of Hermann Cohen. This juxtaposition is not arbitrary. While the works under review give us an opportunity to reflect on Jewish philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, Cohen's work marks either the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth with respect to Jewish philosophy as well as with respect to the politics of Jewish philosophy. Let me illustrate briefly what I mean by this kind of historical periodization.
The history of Jewish philosophy has its epochs as much as has any other cultural pursuit. More often than not, transitions from one epoch to another are marked by the appearance of certain books that signify the culmination of an epoch, the beginning of a new one, or both. Periodization of this kind, however, must take into account the delay that often occurs between the writing of a book, its publication, and the effect it has on its readers. A new epoch may be seen as beginning with any one of such events. In the case of Schleiermacher's Reden, for example, its effect is more clearly discernible in the wake of its centennial rather than with their original publication. Only in 1899 were conditions such that Schleiermacher's theory of religion found open ears among the newly emerging school of the study of religion. Just as Schleiermacher himself was eclipsed by Hegel and needed to be retrieved by Dilthey and Otto, thus, for example, Kant had been eclipsed by Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling and was in need of retrieval following the temporary advance of materialism and empiricism in the mid-19th century. The Kant who was retrieved in the 1860's and 70's, however, had as much and as little resemblance to Kant's Urtext as had Ottos' Schleiermacher with the author of the Dogmatik.
Hermann Cohen
Such ambiguities between an author's intentions and the Wirkungsgeschichte of his or her books are involved when we deal with Hermann Cohen and the history of modern Jewish philosophy. Students of Continental philosophy know Cohen (1842-1918) as a neo-Kantian, founder of the Marburg school, colleague of the Plato-scholar and fellow neo-Kantian Paul Natorp, as well as teacher and friend of diverse thinkers, politicians, theologians, and poets such as Ortega y Gasset, Ernst Cassirer, Nicolai Hartmann, Rudolf Bultmann, and Karl Barth, Kurt Eisner, Viktor Adler, Eduard Bernstein, and Boris Pasternak. What attracted such a crop of students to the provincial town of Marburg, and to the strangely arcane seminars of this small but imposingly emphatic Jewish professor of philosophy was, as Franz Rosenzweig once put it, that he was not merely a professor but a "philosopher."
Cohen's personal magnetism was strong, so strong, in fact, that the Marburg-school collapsed with Cohen's retirement in 1912. He established a second following in Berlin where he taught at the Lehranstalt fŸr die Wissenschaft des Judentums (part-time since 1904 and full-time after 1912) among young Jews seeking orientation from the Jewish thinker in the ideological confusion of the time. Cohen's philosophical legacy, the body of intellectual work, was later ceremoniously put to rest in the famous confrontation between Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos in 1929. Without the voice of the man, his works, albeit a record of his speech since he dictated them into his wife's feather beginning with the Logic of Pure Cognition (1902), failed to exert the effect that he had hoped to achieve. Similarly, Cohen's Jewish philosophy wained in influence immediately after his death which coincided with the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Jewish renaissance, a movement that regarded Cohen either as the representative of a despicable adaptation to the Gentile world, an undignified sell-out of ethnic distinctness, etc, or as the feeble harbinger of sentiments of Jewish self-assertion more aptly expressed by Buber, Rosenzweig, and others.
Cohen's systematic philosophy is contained in two sets of works which are clearly distinguished in form, although they are more intimately related than meets the eye of the superficial beholder. The first set of philosophical works consists of the trilogy Kants Theorie der Erfahrung,2 Kants BegrŸndung der Ethik,3 and Kants BegrŸndung der €sthetik.4 The names and contents of these works seem to put Cohen at the heart of the philosophical movement "back to Kant" (as the otherwise insignificant Otto Liebmann put it), a movement which coincided historically with the duration of the Second German Reich. The association of Cohen's philosophical program with a movement of Kant repristination and Kant philology has long cast a veil over Cohen's more original systematic intentions, even though his deviations from Kant were immediately noted and quoted against him by those who wished to exclude him from the realm of historically responsible Kant scholarship.5
Any appreciation of Cohen's work must be based on reading his early trilogy against the more developed philosophical program as it is presented in his mature work, consisting of yet another trilogy, namely Logic of Pure Cognition,6 Ethics of Pure Will,7and Esthetics of Pure Feeling.8 In addition, one needs to take into account substantive changes in subsequent editions of the "Kant trilogy," as well as a number of smaller works that served Cohen as means of clarification for his program.9 Fortunately, with respect to the program of his theoretical philosophy, this task has been paradigmatically undertaken quite recently by Geert Edel in a Habilitationsschrift called Von der Vernunftkritik zur Erkenntnislogik. Die Entwicklung der theoretischen Philosophie Hermann Cohens [From a Critique of Reason to the Logic of Cognition. The Development of Hermann Cohen's Theoretical Philosophy] (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber, 1988). I believe a translation of this book into English would go a long way towards clarifying Hermann Cohen's position in the history of Continental philosophy and could open the way towards the kind of renewed interest in this thinker as a serious contemporary which, so far, as been limited to a few German, Swiss, Italian, and Jewish philosophers.10
Cohen's philosophical works appeared over a period of roughly 40 years and, thus, were read by few of his contemporaries as a coherent opus. An additional difficulty which still confronts us today is his style, convoluted in his earlier and cryptrically terse in his later works, which can sometimes discourage even the most sympathetic reader.11 Furthermore, the historical and philosophical developments that lie between ourselves and Cohen's time and situation and our own have done much to prevent serious engagement with this thinker who seems, to most, quite rightfully forgotten. The history of philosophy is, after all, based on an interpersonal continuity that reaches from teacher to student. The continuity and development of philosophical thought is not straightforward, and can be disrupted by political events and ideological movements that cause philosophical fashions to change considerably. Philosophy is merely human and, hence, fallible.
Cohen's philosophy, packaged as it was in a neo-Kantian idiom, fell by the wayside when Heidegger and others declared the end of systematic philosophy in the Kantian mold. There seemed no need for a point-by-point account of Cohen's ideas once the whole project had been declared passŽ. Only now do we seem to be ready to work towards a more balanced and objective appreciation of the intentions, strengths and shortcomings of a program which has even begun to be brought into a promising dialogue with analytical philosophy.12
The notable exception to the general philosophical ignorance of and disinterest in Cohen has been in the field of Jewish philosophy. This is not the place to narrate the whole sweep of the history of appropriation of Cohen's philosophy of religion in the broader context of Jewish religious thought.13 A few matters need to be pointed out, however, in order to provide a context for the discussion of Cohen's thought in contemporary Jewish philosophy.
It is important to remember that Jewish philosophy is a problematic discipline in some senses. First, the setting of Jewish philosophy is not limited to the institution of the university and hence to a certain degree independent of its dynamics. Second, due to its position on the fence between classical Jewish sacred literature and the philosophical tradition, modern Jewish philosophy in particular is always in greater need of Jewish authentication than, say, the most trivial neo-kabbalistic tract distributed on a fine day on Fifth Avenue. At the same time, by virtue of its association with a particular tradition of faith, Jewish philosophy is also in greater need of philosophical justification than, say, the most trivial historical essay on a second rate 20th-century philosopher as long as it appears in the Zeitschrift fŸr philosophische Forschung or another such prestigious journal.
Judging by name recognition among the ranks of Jewish philosophers, Hermann Cohen ranks among the most important Jewish thinkers of the modern period. Unfortunately, according to the mainstream of 20th-century authors in this field, Cohen achieved this standing by doing what he himself would never have claimed to have done. Based on the biased and faddish reading given by Franz Rosenzweig, canonized by Julius Guttmann and Shmuel Hugo Bergmann and perpetuated by Nathan Rotenstreich and others, Cohen is widely believed to have abandoned his own system of critical idealism to embrace a proto-existentialist type of religious philosophy that placed the concrete subject at the center of all philosophy. Despite the fact that Rosenzweig was much too intelligent to back up this reading with quotations (he rather referred to his personal and allegedly intimate knowledge of Cohen's true intentions, all this in an essay composed when Cohen could no longer defend himself from this kind of friendly usurpation), the portrait of Cohen as a baal t'shuvah corresponded so much to the self-image of the portraitists that it went largely unchallenged. Hence, just as the historiography of general philosophy obliterated Cohen as a neo-Kantian, Jewish philosophical historiography reinvented him as a kind of Elijah/John the Baptist to the messianic age of Jewish existentialism and speech-thinking; the harbinger of a new epoch.
Neither of these caricatures are completely false. Rather, as all successful caricatures, they are based on exaggerated contours that mean to typify and make recognizable a few, seemingly central, characteristics. Cohen is neither outside the orbit of neo-Kantianism nor are such elements entirely absent from his Ïuvre that would justify positioning his philosophy of religion squarely at the intersection between critical idealism and existentialism. Today we have moved beyond these categorizations. We are no longer concerned with defending Kant, nor does existentialism command the same kind of allegiance that it acquired as a liberation from the neo-Kantian reduction of philosophy to a noematic reflection of validity taking its cue from the natural sciences. As Jewish philosophy moved beyond the German context and found a new center in the post-World-War-II United States, students of Jewish philosophy needed to explore new approaches to Jewish thought that allowed them also to take a fresh look at their predecessors. One scholar in particular, himself of German Jewish extraction, contributed to a reopening of Cohen's case by persistently gnawing away at the standard characterization of Cohen as someone who left behind philosophical criticism to embrace the Jewish religion. I am referring to the late Steven S. Schwarzschild whose influence on the contemporary American revival of interest in Hermann Cohen can hardly be overestimated.14 Among the merits by which he attracted and influenced many of the major players in American Jewish philosophy today, I would like to emphasize the following. 1. Schwarzschild set a high standard of historical and philological accuracy in the study of the relevant sources and historico-philosophical contexts. 2. He was one of the few American Jewish scholars who, throughout his career, remained keenly aware of European developments in the study of Cohen and neo-Kantianism and was in touch with the scholarly community responsible for those developments. 3. Schwarzschild also was persistent in his emphasis on the ethical core of Cohen's philosophy which hardly changed between the publication of the second part of his system (Ethics of Pure Will, 1904) and his late philosophy of religion. 4. By pointing to Cohen as the most rigorous voice in the Jewish philosophical chorus of ethical monotheists, Schwarzschild also set the tone of the contemporary Jewish philosophical agenda in the United States, whether it is sung in a modern or a postmodern mode.15
To be sure, Schwarzschild often exaggerated in his attempt to erase the specific speculative content religion acquires in Cohen's system where it is coordinated with ethics without being sublated into it. He went overboard in his attempt to obliterate all traces Rosenzweig had left in the minds of the readers of his introductory essay to the 1924 edition of Cohen's Jewish writings. By making the congruence between ethics and religion in Cohen into an identity, Schwarzschild lost the ability to describe the specific task Cohen assigned to the philosophy of religion.16
It seems as if, at the end of the 20th century, Jewish philosophy is finally in a position to appreciate and reappropriate some of the strengths of Cohen's philosophy. I believe that Cohen's philosophy of Judaism was never more timely than now as we meet new challenges to the Jewish tradition of liturgical philosophy in the service of maintaining the universal significance of the God of Israel. This kind of philosophical timeliness is not necessarily indicated in a flourishing of scholarship on Cohen or even in an explicit agreement with one or another of his statements. It may even be expressed in works that hardly cite him by name. It is this deeper kind of reverberation with respect to the three contemporary works in Jewish thought that we have gathered to discuss that I shall try to illustrate in my remaining remarks. I shall also try to evaluate whether, in each respective case, it seems beneficial or detrimental to the interests of Jewish philosophy to follow or deviate from Cohen's example.
1. Jewish Philosophy and the Challenge of History
Let me state from the outset that the annihilation of six million Jews by the hand of people who, by ethnic association, hail from the very stock of the philosophers and other literati and artists so greatly admired by Cohen himself represents a philosophic event neither for Cohen nor for Samuelson, Goodman, or Novak. To Cohen, antisemitism was a constant reality and a threat to the moral fabric of the state that had to be met head-on. Yet, if anything, it made the philosophical task more urgent. Cohen's philosophy was highly political not as a defense of the freedom of conscience and expression but as a rigorous foundation of the ethical foundation of the rule of law in a democratic constitution that, as its self-righting principle, rests on a philosophic faith in God and in the imposition of moral virtues onto political and legal action.
The Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel have caused Jewish philosophy to confront the challenge of history. The works of Samuelson, Goodman, and Novak, however, detach themselves from this challenge. Modern Israel comes into the purview of Novak's book on the election of the Jewish People, but mainly as a case that illustrates his major thesis: Israel's election is for the sake of Torah rather than the opposite. Hence the moral implications of the revelation at Sinai are turned, with the prophetic tradition, against all hubris that may be associated with the doctrine of election. Jewish halakhic practice is checked against moral principles inherent in the Torah. While Novak explicitly criticizes Cohen for neglecting the classical Jewish doctrine of election, he bests him by his ability of remaining in an authentic Jewish idiom when applying the Kantian moral imperative to the Jews and their politcal constitution.
Samuelson's focus on creation and cosmogony prevents him from even considering historical challenges, while Goodman's "God of Abraham" is so much identified with the self-righting principle of ethical monotheism that human responsibility for the gods we invent and serve rules out any lacrimosity regarding the Jewish fate. What prevails in all three authors is the return of good taste in these matters. Like Cohen, these contemporary Americans are able to focus on what is philosophically relevant without closing their eyes to the realities around them.
2. The Concept of God
Cohen's Ethics was already an odd book in his own time because it introduced a philosophical concept of God as its foundation. Cohen derives "man" and "action," the fundamental terms for his Ethics, from the realm of jurisprudence. What sounds (as it should) like a bit of talmudic reasoning allows Cohen to operate in a realm that is at the same time culturally conventional (that is, a "fiction") as well as eminently real. The reality of the law and its presuppositions allow Cohen to practice philosophy as reflection on the validity of certain "facts of culture" (as demanded by the neo-Kantian program), while the "fictionality" of the law allows for the openness of its development towards the ethical ideal. Given that ethics is construed around the state and its historical existence and potential for development in the future, the regulative idea of morality can no longer be that of individual immortality together with a God who offers reward and punishment in the beyond. Rather, God is introduced as the idea of the agreement between is and ought, the axiomatic, hypothetical telos that stands for the eventual identity between nature and culture, the real and the ideal, etc. In order to serve in this capacity, however, God must not merely be conceived of as the God of religion, that is the God of the historical and revealed religions, but, as indeed he functions also in Jewish dogmatics, as the one who sustains the world. The interest here is less in assertions about the origin of the universe (an origin not knowable other than through the operations of theoretical physics that underly the same logical presuppositions as does the assumption of God as the condition for the possibility of an eventual agreement between is and ought) rather than in assertions about the end of history: All legislative and political activity aimed at the incremental establishment of peace, justice, and equity among human beings rests on the assumption that this process is "real" in the sense that there will be a world in existence that will witness this process. The God of the Ethics is the hypothesis of the sustained existence of the world as the theatre of moral progress in the eminently factual sense of a legislative progress towards greater good on earth.
Cohen's philosophy of religion addresses the one desideratum not yet covered in the Ethics, the moral individual, defined as one whose ability to act both individually and morally depends on the experience of forgiveness. Cohen recognizes no individuality without morality, and no morality without the religious experience of repentence and atonement.
David Novak puts his finger on what is wrong with this picture when he asserts that the Jewish doctrine of atonement is here made to carry both too much and too little weight. Too much weight is put on it by Cohen when Judaism is construed as the religion of reason that provides the model for all religions and all human societies. To single out Christianity for critique by attacking its doctrine of incarnation, as does Cohen, only shows how narrowly confined Cohen's world is. It operates in a Western Christian hemisphere, chooses to unfold the contents of Judaism vis-a-vis Christianity without considering that he merely buys into Western imperialism and its forgetfulness of other cultures. He wants to be on the boat of cultural superiority, and not the lower decks either. At the same time, Cohen deprives the Jewish tradition of its unique emphasis on a special relation between God and Israel. The God of Cohen's religion is so busy maintaining his universal relationship with humanity that his relation with Israel appears as a merely transitional phase in the history of the world.
I may have been putting a few words in Novak's mouth that you will not so find in his book. In fact, I think Novak misconstrues Cohen's position in the wake of Schwarzschild's one-sided expositions but such philological misreading does not affect the accuracy of Novak's charge. To the best of my knowledge Cohen never committed to writing anything that would give Judaism an explicit metaphysical prerogative although in his heart and practice Cohen believed the Jews to be truly the eternal people. Does Novak's theology of chosenness, then, return to the Jewish "stubbornness" that was so odious to the Christian tradition and which the 19th-century apologetes were so eager to overcome? The answer is clearly: yes and no. "Yes" in the sense that Novak ends a tradition of shamefully hiding what is undeniably the case in Jewish tradition, and "no" in the sense that Novak is able to show that the doctrine of chosenness may be interpreted to imply rather than exclude religious pluralism as well as cooperation between Jews and non-Jews in matters of universal moral concerns. Novak bests Cohen out of the sources of Judaism, a clear case of nitzhu li banai, since Novak remains true to Cohen's imperative of deriving a reasonable religion out of the sources of Judaism.
3. The Bible as a Primary Source of Jewish Philosophy and the Historical Method
Truthfulness to the Jewish sources is a methodical ideal upheld by all four thinkers. If we grant them all at least a basic competence in Jewish learning, we can discern both commonalities as well as differences in scope as well as method applied to its study.
First, let me point out what I see as one of Cohen's major contributions to the field of Jewish thought, a contribution to which Professor Wendell Dietrich has first drawn attention. I am talking about Cohen's interest in Old Testament scholarship and biblical theology. In the late 19th century, Old Testament scholarship and theology were among the most critical and most highly developed philological disciplines at the German faculties of Protestant Theology. Julius Wellhausen, a colleague of Cohen's in Marburg, was the most important voice in the field. Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Israel signify the victory of the documentary hypothesis about the composition of the Pentateuch over all competing theories and also laid the groundwork to the critical reconstruction of the development of the religion of biblical Israel. Against this formidable scholarly criticism of all traditional accounts of biblical religion, Cohen shaped his own account of the development of Jewish monotheism and the correlative principle of an ever more refined understanding of the mutual definition of the ideas of God and man in the Jewish religious tradition that, in Cohen's view, pivots around the doctrine of the atonement. To be sure, Cohen approached the Jewish sources as a Jew and a philosopher. Yet, though guided -- as he openly admitted -- by the conceptual, i.e. philosophical, interest, he nevertheless approached the sources as historical sources, i.e., as sources which first needed to be reconsidered in the light of critical historical scholarship. Cohen is in my view not only the first modern Jewish philosopher who was inclined towards and uniquely prepared for this combination of tasks but also the only one who put this program in praxis without failing either his philosophical or his historical conscience.
His modern successors operate on slightly different assumptions. First of all, the example of Rosenzweig, a philosopher who ignored critical biblical scholarship in favor of a no less sophisticated grammatical and literary analysis of the Bible, opened an alley, recently much trodden not only by Jewish scholars. Secondly, Rosenzweig's approach was much more in keeping with traditional Jewish commentary and exegesis in that it treated the text as a flexible matrix for the philosophical and speculative ideas of later generations. Thirdly, some Jewish philosophers feel that there is not point in listening to Old Testament scholarship given this discipline's current state of dissolution.
How is this problem addressed by Novak, Samuelson, and Goodman? Novak emphasizes the "retrieval of the classical doctrine" of election, i.e., the retrieval of a doctrine which emerges from the rabbinic appropriation of the canon of sacred Jewish scriptures rather than from scripture directly. Novak follows Rosenzweig in integrating the Bible with the Jewish exegetical tradition. This refusal to treat the Bible as a separate historical entity that may be severed from the tradition of Jewish readers can be traced back to Hermann Cohen himself. Novak, with Cohen and Rosenzweig, can thus turn the Bible as part of a living tradition into a tool of criticism against the trend in Protestant OT scholarship that reduces the Old Testament to a historical precondition for its dialectical opposite that comes to the fore in the New Testament. Cohen was the first to argue from within a scholarly context against this supercessionism posing as historical sophistication. Novak further follows Cohen in that he openly admits that one cannot extract doctrinal content from a narrative source without reading it in light of later (or contemporary, as in the case of Plato and Aristotle) philosophical debates. Novak, however, is encouraged by Rosenzweigto read the Bible so predominantly in the light of philosophical questions and medieval Jewish exegesis that the concluding stipulation of a basis of the doctrine of election in Scripture rings slightly naively. Novak may read "Scripture," but he does not read it as ancient Israelite literature. In this sense, Novak resembles the first generation of nineteenth-century readers, the Romantic generation of Geiger and Einhorn, more than he resembles Cohen. While he can claim a greater agreement with the traditional Jewish views on the election than Cohen, and his Jewish authenticity is, therefore, less in question than it would be otherwise, Novak fails to satisfy readers who wish for greater philological sophistication. Perhaps unwillingly, Novak invalidates the scruples of those of us who cannot begin to consider the superstructure of Jewish thought without critically evaluating its foundations in the history of ancient Israel when he castigates Cohen for yielding to Spinoza's criticism of the Bible.
Norbert Samuelson is interested in locating the right and duty to philosophize within the core-texts of the Jewish tradition. Hence he is hardly concerned with reconciling biblical texts with some trivial anthropomorphic understanding of the doctrine of creation. Where he discusses the most important biblical passage on creation, Genesis 1-2:3, he cites the current consensus of scholars about the authorship, place, and date of compositon of the Priestly Source and shows how the topical interests of this group is reflected in a text which aims to use the best model then available to provide a cosmological framework to the priests' reflection on history and theodicy. From this Samuelson is able to work his way on to Plato and back to contemporary theories on the origin of the world, insisting uncompromisingly on the relevance of what Jewish philosophers have done from the anonymous priest up to Rosenzweig, namely to assert that there cannot be a well-grounded Jewish ethics without philosophical certainty as to what and how we know the origin and nature of the universe.
While Samuelson claims to follow Hermann Cohen in this method, it should be clear that the shift from the Bible to Rosenzweig as the primary source and point of departure for such a study prejudices the sources into yielding much about a doctrine that, for reasons of its own, was central to the medieval philosophical tradition but which, in modern times, has been largely marginalized. Religious philosophy in particular no longer cares about scientific origins of the universe, seeing that, since Schleiermacher, religion is concerned with the universe in a completely different sense from that implied by the medievals. It is as if Samuelson was willing to forget that Schleiermacher (as retreived by Rudolf Otto) is but the other side of Feuerbach, a religious form of entertainment (as Strauss once put it). Curiously, however, Samuelson's interest in technical matters of cosmogony seems but to replace one kind of entertainment by another and perhaps more honorable one. Instead of indulging in the kind of metaphoric enthusiasm about I and Thou pervading the second part of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, Samuelson retrieves the right of a Jewish philosopher to be a philosopher, pure and simple. The lack of a more far-reaching religious impulse is finally revealed when Samuelson must admit that he is not sure as to how to get from where he is to a theory of redemption. He reminds me of some of the medieval cabalists who were so caught up in their symbolic mind-games with the meaning of the Torah that their reflections on historic redemption became entirely perfunctory. While Samuelson rightly claims a Cohenian method for his considerations on the constructedness of the mathematical models used by contemporary astrophysics, there is certainly no precedent in Cohen for Samuelson's disenfranchisement of cosmogony from the doctrines of revelation and redemption. Perhaps this disenfranchisement is caused by the focus on creation instead of on the creator?
4. Ethical Monotheism Revisited
Lenn Goodman's God of Abraham hardly mentions Hermann Cohen. Nevertheless it is in this rather than in the other two works that I see the continuation of a thread which runs through Hermann Cohen's philosophy and which, if Ken Seeskin is correct, is central to the project of Jewish philosophy in general. Seeskin recently characterized Jewish philosophy under the heading of "footnotes to Plato." What he meant to emphasize was the very elective affinity Goodman sees at work between the God of Abraham and Plato's idea of the Good. Goodman's book "is not a systematic philosophy (but) concerns only the nexus of God and values." Even this great topic is not dealt with exhaustively on the 275 pages of text. Rather, the discussion of issues as diverse as rituals, child sacrifice, proofs for the existence of God and an argument for creation serve to clear a path "so as to allow the ancient project that interprets the idea of God and the idea of the Good in one another's terms to continue its work." (pp. xv-xvi) In my dissertation on Reconciling Judaism and 'Cultural Consciousness: The Concept of Versšhnung in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy of Religion (Brandeis University 1994) I speak of a principle of "indifferentiability between morality and religion," a principle guiding Cohen in his exposition of Jewish doctrine. This principle is founded on the very same recognition of the epistemological affinities between the Jewish idea of God and Plato's idea of the Good at work in Goodman's "God of Abraham." The similarities do not stop here. Like Cohen, Goodman operates in a philosophical climate where the philosophy of religion is overpowered by schools of thought that take their cues from scientific logic rather than from religious tradition. Like Cohen, Goodman makes a case for the Jewish idea of God which can hold its own as a moral idea that cannot be invalidated by scientific logic or philosophical analysis. Like the Platonic Good, the God of Abraham is a "self-righting" principle which, throughout the development of the Jewish tradition, has engendered ever new creative solutions to the problem of the summum bonum. And, like Cohen, Goodman can allow for a variety of expressions of the ever renewed struggle for greater moral truth and truthfulness.
The similarities do not end here but can be discerned in many details. Lenn Goodman assures me that this is no coincidence seeing that he did actually study Hermann Cohen. Still, Goodman seems to me to rediscover the relevance of a great number of themes and problems out of his own reading of the philosophical tradition. His approach is never derivative. Furthermore, far from accepting Cohen's socialist solution to the pressing political needs of the early century, Goodman sees a different socio-economic strategy emerging as the morally responsible consequence of ethical monotheism for today. Where Cohen wedded Jewish messianism and the sabbath as the symbol of social justice to the political doctrine of political and economic reform, Goodman derives from the rabbinic interest in commerce an endorsement of economic liberalism. Where Cohen was a socialist, Goodman is an Adam Smith economic liberal, a cultural pluralist, and moral conservative.
Unlike Cohen, Goodman does not need to make the rabbis into socialists or liberals. Rather, his argument leaves room for flexibility and development, for adjustment to circumstances, and is characterized by a decided lack of ideologization. In fact, to Goodman and many others today, the strength of Jewish monotheism is its association with the critique of ideologies. Just as Novak bases himself on the Torah when he argues against the fanatic offshoots of religious Zionism, Goodman, too, derives from monotheism a principled resistance to fanaticism of any kind.
Finally, in a forthcoming discussion of Goodman's work, Allan Arkush voiced a concern which has similarly raised against Cohen in Novak's book. The concern is that an emphasis on the God of Abraham rather than on the God of Sinai may highlight the universal moral and esthetic value of monotheism but, given that it is a human ideal, how can it persuade anyone to live according to the Jewish law, remain a loyal Jew, and resist assimilation into a secular majority. To this Goodman replies in a way which would have graced Hermann Cohen as well. He begins his answer by defining what the task of a Jewish philosopher should not be:
Let me start by saying what I think my job is as a practitioner of Jewish philosophy. The analysis of existential commitments is not part of that job, as I see it. I take such commitments to be primary and primitive. There is nothing that I can reduce them to, and I do not think that even if I could analyze such commitments that kind of talk would do anything to enhance such commitments in my readers. There are plenty of writers who can massage and appeal to, titillate or offend such commitments, but I don't think that amounts to philosophy. I can develop reasons that I think would help people to make sense of the Jewish commitments that they find in themselves or others (parents, friends, their own children), but I don't know how to do an a priori deduction of Yiddishkeit, and I have lots of reasons to believe that such a project would fail if attempted.
According to Goodman, what constitutes Jewish existence is birth or, rather, the influence of Jewish mothers upon their children. Let me quote again:
I hold what I have not yet publicly called a vaginal theory of Jewish identity, if the subject must be broached. That is, it is our mothers who make us Jews and who make us willing or unwilling to confine our libidinous and procreative attentions (one of the great discoveries of the 20th century, besides that of atomic energy, was that these are not necessarily the same) to others of our own nation. Mothers do not, I have noted, generally elaborate arguments in behalf of either aspect of their role in this regard. That is, they make us Jewish without telling us why we should be so, except perhaps with circularity, urging that if we do not, the future of the Jewish people is in jeopardy. Nor do they justify the more restrictive aspect of their role. The grounds they give for discouraging, say, intermarriage, or interfaith dating, are similarly suppositious.
In contrast to this existential origin of Jewish identity, Jewish philosophy begins where we try to explain to ourselves and others what Jewish identity is about when it is understood not merely as a given but as a "project." The philosophical explication of this project cannot merely reiterate the tradition but engages in a "critical appropriation of what is viable in" a tradition that constitutes "a living and integrated way of life for individuals and for a community in interaction with other individuals and other communities." The critical appropriation always "leaves the tradition richer" than one finds it, an assumption similarly expressed, for example, in the work of Emmanuel Levinas.
The strength of Goodman's answer lies in its retrieval of the philosophical virtue of "tact." Certain existential questions must be left outside the pale of philosophical discourse. One may say Goodman succeeds in restoring a certain discipline to religious philosophy which to Cohen was still self-evident, a discipline based on a sense of the distinction between public and private. The philosophy of religion is here a public discourse on matters rooted in, but not confined to, the privacy of the individual experience of family and community. To the degree that moral implications can and must be discerned in the private and communal rituals they belong in the publicly accessible discourse; where the privacy of religious convictions, feelings, and loyalties are concerned they may remain unspoken, at least in the context of a philosophical exposition.
Hermann Cohen, operating as he did in a largely unsympathetic environment, went a long way towards explaining to his contemporaries the moral implications of the communal rituals and traditions of the Jewish tradition. This is not the place to elaborate in detail the theoretical justification he gave for the existence of separate religious traditions within a nation state dedicated to the realization of the ideal of humanity. In a nutshell, Cohen believed that particularity was an irreducable element in both perpectives, that of the ethics as well as that of the philosophy of religion. The particular community mediates between individual and state, a mediation necessary both for the moral education of the individual towards the ideal of mankind as well as for the protection of the individual from the state. Still, when it came to the question of "Why be Jewish?" Cohen's answer was as unphilosophical as that given by Goodman.
Consider, for example, the following recollections recorded by Toni Cassirer of her and Ernst Cassirer's last visit with the dying Cohen.
Als wir ihn das letztemal an seinem Krankenbett besuchten, wurde Pesach gefeiert. Cohen lag, schwer atmend, hoch aufgebettet in seinem Schlafzimmer. Die schneewei§en Locken fielen zu beiden Seiten seines von Leiden gequŠlten Gesichtes feucht auf das Kopfkissen, und das Sprechen wurde ihm schwer. Da brachte die Krankenschwester ihm eine Tasse Kaffee mit einem StŸck Mazze herein. Cohen sah auf, ergriff die Mazze, und sein Ausdruck verŠnderte sich plštzlich ganz und gar. Mit zorniger Stimme und gehobenem Arm begann er die LŸge des Ritualmordes zu brandmarken. "Diese gemeine LŸge, an die keiner, der sie verbreitet, je geglaubt hat, ist erfunden worden, um uns zu vernichten", schrie er plštzlich ganz laut. "Aber dies wird ihnen niemals gelingen - glauben sie mir das, meine Freunde, und halten Sie an unserer Religion fest." Wir gaben ihm die Hand und verlie§en das Krankenzimmer. Wenige Stunden danach starb Cohen.17
[The last time we visited him at his sickbed it was Passover. Cohen was lying in his bedroom, breathing with difficulty, his head resting on a high pile of pillows. On both sides of his face, tortured by pain, his snowwhite locks rested damply on the pillow and he could hardly speak. Then the nurse entered to bring him a cup of coffee with a piece of mazze. Cohen saw the mazze, took it and his expression changed completely. With an angry voice and raised arm he began to brand the lie of the ritual murder accusation. "This vicious lie which none of its spreaders ever believed in was invented in order to destroy us," he suddenly screamed in loud voice." But they will never succeed -- believe me my friends, and hold on to our religion." We shook hands and left the sickroom. A few hours later Cohen died.]
Conclusion
I have been making observations rather than arguments. Unlike the explorations under review, including Cohen's writings, this paper focused on intellectual history and similarities in argumentation rather than in the philosophical veracity or Jewish authenticity of the claims made by these authors. Let me summarize my observations which may serve as a contribution to our historical understanding of current publications in the field of Jewish philosophy.
Norbert Samuelson's Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation stands for the return of a radical rationalism that is earlier represented in the medieval Jewish philosophical tradition and which clearly informed Cohen's understanding of Jewish philosophy as well. Cohen's name serves here to legitimize and authenticate the wedding of Jewish religious thought to scientific thinking. A similar understanding of Cohen's thought underlies Novak's critique of Cohen's expositions of Jewish doctrine. Yet, if we were to focus on Cohen's hermeneutics rather than on his epistemology, a focus unfortunately absent in Novak's account, we could easily detect Novak's continuity with Cohen's attempt of accounting for Judaism as a historical Gesamterscheinung, a religion whose inner logic must be authenticated out of the sources of Judaism without relinquishing the necessity of forming the philosophical questions by which to approch these sources. Novak argues for greater truthfulness to the whole of Jewish religious literature than Cohen was willing or able to muster, yet ultimately the difference rests not on lesser or greater truthfulness in their respective reading of the sources but rather on the difference betweeen their respective philosophical questions.
Closer to Cohen's overall philosophical agenda than the former authors, Goodman retrieves the project of ethical monotheism. Goodman's advantage over Cohen lies in the changed philosophical situation that allows him to operate without the systematic constraints Cohen felt obliged to impose even upon his religious philosophy.
Postscript
After I presented the bulk of this paper to the Academy of Jewish Philosophy meeting at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Atlanta (Dec. 29, 1996), Norbert Samuelson raised the question of what I see as the sustainable philosophical legacy of Hermann Cohen. The answer to such a far-reaching question was beyond the scope of this paper and cannot be attempted in a few added words. I hope, however, that some of my future work will reflect my readiness to address this challenge more explicitly. I share the Academy's interest in replacing a historicist approach to Jewish philosophy by a more constructive one. I should be pleased, however, if , in the meantime, I can occasionally serve as someone who clarifies what we are talking about, even though my clarifications seem to be mainly of a historiographical nature.
Footnotes
1 See also my review essay on these monographs in Modern Judaism, vol. 16 (1996): 291-316. Lenn Goodman's work is further addressed by Allan Arkush, David Burrell, C.S.C., and Menahem Kellner in vol. 5 no. 4 (Dec. 1996) of Textual Reasoning. The Journal of the Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Network (electronic publication), currently archived at http://forest.drew.edu/~pmjp.
2 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Berlin: DŸmmler, 1871 (2. revised edition 1885, 3. ed. 1918, 4. ed. 1925, 5. ed. 1987)
3 Kants BegrŸndung der Ethik, Berlin: DŸmmler, 1877 (2., enlarged edition 1910), Kants BegrŸndung der Ethik, Berlin: DŸmmler, 1877 (2., enlarged edition 1910)
4 Kants BegrŸndung der €sthetik, Berlin: DŸmmler, 1889 (xii and 433pp.)
5 The philosophy-historical categorization of Cohen as a neo-Kantian has confused even some of the most recent and otherwise seminal studies of the rise of neo-Kantianism in Germany and of its specific role at the university in Marburg. In Klaus Christian Kšhnke's fine book Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche UniversitŠtsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986 [English edition: The Rise of Neokantianism. German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, (transl. by R.J. Hollingdale) Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991] as well as in Ulrich Sieg's study of the history of the philosophical faculty in Marburg (Aufstieg und Niedergang des Marburger Neukantianismus. Die Geschichte einer philosophischen Schulgemeinschaft, WŸrzburg: Kšnigshausen und Neumann, 1994; and see my review in Journal of Jewish Studies vol. xlvii, No. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 185-189) Cohen is given prominent position without consideration of why his work actually fit so poorly in the neo-Kantian mold, a fact recognized by both authors. Cohen is seen here not only as the culmination of the movement but also as an indication of its deterioration into something quite incomprehensible; the pivot and end of an epoch.
6 System der Philosophie. Erster Teil: Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1902 (xvii and 520 pp); second, improved ed. 1914, 3. ed. WW 6, 1977
7 System der Philosophie. Zweiter Teil: Ethik des reinen Willens, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1904 (xvii and 641pp); 2. revised ed. 1907, 3. ed. 1921, 4. ed. 1923, WW7 1981
8 System der Philosophie. Dritter Teil: €sthetik des reinen GefŸhls, Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1912; 2. ed. 1923; WW 8/9, 1982
9 Among these shorter but programmatically significant works are Platos Ideenlehre und die Mathematik, separate reprint from Rectoratsprogramm der UniversitŠt Marburg vom Jahre 1878, Marburg: Elwertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1879 (31pp), (2nd ed. 1928), Das Princip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte. Ein Kapitel zur Grundlegung der Erkenntnisskritik, Berlin: DŸmmler, 1883 (162pp); (2nd ed. 1928; 3rd ed. 1968, 4th ed. 1984), and "Biographisches Vorwort und Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag" zu F. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, (1. Buch pp. v-xiii "Biographisches Vorwort des Herausgebers" and 2. Buch pp. xv-lxxvi "Einleitung des Herausgebers"), 5. wohlfeile und vollstŠndige Auflage, Leipzig: Baedecker, 1896 (reprinted in 6. edition of Geschichte des Materialismus, 1898; second, enlarged ed. 1902 and 1908, 3. revised and enlarged ed. 1914 and 1921; reprinted in 1928 (S2,171-302); partly reprinted in 1970; critical edition WW 5/II). The 1896 and 1914 editions of "Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag" also point to a number of important changes in Cohen's late philosophy of religion. See this author's Reconciling Judaism and "Cultural Consciousness:" The Idea of Versšhnung in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy of Religion, Ph.D. Diss., Waltham/Mass.: Brandeis University, 1994, p. 81, and generally for an analysis of the development of the religious thought of Hermann Cohen. My view on this development deviates from most previous scholarship.
10 For more bibliographic information see Zank (1994), pp. 4-9.
11 See, for example, Eugen Rosenstock's critical remarks on Cohen's style in a letter to Franz Rosenzweig in 1916. Cf. my unpublished master's thesis, Christlich-jŸdischer Dialog im Ersten Weltkrieg (Heidelberg, 1986).
12 Edel, Geert, "Cohen und die analytische Philosophie der Gegenwart" in: Brandt, Reinhardt/Orlik, Franz,(ed.), Philosophisches Denken - Politisches Wirken. Hermann-Cohen-Kolloquium Marburg 1992, Hildesheim, ZŸrich, New York: 1993, pp. 179-203
13 For a summary of the systematic issues underlying the various perspectives on Cohen's religious thought see this author's, "'The Individual as I' in Hermann Cohen's Jewish Thought" in: The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. 5, No. 2, 1996, pp. 281-296
14 See, for example, Schwarzschild, Steven S, "'Germanism and Judaism' - Hermann Cohen's Normative Paradigm of the German-Jewish Symbiosis" in: David Bronson (ed.), Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933. The Problematic Symbiosis, Heidelberg: 1979, 129-172, idem, "Introduction" in: Ethik des Reinen Willens [= Hermann Cohen, Werke vol.7] Hildesheim, Olms: 1981, vii* - xxxv*, idem, "The Tenability of Herman (sic!) Cohen's Construction of the Self" in: Journal of the History of Philosophy 13/1975, 361-384, and idem, "To Recast Rationalism" in: Judaism 11/1962, 205-209, and, in a fittingly postumous publication, "The Title of Hermann Cohen's 'Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism" in Religion of Reason Our of the Sources of Judaism, transl., with an introduction by Simon Kaplan. Introductory essays by Leo Strauss, Introductory essays for the second edition by Steven S. Schwarzschild and Kenneth Seeskin. Atlanta/Georgia: Scholars Press, 1995
15 If Lenn Goodman's God of Abraham may count as Jewish philosophy in a modern mode, Robert Gibbs's Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas have set the parameters for the postmodern mode. In both, the ethical agenda prevails and can be clearly traced to Cohen's influence. See this author's reviews of these two titles, Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, in: The Postmodern Jewish Philosophy Network, Vol. 4/1 (Febr. 1995) [electronic publication; archived at http://forest.drew.edu/~pmjp], and, on Goodman, "The God of Sinai, the God of Creation, and the God of Abraham: Three Recent Books in Jewish Philosophy " in: Modern Judaism 16 (1996), pp. 309-315
16 I discuss Schwarzschild's position in greater detail in "'The Individual as I' in Hermann Cohen's Jewish Thought" in: The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. 5, No. 2, 1996, pp. 281-296
17Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981, p.94
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