Cohen, Hermann

« Cohen, Hermann Hermann Cohen was the founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and a major influence on twentieth-century Jewish thought.

Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason out of theSources of Judaism) (1919) is widely credited with the renewal of Jewish religious philosophy.

Cohen's philosophy ofJudaism is inextricably linked with his general philosophical position.

But his system of critical idealism in logic,ethics, aesthetics and psychology did not originally include a philosophy of religion.

The mainly Protestant MarburgSchool in fact regarded Cohen's Jewish philosophy as an insufficient solution to the philosophical problem of humanexistence and to that of determining the role of religion in human culture.

Thinkers who favoured a new, moreexistentialist approach in Jewish thought, however, saw Cohen's introduction of religion into the system as a daringdeparture from the confines of philosophical idealism.

Cohen identified the central Jewish contribution to humanculture as the development of a religion that unites historical particularity with ethical universality.

At the core ofthis religion of reason is the interdependence of the idea of God and that of the human being.

Cohen derives thistheme from the Jewish canon through a philosophical analysis based on his transcendental idealism. 1 Life and work Hermann Cohen was the son of a cantor in the provincial town of Coswig in the state of Anhalt.

He abandoned hisrabbinical studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary (Breslau) after witnessing the rift between reform andorthodox Jews over the divine revelation of the Mishnah (the ancient code of rabbinic law).

Seeking orientation inthe conflict between religion and modern consciousness, Cohen turned to philosophy and the sciences.

Afterreceiving his doctorate at Halle in 1865, he published studies on mythological, philosophical and aesthetic topics(God and the soul, Plato's theory of Forms), influenced by the then compelling idea of a ‘mechanism ofconsciousness'; but he gradually abandoned the methodologies of Helmholtz and Steinthal and immersed himself inthe philosophy of Kant.

His 1871 exposition of Kant's first critique, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Kant's Theory ofExperience), brought him to the centre of the Neo-Kantian movement and led to his appointment as a Privatdozentat Marburg.

Subsequent publications, especially Kants Begründung der Ethik nebst ihren Anwendungen auf Recht,Religion und Geschichte (Kant's Justification of Ethics and its Application to Law, Religion and History) (1877) andDas Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode (The Principle of the Method of Infinitesimals) (1883) made original contributionsto Kantian thought.

Cohen's mature philosophical system follows the classic structure of Kant's three critiques butprojects a fourth part, on psychology, and seeks to establish a ‘critical idealism' faithful in broad outline to thetradition of Plato, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant.

Cohen ascribed the continuity of this tradition to a perennialphilosophical problematic that arises from the idealism inherent in scientific thought.

The Marburg School,represented by Cohen and his colleague Paul Natorp, attracted students from as far away as St Petersburg (BorisPasternak) and Madrid (Ortega y Gasset).

Those who became philosophers - Ernst Cassirer, Nicolai Hartmann, HeinzHeimsoeth and Hans-Georg Gadamer - gradually emancipated themselves from Marburg Neo-Kantianism.

But thetendency of some philosophers to ignore Cohen's contributions expressed ideological biases - thus Heidegger's 1929verdict of having ‘overcome' Neo-Kantianism.

In 1876 Cohen succeeded his mentor Friedrich Albert Lange, author ofthe Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (History of Materialism), to a highlyvisible position as practically the only non-baptized Jew to hold a chair in philosophy at a Prussian university.

Threeyears later he found himself compelled to defend Judaism against the charges of Heinrich von Treitschke that it wasalien to the values of German culture.

From then on, Cohen's public engagement on behalf of Judaism and Judaicstudies increased steadily, extending in time to the renewal of Jewish religious philosophy, a field often neglectedamong the more historically oriented disciplines of Wissenschaft des Judentums (the ‘Science of Judaism').

From1903 Cohen was active in the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where, after retiring fromMarburg, he lectured on the biblical prophets, the Psalms, the Greek philosophical roots of medieval Jewish thought,Maimonides, Descartes, and philosophical psychology (see Maimonides, M.).

Shortly before his death, Cohen alsohelped found an academy dedicated to the science of Judaism, at the suggestion of his former student FranzRosenzweig. 2 ‘Critical idealism' as the basis of the sciences and the humanities Unprecedented scientific progress in the later nineteenth century speeded the collapse of German Idealism.Empirical studies of brain function eclipsed intellectual inquiries into the nature of thought, and in many philosophydepartments experimental psychology displaced traditional philosophy.

Opposing the tide of positivism andmaterialism, Cohen championed idealism both for what he saw as its ethical implications and because he conceivedof idealism as the true groundwork of scientific thought.

Like his mentor Lange, Cohen did not malign materialism butsaw it as a heuristic principle, itself a product of critical thought, a hypothesis meant to make scientific cognitionpossible.

Materialism itself, then, showed the fertility of critical idealism (see Köhnke 1991).

Cohen's logic, set out inSystem der Philosophie, Erster Teil: Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (System of Philosophy Part One: The Logic of PureCognition) (1902), constructs transcendental philosophy rather differently from Kant.

Beginning not from the sensesand the a priori forms of sensibility and thought but from the science found in ‘printed books', Cohen findsknowledge grounded in mathematical principles.

These are products not of experience but of pure thought.

Onlysuch knowledge is relevant for the logic of cognition.

The ‘being' it discovers is ‘given' only in the mathematicalabstractions that we metaphorically call laws of nature.

Sense perception, then, including the refined perception ofthe laboratory, must be relegated to the role of a methodological principle.

The limited rules of syllogistic logic(based as they are on grammar rather than mathematical ideas) are similarly relegated to the methodology ofresearch.

While sense perception and syllogistic logic are tools in the verification of hypotheses, the hypothesesthemselves are the ‘origin' (Ursprung) of the objects of cognition.

Hence, the ‘logic of the origin' determines the. »