Cohen, Hermann

« foundation of being in thought: thought as the origin of being.

Reflecting the constantly progressing sciences withtheir shifting paradigms, the system of categories and judgments represented in Cohen's logic is open-ended - quitea contrast to Kant's efforts to find fixed normative patterns in our thinking as earnest of its objectivity.

There areother deviations: most strikingly, Kant's ‘thing-in-itself' (noumena) (see Kant, I.

§3) is eliminated as a superfluousdogmatic prejudice.

In another notable reform, to avoid psychologistic readings of the Kantian a priori that wouldconfuse the a priori forms of consciousness with innate functions of the brain, Cohen identifies the knowing subjectas the ‘unity of cultural consciousness' (Einheit des Kulturbewußtseins).

The quest for a unity underlying the distinct‘directions of culture' (science, law, art) was the ultimate goal of Cohen's system.

The transcendental conditions ofthat unity were to be addressed in the final part (on psychology) of Cohen's philosophical edifice, which he did notlive to complete.

Cohen's revision of transcendental logic pivots on the ‘principle of the infinitesimal method' whoseparadigm is the physicist's reliance not on the senses but on mathematical models (1902: 126).

Cognition, we find,begins, counterintuitively, in a ‘no-thing' and an ‘adventurous detour' (1902: 84) in which reason itself constitutesthe object: the non-sensory infinitesimal becomes the origin of all finite reality.

The anti-materialist, anti-deterministimplications of Cohen's conception of reality come to the fore in the humanities and ethics.

Once it is understoodthat reality is discovered in judgments, not sense experiences, morality seems far less ephemeral than materialismmight seem to make it - provided it can be shown that the ethical concept of a human being is the actual operativeprinciple in some valid mode of discourse.

Cohen finds such a ‘direction of culture' in law, which must presuppose aconcept of the human being transcending the biological.

Ethics, then, is constructed analogously to logic, with thehuman being as the analogue of nature and the laws that regulate humanity's historical and political existence asanalogues of the laws of nature.

Since ethics seeks the principles of a reality that presupposes the idea of a humanbeing, Cohen's Ethik des reinen Willen (Ethics of Pure Will) (1904) becomes a philosophy of law.

Ethics, as ‘theteaching about the human being', becomes the ‘centre of philosophy' and lays the groundwork for all disciplinesdealing with the products of human action (law, economics, the humanities).

Overawed by the sciences, thehumanities have sometimes mistakenly adopted the biological notion of the human being, but what they require isthe ethical notion of a human being: ethics is ‘the positive logic of the humanities' (1904: 1). 3 Ethics and the philosophy of religion Will, action and consciousness are the ‘constitutive concepts' (1904: 389) of an ethics that rests on the‘methodology of the exact concepts of the science of law', to which ethics ‘listens attentively for the sake of itsproblems of person and action' (1904: vii).

Will, action and consciousness are defined in the end so as to unite allethical concepts.

All the actions of a moral subject become transformations of the ‘pure will'.

Beyond the bare ideaof will, however, the concepts of freedom and autonomy are presuppositions of the realization of any good.

For thisreason, Cohen introduces into his ethics traditional Jewish concepts of sin and repentance.

Religious rather thanphilosophical, in his view, these concepts introduce a crucial element of morality that ethics alone cannot provide:the concrete individual.

The state, the community, and other such social agencies operate in the ideal time of legalprogress.

But only the individual can originate moral decisions in actual time.

Ethics, strictly conceived, can addressthe problem of guilt (dolus, culpa) but not that of sin (peccatum).

It cannot deal with concrete human failure.

Forthe law has no power over sin in the sense of guilt but only over culpability (1904: 366-).

Ethics similarly lacks aprinciple of self-transformation.

But this principle is found in the biblical and rabbinic idea of ‘repentance' (teshuvah).Religion can address the concrete individual; but for ethics, by its very structure, the concrete individual is a merefiction.

Ethics and religion share the goal of advancing a humane civilization.

But ethics deals with individuals only asmembers of collectivities.

Religion is charged with the reconstitution of particular individuals in psychological orliturgical time, redirecting each toward the future, through a regeneration of the individual moral consciousness,whose existence is endangered by transgression of the law.

Ethics orients the philosophy of religion towardinterpreting particular truths of faith in so far as they contribute to the ethical goal.

Religion must demonstrate thatits principles not only do not contradict the progress of the state towards the ethical ideal but contribute to itsrealization.

Such a formal directive cannot by itself generate particular truths of faith.

These arise in the self-transformation of mythology into a religion which each faith must achieve, in so far as it has a ‘share in reason'.Religion continuously transforms myths into ethically justifiable truths of faith.

Thus a religion of reason can directthe individual and the community toward moral progress by contributing to the generation of moral consciousness.The task of a philosophy of religion is exposition of the truths of faith of a particular tradition, in so far as they canbe conceived as transcending its myths ( 1904: 337, 388, 586).

The correlation of God and man, fully developedonly in Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism)(1919), serves to clarify both the historical development and the systematic structure of the truths of the Jewishfaith: God and man are correlated as coordinates that progressively determine each other.

Reason here aimscontinually to reconstitute the moral direction of the individual and the community by generating the whole set ofmoral conditions in the language of the Jewish faith.

Accordingly, the religious correlation of God and man mustconstruct the whole apparatus of moral responsibility and law within itself as a condition for the regeneration ofindividual moral consciousness.

Cohen's thought revolves around this correlational idea of God, which is, for him, thedecisive contribution of Judaism to civilization.

Even in Ethik des reinen Willen, God is the systematic capstoneuniting ethics with logic.

Addressing the ‘being of the ought', ethics has no grounding in reality unless the humanspirit has recourse to a principle that unites the present reality (nature) with the ideal of its future.

The realizationof the ethical ideal in the actual world rests on the assumption of a common origin of both nature and man.

Cohen(1919) supports the same idea from within the sources of Judaism that are concretized in the speech-acts of theliturgy.. »