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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
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The Unity of the Self in a Segregated Society,
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This review is from: The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen (Hardcover)
Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) taught philosophy in Marburg (a Prussian university in Hesse, Germany) at a time when this discipline was beginning to be displaced by empirical (physiological) psychology and racism was rampant as a pseudo-science. Against such materialist trends, Cohen taught a combination of the humanizing fictions of the idealist tradition from Plato to Kant and the biblical tradition of prophetic monotheism. This conciliatory view was close to that of F.A. Lange, the author of an immensely popular History of Materialism and a religious socialist. Cohen's critical views on Zionism and his seemingly assimilationist agenda have long eclipsed this thinker from the study of modern Jewish thought. His works are, for the most part, unavailable in English. More recently, however, Robert Gibbs's Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas, as well as Andrea Poma's work on Cohen have reintroduced his thought as a major influence on Western philosophy in the 20th century. In my book, I try to recover the authentic voice of the philosopher from the layers of historic prejudice accrued against him since the artfully deceptive introduction to Cohen's Jewish Writings penned by his former student, Franz Rosenzweig. If Steven Schwarzschild were alive, I believe he would have written the seminal work on Cohen in the English language. As it is, and for the time being, the reader will have to make do with my feeble attempt at explaining what Cohen was, and is, all about. In my view, Cohen attempts to provide a reasoned basis for the confidence that societies (or, rather, the legal fiction of a state) can reform and change themselves toward greater perfection. This would be impossible, however, unless individuals (the fictions-or makings-of actuated selves) can also reform and change. State, society, and other collectives are therefore dependent on the actuality of moral transformations located in the individual. The locus of such transformations is the religion of reason, i.e., religious practice orientated toward the realization of the correlation between God and the individual. In Judaism, the most intimate turning point of this correlation is the purification of the self in the liturgy of the Day of Atonement. This is not to say that Judaism is the only religion of reason, but Cohen is able to turn the entire Western literature on the philosophy of religion on its head by making the despised religion of Judaism the paradigm of a religion aiming at-and in this sense accomplishing-the possibility of constituting truly moral selves. The weak point of my book, as Marc Delaunay pointed out correctly, is that while dealing with logic, ethics, and religion, I have little to say about Cohen's esthetic philosophy. At a time when esthetics is on the rise once again as a focal point of philosophical discourse and given Cohen's profound insights on this matter, this is an unforgivable shortcoming.
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