Book, Hermann Cohen 0, Cohen's and Neokantism Im Context

COHEN AND THE MARBURG SCHOOL IN CONTEXT

HELMUT HOLZHEY, ZÜRICH

1. Neo-Kantianism in Germany: The Historical Background

In 1871 Friedrich Ueberweg observed in his résumé of ‘thepresent state of philosophy in Germany’ that while during thepast several decades the Hegelian and Herbartian schools haddominated the philosophical scene, ‘recently a return in part toAristotle and in part to Kant’ had gained more adherents thanthe post-Kantian doctrines of German Idealism. He further re-ferred to philosophers who had taken up the teachings ofSchopenhauer and Beneke as well as to a number of proponentsof materialism (Karl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner),adding that Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, Gustav TheodorFechner, Rudolph Hermann Lotze, Eduard von Hartmann andothers had gone new ways.1 By 1870 the Hegelian school was in-deed past its peak and neo-Kantianism began to unfold, initiallyin parallel to positivism and always differentiated from the philo-sophies of Schopenhauer, Herbart, and the materialists.2 Themotivation to ‘return to Kant’ was considerably increased byFriedrich Albert Lange (1828-1875) who, in the widely readsecond edition of his Geschichte des Materialismus (1875) spoke of‘a young school of Kantians in a narrower and wider sense of theword’. Among these he counted Otto Liebmann, Jürgen BonaMeyer, and Hermann Cohen. Lange admitted that Cohen’s bookKants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871) had inspired him to revise hispresentation of the Kantian system.3

Translated from the German by Vilem Mudroch1 F. Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie der Neuzeit (Berlin,18723), 329.2 The expression ‘neo-Kantianism’ as a label for a philosophical movementappeared around 1875. Cf. H. Holzhey, ‘Neukantianismus’, Historisches Wörter-buch der Philosophie, vol. 6 (Basel, 1984), columns 747-754.

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In Germany Kant’s thought exercised some influence duringall of the nineteenth century. It became especially prominent inthe ideological debates after the failed revolution of 1848, when,during the post-revolutionary stage of repression, a ‘critical’,ideologically neutral position arose that was sceptical towardsmetaphysics and that instead resorted to epistemology.4 Kant waspresent outside of Germany as well. However, while the recep-tion of Kant in England, which promoted the critique of empiri-cism, hardly assumed the form of genuine neo-Kantianism, andwhile in France (Charles Renouvier) and in Italy (Carlo Cantoniand others) some notable neo-Kantian tendencies did appear, itwas only in Germany that a full blown Kantian movementemerged. Around the time of the founding of the German Em-pire in 1871 a philosophical new beginning based on Kant wasmade. The philosophical revitalization effected by neo-Kantianism coincided with the scientific and technological prog-ress of the Wilhelmian era. Later, this movement split up into di-vergent directions and was partially institutionalized in differentschools.

The beginning was made by individual, young philosophers,who in 1871 had just turned thirty years of age or were evenyounger; the most important ones were Otto Liebmann (1840-1912), Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Alois Riehl (1844-1924),and Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915). Their publications donot represent a unified position. This was caused mainly by thefact that the young Kantians owed their philosophical training todifferent traditions. Liebmann and Windelband were students ofKuno Fischer in Jena, whose understanding of Kant was markedby idealistic tendencies. Riehl and Cohen had been schooled incontemporary psychology and were both strongly interested inscience. In spite of these differences a common direction can beidentified. The authors argued anti-naturalistically and anti-

3 F. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in derGegenwart, Vorrede und Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag von HermannCohen, 2. Buch: Geschichte des Materialismus seit Kant (Leipzig, 18965), vol. 2,115.4 Cf. K. C. Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutscheUniversitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main,1986), esp. 175ff.

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materialistically, thus declining the all too obvious option of cap-italizing on the great general respect for science. In the so-calledKulturkampf between the Prussian government and the CatholicChurch they maintained an anti-clerical position, criticising thetutelage of the Church. Faced with the rampant adherence toSchopenhauer they assumed an anti-pessimistic stance. As a con-sequence they justified and defended the ideal of civil liberty.5

Along with other factors the divergent backgrounds de-termined the nature of the separation of neo-Kantianism intothe different schools. Cohen, who from early on was motivatedby an interest in the ‘idealism in science’, developed a ‘criticalidealism’ for epistemology and ethics, an approach that eventu-ally furnished the ‘Marburg School’ with its leading pattern ofthought. For this purpose, he especially embraced Friedrich Al-bert Lange’s criticism of materialism as it was presented in thelatter’s Geschichte des Materialismus. However, while Lange, whenconfronted with the need for ethical orientation, advocated a‘standpoint of ideal’, to be arrived at by a process of ‘free con-ceptual poetic composition’,6 Cohen championed, instead of thepoetic approach to the ideas of reason, a logical one and thussought a strictly ‘epistemological foundation of ethics’.7 Of someimportance for this conception was a reconstruction of Plato’sideas as pure foundations (hypotheses) of knowledge. Ideas wereconceived as the instruments of knowledge of a particular kind,but not as independently existing entities. This non-metaphysicalemployment of Plato’s philosophy was made possible by the dis-tinction between, on the one hand, the being of things, the oc-currence of events, and the existence of relations and, on theother hand, the validity of propositions. Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), who developed this distinction, fundamental for thewhole of neo-Kantianism, in 1874, identified the alleged ‘being’of Platonic ideas with the ‘validity of truths’.8 Wilhelm Windel-

5 Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus, 321.6 F.A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Ge-genwart, ed. A. Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 981ff.7 Kants Begründung der Ethik, vi.8 Cohen, ‘Platons Ideenlehre und die Mathematik’ (1878), Schriften I, 336-366. Cf. H. Lotze, Logik. Drei Bücher vom Denken, vom Untersuchen und Erkennen,ed. G. Misch (Leipzig, 1912), 505ff.

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band’s writings were influenced directly by Lotze, and it was thelatter’s conception of validity that became the foundation of theunderstanding of logic and philosophy in ‘Southwest Germanneo-Kantianism’. The decisive impulse for this direction of neo-Kantianism, however, was provided by Kuno Fischer’s Fichteanunderstanding of Kant.9

Although the Marburg and the Southwest schools were sep-arated by virtue of the fact that they had different founders, theydid share a common critical idealism that distinguished themfrom a critical realism as it was propounded for instance by AloisRiehl. This third large scale attempt to re-appropriate Kant’s crit-ical philosophy in a contemporary form was marked by an ap-preciation of tradition and of empiricism.10 Not only were theempirical sciences analyzed here in order to identify their ratio-nal a priori elements, but the ‘real’ elements representing thegiven were acknowledged as well. In general, the early neo-Kantianism of the 1870s was characterized by a multitude of tiesto positivism.

Since the 1920s it has been generally accepted that neo-Kantianism had been composed of only two schools. Riehl’s real-istic interpretation of Kant seems to have led to Oswald Külpe’s‘critical realism’ and thus no longer counted as neo-Kantianism.While the Marburg School, represented by Hermann Cohen,Paul Natorp, and the early Ernst Cassirer, explicitly claimed tobe Kant’s true heir, in spite of integrating, after the turn of thecentury, the philosophy of Leibniz, the theory of value orientedcriticism of the Southwestern School with its main representa-tives Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask par-ticipated in the Hegel-Renaissance;11 its representative organ wasthe journal Logos (1910-1933).

mann was instructed in Hebrew and literature since the age of

9 K. Fischer, Immanuel Kant. Entwickelungsgeschichte und System der kritischenPhilosophie, 2 vols. (Mannheim, 1860).10 A. Riehl, Der philosophische Kriticismus und seine Bedeutung für die positive Wis-senschaft, vols. 1, 2.1, 2.2, (1876-1887).11 Cf. H. Levy, Die Hegel-Renaissance in der deutschen Philosophie mit besonderer Be-rücksichtigung des Neukantianismus (Charlottenburg, 1927), 58ff.

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and Gerson Cohen on July 4, 1842 in Coswig (Anhalt), young Her

Born as the only son of Friederike (maiden name Salomon)


three by his father, who was the cantor at the local synagogueand a teacher at the Jewish school in Coswig. In 1853 Hermannwent to the high school (Gymnasium) at Dessau and in October1857 to the Jewish Theological Seminary at Breslau. He quit theschool three years later without graduating, but registered in1861 at the Philosophical Faculty of the Breslau university. Someweeks after having earned his high school diploma, he switchedin the autumn of 1864 to the university in Berlin, where he vis-ited lectures by Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and AugustBoeckh and attended courses in mathematics, science, and med-icine, namely those by Emil du Bois Reymond. His first articles,among them ‘Die platonische Ideenlehre psychologisch ent-wickelt’, appeared in the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprach-wissenschaft, a journal edited by H. Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus.Steinthal’s work on the theory of language had a significant in-fluence on Cohen’s philosophical development.

In 1864/65 Cohen submitted a prize essay in Berlin, whichfailed to win the prize, but did receive praise from Trendelen-burg,12 and which presumably served as basis for a Latin disserta-tion on the teachings of Greek philosophers on the antinomy ofnecessity and accident. This was submitted in 1865 in Halle,where it was accepted. Having shared numerous tenets of Her-bart’s psychology for a number of years, Cohen found his way toKant with a contribution to the discussion between Kuno Fischerand Adolf Trendelenburg concerning the proper understandingof Kant’s theory of time and space. In 1871 Cohen published hisKants Theorie der Erfahrung, a work of fundamental importancefor neo-Kantianism, both in philological and philosophical re-gard. In 1873 Cohen obtained his Habilitation in Marburg; in1876 he became a professor of philosophy there, succeeding hisdeceased promoter Friedrich Albert Lange. Setting it as his goalto renew Kantian idealism, Cohen published his Kants Begrün-dung der Ethik (1877, 19102) and his Kants Begündung der Ästhetik(1889). These works, together with a significantly re-worked andexpanded second edition of his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung(1885) and along with his study Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Meth-ode (1883) constituted the foundations for the teachings of the

12 H. Cohen, Briefe, 19.

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Marburg School. The goal of surmounting the methodologicaldualism of intuition and thought led Cohen to formulate hisdoctrine of the ‘origin’ of knowledge in pure thought in his Lo-gik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902, 19142), the first part of his Systemder Philosophie. In his second major systemic work, the Ethik desreinen Willens (1904, 19072), he presented a doctrine of the ‘eth-ical person’, which, in accordance with Kant’s Metaphysics of Mor-als, he subdivided into a doctrine of law and a doctrine of virtue.Here he justified his theory of ethical socialism and claimed thatthe teachings of religion were accommodated in ethics. In hisÄsthetik des reinen Gefühls (1912) he grounded the validity ofartistic work and judgement in ‘pure feeling’, understood as athird direction of consciousness, connecting the theoretical andpractical production of objects.

2. Hermann Cohen: Life and Writings

In 1912 Cohen became a professor emeritus and moved to Ber-lin. There he taught at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft desJudentums. He had published on philosophical-religious issuesand had taken position in regard to religious, cultural, and polit-ical questions concerning Judaism already while in Marburg.Since his ‘Bekenntnis in der Judenfrage’ (1880), his con-tribution to the ‘Berliner Antisemitismusstreit’13 that had beenoriginated by Heinrich von Treitschke, and his expert opinion‘Die Nächstenliebe im Talmud’ for the Marburg process of 1888,Cohen fought against the rampant antisemitism. Although herepresented a liberal Judaism, he nevertheless vehemently in-sisted on the right to and the duty towards one’s own religion. InMay of 1914 Cohen visited a number of Jewish communities inRussia. His patriotism, at the outset of the First World War stillundiminished, soon turned into bitterness and skepticism owingto the fresh outbreak of anti-Jewish sentiment. Prominentamong the numerous works of his last years, some of them deal-ing with the relationship between the spirit of German culture

13 Cf. W. Boehlich (Hrsg.), Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, (Frankfurt amMain, 1965).

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and the spirit of Jewish culture, are his study Der Begriff der Reli-gion im System der Philosophie (1915) and the posthumously pub-lished Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1919).The former leads on the basis of an esteem for the peculiarity ofreligious consciousness to a new concept of the individual, thelatter connects Jewish religiosity with philosophical reason. InJune of 1917 he proposed to commence on the fourth part of hissystem, the ‘Psychology’,14 in which the unity of cultural con-sciousness was to be developed in a definitive form. This propos-al, however, was not materialized. Cohen died on April 4, 1918in Berlin while correcting the proofs of his Religion der Vernunft.

3. Cohen’s Early Psychological Studies and his First Interpretation of Kant

In the 1860s Cohen’s writings were based on Herbart’s psycholo-gy. Although he did distinguish between, on the one hand, ‘de-ductive critique’, whose task it was to prove the ‘metaphysicalcompetence’ of a concept as well as its inner non-contradictori-ness, and, on the other hand, psychological analysis, he waschiefly interested in the latter, i.e. in the explanation of the ori-gin of all cultural phenomena in terms of human consciousness.He viewed Plato’s theory of ideas as the beginning of the true,namely psychological philosophy, and interpreted idea as the ‘liv-ing thought-act of seeing’,15 in which the essence of things isgrasped. Cohen also sought to provide a psychological expla-nation of the genesis of the Indo-European mythical ideas ofGod and of the soul (birth and death), i.e. a description of the‘psychological mechanism’, which it was hoped would accountfor (the in itself already poetic) myth and especially for later po-ets’ resort to myth;16 according to Cohen’s insight the recogni-

14 Letter to Paul Natorp of June 10, 1917, in: H. Holzhey, Cohen und Natorp,vol. 2: Der Marburger Neukantianismus in Quellen (Basel, 1986), 480.15 Schriften I, 61. 16 H. Cohen, ‘Die dichterische Phantasie und der Mechanismus des Bewusst-seins’, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 6 (1869), 173-263,reprinted in: Schriften I, 141-228.

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tion that the connection of ideas in the mythical consciousness wasinadequate would lead to poetic comparison. Poetry continues tomaintain itself under the dominion of the scientific conscious-ness for two reasons. First, the poet acquires in his childhood‘mythical apperceptions’, which as an adult he cannot fully dis-card as they render his world more comprehensible than wouldscientific thought. Secondly, as an individual, the poet is motiv-ated to imitate traditional art and is supported in this endeavour,from an anthropological point of view, by the constancy of theobjective spirit. Cohen’s psychological method was guided by thefollowing theoretical conceptions: the hypothesis of the unity ofconsciousness; the goal of an analysis of mental processes intotheir elementary forms; a mechanical theory of association andapperception (following Herbart and Lazarus).In 1869 Cohen participated for the first time in the contem-porary attempts to gain a historically adequate and a topicallyfruitful understanding of Kant’s philosophy by contributing astatement to the controversy between Adolf Trendelenburg andKuno Fischer.17 The former claimed to have discovered a gap inKant’s proofs of the complete subjectivity of space and time; heclaimed that the admittedly purely subjective forms of intuitionwere also objective, since he thought that they could have arisenfrom an original activity that was valid both for knowledge andfor real things. Cohen addressed Trendelenburg’s doubts on thebasis of a strict adherence to the ‘certified writings of Kant’,18

whose basic ideas he wished to work out and to defend againstthe most important attacks. The question what Kant taught onspace and time was for Cohen not just a historical one, since hedeemed that it concerned ‘the intersecting point of all profoundcontemporary directions of research […] Does the nature ofthings depend on the conditions of our mind? Or must and canthe law of nature prove our thought?’19 In order to distinguishbetween the old and the new the historian of philosophy wishing

17 H. Cohen, ‘Zur Controverse zwischen Trendelenburg und Kuno Fischer’,Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 7 (1871), 249-296, reprintedin: Schriften I, 229-275.18 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, iv.19 Schriften I, 229.

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‘to present the continuous connection of philosophical prob-lems in all of human culture’ must begin by considering everythought as the ‘result of a mental process’,20 a thought he mustthen both analyse as to its conditioning by historical facts andevaluate philosophically. Always with a view to dealing with Kant,Cohen met the methodological difficulty of proving the original-ity of an idea in its historical context by suggesting that the his-torian turns philosopher and voices his philosophical opinion.Aware that this would somewhat diminish the objective status ofthe writing of history, Cohen claimed that the loss would becompensated by the fact that topical participation and indeed in-tervention by the philosopher would complement purely histor-ical research in a beneficial manner. This would be the case es-pecially when philosophical problems, such as those of Kant,were still ‘in motion’ for the interpreter. Although in regard todiscussions in which different participants appealed to Kant ormarked their differences from him Cohen favoured ‘fidelity’ to-wards the original texts, he linked such faithfulness to the condi-tion that the interpreter views himself as a ‘criticist’ who holdsup his own as well as foreign ideas against the standard of whathe himself considers to be Kantian.21

Cohen’s return to Kant’s theoretical philosophy was driven bytwo aims: first, to deprive the contemporary attacks on Kant oftheir textual basis by resorting to ‘simple quotations’,22 secondly,to restore ‘Kantian authority’ in the interest of the topical ap-proach to philosophy.23 Specifically, Cohen was concerned with anew justification of Kant’s notion of the a priori. With this goalin mind Cohen provided a commentary on the TranscendentalAesthetic and Analytic in the first edition of his Kants Theorie derErfahrung. He closely linked his clarification and justification ofKant’s a priori to the proof of his assertion that Kant ‘discovereda new concept of experience’, thus having delivered in the Kritik

20 Schriften I, 271.21 Schriften I, 272-273.22 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, iv. The criticism of Kant which Cohen especiallydealt with is that by Schopenhauer, Herbart, Trendelenburg, Fischer, Lange,and Ueberweg. He was mainly in agreement, albeit in a critical way, with J.Bona Meyer, Kants Psychologie (Berlin, 1870).23 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, vi.

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der reinen Vernunft a ‘critique of experience’24 which elucidatesthe possibility of experience in a transcendental investigation.Cohen took up Kant’s question, how synthetic judgements a pri-ori are possible, by pointing out that experience is constituted orconstructed in an a priori and formal manner by ‘space, time,and the synthetic unity’25 and that it is given ‘in mathematics andpure science with the character of necessity and generality’.26 Inhis analysis of the a priori of space Cohen distinguished threestages or degrees in Kant’s a priori: the latter signifies 1) meta-physical originality, 2) form, 3) the formal condition of the pos-sibility of experience. While the first two stages may still supportthe misconception that the a priori is identical with the innate,the third degree, the transcendental knowledge of the a priori,compels us to definitely discard the pre-critical disjunctionbetween innate and acquired.27 In regard to the categoriesCohen deviated from Kant by attributing a genuinely a prioricharacter only to the category as the ‘synthetic unity in the connec-tion of the manifold’, while claiming that the categories of the Kan-tian table are a priori merely in a secondary manner.28 Based onthe conception that the a priority of space, time, and the synthet-ic unity constitute the formal conditions of experience, Cohenthen had to maintain that the concept of experience can be con-structed out of these a priori elements.29

Experience provides the criterion for ascertaining that a con-cept is meaningful. However, although Cohen here adhered toKant literally, his recourse to experience for the purposes ofsuch a conceptual test concerned not experience’s material com-ponent (sensation), but its characteristic as the a priori form ofsensibility. Cohen thus advocated a transcendental idealism thatis critical as far as the method is concerned, but formal as far asthe content goes. Its first step is an ‘abstraction from the matterof experience’.30 All reality consists of ‘possible experience, i.e. of

24 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 3.25 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 104.26 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 208.27 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 87ff.28 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 101.29 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 104.30 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 243.

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constructive intuition which places the constructed image intonature and of the ‘self-thought’ concepts of the understan-ding’.31 Although Cohen in his discussion of Kant’s principle ofactuality32 concedes that sensation, no less than the a priori, is acondition of experience, he further claims that this principle isbased on the principle of the Anticipation of Perception,33 bywhich a step is made to extend the a priori over the sphere ofthe empirical.34

Referring to Kant’s statements that ‘the doctrine of sensibilityis likewise the doctrine of the noumenon in the negative sense’35

and that a noumenon is merely a limiting concept,36 Cohen dealtin the last chapter of his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung with the cos-mological antinomy of pure reason and its solution in order toround off his transcendental idealism in regard to the ideas ofreason with the following summary: ‘The idea-entities of materialidealism will become regulative principles whose unceasing em-ployment is the only task of reason.’37

4. Criticism of Kant and the Developmentof an Independent Logic of Knowledge

Cohen’s above sketched interpretation of the Kritik der reinen Ver-nunft had a philosophical intent which went beyond Kant andwhich Cohen worked out in greater detail in the second editionof his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1885) and in his Prinzip der In-finitesimal-Methode (1883). While Kant distinguished between, onthe one hand, the question of the possibility of non-empiricalprinciples (synthetic judgements a priori) in mathematics and inscience and, on the other hand, the question of the possibility of

31 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 253, my emphasis.32 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 218, B 266: ‘That which is bound up with thematerial conditions of experience (with sensation) is actual.’33 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 207: ‘In all appearances, the real that is an objectof sensation has intensive magnitude, that is, a degree.’34 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 214.35 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 307.36 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 255, B 310-1.37 Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 270.

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a scientific metaphysics, Cohen recognized only the question ofthe foundation of possibility or validity of ‘mathematicalscience’; metaphysics signified for him nothing but the problemof the possibility of scientific experience. But there is a secondpoint of deviation from Kant. On Kant’s theory experience iscomposed of the matter of sensible impressions and of the formoriginating in our own faculty of knowledge;38 Cohen, however,focussed on experience solely as far as its form is concerned.This resulted from his conception that ‘experience’ is identicalwith ‘mathematical science’ and the latter is valid knowledge apriori. To enquire after the conditions of the validity of a prioriknowledge under the heading of a transcendental theory of ex-perience meant for Cohen from the beginning bracketing outthe sensible-material component out of the concept of experi-ence or including it in a formal determination of experience.Cohen devoted special effort to this idea of rendering experi-ence a priori, or, more precisely, rendering sensation a priori,sensation in the sense of the sensible-material component of ex-perience.

Cohen’s point of departure was Kant’s ‘Principle of the Anti-cipations of Perception’, according to which ‘in all appearances,the real that is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude,that is, a degree’.39 In order to generate a new concept of actual-ity Cohen re-structured Kant’s principle into the ‘principle of in-tensive magnitude or of anticipations’.40 An important motiva-tion was provided by psycho-physics, especially by the newlyopened prospect of being able to measure the magnitude of sen-sations. The mathematical ‘infinitesimal method’ that was em-ployed for this purpose became for Cohen a paradigm of the act-ive role that thought played in the process of knowledge, in fact,it appeared to him to be the decisive methodological develop-ment in recent science. He sought the logical foundation of thismethod in the ‘principle of intensive magnitude’, which,however, merely claims that an intensive magnitude must be at-tributed to all real objects of perception. Cohen went beyond

38 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 1-2.39 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 20740 Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode, 14.

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this in wishing to ground the giving of the real in the attributionof magnitude, i.e. he attempted to situate reality as such in in-tensive magnitude. While for Kant sensation as the sensible-ma-terial component, in spite of its ability to be determined math-ematically, remained indispensable if knowledge was to havereference to reality, for Cohen the sensibly given became an ele-ment of mathematical and logical thought. The giving of thereal, of something in general, is the responsibility of thought,not of sensation. However, it is important to note that Cohen isspeaking here of the essential condition of the validity of scientif-ic knowledge, not of the discovery of knowledge. The validity ofscientific knowledge is explained by Cohen independently of theempirically given: It is the category (determination of thought) ofreality which ensures that consciousness has any reference to anX as a given, i.e. to an intuition. This connection between intu-ition and the category of reality is completed within the ‘prin-ciple of intensive magnitude’. The logical-epistemological reas-on why the object is recognized as real (i.e. with the quality real)lies in the fact that the infinitesimal unit dx, the infinitely small,produces this reality. For example, ‘the point on the tangent,which unites the different motions of a point in one direction,produces a curve in that direction’.41

The conception developed by Cohen in the 1880s becameone of the leading doctrines of the Marburg School. Natorp ad-mitted as late as 1915 his predilection for Cohen’s determinationof the relation between intuition and thought as it was to befound in the Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode. Natorp’s remarkmust be understood with regard to the fact that Cohen ulti-mately abandoned the dualism of intuition and thought. The in-finitesimal method became the emblem of the sovereignty ofthought over being. The philosophical justification of the object-ive validity of knowledge without recourse to intuition, without

41 Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode, 34. Paul Natorp later made this more pre-cise and in fact corrected it by claiming that it was not actually the point butthe law that is the ‘origin’; one may think of the law as concentrated in thepoint. When Cohen spoke of a producing point, then, claimed Natorp, thepoint should be viewed as the bearer of the law, out of which the extensionaldetermination of magnitude is produced by integration. Cf. Natorp, Dielogischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (Leipzig and Berlin, 1910), 220.

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reference to an X as a ‘given’, characterizes the program ofCohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902). The justification ofthe validity of scientific knowledge became henceforth the sub-ject matter of a logic requiring no preliminary discourse on intu-ition. Just as Cohen worked out an epistemological principle,namely the production of the real qua intensive magnitude in hispublication of 1883, he similarly assigned a special status to ajudgement, namely the ‘judgement of the origin’ in the first,foundational part of his System der Philosophie. ‘Thought isthought of the origin’42 and remains so in all pure knowledge.That means that, borrowing from Plato’s concept of hypothesis, allthought is conceived of as a foundation. Knowledge derives thebasis of its validity solely from thought and not from a ‘given’ towhich thought would have to refer. The pure ground of math-ematical and scientific knowledge consists of an open system ofjudgements (analogous to Kant’s principles of knowledge), a sys-tem of object-producing methods of pure thought. These meth-ods (‘judgements’) are in their unifying functions not foundedon the unity of pure self-consciousness, i.e. on what Kant termed‘transcendental apperception’, but on the unity of analysis andsynthesis that constitutes the judgement as such. Cohen claimeda homogeneity of the basic methods of pure thought and of sci-entific knowledge, so that he attributed an a priori character(‘purity’) to scientific knowledge, e.g. to the law of the conserva-tion of energy. However, the element of the factual in ‘experi-ence’ is maintained insofar as it is recognized that knowledge al-ways includes its own infinite progress. This becomes plain inCohen’s treatment of the problem of sensation. Although the giv-en is still founded in thought and not in intuition, and is thus tobe produced logically, the ‘claim of sensation’ is nevertheless as-sessed in a positive way. Even if sensation itself cannot satisfy thisclaim of securing factual knowledge, the claim is included in themodal ‘judgement of actuality’ and is redeemed ‘idealistically’.Corresponding to the extension of the problem of origin, aproblem that was initially linked to the production of the finitereal out of the infinitely small by means of an infinitesimal ana-lysis, to a general logic of origin, the problem of sensation is ex-

42 Logik, 36.

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panded to include not only the production of the real as specialobject determination, but, more generally, the critical evaluationof all pure object determinations in their relation to actuality. Al-though this evaluation is demanded under the heading ‘sensa-tion’, for a logic of pure knowledge it can only be realised in purethought — defined as the thought of the origin — as it is ex-pressed in the ‘judgement of actuality’.43

With this conception of logic Cohen developed an originalversion of critical idealism. He rejected the attempts on the part ofspeculative idealism to construct the system of rational knowl-edge out of a principle or out of a complex of principles, nordid he admit the notion of the self-explication of absolute knowl-edge. He also refused the intention of analytic theory of scienceto generate formal criteria for the examination of ‘given’ sci-entific propositions. His kind of idealism deviates from meta-physics by virtue of the fact that for him ‘the ultimate founda-tions of truth and science’ are conceived as ‘the laying of thefoundations’, while for metaphysics they represent ‘absolute foun-dations’: ‘as in being so in thought, placed and given in themind’.44 A laying of foundations that is capable of revision andthat can be called to account on the one hand, rationally un-provable, fixed foundations about which no discussion is pos-sible, i.e. foundations of an absolute kind on the other hand:that is the distinction which Cohen adduces against a funda-mentalistic metaphysics, be it based on a naturalistic or a spiritu-alistic footing.45 Critical idealism is satisfied with the ‘most strin-gent’, but also provable laying of foundations;46 absolute andultimate foundations invariably turn out to be illusory. The lay-

43 Logik, 434. Cohen’s ‘judgement of actuality’ takes in his system of pureknowledge the place of Kant’s second postulate of empirical thought, ‘Thatwhich is bound up with the material conditions of experience (with sensation)is actual’, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 218, B 265.44 Logik, 303.45 Cf. G. Edel, ‘Kantianismus oder Platonismus? Hypothesis als Grundbegriffder Philosophie Cohens’, Il cannocchiale / rivista di studi filosofici, 1-2 (1991), 59-87, especially 73ff. I today fully concur with Edel’s non-absolutistic interpreta-tion of Cohen’s theory of origin, unlike in my Cohen und Natorp, vol. 1, 183,218.46 Cf. Plato, Phaedo, 100a, 101d.

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ing of the foundations follows the transcendental method,47 in prin-ciple in all areas of philosophy, but providing guidance first asepistemology (‘critique of knowledge’, ‘logic of pure knowl-edge’). An examination of the conditions of the possibility or ofthe validity of knowledge commences, according to this method-ological conception, with existing scientific knowledge, charac-teristically with mathematics and science.

Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis is in a way a ‘repetition’ ofKant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Just as for Kant positive and negat-ive critiques are entwined48, so Cohen’s logic owes its contours tocritique on the one hand and to a positive thesis on the other.The critique is directed at both materialism and empiricism aswell as at religious metaphysics; the positive goal is to prove theidealistic constitution of science. Cohen achieves this proof byde-ontologizing the philosophical concepts of knowledge and ofscience on the basis of his claim that all determinations of beingare the products of pure thought.

In his Preface to the Logik der reinen Erkenntnis Cohen de-clared his personal conviction that ‘the ideology of idealism’ isbuttressed by the ‘spirit of genuine philosophy’. Idealism is a keyterm in his philosophy, especially in regard to its cultural rele-vancy. At the same time, however, he was greatly concerned toemphasize that his position was critical idealism. When Cohen inhis epistemology, as I have shown above, arrived at the notion ofthe ‘constructive character of thought’ and when he made theclaim that ‘the world of things reposes on the laws of thought’,49

he moved dangerously close to a subjective or spiritualistic, inshort to a dogmatic idealism that attributes a divine creativepower to humans or to the human mind. To avoid this relapseinto metaphysics it would seem that Cohen would be compelledto admit that sensible experience makes a constitutive contribu-tion to knowledge. However, as was pointed out earlier, sensibil-ity for Cohen does not delineate sufficiently between a criticaland a dogmatic idealism. Only the reference to the fact of sci-ence can achieve this. What matters is not the sensibly ‘given’ as

47 Cf. H. Holzhey, Cohen und Natorp, vol. 1, 53ff.48 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B xxiv-xxv.49 Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode, 125.

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the empiricist or sensationalist holds, but that which is given inscience: ‘stars are not given in the sky, but in the reason of astro-nomy’.50 The epistemological analysis is concerned solely withscience and with the kind of given that has already been criticallyappraised within science. The ‘fact of science’ replaces sense-data. Science is, as Kant maintained in regard to pure mathemat-ics and pure science, ‘actually given’,51 and this factuality secures,according to Cohen, the critical character of idealism. Thingsare neither simply ‘produced’ out of the laws of thought, nor isthe reference to actuality on the part of scientific knowledge ow-ing to data; what is crucial is rather a critical appraisal of theknowledge that has been gained, an appraisal that occurs withinscience itself. Science, into which sensible experience along withthings have already been incorporated, thus provides the criticalsupport for the kind of idealism that attempts to prove thatknowledge is the result of constructively producing thought.

5. The Ethical Motive of Critical Idealism

Cohen’s critical epistemology, issuing in a logic of scientificknowledge, is motivated in its idealistic orientation not only by atheoretical, but to a large extent also by an ethical concern. Thispoint is systematically developed in the Ethik des reinen Willens.Just as Cohen’s epistemology, divested of all ontological claims,refuses to have things given or shown to it and to ground pro-ductive thought in the natural human endowment, i.e. in ‘phys-ical-psychological organisation’ (Friedrich Albert Lange), so ananti-ontological and anti-naturalistic spirit manifests itself in hisethics. In fact, the goal of securing a rationally founded ethicscould be the true motive for Cohen’s radical rejection of the giv-en, under whose mask he suspected that matter ‘continues itshauntingly frightening existence’.52 From a formal point of viewhis ethics is idealistic in the same sense as his epistemology, inthat here too concepts are produced by an analysis of a pre-given

50 Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode, 127.51 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 20.52 Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag, 66.

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scientific fact, specifically of the pure science of jurisprudence,concepts that then serve as the foundations of moral action.However, given this idealistic frame more is at stake than just thepossibility of ethical knowledge. Indeed, the idealistic nature ofethics secures, along with the possibility of ethical knowledge,the notion of the autonomy of the acting person. In distinctionto the logical laying of foundations of the knowledge of nature,ethics is concerned with the laying of foundations of normativehuman self-knowledge; Cohen uses here the expression ‘self-consciousness’. ‘Self-imposition of law’ is succinctly identified asthe ‘principle of idealism’.53 It is only at this point that the ethic-al motive of critical idealism becomes fully apparent. Relying onhuman nature (just as relying in epistemology on given things)would necessarily lead to moral heteronomy, i.e. to a constant‘idol-worship of nature’54 in the form of instincts, of natural be-haviour resulting from evolution, of natural needs etc. Againstthis anthropological naturalism Cohen defends in his ethical ideal-ism the notion of a human being who makes it his task to ‘eter-nally’ perfect himself, and not solely or primarily as an individu-al. Apparently directed against Marx’s historical materialismCohen asserted: ‘It is simply not true that the compulsion ofnature and especially of animal nature in man produced thoseachievements of culture which can only hypocritically be calledmoral culture, and should rather be labelled economic.’55

6. Ethics According to the Transcendental Method

In his second Kant-book56 Cohen assumed that the theory of sci-entific knowledge, if only propelled all the way to heuristics,would conduct to the basic concepts of ethics such as freedomand purpose. In proceeding from epistemology to ethics heprovided an interpretation, following which the thing in itself asa limiting concept regulatively determines the totality of the phe-

53 Ethik, 328.54 Ethik, 329.55 Ethik, 37.56 Kants Begründung der Ethik (1877, 19102).

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nomenal world and thus leads beyond experience and its analys-is to the question of determinism, of accident and necessity etc.,i.e. to the problem of freedom. Cohen, however, did not succeedin showing that the regulative idea of freedom, which is the lim-iting concept of the theory of experience, is the foundation ofethical freedom in the sense of ethical autonomy. His Ethik desreinen Willens can then provide the required foundation of ethicsin epistemology only by pointing to the methodological connec-tion between epistemology, now developed in a purely logicalmanner, and ethics. Ethics too should be founded on the tran-scendental method. Generally speaking, in Cohen’s mature sys-tematic philosophy the bridge between theoretical and practicalreason is no longer built on the basis of the concept of freedom,but on the footing supplied by the teleologically accentuatedconcept of the ought.57

In the Ethik des reinen Willens, the second part of his philo-sophical system, Cohen employed a relatively weak conceptionof system. The logic of knowledge functions merely as the foun-dation of the whole philosophical system, influences the otherparts only as far as the method is concerned, not the substance.Methodologically pre-determining is the proof that scientificknowledge originates in pure thought. This confers on ethics thelogical principles, but not the content (will, practical self-con-sciousness, autonomy, etc.): ‘Logic provides a foundation to eth-ics only in the sense that it alone can teach ethics in what man-

57 The path at first taken by Cohen and then seemingly abandoned by him waslater ‘invented’ by Paul Natorp and pursued to its end. For Natorp too theregulative idea of the infinite progress of experience implied a theoreticalought, to which the practical ought must be linked. The totality of the world isnever given to knowledge, it is merely problematic. Natorp applied this ideaalready to the knowledge of the individual object, of the individual fact: Theought is already contained in the ‘problem’ that the individual object raises forknowledge. Knowledge is subordinated to an immanent ought; a completionin the sense of definitively resolving the problem of knowledge is possibleneither in regard to the totality of the world nor in regard to the individualstate of things. Natorp worked out this insight of the immanentought-determination of knowledge into a theory of ideas that as a ‘logic of theought’ leads into ethics. Cf. Natorp, Sozialpädagogik. Theorie der Willensbildungauf der Grundlage der Gemeinschaft (Stuttgart, 1899, 19256), §§5ff.; Philosophie. IhrProblem und ihre Probleme (Göttingen, 1911, 19182), 71ff.

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ner to search for and to construct laws. The content of these lawsmust, however, be discovered by ethics alone.’58 The systemicprimacy of logic should guarantee the rationality of ethics.59

Such a methodological grounding of ethics prevents, on the onehand, a confusion of ethical reflection with personal morality, itis directed, on the other hand, against an ethical agnosticismand irrationalism. The integration into the system is limited bythe fact that ethics is independent as far as the content is con-cerned. This limit is a consequence of the difference between isand ought.60

Cohen’s claim at the outset of his Ethik des reinen Willens thatthe subject of ethics is man needs to be elucidated. This con-cerns in the first place his references to ‘man’. For men are indi-viduals, they live in communities, and together they constitutemankind. In what regard is ‘the’ man the subject of ethics? Notas an individual (or only secondarily so). Cohen did not con-ceive an individualistic ethics. Concentrating on the individual asthe ‘core concept of man’ implied for him searching for themethodological foundation of ethics in psychology and thusresigning oneself to naturalism. Instead his ethics is concernedwith ‘infusing the individual with particularity and with total-ity’.61 Cohen, however, did not write a social ethics based on par-ticularity as it is represented for instance by subcultures. His eth-ics is primarily interested in the principle of ‘totality’. Ethicsdeals with man in general, with humankind understood as unityand as essence. This ‘humankind’ always remains an ideal.However, as this ideal is anticipated by the unity of the state, thefounding part of Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens consists of a the-ory of the state under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat). The state, notin its actual reality but as a ‘principle of ethical self-conscious-ness’,62 is conceived of as the proper ethical subject.

58 Logik, 607.59 Ethik, 29.60 Ethik, 21-2.61 Ethik, 11.62 Ethik, 255.

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Cohen himself pointed out that his ethics should be a theoryof the concept of man.63 And this concept must be produced, likeevery fundamental concept, in thought. A peculiar difficulty ofthe project of constructing an ethics as the theory of the conceptof man becomes manifest with the question, whether thisconcept is descriptive or normative. Cohen clearly opted for thelatter, thus placing himself within the framework of Kantian eth-ics. Human willing is in ethics determined by an ought. Cohen’sexpression ‘pure will’ makes it plain that the subordination un-der a normative law takes precedence over subordination undera desire or under instinctive necessity. Not resting content withthis expression, Cohen further asserted that the will must bebrought to action as to its ‘proper object’.64 The pure will is mor-ally worthless. Only when the will leads to action does it realizeitself. And while ethical anthropology begins with the ‘pure’ will,made determinate by an ought or by a law, it is only the actionthat makes man into a man, since from an ethical point of view aman becomes a man only by virtue of his ability to act.65

The ‘is’ that is specific to the ought,66 the ‘is’ of the law-gov-erned will, is secured, just as in the case of theoretical reason, byrecourse to a scientific fact. That the ‘is of the ought’ is no merecreature of the imagination is most clearly proven, among thecultural phenomena, by law or by jurisprudence. Why? Historydescribes the factual relations between the moral ought andpower and can for that very reason not supply the original fact toan ethics of pure will. Only in pure jurisprudence, i.e. jurispru-dence not as a factual science nor as based on natural law (meta-physics), is a pure form of the ought given, namely in the shapeof laws (insofar as they are linked to the concept of action) as aset of normative propositions, e.g. in the rule of law. But can apure jurisprudence67 guarantee the is of the ought? In view ofthis sceptical question it must be pointed out that the ‘is’ of theought does not refer to empirically given moral action nor to the

63 Ethik, 3.64 Ethik, 174.65 Ethik, 168.66 Cf. H. Holzhey, ‘Sein und Sollen. Postmetaphysischer Idealismus bei Cohenund Natorp’, in: Sinn, Geltung, Wert. Neukantianische Motive in der modernenKulturphilosophie, ed. Ch. Krijnen and E. W. Orth (Würzburg, 1998), 139-153.

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squalid reality of the permanent violations of moral law. The eth-ical ‘is’ does not concern the actual situation in which we live,but refers to the ‘is’ of a state under the rule of law. And the leg-al constitution is not understood here as a sociologically prov-able fact. Placing the ‘is’ of the ought in the constitution meansrather that the constitution as the foundation of the state pos-sesses a legitimizing function for rationally justified factual ac-tion.

However, the structure of Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens withits transition from a theory of law to a theory of virtue suggeststhat the ‘is’ of the ought should be looked also in lived morality.Paul Natorp underscored this point in 1912, while drawing asketch of the transcendental method, by relating ethics to thecultural facts of morality and by describing the latter as ‘practicalforms of a social order and of a life worthy of human beings’.68

Cohen recognized especially (Jewish) religiousness as a form oflived morality. Concerning religion in general he wrote that al-though it claims monopoly in regard to morality, it representsonly the moral ‘state of nature’, whose ‘cultural maturity belongsto ethics’.69 His claim that religion resolves itself into ethics70

would on a reading dictated by his transcendental method signi-fy: Religion too, represented for example by passages of theHebrew Bible, forms a referential fact with which ethical reflec-tion begins in order to produce moral principles and to provethem as such. Cohen for example regarded the prophetic state-

67 Cohen was thinking of a pure jurisprudence in the sense in which it wasconceived of by Rudolf Stammler in his book Die Lehre von dem Richtigen Rechte(1902) and as it would later be developed by Hans Kelsen in his ReineRechtslehre (1934). However, Cohen’s conception does differ significantly fromthe theories of these two authors.68 P. Natorp, ‘Kant und die Marburger Schule’, Kant-Studien 17 (1912), 196-7.69 Ethik, 586.70 Cf. H. Cohen, ‘Religion und Sittlichkeit’ (1907), in: Jüdische Schriften III,151: ‘Religion is absorbed by ethics. […] The absorption means […] a changeto another direction’ of consciousness. In the third edition of his Einleitung mitkritischem Nachtrag (1914) Cohen replaced the slogan ‘absorption of religion inethics’ by the slogan ‘accommodation of religion within ethics’, 106; in DerBegriff der Religion, 58, he explains that ‘accommodation’ signifies enlarging thearea of ethics by the content of religion.

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ment, ‘He has showed you, O man, what is good’,71 as an ethicallaying of foundations by interpreting humanity (the generalconcept for man) as what is good for man.

7. State and Society

Joseph Klein advanced the thesis that Cohen as an assimilatedJew transformed the demand of his people for equal civil rightsinto the constitutionally-legalistic orientation of his ethical ideal-ism,72 briefly: that he sought to found the rights of Jews in hisethics. In my opinion, this interpretation does justice neither tothe experiences of the Jew Cohen nor, and especially, to his eth-ics. Instead of rendering absolute Cohen’s concentration onconstitutional jurisprudence, it appears more compelling — alsoin view of his biography — to focus on his conception of ethicalsocialism, in whose unfolding the Jewish tradition does really playan essential role. Franz Rosenzweig expressed this point in anearly irresistible way: ‘There is a Jewish content which, in anamazingly parallel fashion, reached […] its globally-historicalmaturity only under the sun of the nineteenth century withinGerman Jewry: socialism, specifically messianic socialism as acomplex result of the precept to love thy neighbour and of thedemand for justice […] became effective as a secret impulse inLassalle, and, as far as a recipient of the graceful gift of inconsist-ency, even in Marx.’73 Aside from this Jewish source, the prac-tised socialism of Friedrich Albert Lange would have served as amotivation for Cohen’s socialist attitude. Cohen wrote as early as1877 that the problem of theodicy had been superseded ‘in ourcentury […] by the problem of socialism’.74 In regard to thepolitical socialism of his time he distanced himself from historicaland dialectical materialism. In spite of his appreciation of thecriticism of Lange directed against a rhetorical and hypocritical

71 Mic. 6:8.72 J. Klein, Die Grundlegung der Ethik in der Philosophie Hermann Cohens und PaulNatorps — eine Kritik des Neukantianismus (Göttingen, 1976), 99, 106, 134.73 F. Rosenzweig, ‘Einleitung’ to Cohen, Jüdische Schriften I, xxiii.74 Kants Begründung der Ethik, 327.

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idealism, Cohen diagnosed for the time around the turn of thecentury dangerous effects of the ‘false slogan’: When the socialdemocratic party and its press swear by materialism, then theystand under the threat of ‘the greatest impairment that canthreaten a party of the future’, namely the threat ‘to lose its ownprinciples and to disappear hopelessly’.75 For Cohen, socialismderives its spiritual foundation from Kantian ethics. He based histhesis above all on the affinity between the socialist social criti-cism and the version of the categorical imperative, which de-mands that you ‘act so that you treat humanity, whether in yourown person or in that of another, always as an end and never as ameans only.’76 His interpretation of this version of the categoric-al imperative emphasized that the worker must not be treated asa commodity, ‘not even for the purposes of alleged nationalwealth’.77

Cohen found the ethical foundation of state and society inKant’s conception of the ‘systematic union of different rationalbeings through common laws’ in a ‘realm of ends’.78 This‘realm’ is exemplary both for the ideal state and for the ethicallyreformed society.79 State and society coincide on the basis of thismodel in a co-operatively constituted state. Cohen contrasted hisidea of a state built out of co-operatives not only with the exist-ing situation, but also with the materialistic Marxist interpreta-tion. For this purpose he made a distinction within the conceptof society.80 ‘Society’ signifies first the ‘concrete reality’ or‘equally the living material condition’ for the abstraction of thestate under the rule of law; an example of a society in this senseis the economy.81 The relationship between state and society isthus here described in terms of the categories ‘abstract/con-

75 Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag, 112.76 I. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Akademie Ausgabe, vol. 4, 429(in the translation of Lewis White Beck, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,Indianapolis, 1959).77 Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag, 113.78 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 433. 79 Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag, 116.80 Cf. E. Winter, Ethik und Rechtswissenschaft. Eine historisch-systematischeUntersuchung zur Ethik-Konzeption des Marburger Neukantianismus im WerkeHermann Cohens (Berlin, 1980), 342ff.81 Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag, 116-7.

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crete’. In a second, namely an ethical sense, ‘society’ is under-stood as an ‘ethical idea of the reform of law and state’. Thatmeans that ‘society’ functions as a critical corrective vis-à-vis acorrupt legal system, in which law is degraded to a ‘domestic ofthe economy’,82 and vis-à-vis a ‘state of corporations and of theruling classes’.83 In this usage of the concept of society what is atstake is not the difference between the abstract and the con-crete, but the normatively-critical function of the ideal as op-posed to the factual.

As Cohen distinguished between the actually existing stateand state in the sense of the ethical model, the question ariseswhether there is any difference in meaning between the normat-ive idea of state and the normative idea of society.84 This is in factthe case, insofar as Cohen attributed to society a mediating rolebetween the state and the individual. Such mediation occursboth within the empirical concept, where society as economicactivity is distinguished from the sphere of the governing power,as well as within its idea as an ethical demand for materialjustice. Cohen also viewed the relationship between society andindividual from a dual perspective: from the point of view of eco-nomic reality and from the point of view of the moral idea of so-ciety. He was here concerned with the true, i.e. the ethicalconcept of socialism. In the end it becomes plain that the pre-sumed two meanings of ‘society’ are merely an expression of thecontradiction between the materialistic and the idealistic con-ception of history: ‘According to the one meaning of society theindividual is judged and appraised not so much as a social, butrather as an economic being. According to the other meaningthe person in a moral sense as a social being is made into a prob-lem. From the one meaning arises social physics, from the other socialethics.’85

82 Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag, 118-9.83 Ethik, 615.84 Cf. Winter, Ethik und Rechtswissenschaft, 343: ‘the social concept of socialismas a concealed concept of state’.85 Ethik, 313.

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What is interesting is how Cohen conducted his dispute withhistorical materialism. He commenced with a sociological analys-is of the modern ‘work-based society’ (Arbeitsgesellschaft). ‘The in-dividual […] in all of his work, which in a merciless expansionfills his whole being, is now ruled and determined from the out-side. This dependence of his being expresses itself in the correla-tion which accompanies his work: it does not suffice that he is aworker; for he cannot himself initiate work; he becomes an employeeby virtue of the fact that there is an employer.’86 The sociological ana-lysis operates on the basis of ‘moral statistics’ with the categoryof causality. Cohen admitted that the causal factor is not onlyepistemologically relevant, but that insights into causal processes‘improve the lot of the worker’. But he denied that this will helppeople in a sufficient, humane manner. ‘With the question ofthe belly one may begin’; but to regard man in his struggle forthe improvement of his lot merely as a ‘product of economicconditions’ implies a contradiction. In this context Cohen ap-praised ‘Marx’s socialism’ and, in a certain way, turned it upsidedown. For the ‘moral spirit’ which he tracked down in Marx’smaterialistic theory of history speaks for an idealistic view of his-tory, a view built on the idea (hypothesis) of freedom. But Cohenwas not content to make freedom in the sense of a principle forthe consideration of history into a basic notion; freedom mustlikewise guarantee the future realization of humanity. At thispoint we come into contact with Cohen’s — messianic conceptionof history. He knew no end of history: neither in a ‘realm ofliberty’, nor — in modern terms — in a ‘new world order’ of thevictorious liberal democratic system of the free market economy.‘Not the end of the world nor of mankind should the peacemean that the ‘days of the messiah’ will deliver’.87 The philo-sophical significance of messianism consists rather in directingpolitics: not to the present nor to ‘the glorious national past’,but to the future in the sense of an ‘eternal’ continuation of theeffort to realize morality.88

86 Ethik, 310.87 Ethik, 406.

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8. Philosophy as System and Cohen’s Theory of Culture

As our overview (section 2) of Cohen’s work suggests his systemis composed of three, possibly of four parts. The triadic concep-tion of his system, containing the fields of logic, ethics, and aes-thetics, follows Kant, whom Cohen praised for having created asystem of philosophy and for having recognized it as ‘the con-nection of the modes of production of consciousness, each of whichbegets its own special content’.89 Seen from a historical point ofview, Kant re-integrated art, which in the eighteenth century hadbecome a self-sufficient product of a specific type of conscious-ness, into the systematic ‘connection of general consciousness’.90

But how could Cohen justify characterizing art as the contents ofa specific mode of production of consciousness? The motivationwas likely provided by culture, which, however, had to be trans-posed into the theory of consciousness. For it is imperative thatthe theory of culture remains distinguished from the theory ofconsciousness when a systematically-philosophical justification ofaesthetics is attempted. I will first deal with the last question,namely how Cohen introduced an autonomous aesthetic con-sciousness. In view of the possibility of a psychological interpreta-tion, the argumentation based on a theory of consciousness in-deed stands in need of a justification. Cohen wished to preventthe category of consciousness91 from being appropriated by em-pirical psychology by stressing, inter alia, that the differencebetween the modes of production depends on the directions ofconsciousness: instead of being determined by some subjectivepsychological property, consciousness is determined by its refer-ence to a content.92 Cohen likewise arrived at his argument for

88 Ethik, 410. ‘Eternity’ signifies for Cohen solely ‘the viewpoint of the restless,endless striving forwards of the pure will […] only the eternal effort’ (410). Cf.P. Fiorato, Geschichtliche Ewigkeit. Ursprung und Zeitlichkeit in der PhilosophieHermann Cohens (Würzburg, 1993).89 Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 94f.90 Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 93.91 In his Logik Cohen introduced within the ‘judgement of possibility’ con-sciousness as a heuristic category and distinguished it emphatically from agenetic concept of consciousness, 420ff.92 Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 97.

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the assumption of an autonomous third direction of conscious-ness by taking into consideration its contents: art is independentvis-à-vis nature and morality, it ‘is its own world that becomes ab-sorbed neither in nature nor in morality’,93 consisting rather ofits own creations. Consciousness produces in its third directionthe beautiful as a new content. However, this is not so much anew type of object, but is rather based on the ‘objects’ of natureand of freedom (morality), which henceforth function as matteror as building blocks.94 Cohen thus selected out of the realm ofculture a special area, namely art, and he subsequently had toprovide a justification of its nomological constitution within aes-thetic consciousness. No criterion is offered for espousing artrather than religion or technology, but, referring to Kant, Cohendid insist that with aesthetic consciousness ‘the system of thetypes of consciousness, the system of philosophy, is completed’.95

The new type or direction of consciousness,96 labelled feeling,has its own content insofar as it provides a link between natureand morality, a link which is the sole content of this new direc-tion.97

The situation in Cohen’s topical Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls issimilar: Aesthetics is to be founded as a systematic discipline ofphilosophy on the basis of art as a factual component of generalculture.98 Cohen also addressed the problem of the ‘aestheticlaying of foundations’ by taking the object and its production ashis point of departure. He explicitly admitted that at first sight itmay indeed appear mysterious ‘how next to knowledge and mor-ality another equal and pure mode of production can exist, espe-cially since the work of art, for which this third mode is sought,remains conditioned by those first two modes of production’.99 Apossible solution consists of seeking the new mode of produc-tion in the relation of consciousness to itself rather than in therelation to an object. In answer to the question whether it can be

93 Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 99.94 Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 100.95 Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 101.96 Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 151.97 Kants Begründung der Ästhetik, 225-6.98 Ästhetik I, xi.99 Ästhetik I, 84.

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demonstrated that this subjective relation or comportment is thelaying of foundations of a new object or of a realm of objects,Cohen offered the thesis that the content of the laying of foun-dations in regard to art can only be ‘the nomology of the aes-thetic consciousness’.100 He labelled this consciousness, whichdoes not depart from itself ‘in order to gain an object outside ofits own activity as its contents’,101 ‘pure feeling’.

What becomes plain only with the justification of aesthetics asthe third part of the system provides a general characterizationof Cohen’s determinations of the philosophical concept of sys-tem, insofar as these determinations bring the system into a rela-tionship with culture and its unity. With the expression ‘culturalconsciousness’ Cohen joined two aspects of the problem of sys-tem: the level of the theory of culture and the level of the theoryof consciousness. According to him the isolated ‘facts’ of culture(science, morality, art) as such and as participants in a unifiedculture can be understood only on the basis of the context oftheir modes of production, a context that is identical with thesystem of philosophy. This unity was going to be secured in thefourth part of the system, psychology, which, however, was neverwritten. Unlike Natorp,102 Cohen remained convinced of theconceptually constructive nature of psychology. The unity is a‘methodological’ one (of the laying of the foundations) so thatthe differences between the various directions of consciousnessof the cultural consciousness can be maintained. AlthoughCohen’s specific theory of the subject hardly becomes developedwithin his conception of psychology, it is nevertheless possible tointerpret his rejection of Natorp’s theory of existential experi-ence as part of his critique of metaphysics. In this critique hehoped that systematic psychology would supersede the ‘anti-quated metaphysics’ of the philosophy of identity.103

100 Ästhetik I, 89f.101 Ästhetik I, 97.102 Cf. his Allgemeine Psychologie (1912).103 Einleitung mit kritischem Nachtrag, 38.

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9. Ethical Taming of Religiosity

Historically speaking, Cohen’s theory of socialism stands in con-trast not only to the historical materialism of the Marxist type,but also to the attempt of religion and church to determine thewill of the ethical subject. With Kant’s concept of autonomy eth-ics had liberated itself from religion and theology and Cohen ac-cordingly resorted to ethical interpretation in order to integratecentral religious concepts (e.g. God, eternity, peace) into ration-al philosophy. Historical piety, felt especially acutely by the Jewbecause of the presumed religious origin of morality, finds itselflimited by the enlightened duty towards the universal interest ofmankind, an interest that Cohen never tired of tracking in Bib-lical passages, especially the prophetic ones. Cohen, at the age ofthirty-seven, saw himself compelled to take up this topic againsthis will; up to that point his relationship with the religion of hisforebears tended to be of a rather sentimental nature. However,in 1879 his religious heritage was provoked by the debate follow-ing the appearance of an article in the Preussische Jahrbücher bythe Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke. In his ‘Bekenntnisin der Judenfrage’ Cohen criticised Treitschke’s characterizationof Judaism as ‘the national religion of a tribe that was originallyforeign to us’ as well as the contrast the latter had drawnbetween this depiction and a ‘purer form of Christianity’.104

Cohen based his attack against anti-Semitism not so much on theracist motive (which, owing to his understanding of Judaism, heseemed to overlook) as on the religious zeal of Christians againstJews. Against a Biblical exegesis which claimed that the precept‘love thy neighbour’ was restricted to Israelite tribesmen Coheninsisted that the precept included strangers and that in fact thelove of a stranger provided ‘a creative element in the develop-ment of the concept of man as a neighbour’.105 Cohen exposed

104 Jüdische Schriften II, 73f.105 H. Cohen, ‘Die Nächstenliebe im Talmud. Ein Gutachten, dem Königl.Landgerichte zu Marburg erstattet’ (Marburg, 1888), reprinted in JüdischeSchriften I, 145-74.

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anti-Semitism as a moral disqualification of Judaism, a disquali-fication that was based on a partisan reading of religious texts.The struggle against anti-Semitism was part of the philosophicaleffort, namely of the critical examination of religion by thestandards of reason. In general, Cohen’s ethical interpretationof both testaments was directed against every kind of religiousparticularism, against the separation into dogmatic denomina-tions marked by their absolute claims, and against the sub-sequent practical and theoretical intolerance. The ‘Zionism dis-pute’ with Martin Buber in 1916 proceeded along similar lines.Cohen attacked the Zionist concept of the ‘Jewish nation’, forwhich there was to be created a legally safeguarded domicile inPalestine. Against this Cohen emphasized the proclamation ofthe prophet Micah: ‘Then the remnant of Jacob shall be in themidst of many peoples like dew from the Lord’.106 It was pre-cisely in the dispersal that Cohen recognized the reality and,along with it, the historical mission of modern Judaism. The Jew-ish religion can be maintained only within a ‘universally humaneJudaism’.107 However, in his desire to be a good German, Cohenwas blind to the particularistic nationalist facet of the very spiritof German culture to which he was almost religiously devoted.As late as in the beginning of 1915 he wrote to Natorp: ‘Human-ity will not become extinct, but the new in its development willconsist of the fact, and on this I insist: that it can achieve trueprogress only thanks to a profound insight into the essence ofthe spirit of German culture’.108 The disappointment was notlong in coming.

Religion presents for the proponent of a philosophical systeman even greater challenge than does art with its problematic ob-jectivity. For the system seems to be closed. It displays no deficitwhen religion is not considered as an independent direction ofconsciousness. In addition, there is no room for the religiousconsciousness next to the established directions of consciousnessand their ‘products’. Why then at all inquire after the place of

106 Mic. 5:7.107 H. Cohen, ‘Antwort auf das offene Schreiben des Herrn Dr. Martin Buberan Hermann Cohen’ (1916), in: Werke, vol. 17, 252-255.108 H. Holzhey, Cohen und Natorp, vol. 2, 440-1.

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religion in the system of philosophy? This question arises on thebasis of the recognition that religion is a ‘cultural fact’. No mat-ter what one’s own attitude toward religion is, religion does con-stitute an important cultural factor. And when philosophy is as-signed the task of grounding the unity of culture, then it musttake up the challenge that religion poses. The challenge has adual complexion: Systematic philosophy must account for thecultural factor of religion, but philosophy must also, given itscritical concept of culture, place constraints on the religiousconsciousness, since this consciousness can, and in fact re-peatedly does, endanger the unity of culture. Cohen attemptedto solve this problem by attributing no independence to reli-gion, only a ‘peculiarity’. The negative consequence of this con-ception is that next to a scientific, moral, and aesthetic con-sciousness there will be no independent religious consciousness,nor will there be a realm of religious objects within culture com-parable to the realms of scientific, moral, and artistic objects.109

However, it is difficult to discern what exactly the positive con-notation of ‘peculiarity’ in regard to the system is.

Cohen’s work on religion of 1915 deals not only with the rela-tion of religion to ethics, but also with its relation to all parts ofthe system. Religious consciousness possesses ‘peculiarity’ insofaras it functions as a critical supplement vis-à-vis logic, ethics, andaesthetics. Religion has a critical significance for epistemology, i.e.for theoretical philosophy, by virtue of the fact that it elevatesthe monotheistic proposition that God is the only being to thestandard of all validity of being, thus rejecting all speculative‘positing’. By raising the problem of the individual, religionhelps ethics to alleviate the deficit the latter has in regard to itsconcept of man, a deficit that only now becomes apparent. In re-gard to aesthetics religion, in a certain sense, assumes a criticalstance for its own sake. For thanks to the comparison betweenaesthetic and religious consciousness it becomes clear that onlyaesthetics, but not religion, is based on feeling. Religion does not,

109 Natorp’s solution, which attributed to religion ‘an independent basic formof consciousness’, but no ‘own realm of objects’, renders, on Cohen’spremisses, aesthetic and religious consciousness indistinguishable, Religioninnerhalb der Grenzen der Humanität (Tübingen, 19082), 44.

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according to Cohen, repose on the feeling of ‘absolute depen-dence’ as Schleiermacher had claimed. A corresponding criti-cism is directed against Natorp’s conception of religion. WhenNatorp took the totality of religious experience as his point ofdeparture and when he identified the peculiarity of religiousconsciousness as a ‘limitless and formless surging and weaving ofthe soul’ that was akin to feeling, Cohen objected that the tran-scendence of God, the central point of his own concept of reli-gion, was endangered.

The posthumous work Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen desJudentums also offers an ethical interpretation of religion, just asthe enlightened attitude is not simply abandoned. However,Cohen was here concerned less with a critical examination of re-ligion, an examination based on a standard of reason, than witha detailed interpretation of the contents of religious belief andof a religious life style within the limits of reason. And just as inthe earlier writings Cohen invariably meant by ‘religion’ impli-citly or explicitly the Jewish one, so in the Religion it is the‘sources of Judaism’ on the basis of which philosophical reasoncarries out its work. However, these sources do not simplyprovide an intelligible fact, rather religion is now presented asan admixture of stories, rituals, specific forms of life, and philo-sophical thoughts. Moreover, the philosopher Cohen is chal-lenged by the fact that religion is a historically generated entity.In this way, however, the philosophical attempt to establish aconcept of religion leads to a dilemma. One may either produce aconcept that is genuinely worthy of being labelled a concept,namely a purely philosophical one; for Cohen this would meanproducing an ethical concept of religion out of which all irra-tional and purely historically content is eliminated. Or one mayproduce a concept with a religious and thus irrational compo-nent, but one whose possibility could be questioned. Cohen tookup and radicalized Kant’s insight that human reason is destinedto have to raise metaphysical questions without being able to an-swer them satisfactorily in accordance with the standards of hu-man cognition. He wished to work out a concept of reasonwhich would leave uncontested reason’s competence to thinkgenerality and necessity, thus overcoming the chasm that dividespeople because of their God. At the same time this concept of

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reason was not meant to rely on the metaphysical thought of theabsolute, but was intended to connect theology to the basicmethodological notion of the correlation between man and God.Although religion in Cohen’s late work does gain a share of reas-on, and though this does occur by means of a historical concen-tration on religious Judaism, religion is nevertheless marked by apermanent link to universal ethical reason, which then standsunder its auspices. But Cohen at this point also came to appreci-ate the fact that the systematic and especially the ethical use ofhuman reason fails when faced with the truly difficult problemsof human existence. This was in part the result of a historical ex-perience made by Cohen unwillingly and subconsciously duringthe First World War when he encountered unexpectedly intensi-fying antisemitic tendencies. If earlier he had known experienceonly as a concept, then now he was personally affected. And yet,as one affected in this fashion, he continued to work within aconception of the world, a conception which, however, wasshaped by the sources of Judaism.

10. The Philosopher

It is symptomatic of Cohen’s systematic thought that the personof the philosopher is characterized neither by wonder oramazement, nor by doubt in which certainty is sought. Ratherthe philosopher appears in his confession of messianic convic-tion: I am confident, it is my belief. Does this ‘I’ have — beyonda merely biographical relevance — a philosophical significance?Cohen was no existentialist philosopher and there is no sense inproviding an explanation along these lines. His philosophicalperson is rather located in ethical knowledge, i.e. in the knowl-edge of what one ought to do. What is at stake is not ‘the assur-ance and the ardent elevation of moral belief’, ‘moving theheart so powerfully and stimulating and brightening themind’;110 rather it is the knowledge of the basic ethical conceptsand principles, the ability to provide a justification by way of anargumentative discourse. Why then is a personal engagement

110 Ethik, 512.

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still required, especially since this is not to be understood in thesense of a rhetorically affective accompaniment of rational dis-course? Cohen connected the deficit that required a personal in-volvement with the distinction between knowledge and certainty.As long as in answering the ethical question of what ought to bedone I must content myself with foundations (hypotheseis) insteadof absolute foundations, I will reach only hypothetical certainty,i.e. knowledge, but not absolute knowledge. In order to endurea virtue is required, namely the virtue of truthfulness. Cohen im-plicitly charged that every attempt at knowledge was endangeredby a relapse into fundamentalistic metaphysics. The search forknowledge or truth tends to transpose itself into the search forthe possession of truth. Truthfulness is the corrective of this meta-physical need. The philosopher must not only say the truth, i.e.that which appears to him to be true, he must also accept thefact that the search is as far as he will get. To understand this andto be able to endure it a knowledge of the self is needed, aknowledge that can only be achieved in a personal process oflearning which eludes a totally rational description, in short: avirtue is required. The subjects of philosophy must possess thevirtue of truthfulness.111 At the end of his farewell speech at Mar-burg Cohen said that ‘virtue is related to universality’, but that ‘itis attached to man, to the living man’. The melancholy in whichhis academic career ended suggests how difficult it is to be agenuine philosopher, eternally waiting for the messiah.

111 Ethik, 510.

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