Hermann Cohen

Works

• 1871Kant’s Theory of Experience

  Reading of the Critique of Pure Reason that founded the Marburg school: the a priori is not an innate equipment of the mind but the set of conditions that make experience, as scientific knowledge, possible; reworked in 1885 into the “transcendental method”.

• 1919Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism

  Posthumous main work of his philosophy of religion: from the Bible, the prophets, rabbinic literature and Maimonides, Cohen develops monotheism as a religion of reason centred on the correlation of God and human being, on repentance and on compassion for the fellow human.

Position

Cohen is on the map as the founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and as a modern Jewish philosopher. He read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” not as a psychology of the knowing mind but as a theory of the conditions that make scientific knowledge possible: the “transcendental method” starts from the fact of mathematical natural science and asks for the principles on which its objectivity rests. In his own system – “Logic of Pure Knowledge” (1902), “Ethics of Pure Will” (1904), “Aesthetics of Pure Feeling” (1912) – he went beyond Kant by giving up a sensibility that receives what is given: pure thought produces its content from an “origin”, a principle he developed from the infinitesimal calculus. His ethics took Kant’s formula of humanity as the basis of a democratic “ethical socialism”; in 1896 he called Kant “the true and actual originator of German socialism”. In his late works he read Judaism, from the prophets to Maimonides, as the historical source of a religion of reason: the one God guarantees the ethical ideal, and God and human being stand in “correlation”, in which the individual becomes a self through repentance and the other becomes a fellow human through compassion. He opposed Zionism, holding that Jews should remain citizens of their countries; Buber replied in 1916. Cassirer, his student, carried the Marburg approach into a philosophy of culture; Rosenzweig took up his philosophy of religion.

Life & context

Hermann Cohen was born on 4 July 1842 in Coswig in Anhalt, the son of a cantor. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, intending to become a rabbi, then philosophy in Breslau and Berlin, and took his doctorate in Halle in 1865. His “Kant’s Theory of Experience” (1871) won the support of Friedrich Albert Lange, who brought him to Marburg: he qualified there in 1873, became extraordinary professor in 1875 and in 1876 succeeded Lange to the chair. With Paul Natorp he made Marburg a centre of neo-Kantianism; among the students were Ernst Cassirer, Nicolai Hartmann and José Ortega y Gasset. In 1880 he answered Heinrich von Treitschke’s antisemitic attacks with “Ein Bekenntnis in der Judenfrage”. After retiring in 1912 he taught at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where Franz Rosenzweig attended his lectures. He died in Berlin on 4 April 1918.

Further main works

• Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871; 2nd ed. 1885)
• Das Prinzip der Infinitesimal-Methode und seine Geschichte (1883)
• Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (1902)
• Ethik des reinen Willens (1904)
• Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (1912)
• Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1919)