The Origin: Let’s begin with Hermann Cohen’s LOGIK DER REINEN ERKENNTNIS

• In Event: Drawing Cohen into the Conversation: A centennial commemoration of Hermann Cohen

Abstract

English language readers read Hermann Cohen’s Jewish philosophy in a bizarre way.
Yes, Cohen’s political views color his vision of the ideal society and lead him to oppose Zionism and love Germanism. Of course, Cohen considers Maimonides a hero and Spinoza a heel because one found the right balance between cosmopolitanism and Jewish uniqueness while the other didn’t. Without a doubt, Cohen reinterprets many Jewish concepts to instill them with new meaning for modernity. Yet, as significant as those aspects of Cohen’s writings are, they do not engage with the most monumental feature of Cohen’s Jewish thought: its emergence from a philosophical system.
Without access to Cohen’s system in English, too many readers have not been able to engage with the substantial methodological groundwork that establishes the validity of Cohen’s project. Instead, readers effectively rely on an appeal to authority when engaging with Cohen’s conclusions. Thus, translation into English of Cohen’s entire system of philosophy remains a worthy, if presently unfeasible, desideratum. This paper argues that, at a very minimum, the judgment of origin, the very first in the table of judgments in Cohen’s LOGIC OF PURE COGNITION, should top the list of texts to translate because much of Cohen’s methodology and technical vocabulary depends upon this brief chapter’s argument.
In this chapter, Cohen rejects philosophy’s presupposition of the given substituting an algebraic notation for an ascertainable unknown, and giving logic the goal of deriving conditions for its determination. Cohen next examines the Greek privative particle ME, which leads from the relative nothing through the concept of continuity to the infinitesimal, thereby establishing the methodological vocabulary that unites the disparate parts of the system of philosophy with religion. Thus, when these terms recur in RELIGION OF REASON and elsewhere, Cohen is unmistakably invoking this chapter’s PROBLEMGESCHICHTE, and arguing that Judaism is not merely an alternative western religion, but rather that it is the avenue to the best possible account of truth which has long eluded western thought. Cohen thereby reveals a subtle ambitiousness that has been missing from more recent Jewish thought, but which through further translation can be reclaimed.

Author

• Mark A. Kaplowitz