How are religious ideas, specifically complex ethical-religious concepts, communicated? Are a nonsystematic style and a conceptual inconsistency necessarily irrational? To answer these intriguing methodological questions, Daniel Weiss explores Hermann Cohen's less well-known essay “The Style of the Prophets” (1901) and its reverberation in Religion of Reason (1919), probing the relation between style, method, and content. We learn that Cohen is not (quite) who we thought he was as a thinker. Through a close reading, Weiss seeks to overcome the dichotomy of the two regnant approaches to Religion of Reason, which, for the sake of consistency, understand the work to be either “philosophical” or “religious,” ignoring the mutual tension between these aspects and the multiplicity of voices in the text. Equally important is Weiss's observation that an analysis of Cohen's expository style has been largely neglected and has led to the misreading of his work; this has had implications for subsequent Jewish philosophy (30). What may appear as a paradoxical style is more correctly read as a challenge to traditional philosophical writing and to those who deny the role of Scripture in the “mode of reasoning” of Religion of Reason (7).
This mode of reasoning, situated in the “border-area between art and science” (43), is inspired by the prophets, who adopt an antithetical structure that effectively uses multiple and contradictory perspectives to convey difficult ethical-religious ideas. Not only is theoretical comprehensibility impossible, Weiss maintains, but the ethical relevance of religious ideas depends on cognitive vagueness. Ambiguity always underlies an ethical life that unfolds in continuous tension between ideality and actuality. Weiss notes the analytical distinction between the very limited actualization of a person's ethical task and the meaning that he or she may attach to the very act of striving. According to Cohen's paradoxical logic, living the ethical self is a task that is both “fulfillable and non-fulfillable” (194). In a similar vein, prophetic messianism posits an “infinitesimal-ethical messianic future.”
For Cohen, too, style and method are inextricably interwoven. The communicative style allows him to embed “plurality within totality” while negotiating the universality of reason and the particularity of the sources. By maintaining the “theoretical incompatibility” between philosophy and religion (27) and their “infinitesimal” gap (29), Cohen acknowledged the limits of the methodological rigor of scientific philosophy. According to Weiss, Cohen's early realization of the limitations of rational ethics may have influenced him to choose a “type of indirect communication that presents religious concepts through the medium of scriptural interpretation” (25). What emerges from Cohen's presentation of the Jewish sources is “that theoretical multiplicity or contradiction need not obviate a functional or practical type of unity and coherence” (90). Because of the practical nature of Scriptural ideas they must be appropriated in a practical-rational manner. Cohen's endorsement of the practical-performative unity of the Jewish hermeneutical tradition as elucidated by Weiss brings him surprisingly close to Mendelssohn's affirmation of the “bodily” particularity of Judaism based on its ceremonial law.
Navigating the issue of continuity and discontinuity in Religion of Reason, Weiss asserts that it is neither “‘consistent with’ nor ‘objectively separate from’ [Cohen's] previous system” (29, 95), thus describing Cohen's presentation of religion as paradoxical. Weiss tries to make sense of the contradictions in Cohen's conception of religion, specifically between the “single-voiced form” of the introduction to Religion of Reason and the multiplicity of voices in the rest of the work (113). According to Weiss, Cohen seems to be conflicted about the objectifying method of ethics, on the one hand, which, in order to attain unity, cannot tolerate multiplicity, and religion's affirmation of individuality, on the other hand. Weiss moves outside the traditional line of reasoning by suggesting that Kierkegaard––that is, the Kantian elements in Kierkegaard––can help illuminate Cohen's solution of this conflict.
Weiss accordingly argues that similar to Kierkegaard in his account of the subjective thinker's indirect communication, Cohen makes his point through an interplay of comedy and pathos as fundamental qualities of human existence. Cohen's puzzling proposition that one loves primarily an idea may thus imply that “[a] reader who wants to think of God as a person must train himself to recognize that God can be equally regarded as an idea. A reader who wants to think of God as an idea must train herself to recognize that God can be equally regarded as a person” (123). While one may question the accuracy of this adverb, Weiss challenges us to abandon Buber's literal reading of Cohen according to which love of the idealized person necessarily excludes love of the actual person. For Weiss, saying “two different things with only one voice” (103) is a feature of Religion of Reason's own stylistic indirectness. But this interpretation could open the door wide to arbitrariness, thus contradicting Cohen's explicit intent.
Cohen's mode of “half-saying” leaves the hermeneutical work to the reader. In Cohen's “midrashic,” open-ended approach to revelation, the “source of transcendent authority lies between the text and the reader” (216). The reader is presumably thereby prompted to engage in active reconstruction and continuous re-reading, which may “strengthen” her “practical knowledge and habits” (137). But can we assume that the reader engages the Religion of Reason as a manual “of how to move from Scripture to practical-rational understandings of religious concepts” (216, emphasis D.W.)?
Even if contradiction is integral to indirect communication, such a reading still poses problems, for Cohen remained, in spite of his inner ambivalence, a systematic thinker committed to logical coherence and the transcendental method. To suggest certainty about Cohen's “overall authorial goals” might be tricky (133). In order to compensate for inaccurate presentations of Cohen's thought that obfuscate his originality Weiss argues perhaps a bit too forcefully that the Religion of Reason is to be read in conjunction with “The Style of the Prophets.” This approach refocuses the question of continuity from the prevailing conceptual analysis to that of hermeneutics. Suggesting that Cohen's intention was “ethical and cultural repair” (217), based on a reasoning derived from the textual sources, Weiss widens the panoply of Jewish textual reasoning. It would be worthwhile to further explore “indirect communication” and to investigate its relevance for a comparative hermeneutics of the monotheistic religions.
The question of indirect communication is also addressed by Hartwig Wiedebach in The National Element in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy and Religion, a translation of a revised edition of the German text of 1997. This thematic investigation revisits Cohen's major philosophical writings to show that the problem of nationality, and correspondingly, religion, pervades his system of thought. Cohen was preoccupied with the question of how nationality, a particularistic historical experience, can achieve a “general-scientific meaning” and “a general-cultural significance” (236). Context and events were indispensable to him in answering this question. For example, Cohen's trip to Russia in 1914 sensitized him to the corporate suffering of the Jewish people, which affected his “style” of thinking (10).
Wiedebach, like Weiss, acknowledges that Cohen struggled with that which cannot have been “readily communicated,” in this case, the themes of nationality and nation. Cohen's “language on origin,” or pure thought, is sort of “poetic” (62). Wiedebach is duly attentive to confrontations and controversy encountered by Cohen, for they sharpened his critical thinking and deepened the connection between his system and the “systematic genetics of the concept of nationality” (55). The public debate with Buber, over a separatist orthodoxy, assimilation, and Zionism, challenged Cohen to clarify the concept of nationality and to refine it in light of the idea of monotheism, whose guardian is Judaism. In its law-based, non-territorial coding of Jewish identity, Orthodox Judaism is only in soft conflict with the idea of unity; it continues to uphold a “logic” that according to Cohen is “political” in its very apoliticality. Here Judaism is still affirmed as a religious community defined by its particularistic historical experience. Wiedebach traces the logic of the “paradoxical political program of a non-political actuality” to Cohen's systematic works, where, he claims, “the ambiguous concept of nationality is represented by purely logical determinations” (52–53).
For lack of an explicit theory of nationality, Weidebach identifies Cohen's method of analysis by what is indicated in his Logic of Pure Knowledge. Wiedebach establishes a correlation between the logical dispositions of the “Judgment of Plurality”—which “lays the foundation for Cohen's concept of nationality as plurality,” and thus for his political thinking—and the “Judgment of Reality” (59). Cohen links plurality to the notion of origin, for it constitutes the “eternal beginning of thinking” (56). By establishing difference, plurality is the a priori starting point of definition. Nationality is thus linked to pure monotheism and considered a correlate of religion. This conjunction aligns Jewish particularity with a universal horizon of knowledge “by orienting itself toward the future,” exercising “an ever open anticipation of new difference” (84). Wiedebach puts a new spin on anticipation, highlighting its epistemological significance. Cohen's hermeneutic objective now becomes clear. By recognizing the new knowledge inherent in future Jewish nationality, he justifies it. This perspective allows for a theory of community that is based on the distinction between nationality and the nation: Nationalities are unified in the state. The logical concept of allness is translated into its historical analogy, the nation state, but not without emphasizing the need for an ethical transformation of the natural fact of peoplehood, reinforced by an ethical theory of the state. While Wiedebach underscores the philosophical structure of this argument, the normative-ideological motive is nonetheless palpable.
The contradictory cannot be accepted as a given for Cohen—rather, it necessitates an “annihilating ‘act of judgment’” (67, 146) and a redetermination of content as prescribed by the logic of origin. Therein lies the “eternal paradox” of the anxiety that accompanies historical experience and its transformation into the certainty of ethical teleology. Though Wiedebach acknowledges difficulties in evaluating Cohen's philosophical thinking, such as the “polarity” in his concept of politics, he systematically dissolves possible contradictions, ruling out logical inconsistencies. After all, Cohen relied on mathematical thinking to “ward off all vagueness and uncertainty” (57). Not irony but “naïveté” characterizes Cohen's “philosophical gesture” (65). How else would we understand his belief that decision makers could be educated through philosophy towards personal responsibility?
Wiedebach moves from ethics to aesthetics to reconsider Cohen's intricate views on Germanism and Judaism as they bear on the concept of nationality. For Cohen, aesthetics proved a better prism for particular experiences than ethics. “Genuineness” is a criterion of systematic aesthetics, because artworks reflect a concept of genius that attests to a distinctive national originality, a pure feeling which Cohen finds most pronounced in German cultural consciousness. Indeed, Cohen's rejection of a biological foundation of race seems to conflict with his claim that a people can be a “somatic representation of pure content” (148). This is Cohen's blunder: his aesthetic theory leads him to identify the Germans as an “ethically pure natural power” (241), obscuring the difference between ideal and actuality. Thus we see how pure logic can lead to fallacious conclusions. Wiedebach argues that Cohen's Judaism is constructed according to an analogous logic. It can make claim to the pure personal experience of history, because its religious concepts endorse politics while eschewing statehood. The ritual of atonement exemplifies how Judaism realizes the normative ideal of “the pure thought of humanity” (243) and its moral unity. Germanness and Judaism paradoxically and inseparably combine conditions that appear antithetical: particularity and universality.
In this tightly argued book, the author connects the dots between religion, philosophy, and political theory in Cohen's thought, stressing their closely intertwined nature and elucidating their complex interrelationships. The lack of a subject index is a shortcoming, however.
Both of the works under review generate fresh discussion and shed new light on the intricate paradoxes that Cohen as well as other Jewish philosophers have confronted in their attempts to reconcile the relationship between particularity and universality.
