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7. “He Is (Not) Like You”: How Suffering Commands Self or Soul
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138. In the language of religion we would search in vain for a term connoting the Self. The Self originates in self-awareness, and hence belongs to philosophical terminology. It is to the credit of prophetic religion that it discovered the concept of the person in the concept of the soul. The person as an individual emerges in relation to ancestors, kinfolk, and nation; and these social bonds cannot be severed. Thus we can speak of the individual only in the generic sense as son of man, as one of the children of man. [The term ben adam (son of man) applies in biblical sources in 7 “He Is (Not) Like You” How Suffering Commands Self or Soul Having discussed the ideal of human perfection first halakhically and morally, Cohen in this seventh chapter sets out to ground the human pursuit of the ideal in the individual’s responsibility. The concept of individual responsibility, which Cohen models after the teaching of the prophet Ezekiel, is of central importance to Cohen’s theory of the Self as an infinite task rather than a given entity. The Self emerges in the relationship to another—a thou—rather than in the lonely pursuit of the philosopher trying to achieve the bliss of theoretical knowledge as promised by Aristotelian eudaemonian ethics. Self-perfection, according to Cohen, means the pursuit of justice, a pursuit in which ethical self-awareness makes itself felt as an autonomous power of the human will. Self or Soul (See 138.) The Self. There is no Hebrew term for Self in the Cartesian sense of cogito ergo sum. Maimonides employs the term nefesh (soul) for what one could read as an indication of the thinking Self.1 However, the Hebrew term nefesh, although taken by medieval thinkers at times in the Aristotelian sense of intellect or rational soul, usually carries the implications of the Greek psyche and the Latin anima. Whereas the concept of Self in the modern philosophical sense always points to self-awareness (Selbstbewusstsein), ethics of maimonides 146 medieval usage of the Hebrew nefesh often refers to pure physical vitality in explicit opposition to the intellect. Also the postbiblical Hebrew term sekhel for mind does not denote the Self but rather the rational faculty (nou~, intellectus; Vernunft; reason) with no indication of any subjective self-awareness. particular to the prophet Ezekiel himself who represents to Cohen the very responsibility of the single individual . RoR 211; RdV 246. In other instances, the term ben adam simply indicates the generic term descendant of Adam (a human being). The application of the term son of man to the founder of Christianity originates in Jewish apocalyptical, apocryphal writings close to the Essene movement. Flusser 1997, 124–33.] Even the individual cannot be conceived of in his or her own right except within this generic relationship . [Cohen’s concept of the individual , pointing beyond the universal and generic domains of ethics (BdR 61–62; RoR 167–68; RdV 195–96), is strictly bound to the ethical pursuit of the ideal of humanity. BdR 58–59; RoR 167–68; RdV 195–96.] The prophets who discovered the concept of individual soul. Cohen refers to his favorite passage in Ezekiel (18:4, 20), “hanefesh hachoteth hi tamuth” [the soul that sinneth, it shall die]. Cohen credits his namesake, the prophet Ezekiel, with the discovery of the original human commitment toward the Good and, subsequently , with the discovery of ethical responsibility, by proclaiming that it is the individual alone who can be made accountable for her own transgressions: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die; the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father with him, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son with him.”2 It is Ezekiel who abrogates the concept of hereditary sin and of collective responsibility, which, according to Cohen, constitutes a main feature of mythical thought: “We must eradicate the archevil of myth, namely its claim that human nature is tainted with hereditary sin.”3 The idea of free will and of individual responsibility results in the personal accountability of human action, giving rise to the concept of the individual Self. According to Cohen, the prophet Ezekiel discovers the concept of the “single individual ” (das Individuum als Ich) and contributes it to the consciousness of human culture.4 Das Individuum als Ich points to the unique Self, the meta-ethical Self that lies beyond the range of ethics: The problem of the single individual [Ich] can neither be...