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Foreword
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Foreword Without students, there are no teachers. For about ten years, interest in Franz Rosenzweig has been growing, not only in Jewish studies, but indeed , in other contexts, including philosophy, theology, and German studies . Part of that interest arose in relation to Emmanuel Levinas, who, though never Rosenzweig’s student, clearly expressed a deep debt to Rosenzweig, and especially to The Star of Redemption. Levinas, whose moment of fame in France is now being echoed in North America, represents a specifically Jewish inflection of postmodernism. Rosenzweig, on the other hand, lived in that fecund and difficult moment of Weimar Germany—the years before the Shoah—and died in 1929. Rosenzweig, however, is not the topic of the book that lies in your hands; this work is written by Rosenzweig’s own teacher, Hermann Cohen. The book before you is a decisive refutation of Rosenzweig’s view of his own teacher—and at the same time a vindication of the teacher, and even of the student. Thus we are drawn from student to teacher, to learn from the teacher and become students. There are many lines back to Cohen, and were we ourselves not interested in becoming students, interested not in the teaching but only in the history of teachers, we would still need to study Cohen. Rosenzweig hails him as a Columbus (and I would, as a Copernicus ), and claims that Cohen was the first truly Jewish philosopher who discovered a new route, a new thinking. Like a Columbus, it is Cohen who discovered the new possibility and exigency of thought, discovering a land for the voyages not only of Levinas and Rosenzweig, but also of Buber and Benjamin and, in different ways, of Scholem, Strauss, Pines, and many others. Cohen is not merely the first, he is also the teacher of those who follow . His teaching, moreover, is one that reflects a decisive need in philosophy itself, a need to engage with Judaism. Judaism for Cohen is defined through its literary sources and so retains a certain kind of particularity even as it enters into conversation with, or better a correlation with, or still more clearly, even as it is translated into, philosophy. This foreword x disruption of the Greek/German philosophical tradition happens so seamlessly and so adroitly in Cohen, that even students like Rosenzweig could overlook Judaism’s role in Cohen’s systematic philosophical works. But what seems obvious to postmoderns, that an engagement with otherness should disrupt philosophy’s authority, is developed in a complex and in its own way disturbing fashion in Cohen’s work. For Cohen will not compromise on universality and on reason (and in this remains a modern, even a modernist), but at the same time he negotiates with the specificity of Jewish sources, and not merely as warehouses for properly philosophical ideas, but as texts and, indeed, as originary sources for a reasoning that knows ideas that are foreign to the Greek tradition. What happens when such ideas become translated into philosophy , when, for example, the messianic age becomes the idea of humanity , or when atonement becomes the way of individuating the self, is a reorientation for philosophy itself. The 1908 essay “Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis” (Ethics of Maimonides ) is one of Cohen’s central teachings of this new thinking. It is here translated into English for the first time, and the translator, Almut Sh. Bruckstein, has provided not only a translation and a commentary, but also an extremely valuable introduction, in which she explains why Cohen undertook to write this essay in 1908. She situates it not only in the Maimonides project of the German Jewish intellectuals, but also in Cohen’s own career. Cohen’s task is to listen again to Maimonides, but to listen in order to let him address Cohen’s contemporary philosophical and religious scene. Cohen does make historical claims per se, that Maimonides innovated in relation to his philosophical context, or as biblical interpreter, but such claims are vastly overshadowed by Cohen’s discovery of a full range of ethical insights, insights that almost leap across the generations to address Cohen and his contemporaries. The essay is a reframing of the histories of ethics, of philosophy, and of religion—starting with Socrates, and demanding a revisiting of the tension between Aristotle and Plato. The essay makes its case with the Protestant philosophical and theological establishment of Cohen’s time—arguing for the philosophical superiority of a rationalist theology—or, as Cohen would prefer, of a...