New Work on Hermann Cohen: A Review Essay

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the full potential of “modernity” began to manifest in complex processes of change and innovation, some European philosophers formulated comprehensive systems that represented the modern worldview but also tried to humanize and, to some extent, to reenchant a world that allowed itself to be known, disclosed, and even produced by the spontaneity of the human intellect or “spirit.” Emboldened by the idea of liberty and forewarned by the excesses of the French Revolution, these philosophers followed the lead of German thinkers and poets, including Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the “philosopher with a phrygian cap,” the theologian Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the poet, playwright, and aesthetic moralist Friedrich Schiller, and the Jena philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). The movement of “German idealism” crystallized around a group of Tübingen students of theology, including the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and the philosophers Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), who articulated ways of rationally accounting for the complex forces unleashed by the rapidly expanding universe of knowledge, technology, and political change. The main challenge was to strike a balance between natural necessity and human freedom, to reconcile the spontaneity of the intellect with the immutable laws of nature, and to appreciate the sub-lime beauty of the spirit that permeates both nature and world of human making. The programs and systems of philosophy these thinkers produced in their respective attempts to articulate the underlying rationality of change proved in many ways insufficient. Standard histories of philosophy speak of a “collapse” of German idealism in the face of the run-away success of the specialized sciences that defied attempts at philosophical systematization and in the face of more radical movements, such as philosophical materialism and biologistic nationalism. The idea of a rational or discursive basis on which to reconcile and mitigate the irrational forces of change that consumed millennial forms of life to form new and unpredictable ones, has remained alluring, even pressing. Those of us for whom philosophy matters periodically return to the poetic and philosophical works produced at the dawn of contemporary modernity, around 1800, if for no other reason than to recall where our own ideas about modernity came from, to reexamine our presuppositions, and if possible to forge new ones, better able to account for where and what we are as humans who organize themselves in families, communities, and nations aspiring to a common humanity in the face of the forces of destruction we have unleashed and that we seem ill-equipped to control.

Modern Judaism participates in this story. Modern Jewish religious and political movements were shaped in response to the theoretical, political, social, and economic challenges of European modernity. Jews responded as individuals and collectives. Many individuals sought their fortune either by migrating away from European upheaval, seeking opportunities in the New World of the Americas or in the very old world of Palestine. Collectively, the great Jewish question of the nineteenth century concerned political and social equality beyond the accustomed boundaries of religion. The mitigation of religious difference in the social and political spheres proceeded in fits and starts. As a result, Jews often found that their accustomed feeling of foreignness and otherness was merely transposed into new and different keys of incompatibility. While forcing themselves to relinquish the old self-understanding of a nation dwelling apart, European Jews used a blend of European and Jewish ideas to articulate the abiding meaning and sense of Jewish continuity in novel ways. Modern Jewish religious movements sought to strike a balance between continuity and change, ritual...