The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen

Ethics

6 Ethics 1. THE DEVELOPMENT OF COHEN'S INTERPRETATION OF KANT'S ETHICS The best way ofhighlighting the critical meaning of Cohen's ethics is to begin with his interpretation of and departures from Kant's ethics, following the same procedure as in the previous chapter on logic. As has already been noted, in 1877, Cohen published Kants Begriindung der Ethik, an interpretation of Kant's ethics, following his interpretation of Kant's theoretical philosophy (Kants Theone derErfahrung, in 1871), both of which, together with his 1889 book Kants Begriindung der Asthetik, make up his complete commentary on Kant's critical philosophy (to which should be added the later Kommentar z.u Immanuel Kants Kntik der reinen Vernunft, published in 1907). In this early work, Cohen criticized several points of Kant's practical philosophy, going beyond its literal meaning, in an attempt to correct its weaknesses and fill in gaps. However, in the years that followed, Cohen's ethical thought, alongside his approach to Kant in the same area, underwent a substantial evolution , arriving at a systematic formulation in Ethik des reinen Willens, that is quite distant from that in the first edition of Kants Begriindung der Ethik, even contradicting it in certain aspects. I do not propose to provide a detailed analysis of this evolution, mainly because this has already been scrupulously carried out by Eggert Winter,! to whose analysis brief reference will be made here. lO3 104 THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHYOF HERMANN COHEN In the first edition of Kants Begrnndung der Ethik, Cohen had been particularly dissatisfied with Kant's failure to provide a deduction of moral law, which the latter considered impossible, owing to the different conditions of practical and theoretical reason. Cohen could hardly pass over such a failure, since, in his view, the transcendental method is the foremost point in favor of Kant's philosophy. Cohen was thus faced with an embarrassing problem. Though, in the first edition of Kants Begrnndung der Ethik, he had accepted Kant's denial of the possibility of the deduction of the practical a priori and substitution with its exposition (cf. KBE 179ff.) (actually, it is less of an acceptance than an intention to explain Kant's thought beforejudging it, in a book which is more of an interpretative commentary than a critical essay), he was already showing signs of dissatisfaction with this solution and looking for the possibility of founding the a priori principle of morality within the context ofKant's own philosophy. Cohen's analysis of the meaning of an exposition of the practical a priori is an initial attempt in this direction. He rejects all the interpretations that explain its discovery either empirically or dogmatically-speculatively (cf. KBE 179ff.), trying tojustifY the position ofa concept which is analytical in itself; that of 'pure will,' in the transcendental-methodical sense, as an 'abstraction' (KBE 186), needed for founding the possibility of morality: "Following the transcendental method, we start offfrom the analytical concept of pure will and develop its content concerning the construction of systematic connections of the knowledge regarding a need for the practical use of reason. The formulation of moral law is to be deducedfrom the analytical concept ofpure wilt (KBE 188) .2 However, if Cohen's effort to justifY Kant's practical a priori had stopped here, it would have been understood as a postulate position, an idea which Cohen did not accept. It should be recalled that one of the points on which he had criticized Kant is precisely that of the postulates (cf. KBE 344ff.). Actually, the effort to justifY Kant's practical a priori went even further. The whole first part of Kants Begrnndung der Ethik (cf. KBE 23-133), which deals with the theory of ideas, is conceived with the objective of demonstrating that the need for a practical philosophy grounded in an a priori principle, and the foundation of such a principle , is already present in Kant's theoretical philosophy (cf. KBE 17). The interpretation provided here by Cohen of Kant's t.heory of ideas, therefore , does not only aim at completing the interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason in the first edition of Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (which was definitely unsatisfactory concerning Kant's transcendental dialectic), as Cohen himselfpoints out in the Vorrede to the second edition of the book (cf. KTE xv). Its purpose was also to show how the theory of ideas pre- Ethics 105...