Hermann Cohen

Raised in a religious observant family in Coswig, Saxony (now Germany), Hermann Cohen intended to study for the rabbinate but later chose to study philosophy instead. Making his entire career at the University of Marburg, Cohen revived and recast Kant’s philosophy. Kant’s account of human knowledge was that it was possible only through a priori categories of apperception. Cohen defended this account against tendencies to reduce it to an empirical cognitive psychology, thus laying the groundwork in important ways for the great pure philosophical projects of the interwar period, phenomenology, and logical positivism. Cohen broke sharply with Kant, however, in his defense of Judaism. Against Kant’s Enlightenment charge that Judaism was fatally “heteronomous,” in other words, a mishmash of laws founded on authority but not reason, Cohen presented Judaism as both the first iteration of the ethical universalism toward which all human morality had to strive and as an ethical religion that, properly understood, was fully grounded in reason. This argument was most fully developed in his last great and posthumously published work, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919), but articulations of Cohen’s continual engagement with Judaism can be found much earlier, as evidenced in his 1880 response to the deeply unsettling antisemitic charges that Jews were “an alien tribe” in the German nation made by the influential and (nominally) liberal German historian von Treitschke. Cohen himself was a fervent German patriot, insisting that Judaism was an inherently ahistorical religion whose spiritual mission transcended any accidental Jewish collectivity. He thus became an outspoken opponent of Zionism as it spread among some German Jewish young people and continued to adhere to a liberal-national faith that German Jewish integration and acceptance was possible. The ideas of national revival and religious “return” that moved the next generation of avowed Jewish philosophers in Germany like Buber and Franz Rosenzweig could not have been more opposed to Cohen’s austere neo-Kantian effort to ground all aspects of human life in rationality, but his efforts to mount a full philosophical defense of Judaism undoubtedly had a galvanizing effect on philosophically engaged German Jewish youth.