Journal of Jewish Thought

& Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

brill.com/jjtp

Eric Gans’s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the

Jewish Question vis-à-vis Hermann Cohen’s Heritage

Roman Katsman
Department of Literature of the Jewish People, Bar-Ilan University
roman.katsman@biu.ac.il

Abstract

In this article I compare some elements of Eric Gans’s thought with a few aspects of
the philosophy of Hermann Cohen—first and foremost, Gans’s concept of the origin
and Cohen’s concept of Ursprung—while revealing the deep affinity between these
two lines of thinking.

Keywords

Hermann Cohen – Eric Gans – Ursprung – origin – neo-Kantianism – recent Jewish

thought – anti-Semitism

…
Thought is thought of the origin.
Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (36)

∵
The purpose of this article is to reread some of the works of Eric Gans, a founder
of Generative Anthropology (hereafter GA), a “Bronx-French intellectual”
(CLR 433, 10/6/2012),1 and a professor of French at UCLA, in light of Hermann

1 Gans’s online work Chronicles of Love and Resentment is available at http://www.anthropoetics

.ucla.edu/views/Chronicles_home.cfm. Citations are given in the form CLR, issue number,
and date of posting.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi 10.1163/1477285X-12341265

Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 237

Cohen’s concept of Ursprung—origin. I argue that the deep affinity between

Cohen and Gans lies in the method of thinking of the Human through the
origin as a transcendental hypothesis. If the concept of origin looks nowadays
hopelessly metaphysical, reductionist, and traditionalistic—in short, inad-
equate—it is because the “idea of Human” died together with the “idea of
Humanity”: for the first time, in Nietzsche’s thought; later, under the attacks
of Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Gogarten, and others on Cohen’s heritage in
the 1930s;2 and finally, in poststructuralist and postmodern thinking, like Gilles
Deleuze’s “surface” philosophy and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, aimed
against any transcendental philosophy.3 GA aims “to put the Human back in
the Humanities”4 after the crisis caused by post-human thinking, and to that
end reinserts into the humanities the idea of origin. Indeed, Gans’s mode of
thought is anthropological, when he talks about the hypothetical event of the
origination of the Human (originary thinking), while Cohen’s mode of thought
is exemplarily philosophical, when he describes the origination of the (intel-
ligible) world from the a priori act of hypothesizing the idea (“origin of think-
ing” and “judgment of the origin”).5 But my purpose is to reveal the congruence
between these two lines of thinking.
Such an attempt has been provoked by a few comments by Gans himself,
who a few years ago took up the question of the Jewish elements of GA: “But
in what sense is GA, which takes no obvious religious stance, ‘Jewish’? Should
it be seen despite appearances as a redefinition of the essence of Judaism, as
various Jewish thinkers through the ages, say, Spinoza or Hermann Cohen,
have attempted?” (CLR 434, 10/27/2012). I suppose that GA, similarly to Cohen’s
philosophy, narrates “two distinct tales within a larger story”: insofar as it is
Jewish thought, it retrieves the philosophical depth of Judaism; and insofar as
it is philosophy of religion, it investigates the role of Judaism’s p
­ hilosophical

2 William Kluback, The Idea of Humanity: Hermann Cohen’s Legacy to Philosophy and Theology
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 274.
3 It would be more precise to say that Deleuze replaces the origin with his concept of the
“dark predecessor” of differences, and Derrida replaces the transcendental, in particular in
the course of his analysis of Husserl’s concept of origin, with “différance.” Gilles Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), 150ff.; Jacques
Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr.
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 141ff.
4 “Putting the Human Back into the Humanities” was the theme of the seventh annual
Generative Anthropology Summer Conference in 2013 ( http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/
GASC/gasc2013/index.htm ).
5 Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis. System der Philosophie. Erster Teil, vol. 6 of
Werke (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005), 80ff.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

238 Katsman

depth in Western culture.6 This discussion, being further developed, can prove
the relevance of Hermann Cohen to recent anthropological discussion, on
the one hand, and place Eric Gans within the neo-Kantian (apparently non-­
pantheistic, non-Spinozan) tradition of Jewish thought, on the other.
The proposed analysis by no means purports to present Gans’s concep-
tions in full, and only a few of his insights will be mentioned in the course
of this article. The following preliminary remarks provide a brief orientation
tailored to the present purpose.7 Gans’s Generative Anthropology is a theory
of the origination of language and culture. Revisiting René Girard and Jacques
Derrida, Gans argues that “humanity subsists only by turning its attention
to the transcendental center in order to ward off the ever-present threat of
mimetic violence.”8 On this basis he formulates the originary hypothesis, which
affirms that humanity and its institutions are most parsimoniously described
as originating in a singular event. In this event, a representation is born, and
the first representation is that of the sacred:

The first sign is the name-of-God; representing the material center

of desire gives it the meaning of the subsistent center of the scene of
representation, thereby undecidably discovering and inventing its sig-
nificance. Hence there is a non-mystical sense in which, since all words
derive from the representation of a central object of desire, every word is
a name of God.9

Therefore, all knowledge is a hypothesis of the origin, and every thought is a

thought of the origin. At the originary scene, the mimetic, violent “gesture of
appropriation” is aborted by its performer and turns into the first sign; thus the
violence is deferred and representation is born. Signification and cognition are
described in nonpsychological terms as a critical revisiting and rethinking of
this originary anthropological scene. Therefore GA is, as one may say, a critical
idealism in the realm of anthropology.

6 Michael Zank, The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen (Providence, RI:
Brown Judaic Studies, 2000), 44.
7 Gans himself provides illuminating short introductions to his theory in many of his
printed and electronic publications. See, for example, “A Brief Introduction to Generative
Anthropology,” http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro.htm.
8 Eric Gans, The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 177.
9 Ibid., 178–179.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 239

Hermann Cohen distanced himself from psychologism by supposing an a

priori of the critical method,10 yet at the same time he was looking for a way
to include psychology in his system of philosophy. Biographically, the psy-
chological quest of Cohen, early acknowledged and already expressed in his
first works11 but only carried out in his later Ethics of the Pure Will (1904),
reached its peak in a quasi-anthropological form in his posthumously pub-
lished opus magnum, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919).12
The project has not only remained unfinished: it has demanded formulation
or reformulation in anthropological terms. Charles Taylor, as Avi Bernstein-
Nahar insists, has created a “philosophical anthropology” somewhat similar to
Cohen’s ethics that is opposed to the “anthropology of naturalism” and practi-
cal and activist enough to influence recent political and educational ethics, in
view of the rebuffing of historicism including “atomization, naturalism, [and]
relativism.”13 Eric Gans’s GA is another project in which the possibility of estab-
lishing a “pure” anthropology has been advanced, enhanced by its affinity to
Cohen in its critical-idealistic character.
Gans’s concept of minimal hypothesis is connected, by the first of its terms,
to infinitesimal thinking (which is also one of Cohen’s sources), and by the
second, to critical idealism.14 Approached from an anthropological perspec-
tive, this pair of connections led Gans to rethink Judaism not only as a religion
of reason, as in Cohen, but as a religion of infinitely minimal reason for the a
priori transcendental hypothesizing of the Human, when the transcendence
of God constitutes a morality beyond any natural order (just as required by
Cohen).15 In the same sense that, in Cohen’s logic of pure knowledge, think-
ing of the origin (Ursprungsdenken) is the origin of validity determination and

10 Hermann Cohen, Teoriya opyta Kanta [Kant’s Theory of Experience], trans. V. N. Belov
(Moscow: Akademicheskiy proekt, 2012), 142–145.
11 Helmut Holzhey, “Cohen and the Marburg School in Context,” trans. Vilem Murdoch,
in Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism, ed. Reinier Munk (Amsterdam: Springer, 2005), 3–37,
at 9.
12 Hermann Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1904); idem, Religion of
Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1972).
13 Avi Bernstein-Nahar, “In the Name of a Narrative Education: Hermann Cohen and
Historicism Reconsidered,” in Hermann Cohen’s “Ethics,” ed. Robert Gibbs (Leiden: Brill,
2006), 147–185, at 150–151, 171–172.
14 Eric Gans, The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), 19ff.
15 Hermann Cohen, Reason and Hope, trans. Eva Jospe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 57.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

240 Katsman

is thus the rationale of all philosophy,16 in Gans’s theory, originary thinking

determines the minimal validity of the representation of any arbitrarily small
content of the Human, and is thus the rationale of all anthropology.
In The Origin of Language, Gans establishes a scientific theory of repre-
sentation and argues that such a theory “can only posit the unity of ‘mind’
and ‘matter,’ or more precisely, of representations and reality, as a verifiable
hypothesis concerning the historical origin of representation.”17 Gans admits
that he owes to Girard the “insight” of the transcendental hypothesis,18 but in
fact both thinkers are indebted to Kant. Thus, in his next step, in his polemic
with Girard, Gans distinguishes between the institutional nature of the sacred
and the formal nature of the representational. He actually equates representa-
tion with presence, appearance with significance.19 This move of Gans in rela-
tion to Girard can be viewed as parallel to Cohen’s move in relation to Kant: a
transition from an aesthetical20 conception of the empirical origin of experi-
ence to a purely formal logical conception of transcendental, purely cognitive
origin. Even more important is the notion of representation not only as a par-
ticular category of formal logic, but as a theory, which is perceived as a victory
of humans over violence.21 Gans’s move of equating the Human with the theo-
retical, ideal, and hypothetical brings us back to neo-Kantianism.
A nonmetaphysical reconstruction of Plato’s ideas as pure foundations
(hypotheses) of knowledge was characteristic of all neo-Kantianism from its
beginning,22 but for Cohen, synthetic judgment a priori, theory, idea, human
cognition, transcendental hypothesis, and origin (Ursprung) are all the same.23
Perhaps we should add to this list a hermeneutics of origin, correlating with
the logic of origin (Ursprungslogik), and constituted by monotheism and mes-
sianism: predicating the past upon the future.24 Moreover, the idea of origin is
connected to the question of the actual beginning of thinking and knowledge

16 Cohen, Logik, 31–38.

17 Eric Gans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1981), 6.
18 Ibid., 4.
19 Ibid., 17.
20 Ibid., 21.
21 Ibid., 22.
22 Holzhey, “Cohen and the Marburg School in Context,” 5.
23 Andrea Poma, Kriticheskaya filosofiya Hermana Cohena [The Critical Philosophy of
Hermann Cohen], trans. O. A. Popova (Moscow: Akademicheskiy proekt, 2012), 51.
24 Almut Sh. Bruckstein, “On Jewish Hermeneutics: Maimonides and Bachya as Vectors in
Cohen’s Philosophy of Origin,” in Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Religion, ed. Stephane
Moses and Hartwig Wiedebach (Hildesheim: Olms, 1997), 35–50, at 37.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 241

as a specific event in time or history; the judgment of origin (Ursprungsurteil)

consisting of scientific analysis and synthesis is what constitutes cultural facts
as the ground for philosophical thinking.25 This judgment has its own begin-
ning (Ausgang) in predication that constitutes determination, its unity, unity
of knowledge, and at last—unity of object; the first demand of thinking is
that it places “the origin of each and every content that it is able to create into
thinking itself.”26
The development of Cohen’s thinking about the generation of knowledge
was inseparable from his thinking about the generation of nation and religion,
and Judaism as the unity of the two. Hartwig Wiedebach has shown that Cohen
viewed the event of the beginning (Ansatz) as both a misery of cognition and
a historical problem, inseparable from the form of narration and the national
myth: the myth of a nationality has to be narrated; “the historical ‘misery,’
which comes to life in the ‘narrative’ of the original adventure, is the misery
in the thinking of (natural) science.”27 Wiedebach examines this shift from the
natural sciences to the origin (and outside of psychology) as a philosophical
problem but not an anthropological one. The relevance of the anthropological
method within philosophy regarding the problem of the origin has become
explicit in GA. But methodologically, thinking of the origin of thinking reveals
itself as originary thinking and vice versa:

Thinking about the origin is all about exceeding the horizon of objec-
tive determination. We could speak of a transcending correlation in this
regard. The certainty of the content determination requires as a precon-
dition that the thinking has gone beyond the horizon of content and has
successfully returned from this “adventurous detour.” Now that this medi-
tation of origin has survived the extreme “misery” of questionability, the
actual possibility of determining a starting point (Ansatz) arises.28

These words from a recent study on Cohen could easily be attributed to Gans’s
school. Gans and his associates aim at the scientific discussion of national and
religious problems while standing on firm, critical neo-Kantian grounds—
which, however, are not always recognized.

25 Zank, Idea of Atonement, 14.

26 Werner Flach, “Cohen’s Ursprungsdenken,” in Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism, ed.
Reiner Munk (Amsterdam: Springer, 2005), 41–65, at 46–48.
27 Hartwig Wiedebach, The National Element in Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy and Religion,
trans. William Templer (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 63.
28 Ibid., 66.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

242 Katsman

Gans arrives at a formulation of the originary theory-hypothesis as both the

transcendental content of representation-signification and its critique. To this
end he constructs a formal theory of two transcendences where the theory
and its subject matter are identified. This is a theory-and-act of designation.
The first transcendence “is that of collective presence, the empty form of rep-
resentation, which is revealed from the beginning as something given from
without”; the second transcendence “of the object-as-designated is the source
of representational form, which is at the same time a critique of the very tran-
scendence it posits.”29 Here, with the judgment of the act of designation and
with the questioning of its possibility and validity, the critique (and knowl-
edge) begins.
The definition of the transcendental hypothesis as the content and critique
of an act of designation is a Kantian move, and making this definition in purely
formal-logical terms is a Cohenian move. On the other hand, this definition
sheds a new, anthropological, light on Cohen’s philosophy: the origin-hypoth-
esis (Ursprung) defines the human as a communal, reconciliatory, redemptive,
communicative subject directly, out of the formal a priori principle, before any
theological or institutional sacralization. The transcendence of a sign and of
an act of designation requires critique (being “unalterably other”)30 and, at
one and the same time, makes any criticism possible.
Wiedebach analyzes Cohen’s logic of the origin as analogical to the logic
of myth and religion, with the result that the misery of knowing the origin
turns into a scene of sacrifice, where a gesture of humility is performed: “What
is sacrificed is the question about the ground of subjectivity itself, the ques-
tion of awareness (Bewusstheit). And likewise, in analogy to religion, humility
of the philosophical origin becomes productive as an active renunciation.”31
According to this analysis, the origin appears, one may say, as the effacement
of the origin along with the question about it. This is reminiscent of Girard’s
scene of the destruction of the sacrificial victim. However, Gans’s GA makes
it possible to translate this negative terminology (connected to the victimary
discourse, as defined by Gans) to the positive “gesticulation” of language con-
stitution within the imagination of the originary scene.
According to Gans, as mentioned above, the originary sign is an abortive
gesture of appropriation of a mimetically, collectively desired but ­untouchable
(sacred) object.32 Therefore, that act of constitution of cognition, which is

29 Gans, Origin of Language, 27–28.

30 Ibid., 27–28.
31 Wiedebach, National Element, 209.
32 Gans, Origin of Language, 35.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 243

called in Cohen Ursprung, idea, theory, or a priori hypothesis, is a transcenden-

tal signified of the originary scene in Gans’s terms—the abortive, unrealized
but significant and signifying gesticulation towards the object. The impact of
this insight is double: on Cohen’s side, it bases the Ursprung anthropologi-
cally upon the collective desire and observation of the other (which enables
the critique of both the desire and the other); on Gans’s side, it extends the
field of application of the concept of abortive gesture to its maximal possible
measure—the gesture of cognition, thinking. Thus, the Gansian anthropo-
logical-cultural critique of the appetitive desire, of violence, unites with the
philosophical critique of pure reason in its refined, Cohenian form. Such a cri-
tique of origins is important, beyond any doubt, especially for modernity, as
Gans himself points out by referring to Kant,33 but even more important is the
hypothesis that the origin (as Ursprung) is the source of the critique.
To emphasize the nonempirical character of his anthropology, Gans turns,
not coincidently, to Kant’s idealism, but appropriates it within GA, while
questioning the a priori, the firstness of theory: The possibility of conceptual
thought depends on the inaugural act of human freedom, of the practical-
ethical, in which the sign representing the central sacred object is transformed
into an instrument of cognition. Moreover, the aesthetic experience of repre-
sentation is viewed as the moment of the originary event. The origin unites
transcendental sign and worldly referent.34
Gans answers Cohen’s question of Ursprung, though from the anthropologi-
cal point of view. Thus, he preconditions ethics to theory, to conceptual cogni-
tion. However, from the Cohenian point of view, theory is a transcendental
hypothesis, which is necessary for people in order for them to be aware of the
presence of the other and to be capable of apprehending his/her gesture. No
ethics can exist before the act of transcendence and critique. The act of origi-
nary signification or designation is the first act of theorizing, the Ursprung.
An attempt to precondition ethics to the existence of the Self was successfully
carried out by Emmanuel Lévinas,35 leading in turn to the disintegration of
the Self and of any possibility of talking about origin. On the contrary, Cohen
moved from the concept of the other as the origin of the self 36 to the con-
cept of Mitmensch (fellowman), built upon the Jewish biblical concepts of reʿa

33 Ibid., 274.
34 Gans, Scenic Imagination, 83.
35 See, for example, Emmanuel Lévinas, “Time and the Other” and Additional Essays, trans.
Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).
36 Cohen, Ethik, 201.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

244 Katsman

(fellowman) and ger (foreigner).37 These concepts are made not to establish
the self upon the other, but to prevent hostility toward the other as the means
of preserving the self as the chosen one. The advantage of Gans’s anthropologi-
cal approach lies in its ability to easily and elegantly connect Mitmensch and
Ursprung within the imaginary scene of originary violence deferral and repre-
sentation, which returns as a transcendental hypothesis every time cognition
(the apprehension of signs) takes place. Therefore, one can speak of Cohen’s
version of Kant’s “ur-anthropology,”38 revisited and redefined by Gans.
Gans criticizes Kant for separating the transcendental realm of representa-
tion from the empirical world of appetite, human reason from sacralization,
which is, however, for Gans, the source of representation and its ­universality.39
Cohen rethought Kant in many aspects, and one of them was sacrality. He
developed his “ur-anthropology” (in Gans’s terms) in his Religion of Reason. It
is built on the concept of sacrality, understood in connection with the idea of
God (or the “God-idea,” as Cohen puts it, comparing Kant to Judaism)40 and in
connection with human ethics as the task and source of purpose of humanity.41
The sacrality of God and the sacrality of humans that derives from it are con-
nected by the conception of correlation—the core of Cohen’s philosophy of
religion. It defines the relation between rest and movement of consciousness,42
between Creator and creation, between the sacrality of God as Ursprung43 and
the sacrality of relations between people as ethics;44 it defines the homogene-
ity of religion and ethics.45 God is perceived, in the monotheistic manner, as
the Ursprung. Any act of origination is thus an act of sacralization. One can
assume that the concept of correlation is a Cohenian logical and ontologi-
cal analogy of Gans’s concept of representation. Even if in Cohen the idea of
God is, as Reinier Munk has claimed, not necessary for his philosophy as a
(logical-ethical) System of pure, transcendental thought, but is circumstantial

37 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 113ff.

38 Gans, Scenic Imagination, 87.
39 Ibid., 88–89.
40 Hermann Cohen, Reason and Hope, trans. Eva Jospe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 82.
41 Cohen, Ethik, 590; Poma, Kriticheskaya filosofiya Hermana Cohena, 243–244.
42 Hermann Cohen, Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls, 1. Band, vol. 8 of Werke (Hildesheim: Olms,
2005), 138–143.
43 Hermann Cohen, Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie, vol. 10 of Werke
(Hildesheim: Olms, 2002), 47.
44 Ibid., 100.
45 Ibid., 58.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 245

in his critical hermeneutics of culture,46 in Gans’s philosophical anthropology

the idea of God is reestablished as a necessary Urgrund (foundation) of both
thought and culture, and as the necessary correlation between them. Both in
Cohen, as Munk himself has shown,47 and in Gans, this necessity is justified by
the concept of the origin.
Understanding representation as the Cohenian correlation does not add
much to Gans’s anthropology, but rather clarifies its place in the philosophy
of Judaism as a radical monotheism. On the other side, understanding correla-
tion as the Gansian representation opens a promising possibility of interpret-
ing the project of Cohen in terms of cultural/social linguistics and semiotics,
to (re)establish Cohenian aesthetics, and perhaps even to fulfill Cohen’s last
wish—to complement his system of philosophy with psychology perceived
as a science of the human, that is, as anthropology.48 For Gans, the task is to
describe “the genesis of transcendence from immanence, whose mystery only
anthropology, not metaphysics, can solve.”49 The critical idealism of Cohen,
which can be viewed as either metaphysical, particularly in his later works,50
or antimetaphysical,51 establishes his philosophy upon a scientific and histori-
cal fact, which leads him to the problem of Ursprung as the central problem of
modern logic and science since Nicolaus Cusanus.52 Against antifoundation-
alism, Cohen views Ursprung as the foundation (Grundlage, Grundlegung) of
thought, logic, and theory,53 and of representation, imagination, language, and
culture.54 One can see thus that the Cohenian foundation of pure reason is
already anthropological by nature. Although it is based on the mathematical
infinitesimal method,55 Cohen’s method is inevitably revealed as anthropo-
logical due to both its task of separating the Human from the biological and its
(in Gans’s terminology) originary methodology for fulfilling this task. After all,

46 Reinier Munk, “On the Idea of God in Cohen’s Ethik,” in Hermann Cohen’s “Ethics,” ed.
Robert Gibbs (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 105–114, at 108–109.
47 Ibid., 110–111.
48 Matvei Kagan, “Hermann Cohen,” in O khode istorii [On the Course of History] (Moscow:
Yazyki slavianskoy kultury, 2004), 33–44, at 44.
49 Gans, Scenic Imagination, 89.
50 Jehuda Melber, Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Jonathan David, 1968),
65–69.
51 Holzhey, “Cohen and the Marburg School in Context,” 17; Zank, Idea of Atonement, 392.
52 Cohen, Logik, 31.
53 Ibid., 305ff.
54 Cohen, Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls, 21–23, 74–79, 239ff.
55 Poma, Kriticheskaya filosofiya Hermana Cohena, 131.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

246 Katsman

Hermann Cohen had already created his psychology-anthropology by found-

ing the Ursprung as an immanent transcendental hypothesis.
According to Gans, a new way of thinking should minimize the dichotomy
between religion and philosophy.56 Thinking anthropologically, Gans meets
Cohen, whose later works demonstrate such a minimization. For both Cohen
and Gans, what connects religion and philosophy is morality. According to
Cohen, God’s attributes are the archetypes of human morality.57 Gans insists
that such constructions as Kant’s categorical imperative must be understood
as deriving from humanity’s originary configuration.58 This approach has led
Gans from linguistic theory to a moral model, very similar to Cohen’s path
(though not biographically linear) from logic to ethics. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, for example in the philosophy of the Russian Silver Age
(e.g., in Nikolai Berdyaev), it was fashionable to scoff at Cohen’s philosophy for
its alleged overestimation of reason, logic, and rational thinking at the expense
of “genuine,” “authentically” human existence. The originary model of Gans
proves that thinking of Ursprung, of the transcendental hypothesis as consti-
tutive of the uniquely human condition (and cognition) provides the most reli-
able warrant for the humanistic worldview. Not romantic or mystic but scenic
imagination is capable of preserving a human figure at the center of attention
(which consists of love and resentment, in Gans’s terms), being the minimal
but inexhaustible source of meaning and culture.59
Gans praises Girard for his analysis of the Bible as anthropology and as the
foundation of human science through revelation.60 If this is true, the Cohenian
conception of the united system of religion, science, and philosophy was revi-
talized already in the sixties (contemporaneously with the “talmudic lectures”
of Emmanuel Lévinas). Girard reanimates a question raised by Cohen and
other philosophers and theologians toward the end of the nineteenth century:

Girard’s interpretation of Christianity situates the traditional debate

between Jews and Christians concerning the necessity of a worldly Law

56 Eric Gans, The Girardian Origins of Generative Anthropology (Imitatio/Amazon Digital

Services, 2012), Kindle edition, 37–38.
57 Cohen, Reason and Hope, 52.
58 Gans, Girardian Origins, 265–268.
59 Adam Katz, “The Question of Originary Method: The Generative Thought Experiment,”
in The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, ed. Adam Katz
(Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2007), 101–138, at 101.
60 Gans, Girardian Origins, 1427–1430, 1698ff.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 247

on a new plane: is any religion (Jewish or other) necessary, or can we

create a world of mutual love without interdiction (the Law) and ritual?61

Cohen’s answer was that in Judaism, as opposed to Paulinism, there is no

conflict between the two sources of religion, reason and revelation, and rit-
ual serves as a vehicle of ethics62 (although he does “make a clear and vital,
though possibly still somewhat embarrassed distinction between the ritualism
of our religion and its eternal essence”).63 In this pronouncement, Cohen per-
ceived one of the affinities between Judaism and Kant’s philosophy. Another
one is obedience to the Law, and Cohen parallels the Kantian “we must not
be ‘volunteers of morality’ ” with the talmudic statement, “Greater is the man
who acts in obedience to the commandment than without commandment”
(b. Kidd. 31a).64 On the other hand, Cohen detaches law from ritual and denies the
importance of the latter, perhaps under the influence of Protestantism.65 Gans
has shown that, from the originary point of view, the Law and ritual are insepa-
rable, and thus must not be rejected, overwhelmed, or ignored, but should be
traced to their minimal transcendental-hypothetical origin. This insight serves
as a starting point for his discussion of religion, and Judaism in particular.
The “redefinition of Judaism” was not Eric Gans’s purpose from the begin-
ning, but has emerged from his originary thinking as one of its inevitable con-
sequences. His program has always been anthropological, not philosophical
or religious. However, for both Cohen and Gans Judaism is the philosophy of
origin; and the anthropology of origin in Judaism is part of the system of phi-
losophy and one of the sciences on which this system is supposed to be based.
Gans’s extensive discussion of Judaism begins in The End of Culture (1985),
with his definition of “narrative monotheism,” which embodies a contradic-
tion between the Jewish concept of historical linearity and the ideal universal-
ism of Judaism. An important turn in Gans’s thought occurs when he discovers
that the biblical text of the Mosaic revelation reproduces the structure of the
hypothetical scene of origin.66 Further, this insight leads him to assert the

61 Ibid., 1505–1507.
62 Cohen, Reason and Hope, 79.
63 Ibid., 89.
64 Ibid., 81.
65 Melber, Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Judaism, 55, 88; David N. Myers, Resisting History:
Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 42ff.
66 Eric Gans, Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (Savage, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1990), 49.

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248 Katsman

Jewish character of GA, and the unity of theology and anthropology in it. We
come to the recognition that the sign born in this revelation is a hypothesis:
God’s sign for Moses’ mission is for the moment “only” a hypothesis that Moses
will have to keep in mind throughout the performance of his task.67 The ironic
“only” in this passage should not mislead us: a sign must be a hypothesis (an
idea, theory, Ursprung) in order for “primitive” consumptive, appetitive exis-
tence to become historical—that is, spiritual and creative—existence, which
alone is the eternal task (burning but is not burnt).
When he discusses God’s answer to Moses’ question about His name “I am
that I am,” Cohen postulates the emerging of “a primeval language”: “God’s
name, it says, is ‘I am that I am.’ God is the One Who Is. God is the I that sig-
nifies being as such.”68 This insight about “a primeval language,” which was
only partly developed by Cohen while incorporating into his methodology “the
Humboldt-Steinthalian linguistics,”69 has been elaborated by Gans.
In his interpretation of “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” the name of God given in the
Mosaic revelation, Gans arrives at a rejection of myth and an acceptance of
the ethical-historical conception of theology. His method is anthropological,
but his conclusion is almost identical to that of Cohen: God’s name “supplies
not an etiological explanation in the manner of myth but a universal theo-
logical justification.”70 The Mosaic religion is the ethics and the revelation of
reason—not necessarily logical, but absolutely inevitably practical.71 This pro-
vides an (anthropological) resolution of the argument between the pan-logism
of Cohen’s system and its critics, such as David Koigen, who claimed a space
for the mystical, irrational, mythical, and ritual aspects of Judaism.72 Now it
is clear that those critics were not quite accurate in talking about the devel-
oped ritual practices of the established religious congregation, thus missing
the proper point of criticism—the origin of religion. Although Cohen does not
deny a “particular religious practice” and presents the Atonement, his para-
digm of religious practice, as an “analogy to the reflective processes of thought,”
one should rather look at the ritual of the Ursprung.73 This is what Gans does
in his GA, thus discovering a minimal, parsimonious, pre-institutional ritual

67 Ibid., 58.
68 Cohen, Reason and Hope, 93.
69 Wiedebach, National Element, 134ff.
70 Gans, Science and Faith, 67–68.
71 Ibid., 67–68.
72 David Koigen, “Platonovo-kantovsky judaizm” [The Platonic-Kantian Judaism], Evreysky
mir 2–3 (1910): 34.
73 Zank, Idea of Atonement, 32–33.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 249

that is fully rational, since it is practical, but not necessarily logical and sys-
tematic yet, since (again) it is still fully and only practical. In GA, theology
and anthropology become one, Cohen’s Ursprung and Gans’s origin become
one.74 Gans takes a further step away from the Religion of Reason: religion is the
science and the philosophy because it is the “activity that commemorates
human origin,” the activity which is nothing but a transcendental hypothesiz-
ing of the Ursprung.75
In the origin, according to Gans, ethics is found in its minimal form defined
as morality.76 This originary minimalism explains the universal nature of
pan-ethicism, which is inherent in Cohen’s system. Ethics as law arises in a
developed community. Thus, the problem of Cohen’s frequently criticized
pan-ethicism and equation of reason and law can be solved by attributing the
genesis of the minimal ethics to the origin-Ursprung itself, when it is under-
stood within anthropology after it has already been unified, according to Gans,
with theology.
Gans continues his comparison of the Jewish and Christian forms of revela-
tion in Signs of Paradox (1997), when he directs his interest in Judaism and
Jewish thought to the notorious “Jewish question.”77 At the same time, he begins
an analysis of anti-Semitism in his Chronicles (in Cohen’s life and work, too, his
turn to Judaism was marked by his book published in 1880 about the “Jewish
question” as a rebuff to anti-Semitism—Ein Bekenntnis in der Judenfrage).78
Gans writes that the Passion is destined to reanimate the originary resent-
ment that led to the sparagmos. This reanimation undermines the effect of
the deferring of violence in the originary event. Such a dynamic is opposite to
the Jewish self-perpetuating thematization of waiting for the Messiah.79 This
causes the rejection of Christianity by Jews, and the appearance of the “Jewish
question.” In addition, and perhaps even more importantly, this gives birth to
the equivalence between the prophetic vision, or “enunciation of the moral
utopia,” and “victimary” role of the enunciator.80 This conceptual equivalence
is found in Cohen’s Religion of Reason81 as a justification of the sufferings of

74 Gans, Science and Faith, 81.

75 Ibid., 120.
76 Eric Gans, Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology (Stanford CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 47.
77 Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures (Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997).
78 Melber, Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Judaism, 83.
79 Gans, Signs of Paradox, 155.
80 Ibid., 156.
81 Cohen, Religion of Reason, 234–235.

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250 Katsman

the Jewish people (even if not of advocating their persecution), of the two-
thousand-year-long exile, and furthermore of the argument against the termi-
nation of Jewish suffering by Zionism and the ingathering of the exiles.82
From this moment on, up through Gans’s entries in Chronicles of Love
and Resentment on the State of Israel (416, 12/31/2011; 467, 8/2/2014), the split
between his thought and that of Cohen steadily grows wider. From the per-
spective of almost one hundred years after Hermann Cohen’s death, we better
understand his place in the formation of the modern Jewish philosophy of his-
tory: from the ga point of view, Cohen can be considered as one of the found-
ers of contemporary “victimary” thinking, as opposed to originary thinking.83
The idea of Versöhnung (atonement, reconciliation), according to Michael
Zank, is the core of Cohen’s philosophy (and moreover a metaphor for philoso-
phy in general); it “serves as a link between Judaism and culture, religion and
reason, Jewish thought and the philosophy of religion, as well as between reli-
gion and ethics.”84 This idea realizes the vision of a sinful and guilty individual
before God, the self, and a fellowman; and it imparts to Cohen’s philosophy the
irresolvable contradiction between its moral and historical aspects, between
Ursprung and victim.
Notwithstanding this implicit contradiction, Cohen proclaims the idea of
the infinite openness of history, due to the messianic nature of waiting for the
end of days. For Cohen, “our God’s spirituality, admitting of neither form nor
image, is the primal cause of His truth. To be congruent with this spirituality,
our love of Judaism must be kept alive as knowledge, as study, and as learning.”85
Cohen points to Kant’s historical conception of “perpetual peace,” comparing
it with the prophets and Jewish messianism: “He who believes in perpetual
peace believes in the Messiah, and not in the Messiah who has already come
but in one who must and will come.”86 The conception of Gans looks like a
reconfirmation of Cohen’s ideas, notwithstanding their “victimary” character:
the Christian closure of worldly history and knowledge contradicts the Jewish
infiniteness of the learning process, the accumulation of knowledge through-
out history.87

82 Melber, Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Judaism, 89, 406.

83 Wiedebach treats the concept of “vicarious sacrifice” as analogous to humility: “Guilt is
lacking: Israel is punished, but is without guilt.” Wiedebach, National Element, 198ff. Note
further his identification of “the poor (stateless) man as ‘human type’ ” (204).
84 Zank, Idea of Atonement, 19–20.
85 Cohen, Reason and Hope, 56.
86 Ibid., 88.
87 Gans, Signs of Paradox, 161.

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Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 251

However non-Christian Cohen’s views may seem, the implicit contradiction

between originary and victimary discourses in his thought enabled Jacques
Derrida, one of the principal representatives of anti-originary victimarism
(understood as antilogocentrism), to interpret Cohen’s concept of the “Judeo-
German” psyche as “strictly Judeo-Protestant,” though mediated by Cohen’s
view of the German culture as essentially Hellenistic, and by his view of
Protestantism as a feature that may be ascribed to Maimonides within medi-
eval Judaism.88 David Myers’s elaborated analysis exposed the attractive intri-
cacy of Cohen’s relation to Protestantism, particularly regarding his somewhat
ambivalent position—antihistoricist, though tolerant of history.89 For Cohen,
thinking of history, like any thinking, is thinking of origin, which means not
only that it is transcendental and a priori, but that it produces continuity, cre-
ates temporal narrative (focusing on crisis and critical by nature), and is suc-
cessive and open to past and future.
From the viewpoint of Cohen and his students, such as Matvei Kagan, the
closed nature of history in Christianity makes history redundant and causes a
crisis of culture.90 Kagan sees here a pantheistic theology and ethic that can-
not be accepted by Judaism. In the “nonpantheistic altruism” and freedom of
Jews he sees the reason for their refusal to accept Christianity.91 The image
of God or of a savior as a living hero is likely to bring about a cultural crisis.
The task of identifying with the hero, a task of imitation, is not a historical
task. In Christianity, the very identification with Jesus is presented as a “ready”
redemption, in Kagan’s terms, which makes any cultural work redundant. All
the cultural work that was done and is being done in Christianity is being done
not by virtue of its historical perception, but rather in opposition to it.
This view of Christianity witnesses not only the proximity of Gans’s ideas
to Cohen’s school, but also their distance from it: as Gans shows further,
Christianity not only closes the originary scene but makes it universally
explicit throughout history, thus confirming the paradox of Jewish revelation
(i.e., of the universal God and a “tribal” revelation). For Cohen’s school, as for
Gans, crisis is inherent in history, but an anthropological model, like the one
provided by ga, imparts a strong scientific foundation to this conception. Gans

88 Jacques Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” New Literary History
22, no. 1 (1991): 39–95, at 53–55.
89 Myers, Resisting History, 40.
90 Matvei Kagan, “Evrejstvo v krizise kultury” [Judaism in a crisis of culture], in O khode
istorii [On the Course of History] (Moscow: Yazyki slavianskoy kultury, 2004), 171–182,
at 175.
91 Kagan, “Evrejstvo v krizise kultury,” 175.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

252 Katsman

reveals that not only critique but also crisis is anthropologically inherent in the
origin, that is, in Ursprung.
The Jewish topics connected to the problem of origin have appeared
throughout Gans’s Chronicles since at least 1997, mostly in the context of anti-
Semitism as a “dream of a new version of history in which Jews never existed”
(CLR 90, 4/26/1997). Later on, Gans discusses two of the newer forms of anti-
Semitism—anti-Zionism and Judeophobic terrorism (CLR 267, 8/10/2002). At
last, the problem of anti-Semitism takes the form of the problem of firstness: the
undeniable fact that God originally, firstly revealed Himself to the Jews causes
a desperate anti-Jewish resentment (CLR 301, 6/5/2004). Thus, the fight over
this firstness keeps history perpetually open to crisis and conflict(-deferring).
Gans formulates the essential attitude of ga—construed as “a Jewish cre-
ation” of “Bronx Romanticism”—to the Jewish question: “Originary think-
ing is the authentic expression of Jewish firstness. . . . ga is a Jewish creation
with no particular attraction for Jews. . . . ga recognizes the historical signifi-
cance of Jewish firstness without treating it as a form of superiority” (CLR 382,
11/7/2009). The consequences of God’s “Oneness,” His “Uniqueness”—the core
of Judaism and of Jewish existence for Gans as well as for Cohen92—are not
only anthropological but also philosophical. Gans’s definition of the “Jewish
essence” provides a non-dichotomous solution for the Cohenian problem of
the universality of the Judaic “Oneness” of God and the unique role of the
Jewish people as the chosen people. To clarify his conception, Gans uses
the well-known paradox of the barber who shaves every man who does not
shave himself:

The Jewish essence may then be defined as removing the specificity of

all relationships to God, to a universal unmarking of the specific modes
of dialogue that associated the gods with specific communities. But this
“shaving” operation is at the same time an indelible marking of the Jew
himself, since he is the one exception to the universal sameness of our
relationship to the divinity, the unique unmarker, the Barber, and con-
sequently the embodiment of the Jewish Barber paradox. (CLR 405,
5/21/2011)

Since the late 2000s, the Jewish question has become one of the central (and,
we can safely say, philosophical) questions of Gans’s anthropology. His insights
regarding this question have been summarized under the conceptual umbrella
of “Jewish firstness” in Chronicles 415–416 (12/24/2011, 12/31/2011). Moreover,

92 Cohen, Reason and Hope, 83, 93; idem, Religion of Reason, 35–49.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 253

he proclaims now that “all forms of human domination can be understood

in terms of firstness” (CLR 416, 12/31/2011) and thus “Jewishness” explicitly
becomes the basic model of originary thinking, as foreshadowed already in
Science and Faith (1990).
The discussion of the Jewish question by Eric Gans and Adam Katz in
Chronicles during 2012–2013 starts with a reformulation of originary think-
ing as “the move toward the infinitesimal”: “This infinitely generative divin-
ity articulates the universality of firstness with its necessary idiosyncrasy: the
mystery of a particular sign that catches on having started here or there and
not elsewhere” (Katz, CLR 421, 3/10/2012). Katz puts ga in the line of thought
that leads from Leibniz to Cohen, although “infinitesimal” is not equivalent
to “minimal”; it means that any arbitrarily small sign is always reducible to a
smaller one. However, the concepts of nonstandard mathematical analysis do
make sense in the context of ga: any sign can be presented as a configura-
tion of several signs, standard and nonstandard (infinitesimal), unmarked and
marked, in Gans’s terms, although this act of marking is not intuitive and imag-
inative, but purely (ideally) cogitative.93 The infinitesimal intensively exists
only in the mind and thus defines the material; neither cogitation nor materi-
ality can be reduced to the sensuous imagination; truth cannot be reduced to
the self-evident.94 Cohen’s understanding of origin as the infinitesimal point of
production (of both the real and the critique of its thinking thereof) was later
developed by his colleague Paul Natorp, who saw the Law as concentrated in
that point.95 This marking of a minimal intensive origin of signification—and
therefore of law and ethics—is a transcendental hypothesis, the Grundlegung
of the Ursprung, in Cohen’s terms, and is the main procedure of pure philo-
sophical (generative) anthropology.
On the basis of the notion of firstness, and in dialogue with Daniel Gordis’s
The Promise of Israel, Gans redefines nationalism, as if to answer Cohen’s
anti-Zionist arguments: “Although nationalism is a concept put into practice
above all by Christian nations, . . . the underlying model of the nation-state was
always the ‘ethnic’ and long stateless nation of Israel” (CLR 435, 12/30/2012).96
Therefore, the originary-Ursprung thinking itself, and not only the books of
the prophets, should have led Cohen from the legitimization of Germany
to its foundation in the biblical model of Jewish statehood. Zionism is an

93 Cohen, Teoriya opyta Kanta, 113.

94 Ibid., 114–115.
95 Holzhey, “Cohen and the Marburg School in Context,” 15.
96 Daniel Gordis, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its
Greatest Strength (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2012).

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254 Katsman

integral element of Western monotheistic civilization, as understood through

the Kantian and Cohenian Enlightenment epistemology and ethics. The exilic-
diasporic conception of Jews effaces the originary scene of the nations’ origina-
tion and the unique figures in it. Such effacement is, as Gans shows, a resentful
and immoral obliteration of history, which can be countered by historical com-
memoration. For Cohen, Judaism, thanks to the concept of the One God, is “an
entirely universal religion,”97 which means for him erasure of the reason and
hope for the Jewish nation-state. The problem is not only that “the blessings”
of the modern state98 are (quite inconsistently) not applied to the idea of a
Jewish state, but that the very idea of such a state is violently disintegrated in
such embarrassing statements as “we see the destruction of the Jewish state as
an exemplification of the theodicy of history,” or “Palestine is not merely the
land of our fathers; it is the land of our prophets.”99 From Gans’s point of view,
this is nothing but an attempt to efface the origin—the originary model-state
of Israel. Gans’s analysis sheds light on the contradiction in Cohen’s thought:
between critical idealism (constituting the Ursprung) and anti-Zionism (eras-
ing the Ursprung). It is easy to empirically discredit the argument of Cohen—
one of those liberal German Jews “who feel, politically as well as emotionally,
at home in their fatherland”100—by pointing to the Holocaust. But it is more
important to suggest an anthropological-philosophical counterargument: the
only way to constitute the Human, be it a subject of ethics or of the “messi-
anic mankind” envisioned by Cohen,101 is to reconstitute—to hypothesize and
remember—the origin.

If anthropology is a science, it is a source and premise of philosophy—in

the same sense that mathematics is a source and premise of philosophy in
Cohen’s view. Cohen wrote that “if thinking is revealed and built by a hypoth-
esis, then the first hypothesis should be the science itself.”102 ga realizes this
principle; moreover, it redefines the object of anthropological investigation
as an originary scene that is being nonintuitively constructed by means of a
critical-idealistic method. Attempts to demonstrate the relevance of Hermann
Cohen to our days can even lead to a presentation of his “critical hermeneu-
tics” as providing “conceptual tools for the contemporary, postmodern agenda”

97 Cohen, “An Argument against Zionism,” in Reason and Hope, 168.

98 Ibid., 167.
99 Ibid., 168–169.
100 Cohen, “Religion and Zionism,” in Reason and Hope, 170.
101 Ibid., 171.
102 Cohen, Teoriya opyta Kanta, 106.

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Eric Gans ’ s Thinking on Origin, Culture, and the Jewish Question 255

of the “critical construction of ‘facts,’ ” as “according to Cohen, history is itself

constructed.”103 However tempting, this view is rather misleading. The concept
of the “critique” and “construction” of facts and history proposed by Eric Gans
clarifies and amplifies the genuine and, at one and the same time, actual sig-
nificance of Cohen’s method: critique is the construction of the origin, which
is not itself a fact but rather a scientific transcendental hypothesis for under-
standing the fact.

103 Almuth Sh. Bruckstein, in Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Maimonides, trans. with commen-
tary by Almuth Sh. Bruckstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 166.

Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 23 (2015) 236–255

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