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JUDAISM AS A “METHOD” WITH HERMANN COHEN

AND FRANZ ROSENZWEIG

Gesine Palmer

Über Fragen des Wie, der “Methode,”

sollte man ja eigentlich immer nur
nach getaner Arbeit, nicht vorher
reden.”1
[on questions of How, of “method,” one
should eigentlich only speak after work
has been done]

I love Rosenzweig’s philosophy. Hence I feel free to do the contrary

of what he states with the sentence quoted as a motto. Only doing
so I do what he implies with his use of the word “eigentlich.” The
German word “eigentlich” has two meanings in general speaking:
(1) It can be used as an attribute in order to stress the very prob-
lem that has not been recognized as central yet: one would say: das
eigentliche Problem is not A, but B. The real problem is not A, but
B. (2) It can be used as an adverb: eigentlich müßte ich alles auf
Englisch sagen, aber ich tu es nicht. Eigentlich I should say every-
thing in English, but I don’t do so. Eigentlich one should talk about
method only after work has been done: but this time—or: in real-
ity—I make an exception. “Eigentlich” appears to be the word to
mean or to point to the should-be or ought-to-be, and at the same time,
with no less emphasis, to that which is. What I am going to do here
is to talk from the beginning to the end and from the end to the
beginning only about method. Eigentlich I should do so by devel-
oping a new method, or making use of a well-established method
that will allow me to think about method. But I don’t have any such
meta-method, not even a new method of Eigentlichkeit with ques-
tion marks or anything the like. Instead I try to help myself through
the difficult task given by my title in the following way, which I
recommend to you too:

1
Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, in Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein
Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1976, 121.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 JJTP 13
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38 gesine palmer

Imagine yourselves in the position of young Charles Yves, the

composer of The Unanswered Question, and his father, standing on a
wooden tower in the center of a big forest, watching out for and
listening to several brassbands approaching this tower from several
directions, playing different tunes and rhythms, marching in different
tempos. Perhaps this imagination can help to trick out the speaker’s
inability to spell out different elements of a structure or a fabric of
meanings at the same time.

I.

To claim that I knew what Judaism is, I wouldn’t dare. Who would?
Rosenzweig engaged a lot of arguments against the question for the
essence (das Wesen). Whatsoever he may have written on Judaism, he
did not intend to inform his readers about the essence of Judaism.2 [. . .]
With respect to Hermann Cohen he said that someone who would
have written only about Judaism and only about Judaism could never
have made his philosophical achievements.3
What Rosenzweig himself did in his Star of Redemption, according
to his own self-commentary, was not at all writing about Judaism.
Rosenzweig, instead, wrote philosophy in a Jewish way. With this,
he at the same time re-wrote Judaism, he made Judaism a sort of
“Schrift.” In fact, he did not give it a new Schrift, he “used” it as a
Schrift, he made it a Schrift, and this Schrift was his method, his metho-
dos, his way, a method qualified as “das Jüdische.” In a letter to
Hans Ehrenberg, written September 1921, he says: “Ich bin so wenig
Spezialist für Judaica wie Max Weber (das Jüdische ist meine Methode,

2
And even Cohen wrote: “Für das Wesen und die Natur Gottes interessiert sich
der Mythos.[. . .] Sein [. . .] (Gottes, gp) Begriff und sein Dasein bedeutet nichts
Anderes, als dass es kein Wahn sei, die Einheit der Menschen zu glauben, zu
denken, zu erkennen. Gott hat es verkündet. Gott verbürgt es; sonst hat er Nichts
zu bedeuten, Nichts zu besagen. Seine Eigenschaften, in die man sein Wesen ent-
faltet, sind nicht sowohl die Eigenschaften seiner Natur, als vielmehr die Richtungen,
in welche jenes Verhältnis zu den Menschen und an den Menschen ausstrahlt,”
Hermann Cohen Ethik des reinen Willens, 2. Aufl. 1907 (55).
3
Zweistromland, Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1984.
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judaism as a “method” 39

nicht mein Gegenstand).”4 [I am so little an expert for Judaica as

Max Weber (the Jewish is my method, not my subject)]
But what is a “method” in philosophy, what can it possibly be?
And, if we could tell something about it in reflexions on Kant and
Hegel, Dilthey and Windelband, Popper and Wittgenstein, Pierce
and Searle, Kuhn and Deconstruction, how could we conceive of
an entire religion functioning as a philosophical method? And if we
disclaim in the beginning to know what this religion is and in a sec-
ond step disclaim to know, what a method in philosophy could pos-
sibly be, how can we, how can I still hope to set myself on to work
under such a title?
A question unanswered by Brassband No. One.

II.

How do we usually think about method in philosophy or in the

sciences concerning societies and their religions? Don’t we, without
asking further, presuppose a scholar, A, sitting in a certain place, B,
(or having a certain hypothesis B) thinking about an object, C, and
having a certain telos in mind when thinking, D, which she wishes
to approach in making use of a certain method E, which, used
properly, will be the right way for philosopher A to arrive from
hypothesis B (a hypothesis concerning C) at a true sentence D (a
true sentence about C)? At least, as soon as we have to write pro-
posals for scholarly projects, we always find ourselves forced into this
scheme—as if nothing had happened in philosophy during the last
hundred years. (Perhaps, as a matter of actual fact, nothing has
happened?)
If I draw into question E (asking: what can a method possibly be
in philosophy?) and if I undertake to make precisely that thing a
method, which is not to be described in terms of its being, yet which
in our scientific order still is considered to be rather an object of
thinking than its method, I seem to blow up this entire frame of
thought. Rosenzweig already seems to have done so, though in the
footsteps or on the shoulders of Hermann Cohen, who had written

4
Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff. 1979 I, 2, S. 720.
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40 gesine palmer

the strangest of philosophies that may be characterized as a Jewish

reformation of the Kantian system. May it?

III.

Rosenzweig’s sentence saying that the Jewish is his method stands,

as it is, in contradistinction to Weber, whose thesis is all about a
certain religion (as an object of scholarly research) that, in his eyes,
is defined by the introduction of method into life, by inventing what
Weber calls “methodische Lebensführung.” In these terms, Weber
wrote about Protestantism and its being rooted in Judaism, and his
expertise or his non-expertise brought to the fore a sentence about
the essence of the religion that was the object of his research—while
Rosenzweig says, for him Judaism is not an object of research but
his method. Then what does Rosenzweig research by his method—
does he research at all? And does he suggest with this sentence that
for Weber himself Protestantism is a method rather than an object
of research?
The assumption that Protestantism has indeed become a method
in science can be read out of a very famous sentence written by
Hermann Cohen in his Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums:
The idea of wanting to replace one religion by another is just as much
an historical absurdity as it is a contradiction of the philosophy of his-
tory, which must ward off the idea of the absolute and study the part
taken up by reason in the great variety of cultural phenomena. If reli-
gious bias becomes a scientific, a methodological bias, and Christianity
is claimed to be absolute, then the controversy must not be engaged
in the field of scientific methodology but in the question itself which
is at issue.5
But this is quoted from his later work Religion der Vernunft aus den
Quellen des Judentums. Here he indeed seems to recommend retreat

5
“Der Gedanke, eine Religion durch die andere ersetzen zu wollen, ist ebenso
ein geschichtlicher Ungedanke, wie er der Geschichtsphilosophie widerspricht, welche
den Gedanken der Absolutheit abzuwehren und in der Mannigfaltigkeit der
Kulturerscheinungen den Anteil der Vernunft an ihnen zu erforschen hat. Wenn
religiöse Befangenheit zu einer wissenschaftlichen, einer methodischen wird, und die
Absolutheit des Christentums behauptet wird, so ist der Streit nicht auf dem Gebiet
der wissenschaftlichen Methodik auszutragen, sondern schließlich am Streitproblem
selbst.” Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Leipzig
1919, 429.
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judaism as a “method” 41

from the methodological battlefield after proof has been made that
several questions, at first sight appearing to be questions of method
and science, are “eigentlich” nothing but “religious bias.” He seems
to recommend return from the methodological battlefield to that of
religious dialogue, as it may have existed during the middle ages—
before something like “Religionswissenschaft” applied the method-
ized notions of one religion to every other and made them a concealed
measure of values by using them as categories of classifications of
religions in the scheme of, to give but one famous example, Gustav
Mensching. (Mensching, under the notion of “development,” had
hierarchized religions according to their universalism and their
“Innerlichkeit” or individualism, of course he preferred monotheism
from polytheism, and of course Christianity from Judaism and
Protestantism from Catholicism by establishing, for instance, the
difference between “Gesetzesreligion” and “Glaubensreligion.”)
In his ethics, however, Cohen seems to introduce in his own way
his Jewish thought as a method into philosophy. A proceeding that
may have inspired Rosenzweig, who loved Cohen’s Religion of Reason,
to do the opposite of what Cohen recommended, just as if he,
Rosenzweig, were saying to Christian philosophers and scientists: you
want to fight us in the battlefield of methodology? Bevaqashah, here
we are: going beyond any Johannine Christianity (what for Cohen
is “pantheism”) back and forth, freeing philosophy to its own best
from Christian restrictions. This may be a method to be found also
in the works of Lévinas and Derrida, and as a not completely con-
scious one, perhaps even with Freud, Marx and others. But how to
discern Christian restrictions in philosophy, and in order to talk about
Judaism as a method; does it suffice to call a certain critical distance
to Pagan and Christian ideas “Jewish”?

IV.

Some years ago, I took part in a conference in Heidelberg about

sacrifice and its transformations. I gave a talk then about the theo-
rem, shared by Sigmund Freud and Hermann Cohen, that in Judaism
law was the substitute for sacrifice, and that Christianity, in reestab-
lishing a sacrificial system, fell back behind the cultural advance
achieved by the prophets. After my talk some colleagues seemed to
have been impressed by everything I had quoted and paraphrased
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42 gesine palmer

from Hermann Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens, till then quite unknown
to them. Some of them certainly would not mind to be described
as doing their scholarly work precisely according to the A,B,C-scheme
outlined in Paragraph II. For some reason, however, one scholar felt
compelled to say: “As to Freud, you may be right in preferring
Cohen” [a whole German school of Historians of Religion dislike
Freud because of what they take to be his methodological vague-
ness]. But, he went on, “if we compare Weber to Cohen, you must
admit that Weber is the greater because of his methodological pre-
cision and his notions of action and meaning dealt with in Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft.”
At that time, I did away with the concept of greatness, saying
that I don’t look at scholars of this rank like a watcher of Olympic
games with Gold, Silver, and Bronze in philosophy and science. For
this way of seeing presupposes that all of them were striving for the
same thing, the highest jump, the quickest sprint, the greatest method-
ological innovation or security—to be judged by me as an external
spectator. While eigentlich, that which makes me take one philosoph-
ical enterprise more seriously than the other, and what makes me
feel that one philosophical language speaks more intensely to me
than another, is already beginning with the different questions those
scholars ask. But the very fact of this measuring left me with the
following question, that I returned to the colleague instead of an
answer: Can there be a plurality of truths, even if the very notion
of truth seems to only allow for one truth? And whence the ques-
tions someone poses to religion? Why does one, Weber, ask for the
essence of certain religions, while the other, Cohen, seems to win
not only so called personal values but a valid method of posing prob-
lems from what can and cannot be called “his religion”?

V.

Two of those scholars who exercised the most severe criticism towards
Hermann Cohen’s Ethics when it came out as a second edition in
1907, had their critiques published in the journal Archiv für Sozial-
wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, edited by Edgar Jaffe, in cooperation
with Werner Sombart and Max Weber. Hermann Kantorowicz6

6
Hermann Kantorowicz, “Hermann Cohens Ethik des reinen Willens, 2. Aufl.
1907,” in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik XXXI, 1910, S. 602–6.
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judaism as a “method” 43

and Ferdinand Tönnies7 both missed in specific terms Cohen’s point

at the very junction, at which Rosenzweig developed it further to
the above quoted sentences. Perhaps the fundamental shift in the
relationship between religion and method, brought about by Hermann
Cohen in his Ethics, is too well hidden?
In his Ethics Cohen seems, at first sight, to definitely eliminate reli-
gion as a source and even stricter as a methodology for ethics. This
is comparatively new for himself at that time. In 1882 Cohen was
already looking for a scientific foundation of ethics, for a scientific
fact, but he thought to have no other resource to cling to than
religion:
. . . Wissenschaften, nach deren sie bedingenden Grundlagen geforscht
werden könnte, sind bekanntlich für die ethischen Probleme nicht als
Facta gegeben. [. . .] Da bleibt denn kein anderer Ausweg als das
Factum analoger Culturerscheinungen anzusprechen, wo es am Factum
der Wissenschaften fehlt. Ein solches Cultur-Factum, in welchem alle
sittlichen Dinge sich zusammenfassen lassen, ist uns die Religion.8
[It is well known that for ethical problems there are no scientific facts
given to provide for their foundations. For the sake of this lack of
scientific facts there is no way out but to appeal to the fact of analogue
cultural phenomena. Such a cultural fact, in which all moral things
can be comprised/summarized, we take to be religion.]

7
Ferdinand Tönnies, “Ethik und Sozialismus I,” in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik XXV, 1907, S. 573–612; “Ethik und Sozialismus II,” in: ebd., XXIX,
1909, 895–930.
8
Vorwort zu Friedrich-Albert Langes Geschichte des Materialismus, 4. Aufl., Iserlohn
1882, S. XI. In the new edition of the same text from 1896, the assertion about
the lack of a scientific fact remains unchanged in the first paragraph. But it occurs
as the sharper point of the problem of mathematical certainty and thus also with
an alteration of the formulation in regard to religion:
“. . . Wissenschaften, nach deren sie bedingenden Grundlagen geforscht werden
könnte, sind bekanntlich für die ethischen Probleme nicht als Facta gegeben. . . .
Da bleibt denn kein anderer Ausweg als das Factum analoger Culturerscheinungen
und Wissenschaften anzusprechen, wo es am Factum einer Wissenschaften fehlt,
welcher eine mathematische Gewissheit beiwohnt.
[Absatz]
Ein solches Analogon bieten diejenigen theoretischen und praktischen Richtungen
der Cultur dar, welche als Geisteswissenschaften, als “sciences morales,” und als
das Gebiet der religiös-sittlichen, wie der civil-sittlichen Einrichtungen sich
bestimmen . . .
Hence, Cohen’s new opinion is, “Wie ist all jenes Sittliche nach Art der Wissenschaft
möglich?” (Vorwort zu Langes Geschichte des Materialismus, 5. Aufl., Leipzig 1896,
S. XIf.)
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Twice he regrets that there is no scientific fact, hence that ethics

appears to be without scientific foundation, left with but a cultural
fact, which only can help to summarize moral things.
The question of a methodological foundation, however, did not
let him rest. In 1896, in his preface to the following edition of Lange’s
work, he has dropped religion as the cultural fact, and he turned
to the “Geisteswissenschaften” in general as an analogue. But this
wasn’t enough either. Where could he find a hard methodology for
ethics?

VI.

In the first edition of his ethics, Cohen has found his scientific fact:
he gives account now of legal science functioning as the mathematics
to ethics, and ethics functioning as the logic of Geisteswissenschaften.
Ethics can be considered to be the logics of the humanities.[?] The
notions of the individual, of allness, of willing, and of action are its
problems. All philosophy is depending on the factum of science
[Wissenschaft]. This assignment to the fact of science is, with us, the
eternal value of Kant’s system. The analogon to mathematics is legal
science. The latter may be considered to be the mathematics of the
humanities, in particular the mathematics of ethics.9
On the basis of this idea, in his Ethics Cohen emphatically disavows
any foundation for ethics in religion. The fundamental task of ethics
as a scientific enterprise is to elaborate the notion of man, “den
Begriff des Menschen.” On this behalf, the question of the individ-
ual and the necessary correlative notion to the individual is being
posed anew. For Cohen, as far as ethics is concerned, the notion
correlating to that of the individual could not be the majority, but
only the “Allheit,” all possible others, the principle of allness. State
and religion are competing candidates to deliver the right concept
of allness, “die richtige Allheit.” Here, Cohen clearly opts for the
state10 as the idea—notabene the idea, there is no talk here about

9
Hermann Cohen Ethik des reinen Willens, 2. Aufl. 1907, S. 65f.
10
“If religion claims to be something different and specific it holds back relations
to law and state which are an intrinsic part of it; moreover it leaves the sphere of
practical reason and establishes itself as science in disguise. With this, however, its
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judaism as a “method” 45

some real state, as there is no talk about real legal systems in the
foundational formula—he opts for the state as the idea on which to
build the accurate notion of allness. Whatever seems to be particu-
laristic in the notion of state is being corrected by the ideas of a
confederation of states and international law. “Think of a similar
confederation of religions. The idea seems to belong rather to a satir-
ical utopia,” Cohen states.11 The ideas of a confederation of states
and of international law, as it were, depend on the legal structure
of the state. Legal structure, concludes Cohen, is the very structure
to provide for the right method of ethical thought. As long as he
then would have confined himself to natural law, his readers might
have followed him somehow: Natural law has been the well estab-
lished ethics of law, or the law of law: But unimpressed even by
Kant’s authority, Cohen claims against him, that ethics will lead
back to and must work with the formal structure and the notions
of positive law (still not with the notions of really existing laws, but
on the principle rationality of the method of law). Only this struc-
ture will provide for the central piece of Cohen’s ethical reasoning:
the scientific evidence of a necessary notion of the other. In order
to “produce” or to “generate” or to “beget” (Cohen uses the German
word “erzeugen”) scientifically the other person, den Nebenmenschen,
the methodological detour to positive law is unavoidable. A legal
person is one party of a contract—hence, even if there were no evi-
dence for the existence of a responsible individual all by herself, even
if there “is” nobody: there has to be one as soon as a contract
between different legal persons is to be made; to this purpose both
parties have to be supposed to be capable of a constant will. It turns
out that a legal person and a moral subject come into being because
and insofar as they shall be, or should be. And in a similar way
even logically, Cohen claims, the moral self is actually being gener-
ated by the other: according to the logic of origin [Logik des Ursprungs],

claim and objection vanish because religion is not scholarship. Only logic makes
knowing into science. And only ethics, in connection with and on the foundation
of logic, allows for morality according to the fundamental law of truth.”
11
Ibid., S. 60. “Man denke sich dementsprechend einen Bund der Religionen.
Der Gedanke scheint einer satirischen Utopie anzugehören.”
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46 gesine palmer

any notion that is being generated has to be won by the detour to

its non-existence. The proper notion of the I [das Ich], (proper in
explicit contradistinction to Fichte’s concept) depends on the proper
notion of the non-I [das Nicht-Ich]. The proper notion of the non-I
is the notion of the other to the I that generates the I. Thus the
other is connected to the I not in any inclusive manner neither in
the function of merely a strange object or a matter of experience.
The connection is rather a necessary generative correlation. “Das
Selbstbewusstsein ist in erster Linie bedingt durch das Bewusstsein
des Andern.” (213) [self-consciousness is originally conditioned by the
consciousness of the other]. Ethics and its notion of man have thus
been saved from any dependence on emotions, religions and expe-
rience. How can I call this method “Jewish”? Isn’t Judaism “Cohen’s
religion”?

VII.

Kantorowicz in his first sentences seems to get Cohen’s point. Very

accurately he quotes the function: mathematics: logic = legal sci-
ence: ethics. But then he takes it as a matter of fact that the heart
of Cohen’s construction will be done away with in the same way
that his logic has been done away with by Nelson, i.e. by the proof
that his claims concerning mathematics, especially legal science, are
based on wrong assumptions and too little knowledge. For this rea-
son he affirms that Cohen’s way of putting “action” (Handlung)
(instead of “Gesinnung”) in the center of ethics is based on a mis-
understanding of the juridical meaning of the Latin term actio (mean-
ing “Klage,” [“accusation”?]). What comes to the fore in this kind
of argumentation, however, is that Kantorowicz himself misunder-
stood the way a “wissenschaftliches Factum” works in Cohen’s terms.
It is not a box full of “existing” and easily applicable methodologi-
cal bites, ready for use in any context: for Cohen, there are, rather,
certain kinds of problems being posed in legal science, which are
the very problems ethics has to deal with—in a way of its own, but
in correlation to the way legal sciences are dealing with them. In
the very idea of law, there is demand or even a desire for the infinite
in a way that is analogous to the need in mathematics for a cate-
gory of the infinite. Hence legal language is the language to search
and spell out possible relations between the infinite and the finite.
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judaism as a “method” 47

With this turn, Cohen has developed the most consequent of renun-
ciations as to sentences of “being” in “Geisteswissenschaften,” while
he builds constructions of notions in terms of the “ought to be.”
Kantorowicz criticizes the consequences of Cohen’s constructions in
terms of a flat realism or empiricism and even claims that, if Cohen’s
function would work out (which in Kantorowicz’s eyes it doesn’t) it
could be very fruitful for empirical legal science. Only a little later
Hans Kelsen remarked that the method in social and legal sciences
taken for granted by Kantorowicz is itself comparatively new.
Die Verwandlung, die die Lehre von den menschlichen Beziehungen
aus einer Gerechtigkeitslehre zu einer die Wirklichkeit des tatsächlichen
Verhaltens kausal erklärenden und sohin wertfreien Soziologie heute
schon zu einem großen Teil durchgemacht hat, ist, im Grunde genom-
men, ein Ausweichen der Erkenntnis vor einem Gegenstand, den zu
bewältigen sie die Hoffnung verloren, ist das—unfreiwillige—Eingeständnis
einer jahrtausendealten Disziplin, daß sie ihr eigentlichstes Problem,
vielleicht nur derzeit, als unlösbar aufgibt.12
[The change, which the theory of human relations has gone through
today, the change from a theory of justice to a sociology which deals
with the causal laws of actual human behavior in a value free manner,
is basically knowledge’s evading from the face of a subject which to
cope with knowledge has lost hope, it is the—unwilling/unconscious—
admitting of a discipline that is thousands of years old, that it gave
up its “eigentlichstes” problem as unsolvable, perhaps only for the time
being.] What made the Jew Cohen and the Jew Kelsen return to this
eigentlichstem problem?

VIII.

Ferdinand Tönnies in his critique displays a deeper understanding

of Cohen’s fundamental seriousness concerning the ought-to-be. He
writes: “It is infinitely difficult to paraphrase the thoughts of our
philosopher without modifying them by approximation and adapta-
tion to a way of thinking closer to one’s own or another thinking
in terms of social sciences. This is because we have to deal here

12
Hans Kelsen, Die philosophischen Grundlagen der Naturrechtslehre und des Rechtspositivismus,
Berlin 1928, S. 7.
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48 gesine palmer

with a very special form of the Kantian practical philosophy, a form

that makes every perspective on that which ‘is’ depending on that
which ‘ought-to-be’.”13 Tönnies understands this out of sympathy.
But as soon as it comes to the methodological meaning of legal sci-
ences, his understanding comes to an end too. So strange is this idea
to German and perhaps to Christian thinking in general that even
a scholar of Tönnies’ rank, even someone who has sympathy with
Cohen’s general ideal(ism) as long as it remains an abstract philo-
sophical preference, falls back behind his own principal insight in
Cohen’s way of thinking when it comes to the concrete idea—as if
legal categories could prove to be helpful in dealing with ethical
questions. That the term of a legal person (“juristische Person”) is
conceived of as a basic category for moral responsibility seems to
separate the idea of “Sittlichkeit” (morality) in too harsh a way from
any natural or historical foundation, while at the same time con-
necting it and founding it on a system of notions which do have a
very visible empirical context with which they can be easily con-
fused. Tönnies, however, though not following Cohen wholeheart-
edly in everything, shows great respect to the consequence in question.
Comparing Cohen’s theological extemporations to Kant’s system, he
comes to the conclusion that the nucleus of Kantian philosophy
shines through Cohen’s rewriting, while the difference between both
philosophers is that Kant in his “praktischer Vernunft” only looks
for the formula to a moral law given somehow, whereas Cohen in
all seriousness tries to lay the foundation for the “Erkenntnis” of the
moral law and to reestablish this “Erkenntnis” as the central prob-
lem of social sciences. If it is not this task in principle that seems
to be all too strange to Tönnies, could it be the “Jewish” way of
taking every little casual problem serious as to the language of the
will for justice?

13
Tönnies 1909 (s. note 5), 909: “It is exceedingly difficult to render the thoughts
of our philosopher without modifying them by way of approximation or assimila-
tion to a way of thought that is closer to one’s own or to those who are used to
think in terms of social sciences. For his is a very strange interpretation and devel-
opment of Kantian practical philosophy, a development which makes the whole
concept of what ‘is’ depend on the concept of what ‘ought to be’.”
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judaism as a “method” 49

IX.

There has been much ado about Rosenzweig’s concept of “Bewäh-

rung,” and his interpreters seldom miss mentioning that he had
proved the truth of his philosophy by his life. With him, as with
Cohen, as perhaps with every real thinker, no less meaningful than
this sort of Bewährung, may be the other one: the readiness to have
theoretical notions informed and modified by experiences of “real
life.” In Cohen’s case, there was a very painful encounter with the
contemporary legal system, and, at the same time, in the same con-
text, with a scholar who had his own way of combining method and
religion. Paul de Lagarde, a then (and somehow still) famous expert
for the oriental languages and religions, had the idea of making the
Gospel into a true method, a method to achieve what he called
“morality physei,” and the method for the history of religions. Actually,
Lagarde displays sound historical scholarship in questioning every
single pretence of every existing church as to early Christianity, and
we may accept as the result of comparatively unprejudiced inquiry
what he presents as the very essence of the Gospel.14 He relates that
there is discernible but one common principle of all the Gospels and
the Apostolical Letters (while on all other subjects the opinions of
the authors of the NT differ): it is the principle of new creation, of
rebirth, or the principle of conversion, of man entering a new higher
order of things that suspends guilt.15 This principle is thought of
as embodied in one person, namely Jesus, with whose very person
it is inextricably bound up. The effect of this close connection
between religion and a certain person (to which, of all the religions
of the world, according to Lagarde, Buddhism comes closest) is the
avoiding of a very “garstig Ding,” the avoiding of coercion (Zwang),

14
By the way, all his arguments, inasmuch as they are critical towards the canon
and towards the harmony of the NT, are derived from the english Deists (espe-
cially from Toland, but with an evaluation of things quite differing from his) whom
he appears to have studied thoroughly.
15
“Even Paul knows about the new creation which appears with John as rebirth,
with Peter as becoming participant of the divine nature. The entrance of a human
being into a new, higher order of things abolishes his guilt: the human leaves his
guilt behind with his earlier life and with[all] sin [soever] like a butterfly leaves its
cocoon, from which it came. Having been articulated by Paul, Peter, and John
alike, this idea [of a new creation] is likely to be the original Christian idea of
humanity and sin,” Schriften für das deutsche Volk, Jena 1934, 54.
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50 gesine palmer

since the person standing in the center of the religion does not
demand anything but causes upheaval and a new Becoming by his
mere being.16 While lawgivers like Moses or Zoroaster only produce
a demanding or coercing law that is thesei and unable to further a
new Becoming: “The Gospel is a survey of the laws of spiritual life,
found by religious genius; as such it is, accordingly, substantially
description, description in much the same way as chemistry and
physics are description.”17 Thus, historical science proves that the
Gospel itself functions as natural science. With Lagarde, the Gospel,
with its essence summarized above, is the best method of describ-
ing the laws of spiritual life available. Hence, one could conclude,
to focus attention on the description of the laws of “spiritual life,”
makes Geisteswissenschaften a Christian sort of science.
Lagarde became a personal opponent to Cohen due to a failure
in the German legal system, and by a failure that only the attorney
general tried to prevent, however, in vain. In 1888, there was a law-
suit in Marburg enacted by the Jewish community in a first attempt
to make use of a law (§166) that forbade insults towards any reli-
gious community equipped with the rights of corporation—includ-
ing Judaism.
An antisemite with the name Ferdinand Fenner was accused of
insulting the Jewish religion with his claim that every Jew following
the Talmud is a rascal because Talmud allows the Jews to rob and
defraud Goyyim. The court now did not discuss the actions of the
accused and his relation to the law at hand, but decided—against
the will of the attorney general Bertram—to obtain expert testimony
from both parties about the following questions:
1. whether the prescriptions of belief and morals contained in the Talmud are to be
considered as binding commands for believing Jews and whether an insult of the
Talmud is to be considered as an insult of the Jewish religious community or one
of its institutions.

16
In op. cit., 81 he states “that for every coercion there is something extremely
nasty,” and while Buddhism does avoid coercion, too, he says about Zoroaster and
Moses that “they are lawgivers, but they do not live what they teach, they demand:
Jesus preaches and he Is what he preaches: the Gospel is in some way identical
with the person that preaches it,” op. cit., 87.
17
Op. cit., 69, in German: “The Gospel is a portrayal of the laws/doctrines of
spiritual life found by way of religious genius; hence it is basically description in
much the same way in which chemistry or physics are description.”
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judaism as a “method” 51

2. Whether it is written in the Talmud: The Law of Moses is valid only between
Jews, it is of no concern to “Gojims”, the Jews are allowed to rob and to defraud
them.18
With the formulation of these questions, the court took up Fenner’s
summary of the Talmud and burdened the Jews with proving that
they were not incited by their own tradition to commit crimes. The
accused and the accusers changed places, and the court inverted its
task: it had to apply a particular law, but instead of doing so, it
questioned this very law in principle. (The contradiction is this: If
Judaism was a religious community, equipped with the rights of cor-
poration, then the accusation of insulting such a community had to
be proved from the text of the insulter and its probable effects on
the insulted [this is, by the way, the proceeding proposed by the
attorney general from the beginning, as can be seen from his plead-
ing].19 Or the question is whether Judaism deserved the rights of
corporation. But this discussion was even then not to be held in a
court but in parliament [and Bertram took upon himself to affirm
as a central task for the members of parliament the preservation of
the rights of Jewish subjects]. The Marburg court, however, obtained
expert testimonies on the Talmud.)
The testimony for the antisemitic party was written by Paul de
Lagarde, the testimony for the Jewish party by Hermann Cohen.
Lagarde did not appear personally in court, while Cohen did expose
his face to all sorts of questions meant to prove that the Talmud
did pronounce a particularistic system of morality, for which reason,
Jews were to be considered unreliable and even dangerous subjects.
Cohen made an enormous effort to prove the Talmud to be the

18
These questions are in print as part of Cohen’s expert witness, Cohen 1888,
3, in German: “1. Ob die in dem Talmud enthaltenen Vorschriften des Glaubens
und der Sitten als bindende Gebote für die gläubigen Juden anzusehen sind und
eine Beschimpfung des Talmuds als eine Beschimpfung der jüdischen Religions-
gemeinschaft oder einer Einrichtung derselben anzusehen ist. 2. Ob in dem Talmud
steht: ‘Das Gesetz Mosis gilt nur vom Juden zum andern, auf Goijims hat es keinen
Bezug, die dürfen sie bestehlen und betrügen’.”
19
The pleading is quoted at length and with polemical insertions in Otto Boeckel
(anonymous): Der Prozeß Fenner nach den Akten dargestellt und beleuchtet, Marburg
1888, 41–47. I wish to thank SICSA for help with finding this book in Israel, and
the Wiener Library Tel Aviv for sending a copy. Bertram asked, for instance: “And
if the moral and religious law allowed to defraud Christians, would this mean that
the expression ‘rascal’ would be allowed to the accused?” op. cit., 45.
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52 gesine palmer

source of the precept of universal charity as having developed out

of concern for the stranger.20 And he stressed both in the beginning
and at the end of his explanations that the notion of ben noach is to
be considered as a “staatsrechtliche Institution/Kategorie,” an insti-
tution/category relating to public law.21 Lagarde, on the contrary,
forced to admit in his expert testimony that the allowance to rob
and to defraud Gojim is not to be found literally in the Talmud,
produced many quotations from Rohling, Eisenmenger, and Delitzsch
in order to prove that it is nevertheless in accordance with the spirit
of the Talmud.22 This spirit of the Talmud, however, is in Lagarde’s
opinion not comparable with the spirit of any Christian Dogmatic or
with any real Weltanschauung, since it does not at all contain “pre-
scriptions of faith.” From the lack of prescriptions of faith Lagarde
derives the following sentence concerning Jewish morals: “‘Morals’
in our sense is unknown to Israel in its most characteristic scrip-
tures. The ‘morality’ of the Israelites is always thesei, not physei; it is
always accompanied by an unreborn natural disposition, which is
never touched by it.”23 (And here I could see one of the negative
sources for Cohen’s idea of the recreation of the criminal by his
autonomous subjection to a concrete, single, positive law).
Bertram, in agreement with Cohen, did away with Lagarde’s expert
testimony and concentrated on Fenner’s indicted statement, by which
every Jew could feel insulted, and he reduced the impulse to the old
Glaubenshaß.24 While Martin, counsel for the defense, could claim in

20
See especially Cohen 1888, 7f and 17–22. The several sources about Cohen’s
bearing in court are enumerated with Sieg 1993, 224, note 4.
21
“The constitutional institution of the Noachide belongs to the oldest portions
of the Mishnah,” Cohen 1888, 18. “For edifying considerations and excerpts from
the collections of talmudic quotations, which have been delivered by experts from
the times of Moses Mendelssohn onwards, if they were proper in this place, may
be estimated superfluous as soon as the constitutional meaning of the Noachide is
stated,” op. cit., 21f.
22
“The position of the accused changes, if we, as I think we must, abandon the
form of his sentence and focus on its content.” Quoted according to Boeckel 1888,
30. The complete text of Lagarde’s expertise is not available, but Boeckel 1888
produces a large part of it probably in verbal quotation.
23
Quoted according to Boeckel 1888, 25, in German: “‘Sitte’ in unserem Sinne
kennt Israel in seinen charakteristischen Schriften nicht. Die ‘Sittlichkeit’ der Israeliten
ist stets thesei, nicht [the word ‘nicht’ is missing in Boeckel’s account, but quoted
by Cohen, 1888, 26] physei da; sie geht allerdings stets neben einer unwiederge-
borenen, von ihr niemals berührten Naturanlage her.”
24
“I am deeply convinced that only religious hatred triggers Antisemitism,” Boeckel
1888, 45.
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judaism as a “method” 53

favor of his client that the antisemitic movement was a political party
with all the rights of any political party. He referred to anti-Jewish
statements of Herder, Kant, and Fichte in order to show that anti-
semitism was not “a monstrous excrescence of uneducation and men-
tal coarseness,” and he insisted that his client had only attacked the
Jewish Nation, taking no interest at all in their religion. In the end,
Fenner was sentenced to the minimal punishment allowed in such
cases: he had to spend a fortnight in jail and to pay for the lawsuit.25
Many aspects in this case would deserve further consideration. At
least two may have had their consequences in Cohen’s Ethics:
1. Bertram, the public persecutor, had to take great pains in order
to draw attention back from a general judgment over Jewish morals
to the special case at hand. This was because the lawyers themselves,
in spite of their everyday practice, were affected by a general ten-
dency to prefer moral judgments about the entire being of persons,
spirits, nations, and religions to the restricted judgment about single
actions and their relations to a certain single law. I might say this
was their “method,” against which the rational method of legal lan-
guage had but little chance in the case at hand.
2. Lagarde, in his expert testimony, blames “the Israelites” that
their morality (Sittlichkeit) is only thesei and never physei. Cohen, in his
expert testimony, answers to this twice. First, he says: Law is always
[. . .] physei and (hence) “wandelbar,” thus hinting that the law’s being
physei does not prevent it from being changeable.26 Eternity is not
an attribute of the physei, but if of any, then of the thesei. In the sec-
ond comment he observes that the Lagardian manner of using the
term thesei in connection with a morality that relates itself to certain
commands of a God is unusual.27 The principle antagonism is this:
while for Lagarde morality must be physei (and that means: not con-
nected with particular “external” commandments) in order to be

25
The sentence is given with Boeckel 1888, 51.
26
“Law, however firmly it might claim to be of divine origin, has its natural
origin in history, and hence it is at the same time physei and changeable,” Cohen
1888, 15.
27
“Concerning the dogmatics of Judaism I restrain myself to the note that the
use of the philosophical terms of thesei and physei ‘morality of Israelites and Jews
is always thesei, never physei’ is unusual. The sophist says that the law is thesei:
but that the morality of Israel is thesei because it stands ‘under the reign of cer-
tain commandments of its God,’ is a new use of the term,” Cohen 1888, 26.
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54 gesine palmer

“echt,” Cohen begins to bind up morality precisely with special com-

mandments of the laws that are thesei because these appeared to be
the only opening for a rational language in the dense wall of irra-
tional proceedings. This case is his experience of love and hate as
leading categories in public, political and juridical matters. Is it
because of this that he does not want to leave the rights of the other
to the Lagardian and Christian “method of love?”

X. AT THE TOWER, where one meets the other

To reduce Cohen’s ethics to its being motivated by the depressing

experience of this law-suit would be stupid. But may it be allowed
to take for granted that a man like Hermann Cohen could not go
through it without thinking the whole thing through under the per-
spective of his moral philosophy. It may be understood now how
the single action, “Handlung” could return into the center of moral
reasoning, in spite of all Kantian preference for “Gesinnung.” The
legal system itself stops functioning if it refuses to strictly confine the
cases to cases of one acting against the other and the other acting
against the one, and both or one acting against the very idea of jus-
tice. Hence by all the argumentations in the Ethics, not only ethics
is being urged into a closer connection to legal science, but also to
legal practise; and legal sciences as well as legal practise are being
urged to their responsability first and foremost for actions between
legal subjects.28 Die eigentliche Leistung, the real achievement of this
step, however, is the methodological invention of the other as “thou.”
Without whom there is, according to Cohen, no self and no action.
The achievement is to make the very idea of a moral subject depend-

28
The relation between the Latin expression “actio” meaning action and, in a
legal context, “Klage,” is exploited by Cohen this way: “It is, therefore, hardly by
chance if the word for action becomes the foundational word of the whole legal
technology; actio is action and law suit. A right which is not suable/actionable, is
no right. Hence the notion of action is legally connected with actionability. The
enaction of a law takes place in the trial. Hence the notion of law is connected,
on the other side, with the notion of action. Action means, as actio, if not a claim
to a right, but the claim to court’s judgment,” Hermann Cohen Ethik des reinen
Willens, 2. Aufl. 1907, S. 64.
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judaism as a “method” 55

ing on the subject’s acting towards his fellow-subjects. The moment

in which the other is seen is the very moment in which a decision
for a responsable, a responding self as the ethically demanded self,
can be made: the very decision that generates for a moment an indi-
vidual will, generating at the same time the space for the next opportunity to
generate such an ethical person. This might sound like a Pre-Lévinas-
Theorem. But the point with this theory is that it does not reduce
responsbility to this moment, there is no claim made for mere
Unmittelbarkeit. The other is methodologically generated by a very
simple step belonging to the Ursprungslogik: In order to conceive of
an I one has to first think of non-I. Non-I can be He, the other.
So far logic. The other is no longer a mere fact of experience, but
a necessary notion. The necessity of this notion guides every further
step and justifies the search for a methodolgy of behaving towards
the other; and the finding of contract as the means to make out of
another person a thou.
The contract turns the claim into an address. In this process the Other
changes to I and Thou. Thou is not He. He runs the risk to be treated
as It. Thou and I simply belong together. I cannot say Thou without
relating you to myself; without unifying you in a relationship with me.
But there is also the heightened demand: that I cannot even think I
without thinking Thou. In self consciousness, therefore, the Other has
turned into the dual of the I. (248)
It is contract, that makes the he to a Thou.
“Es gibt keinen Anspruch ohne Ansprache.” Today I’d rather feel
compelled to say the other way round: there is no Ansprache without
Anspruch. But that is because a long history of individuation has
deceived us into thinking that we have to be responsable only for
ourselves. So we do agree to Ansprache, but we have difficulties to
agree to Anspruch. We tend to take it as an error or an immaturity
to think we could have an Anspruch towards anybody.
In this we might find an answer to a question not yet asked: why
read Cohen’s ethics today? Because he dared to teach that there is
no Ansprache without Anspruch, no right without pleadability, no indi-
vidual without an allness, and no autonomy without a given law,
without a detailed language for the relations to others.
Therefore religion as such is excluded from the methodology of
ethics, which has not the task to prove any hypothesis but to generate
an infinite possibility of moral selves. Nevertheless, if any religion
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56 gesine palmer

can be made sense of in the frame of this task, it is supposed to be

Mosaism, Jewish monotheism, the religion of the prophets, the very
religion that does not reveal what God “is” but “what is good,” if
we conceive it under the given idea of one God. There is nothing
to be said about this being of the good, however, except that it shall
be. How to say that it shall be—that is Hermann Cohen’s method-
ological question in his ethics.
I’ll have the brassbands march off now.
In the background of Paul de Lagarde’s expertise on the Talmud
there was an elaborated theory that made true theology, natural sci-
ence, the history of religions, and a German gospel one thing. Its
methodolgy was an attempt to accommodate the essence of Christianity
to the demands of a scientific pattern of description, excluding will-
ing and prescription for the sake of avoiding coercion. In Judaism
he sees a serious obstacle to his method, and he, as an envious per-
son from the outside, is outing the very method of Judaism Cohen
is going to apply then: “That the Jews wanted under all conditions
to act according to the commands of their God, this has been their
strength: by this they have been educated, not by their race or their
being chosen or by the content of their religion.” And you can feel
the entanglement he is in, if you read the following sentence, in
which he tries to make of this again a set of qualities, a notion of
Being: “The national qualities which were shaped by the talmudic
training will remain and work on if the Talmud itself has been for-
gotten out of ingratitude by his people that has become modern.
Here you have the advantage which a national religion offers to a
people.”29 It is the eternal and universal foundation of an ethics of
Doing on a specific, that is, a concrete and somewhat particular law,
in other words on a system of prescriptions thesei, whose application
can be debated anew in every case, that substantially challenges every

29
Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften 1934, 29f: “That the Jews wanted to act according
to their commandments under all circumstances, this was their strength: by this
they have been educated and on this behalf they are so horribly superior to us,
not by their religion or their race or their chosenness or the content of their reli-
gion. The properties which have developed by the talmudic education, will remain
and work for a long time, even if the Talmud will have been forgotten by an
ungrateful people that has become modern.”
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judaism as a “method” 57

pretended ethics of Being and its claims to be Copernican or to be

solely founded on a correct description of nature.
Tönnies’ critique may stand as it does. He discerns many nuances
of Cohen’s intention and has only one stumbling-block in his own
favourite subject, the differentiation between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,
by which he tries to integrate the natural into the formality of soci-
eties, and another in the very fact that Cohen seems to take detailed
legal discussion about the tiniest problems seriously as a moral effort
to do the right thing—an effort necessary for the generation of the
individual.
This last point, however, may be the one to make the difference
between Christian and Jewish thinking on this level of discussion—
a difference that leaves the Christian helpless in the face of the Jewish
thinker. Still, in their understanding of humanity as a virtue, more
“rational” than “love,” Tönnies and Cohen seem to share grounds.
A misunderstanding of humanity is being “executed” in Kantorowicz’
sarcastic remarks on a central piece of Cohen’s notion of “Selbst-
bestimmung,” when it comes to the function of punishment for the
criminal. Cohen claims that the criminal needs to accept in an
autonomous act the measure of punishment for his crime and pro-
duce by his acceptance of guilt his own new striving for a new self.
This, with Cohen, is central for the Selbsterhaltung, the upholding of
readiness and ability to strive for a moral self. In consequence, the
appearently “human” act of renunciation on punishment is an error,
depriving the criminal from the chance and the means for repen-
tance and a new creation of the self. Kantorowicz comments: “the
poor fellow,” and goes on in dramatically wondering, how a liberal
humanist like Cohen could be able to oversee the deep moral value
of a tendency to abolish punishment. What point did he miss? Cohen
develops the notion of how law taken seriously even in its Anwendung
should function: and here it has to be a visible symbol of a con-
crete Allheit, throwing something into the way of a criminal in order
to make himself see his error: and in order to help him clearing
himself from his failures by repairing the violated measures. It may
not escape this task for mere reasons of psychological convictions
depriving man from his responsability for others: so it has to speak
the other’s language and at the same time the language of eternal
justice. He will have been more aware than anybody that actual law
many times fails to fulfil this function and that therefore mildness is
to be preferred over harshness. Nevertheless a principle dam against
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58 gesine palmer

a tendency to eliminate questions of the ought from science, and to

eliminate scientific method from questions of the ought according to
Cohen can only be brought about by applying law in a manner that
takes its principles seriously.
A non-religious and almost unidentifiable (but to those who read
the esoterical way, nevertheless unoverlookable) Judaism becomes
method when Cohen has Socrates, a stranger to Judaism, prove the
fundamental and substantial meaning of positive law for the moral
self. Cohen’s interpretation of Socrates’ reason for not evading the
death sentence is almost monstrous, and Cohen, usually standing in
the tradition of prophetical criticism, makes out of the Socrates-story
an inverted sacrificial story, an inversion of antinomian Paul-oriented
Christology according to which Christ died for the sake of the end
of the law. The eternal sense of Socrates’ sacrificial death30 for the
moral world is, according to Cohen, that this martyrdom testifies for
the following claim: in spite of the evident fact that written law can
include bad and stupid laws, there is nothing but the written law to
build a unified moral self upon. Socrates testifies with his death for
the claim that a single, positive law is necessary and irreplaceable
for pure will.31 Cohen places this, if I may call it so, “Midrash” on
Socrates’ “Qidush HaShem” in the paragraph preceding his harsh
critique against Kant’s distinction between morality and legality.
While in a widespread understanding the difference between legal-
ity and morality is a necessary presupposition for any criticism towards
existing laws, Cohen stresses that this criticism can only be done if
positive law and moral law share grounds, a position taken up by
Hans Kelsen in his essay on the philosophical foundations of natural
law and legal positivism.
The Kantian distinction of legality and morality is, of course, an
obstacle to the methodological turn Cohen gives his ethics by build-
ing it through the scientific fact of legal sciences. In order to argue
against it, Cohen has to take two steps. The first is to blame Kant’s
distinction on a religious prejudice: its origin is to be found in Paul’s
polemics against the Torah (268). The second is the question of

30
“Das ist der ewige Sinn, den der Opfertod des Sokrates für die sittliche Welt
hat,” Hermann Cohen Ethik des reinen Willens, 2. Aufl. 1907, S. 264.
31
“Here, however, the single law in all its lowness, is still supposed to be a sym-
bol of the eternal and true law. From this can be seen that the notion of the law
as the notion of the single law, is necessary and irreplaceable for the pure will and
the self consciousness,” Ibid., 267.
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judaism as a “method” 59

coercion. Here Cohen comes to the conclusion that the distinction

between a positive law, equipped with measures of coercion, and a
moral law, equipped only with the notion of necessity given by its
methodological coherence, is meaningless as soon as the coercion of
the moral law has its foundation in the relationship between the one
and the other no less than positive law, whose task it is to mediate
between the one and the other (an idea that deserves far more dis-
cussion than it has raised until now). But for my purpose here the
interesting turning point is the following: Cohen refuses religion any
meaning in ethics, and consequently he criticizes Kant on the grounds
of his adherence to a Christian prejudice. His distance to that Christian
prejudice stems from his Jewish way of thinking as well as his capa-
bility to think that a positive law can offer the best methodology for
ethical reasoning as well as a messianic idea strictly oriented to the
future. But at the very core of his argumentation, he refrains from
quoting any Jewish source; he argues philosophically, and the only
personal example he gives is the Greek father of philosophy. If
Judaism is to function as a universal method in the ethics, does it
have to be stripped from its particular “religious” characters?
Rosenzweig, Sholem and Benjamin solved this problem in another
way: with them, Judaism indeed is not a religion.
In his famous “Wissenschaft als Beruf ” Weber professes a certain
nihilism of ideals when stating: what a man has as an actual ideal
or demon does not matter, as long as he has any ideal at all. Because
even for Weber, without any basic moral decision there will be no
real science. But about the decision, there can be no science. Can
Cohen provide for anything against this? Certainly not by the mere
idea of his formal reasoning. But he has something to offer that
seems, at close reading, to tear a hole in his methodological fabric:
and davqa with this leads to the truest truth of the truest.32 Weber
reduces morals of science to an imperative that there be an imper-
ative of some sort. Perhaps one of the fundamental philosophical
errors concerning law has always been and still seems to be the
reduction of its language to the imperative form. Indeed, there is an
imperative in law that claims in itself to say something about things
that are not law. But legal thinking, in order to connect that which
is not law to the law, is a thinking in and about and an ever new

32
At this point: listen to Dizzy Gillespie’s version of the bluest blues of the bluest!
Which he sings!
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60 gesine palmer

evaluating of conditions. So, perhaps the most Jewish way, or at

least the closest to halachic way in Cohen’s ethics is that which he
enters when he begins to reevaluate condition as such (1907, pp.
179–194): Kant himself, he writes, has urged against his will the
prejudice, as if intellectual activity were sufficiently described by the
laws of causality, as if causality were the center of all thinking. For
the purpose of establishing condition as a necessary category even
in terms of his logic, Cohen knowingly and on purpose steps back
behind the consequences he himself drew from infinitesimal mathe-
matics. He says that condition is not possibly expressible as a func-
tion under the perspective of infinitesimal-math, but very well as
what had been thought of as function before this new development
occurred. And I can see the head shaking of every possible reader
who sees himself confronted with a sentence like this:
But is ethics then, and even legal science, to renounce the notion of
condition because it cannot be formulated in mathematical sentence?
Had not legal science to calculate with numbers and proportions as
they were at hand as functions before the invention of infinitesimal
calculus?33
Perhaps this is one of the real holes in the fabric of his rational
argumentations, but a significant hole it is; an incorrectness leading
to the truest truth of the truest.34 Pure will with Cohen is expressly
never an unconditioned will. Perhaps that does not settle the prob-
lem of greatness posed by this band. But to me, Cohen’s answer to
the seeming emptiness of the Kantian Imperative convinces me more
than the Weberian for two reasons:
1. It says: it matters what you strive for and when and where and
how you do it; striving for something is striving for nothing is no
striving at all is no act of will is dead.
2. It opens a space for thinking between the Is and the Ought,
between actual reality, ideal notion, and the ways to conceal them,
instead of exluding the If-questions from every rational relevance:
and being arrived at only by a step back behind a cultural achieve-
ment, it even breaks a hole for hope into the wall, into which ratio-
nality can change as well as irrationality.
In Rosenzweig’s view, Cohen arrived at the Jewishness of his

33
Ibid., 180.
34
According to Rosenzweig it is repetition in which man speaks his very truth.
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judaism as a “method” 61

method only in his Religion of Reason, when he spells out the pos-
sible relations between Judaism and Philosophy by creating a new
“Judaism proper.” But to this work, the Religion of Reason, Rosenzweig
ascribes the universal value of the discovery of the continent of the
New Thinking, particularizing: In the same kind of error, that made
Columbus believe, that he had arrived at the Eastern coast of the
old world, while in reality he had discovered a new continent, thus
Cohen believed, that he had discovered an addition to the old phi-
losophy by construing “Eigenart” for religion and its particular care
for the individual, while eigentlich he had discovered the lost paradise
of mankind, from whose grounds out of the cracks of his and all
the systems in the world the new, the new built city of natural
thinking will rise.35
But what is this “natural thinking”? Apparently it returns from
the should-be sentences to a great ecce realitas, for whose sake
Rosenzweig tore down the great A = B exchanges and allows to
think and to realize the B = B, A = B exchanges? A = B sentences
are, according to the methodological scheme, demanded by societies
for the financial support of research projects outlined above, the
goals of research: C-sentences as hypotheses in the beginning of, D-
sentences as results in the end of research. If we take Weber again as
an example, his A = B sentence would be: Capitalism as an economic
system of a certain rationalism has its irrational sources in the ethics
of Protestantism. This is surely not the sort of sentence Rosenzweig
had in mind. Natural thinking, with Rosenzweig, does not mean to
explain and describe the causal ways of nature or to explain and
describe man’s and society’s ways in a similar way (as Freud thought
he was doing). If the stubborn B = B is called real human being,
it is nevertheless a real human being who has been generated by
the logic of origin: by that which he is not. In his B = B stubborn-
ness, he is the only possible address for any A = A, and what happens
between the two is not far away from Cohen’s notion of correlation
between two eternally different beings who nevertheless come into
being only because they are depending on their mutual dependency. A Weberian
sentence is one that tries to ignore the ought-to-be-sentences or makes
them subject to the is-sentences. A Cohenian sentence is a sentence
that generates the notions for anything between men as forms of the

35
Ibid.
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62 gesine palmer

ought-to-be: legal language is the language for any ethical talk and
for any talk in the realm of humanities at all. A Rosenzweigian sen-
tence comes after this methodological demand and has the properly
generated individuals and their counterparts and their natural rests
speak now in any possible proper and foreign language.
The work of Cohen and Rosenzweig is done. It is left to us, their
readers to talk about their method. But how talk about method after
work has been done? Walter Benjamin, as we have seen, a busy reader
of Cohen, and, as I may add, a respectful reader of Rosenzweig too,
in his book on the Trauerspiel had his own way of drawing into
question method in philosophy, that may be or may be not Jewish:
The methodological element in philosophical projects is not simply part
of their didactic mechanism. Its method is essentially representation.
Method is a digression. Representation as digression—such is the
methodological nature of the treatise. . . . For knowledge, method is a
way of acquiring its object—even by creating it in the consciousness;
for truth it is self-representation, and is therefore immanent in it as
form. 28–30 (Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne,
Verso, New York, 1985).36
The metaphor of “Umweg,” of circumvention or detour, I take to
be due to his criticism towards Cohen’s system. But through the
backdoor a notion of truth as a given enters a notion that makes
him fall back behind the Cohen, who wrote in his ethics: “Das
Suchen der Wahrheit, das allein ist Wahrheit. Die Methode allein,
mittelst deren Logik und Ethik, beide zugleich, nicht eine allein,
erzeugbar werden, diese vereinigende, einheitliche Methode, sie voll-
bringt und verbürgt die Wahrheit.37 (The quest for truth alone is
truth. Only that method by which logic and ethic, both together
and not one of them alone, is generatable, this unifying and in itself
one method, fulfils and guarantees truth).
And doesn’t Cohen “fall back” behind himself, when he talks about
a method that would guarantee truth? And what for heaven’s sake
does Rosenzweig do when stating that Judaism is always already
with the truth?

36
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Erkenntniskritische Vorrede, GS ed. Suhrkamp,
I, 1, 207–9.
37
Hermann Cohen Ethik des reinen Willens, 2. Aufl. 1907, 91.
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judaism as a “method” 63

I suggest to return to Rosenzweig’s very special use of “eigentlich,”

a use that is far from any Jargon of Eigentlichkeit if you read him
as I read him:
Und zwar ist das Verhältnis von B = B zu A = B ein aggressives, auf
Umwandlung gerichtetes, das von A = B zu B = B hingegen nur ein
theoretisch-skeptisches (ungläubiges), das sich mit bloßer Umdeutung,
mit Erklärung von B = B als “eigentlich” A = B zufrieden gibt.38
(Actually, the relation from B = B to A = B is an aggressive one,
striving for change, while the relation from A = B to B = B is only
a theoretical, sceptical (unbelieving) one that is satisfied with a mere
change of meaning, with the explanation that B = B means “eigentlich”
A = B.)
Eigentlich, Rosenzweig turns out to be the one who most seriously
calls into question method as such, precisely with the claim that for
him Judaism is a method. He would provoke the question: Isn’t it
eigentlich against all truth of human beings to take anything for
granted, even truth? Eigentlich this will be the case—but no less
eigentlich we will cease to be and as we ought to be human if we
ever stop our endeavors to ask for truth. Here we are at the ever
new beginning of speaking this and that and what not. . . . .?

38
FR, “Urzelle” des Stern der Erlösung, Brief an Rudolf Ehrenberg vom 18.11.1917,
in Zweistromland, Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1984, 3, 125–38, p. 135.