Hermann Cohen and the Redemptive Potentiality of Sin

Hermann Cohen and the Redemptive Potentiality of Sin

Part Three of a series on Hermann Cohen

Hermann Cohen (b.1842 – d.1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and the intellectual precursor to the Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Starting from the proposition that ethics had to be universal, Cohen outlined a Kantian (and non-Marxist) ethical socialism rooted in the prophetic vision of the Hebrew bible.

Hermann Cohen and the Redemptive Potentiality of Sin

Anticipating Martin Buber, Cohen says we must recognize the living, breathing individual as a thou and not just as a generic example of humanity. As significant as the universal ethical ideal is for Cohen, he recognized that ethics is concerned with individuals only insofar as they are members of the human community. Ethics cannot always deal with individual moral feelings or with sin. In other words, it is religion rather than ethics that is concerned with the sin of the individual.

It is the prophet Ezekiel whom Cohen singles out as bringing a new and important aspect into early Judaism: the sin of the individual for which he alone stands responsible before God. This is Cohen’s interpretation of Ezekiel’s “Cast far away from yourselves all the transgressions that you committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit” (Ezekiel 18:31; my translation). Whereas ethics offers a collective but not individual self-transformation, Ezekiel promises personal liberation from sin through repentance. Indeed, it is Ezekiel who bequeaths to Judaism what Cohen calls “the God of the individual man.”

It is only when the individual acknowledges his or her own moral failings that it is possible to atone and to strive for moral improvement, Cohen argues. This act of atonement establishes an intimate and personal relationship between the individual and God. And in so doing, the individual becomes a unique moral and religious self: 

The apex of monotheism is Messianism, but its center of gravity lies in the relation between God and the individual. At this point Ezekiel deviates from the mainstream of Messianism, insofar as he ceases to look at the world and turns to an inward look into the individual.

Moreover, it is through Ezekiel that God informs the Jewish people (and therefore the world) that the fateful correlation between sin and punishment is now broken, and so the punishment of death is abolished. Cohen states that “to sever the connection between suffering and guilt – to discard, that is, the notion that suffering is a punishment for guilt – is one of the most far-reaching consequences of monotheistic thinking.” Indeed, it is of momentous significance, Cohen adds, for how society deals with and responds to suffering. 

Ezekiel not only breaks the traditional link between sin and punishment; he also declares that repentance now takes the place of public sacrifice. With the rejection of burnt offerings, the locus of atonement shifts from the public ritual to an inner work: the individual undertakes an inward sacrifice of self‑examination, contrition, and moral renewal. It is through this disciplined inward gaze that a person comes to know themselves in a way no external ritual — or indeed no other person — ever could. “In myself, I have to study sin, and through sin I must learn to know myself,” says Cohen. “I am permeated by the thought that I do not know any man’s wickedness as deeply, as clearly, as my own.”

Interestingly, Cohen offers the view that sin and the atoning work that follows has the effect of making a person unique: it lifts him or her out of the impersonal totality of nature. Indeed, it is through sin — and in the recognition of sin — that man first becomes an authentic individual. Nevertheless, the sinner has a choice: stay unique in your sin (we are uniquely bad rather than uniquely good, it seems), or repent and return to the ethical community.

For Ezekiel, “the individual raises himself up out of his social environment, and indeed through his own sin,” Cohen explains. But this sin “is not an end-station for man, but rather an ever repeated beginning of an ever-opening new life.” Repentance culminates in a reorientation toward the world — a renewed readiness to step back into history with a clarified and heightened sense of responsibility. It marks the transition from inward reckoning to outward ethical engagement, and a renewed commitment to the messianic imperative of elevating humanity, alleviating suffering, and widening the sphere in which human beings may live freer and better lives. Ezekiel’s injunction to “turn yourself around and live” thus becomes, in Cohen’s system, a summons to re‑enter the public sphere as an agent of ethical transformation through which the ideal becomes progressively realized in the real.

Bibliography

• Cohen, Hermann. Jewish Writings. Ed., Bruno Strauss. C. A. Schwetschke (1924).

• Cohen, Hermann. Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen. Tr., Eva Jospe. Norton (1971).

• Cohen, Hermann. [1919] Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Tr., Simon Kaplan. [2^nd Edition]. Scholars Press (1995).

• Gibbs, Robert. “Jurisprudence is the Organon of Ethics.” Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism. Ed., Reinier Munk. Springer (2005).

• Homburg, Phillip. “Towards a Benjaminian Critique of Hermann Cohen’s Logical Idealism.” Anthropology & Materialism, Special Issue [I] (2017).

• Kant, Immanuel [1785]. Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals. Tr. James W. Ellington. (3rd ed.). Hackett Pub. Co. (1993). 

• Poma, Andrea. Yearning for Form and Other Essays on Hermann Cohen's Thought. Springer (2006). 

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Tr. Hazel Barnes. Philosophical Library (1956). 

• Seeskin, Kenneth. Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge University Press (2014). 

• Solomon, Norman. “Cohen on Atonement, Purification and Repentance.”  Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism. Ed., Reinier Munk. Springer (2005).