The Correlation of Science and Ethics in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy

The Correlation of Science and Ethics in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy

Hermann Cohen (1842 – 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. 

Part Two of a series on Hermann Cohen

Hermann Cohen (1842 – 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.

The Correlation of Science and Ethics in Hermann Cohen's Philosophy

Science and ethics

Cohen makes a distinction between the logic of science and the ideal of ethics, and notes that the natural world and the world of ethics are perceived very differently. This is because the order of the physical world is unchangeable (for example, the sun sets in the west, night follows day, etc.), while in the ideal world ethical rules can be accepted or rejected. It seems there should be one explanation for science, which is empirically self-evident, and another for ethics, which is something that is open to debate. Cohen reasons there must be something that allows science and ethics to coexist and interrelate.

Cohen’s answer was to call on God as the inevitable and ultimate ideal coincidence of what is (science, nature) with what ought to be (ethics). Or to put it another way, God is the eventual coincidence of human culture with nature; the real with the ideal. And because God stands outside nature and ethics, He points to the rapprochement between is and ought, thereby helping to bring about moral action in the world, the same moral action that is recommended by the Hebrew prophets as seen through the prism of the Kantian categorical imperative.

The advantage of having a transcendent God is that neither nature nor morality can claim priority over the other, meaning that just as ethics must conform to science, so science must conform to ethics. Thus, just as ethics must answer to the findings of science, science must remain accountable to ethical reason. In this way, God guarantees not only the distinct integrity of nature and morality but also the necessary relation that binds them.

For Cohen, then, scientific praxis and moral praxis must become reciprocal. Furthermore, and congruent with Cohen’s own prophetic messianism, it is in the future that ethical principles will be fully realized, at which time the ethical will merge with the ontological, so that being and morality no longer contradict each other. As Phillip Homburg remarks, Cohen aims “to assign ethics a status that raises it to the same level of dignity as the concepts of logic or mathematics.”

Beyond mediating between science and ethics, Cohen’s notion of correlation also structures the relation between humanity and God. Because humans are rational beings, our capacity for inference — to move from the contingent to the universal — requires a distinctive mode of relation to the divine. For Cohen, the very awakening of reason in us is God’s revelation: reason is the medium through which God addresses humanity, the point at which the human mind becomes capable of receiving and responding to the universal.

It is important to note that the correlative relationship between God and humanity, for which Cohen borrows the biblical concept of the Holy Spirit or Spirit of Holiness, is respectful of God’s separateness. As Norman Solomon explains in an essay on Cohen’s theory of atonement, God and man are “the inevitable counterpart of the other, mirroring but not merging.” Solomon goes on to say that merging “would obliterate the distinctiveness of God and human; it would verge on pantheism. God’s holiness demands human holiness as its correlate.”

Indeed, Solomon is right to refer to the bogeyman of pantheism because Cohen is markedly antagonistic towards the pantheistic doctrine that identifies God with the universe (or regards the universe as a manifestation of God). Cohen is adamant that while God is the capstone of both logic and ethics, He nevertheless transcends both. For this reason, Cohen rejects every form of pantheism or mysticism that collapses God into the world; such views, he argues, erase the very transcendence that makes ethical obligation possible. In this respect, Cohen was very different from Spinoza, for whom God and Nature are virtually synonymous.

Cohen therefore conceives God as a transcendent synthesis of nature and ethics — the unifying ground that guarantees their correlation without reducing one to the other. This transcendent God is also the horizon toward which humanity is historically summoned: the ultimate realization of a Kantian kingdom of ends, a world in which every human being is treated as an end in themselves, never as a mere means for others. The realization of the ideal, which is grounded in God and finds its ultimate fulfilment in Him, is mankind’s historic task, his ethical project.

Since the ethical task is not dictated by the logic of being, it is not predetermined but projected, envisioned, and urged by the Hebrew prophets — a work of liberation that human beings are free to realize. Whereas Sartre holds that indeterminate consciousness can never coincide with immutable being, Cohen maintains that the closing of the gap between the ideal and the real is humanity’s historical vocation, and he sees Judaism as integral to this mission.

Coming soon: Hermann Cohen and the Redemptive Potentiality of Sin