A Harmony of Paradox and Contradiction: Communication between Human Beings and God According to Hermann Cohen’s Jewish Philosophy

Hermann Cohen, a German Jewish philosopher and one of the founders of Neo-Kantianism, is considered by many to be the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this lecture, I will explore the encounter between the act of communication and Jewish philosophy in the writings of Hermann Cohen to formulate new observations about the communication between human and God, and to shed a new light on Cohen’s Jewish philosophy with modern communication theories.

My lecture focuses on three themes in Cohen’s Jewish philosophy:

1. Prophetic sermons: for Cohen, the prophets’ speeches are the pure social source of religion. The prophets’ love of humanity is reflected not only in the content of their speeches, but also in their heterogenic style that reflects the diversity of humanity and in their medium of choice (mass communication that addresses all and not only the educated elite –like the platonic dialogues).

2. Prayer: viewing Cohen’s concept of prayer as communication of transformations and as ritualistic communication. Cohen’s vision of a pluralist and diverse humanity of individuals, formulates by the prophets, is implemented by the Jewish prayer that challenges the boundaries between these two definitions of communication. The personal connection created by individual prayer (transmission) can be established only within the communal prayer (ritual). Thus, the communal prayer creates a community of individuals, community which is the Kingdom of God.

3. Biblical psalms: in his article “Die Lyrik der Psalmen” Cohen portrays the transformation of the human-being into an individual by uttering the words of the psalms. Following the linguistic philosopher John Langshaw Austin, who coined that concept “performative utterance”: a speech-act in which the content of the sentence is performed by the utterance of the sentence itself, it appears that for Cohen the language of psalms is performative utterance, that enables the human being to create his/her individuality thus creating the spiritual existence of humanity.