Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor.” by Dana Hollander

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor.” by Dana Hollander Shira Billet Dana Hollander. Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 324 pp. Chief among Leo Strauss’s instructions for the student of the history of philosophy was the insistence on a “serious, i.e. passionate interest in the past.” For Strauss, this meant being “prepared to learn something not merely about” past philosophers “but from them.”1 In an exciting monograph, Ethics Out of Law: Hermann Cohen and the “Neighbor,” Dana Hollander turns to Strauss for guidance in key places to illuminate difficult aspects of the philosophy of the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). This historically grounded and philosophically insightful book offers readers much to learn “about” Cohen’s oeuvre, context, and philosophical contributions. The book’s more ambitious and audacious claim is that we have something important to learn “from” him, found in the central but little understood—and indeed counterintuitive—claim of his systematic philosophical ethics that “ethics is founded in law.” Hollander suggests that this claim is ripe for recovery for contemporary ethical and political thought, perhaps more so than it was in Cohen’s day, especially for a contemporary ethics of hospitality, and for a politics deeply concerned with the place of those who are othered and marginalized. She finds a crucial interpretive key to Cohen’s “ethicolegal” philosophy in his Jewish and philosophical understanding(s) of the “neighborstranger,” a theme that traverses his Jewish and philosophical corpora. Hollander presents an “integrative” reading of Cohen “across” his two corpora as a methodological contribution not only to the study of Cohen, but to the study of Jewish philosophy more broadly. Cohen’s nineteenth-century German legal and philosophical language is unfamiliar terrain for contemporary readers, but Hollander is a skilled guide. In chapter 1, out of Cohen’s understanding in his 1904 Ethik des reinen Willens (Ethics of the Pure Will) of Recht and Gesetz (differently inflected terms for law), legal personhood, and Genossenschaft (association), Hollander explicates Cohen’s understanding of the self that seeks to be ethical as inevitably situated within communities and social frameworks structured by legal and political norms. Central to Cohen’s ethico-legal understanding of law is the idea of law as “generative and futural” (79)—that law is “not encountered” merely “as a preexisting, ready-to-hand instrument to be wielded”; rather, the facts that arise from our [End Page 198] embeddedness in law constitute a “starting point for interrogating the legal order for the purpose of achieving greater universal justice” (262). Hollander shows how Cohen’s attention to the legally situated, future-oriented ethical self contributes to philosophical accounts of ethics that typically pay little attention to law. Hollander identifies a “paradoxical” aspect of Cohen’s account of law in the Ethik that leads her to seek clarification, in chapter 2, through his Jewish writings, introducing the other major project of the book beyond the mere recovery of Cohen’s ethico-legal insight—namely, her methodological project of reading Cohen “across” or “traversing” the two corpora (“systematic philosophy” and “Jewish writings”) in which his writings have been inherited. The book explicates a method of reading across corpora that identifies certain themes as the “hinges” or “passageways” or “relays” that “join” them, or, in a different metaphor, renders visible the “seams” that are stitched between the “Jewish-philosophical” and “ethico-legal” agendas in Cohen’s work. Hollander’s attention to methodological questions animates chapter 3, where Strauss’s own methodological reflections on Cohen’s Jewish philosophical work offer the scaffolding for Hollander’s method. Chapter 4 is a transitional chapter in which Hollander identifies an unexpectedly political aspect of law in Cohen’s Jewish discussion of Gesetz (a justice-oriented, messianic politics), and introduces the “neighbor-stranger” as the central “hinge” that links the philosophical and Jewish corpora with respect to the question of “ethics out of law.” Cohen had argued from very early on that the Biblical Hebrew reʿa (Leviticus 19:18) was properly understood not in the proximate notions of the “neighbor” or “nearest one” (der Nächste), but rather in universal...