On Cohen's I and Thou
“It is an intriguing [Aristotelian] illusion that the solitary thinker, in his state of eudaemony, is most likely to attain full selfhood. We [Jews] know, however, that the isolated self exclusively engaged in thinking cannot be an ethical self. The ethical self must be engaged in action. For this self, there exists no I without a Thou. Reah means ‘the other,’ the one who is like you. He is the Thou of the I. Selfhood is the result of an unending relation of I and Thou as well as its abiding ideal. True, the ideal remains the ideal, as the task [of ethical action] remains the task. But an ideal is an ideal only because and insofar as it asks to be emulated so that I may approximate it. And a task is a task only because I am charged with it, because it is incumbent upon me. By working at this task, I work on myself, toward my selfhood. In short, selfhood ensues from the interaction between I and Thou.”
Hermann Cohen, “I and Thou: Selfhood through Ethical Action (1908)” in Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1971), p. 218. An interesting historical note on the origins of I-thou relations in European philosophy. Cohen was a major figure in Neo-Kantian thought at the University of Marburg and the first Jewish full professor appointed in Germany. Generally popularized by Martin Buber’s 1923 I and Thou (Ich und Du), the terminology was later repeated by various others such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio. I came across Cohen’s use of the terminology years ago while researching Barth’s Neo-Kantian background, illuminated helpfully by Simon Fisher’s 1988 Revelatory Positivism? Barth's Earliest Theology and the Marburg School. I had been hunting down various Neo-Kantian texts via interlibrary loan, one of which still had the library records in its front matter. As an indication of how few read through this material, I was the first since Fisher to check the rare German text out of Oxford’s Bodleian library. As it happens, I’m writing a lecture on Buber for this semester’s Philosophy of Religion course, so wanted to cite the context after Kant where the problem of a groundless ethical ego arises. Cohen’s 1908 note arose from his study of Maimonides, and was then taken further again in his 1919 Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (pg. 15-16ff).
