Thinking in Translation by Orr Scharf

Author:Orr Scharf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2019-08-19T09:45:44.811000+00:00

God’s truth is none other than the love with which he loves us. The light with which the truth illuminates is none other than the word to which our Truly makes answer (SE, 436/SR, 392).

5.1.3

Truth in Religion of Reason

Rosenzweig’s acquaintance with the sources of Judaism is usually considered one of his main weaknesses. As noted in the previous chapters, the sources that he cites in the Star were shown to have been derived from the writings of his two venerated teachers at the Lehranstalt: Ismar Elbogen and Hermann Cohen. Despite his astounding intellectual voracity, it was impossible for the graduate of a German Gymnasium and universities to have established a firm grip on the “Jewish bookcase” in the course of one year’s study and several years of active military service. Still, even where Rosenzweig is clearly basing his discussion on the sources appearing in his teachers’ treatment of the same subject, the interpretation is entirely his own.

Such is the case with the concept of truth, which is based on the same sources that Hermann Cohen includes in the Religion of Reason. This observation goes well beyond the biographical anecdote: the differences in the function of the sources within each system, in the way in which they are interpreted, and the use of translation as the element that transforms the nature of philosophical discourse from analytical to hermeneutical, allow us to appreciate the daring originality of Rosenzweig’s invention of a new dynamic between the traditions of German Idealism and Judaism. A comparison of Rosenzweig’s discussion with Cohen’s clearly shows that the former student developed his ideas as a counter-response to the master’s attempt to establish a neo-Kantian conception of Judaism.12

The essential difference between Rosenzweig’s conception of truth and that of Cohen, to use Stéphane Mosès’ term, is that it outspans the system by drawing a bridge between its tight-knit structure of the infinity of knowledge at which that structure is pointing, thus announcing its inability to articulate that infinity. Cohen, on the other hand, insists on a closed system within which the sources of Judaism offer the optimal articulation of its purely rational synthesis of ethics and nature.

Both discussions are anchored in an interpretation of Jeremiah 10:10, presenting it as the summa of their argument and repeatedly invoking it to reiterate their point. But while Rosenzweig uses it as his opening, Cohen first describes the philosophical problem that the concept of truth out of the sources of Judaism purportedly resolves.

We may therefore read Rosenzweig’s severing of the Gordian knot between reality and truth, as a direct critique of Cohen, who, by positing truth as the Urproblem of philosophy, is repeating philosophy’s perennial error that Rosenzweig criticises. Hence, “For the world, truth is not law but content. The truth does not verify [bewährt] reality; reality maintains [bewahrt] truth” (SE, 16/SR, 14), is Rosenzweig’s counter-argument to Cohen’s “Truth alone is the law of the necessary connection of natural cognition with moral cognition” [Wahrheit ist allein das Gesetz des notwendigen Zusammenhangs der Naturerkenntnis mit der sittlichen Erkenntnis”.

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