Karl Barth. Paul S. Chung
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be deeply related to the field of socialistic analysis that would later become manifest in Barth’s pastorate at Safenwil. Like Kant, Cohen was interested in establishing the epistemological foundation of modern science. Cohen tried to develop his philosophy on the basis of mathematical physics. Kant’s basic insight, the so-called Copernican revolution in philosophy, comes from the fact that objective reality is known only insofar as it conforms to the knowing mind.
The human mind is active in the knowing process. Objects of experience may be known, but things lying behind the realm of experience, or things-in-themselves, are unknowable. Therefore, Kant’s epistemology is based on sensible intuition—which Kant often conflates with imagination—and the categories of understanding. The senses furnish raw data, which the mind then organizes and systematizes. Although the faculty of imagination intuits, imagination cannot possess an identity of its own. Empirical data are perceived by intuition and are brought by the categories of understanding to form the objects of knowledge. The faculty of understanding is involved in the processes of classifying and ordering data that is presented to it by means of the faculty of imagination. This means that what we view and how we view are dependent on our idea of reality. The world is actually the way we see it. In Kant’s famous dictum: “Thoughts without concepts are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”19
Things are known as they appear to our senses and are formed into objects by the categories of understanding. The thing in itself (Ding an sich) is not known to us. Kant distinguishes phenomena, namely things as they appear, and noumena, namely things as they are in themselves. It is the noumena that give rise to our knowing. Generally Kant uses noumenon (thing in itself) to refer to an object existing apart from any relation to a knowing subject. All we know are phenomena, as they are present in our experience. Because we cannot gain knowledge of things in themselves, Kant’s theory of knowing puts restrictions on transcendental realities (God, the immortal soul, human freedom). Such postulates are to be seen and discussed in other domains of human reason, namely reason in its practical area. The noumenon is conceived of as free. Freedom exists apart from the relationship between reason and understanding.
Therefore, practical reason is not freedom itself, but an effect of freedom. This particular relationship between practical reason and freedom is called the moral law. Our relation to the world, according to Kant, is not merely restricted to scientific knowledge; there is a realm of moral value. Kant establishes the moral nature of existence in terms of the universal human moral experience. The fundamental law of pure practical reason is known as the categorical imperative. According to Kant, the command of the categorical imperative is as follows: “act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a Universal Law of Nature.”20 The human subject must act in accordance with the idea of the moral law.
Cohen takes issue with the precritical and ontological existence of Ding an sich in Kant. Thought as such, and not the world of the noumena, gives rise to cognition. By taking “being” to be the product of thought, Cohen argues that the real being is generated not by empirical sensation but by the thought itself. The knowing subject is a transcendental, pure and simple consciousness as a mathematical point. Thought has no origin in anything outside itself, because it is self-originating. Sense experience is not a source of the content of knowledge but a basic feature of human experience. Cohen’s concept of origin (Ursprung) refers to the beginning of cognition in thought itself. As far as the origin, as the logical originator gives rise to its content, Ursprung is originative and creative of the objects of its knowledge.
For Cohen, logic, ethics, and aesthetics are valid patterns of cognition, especially in logic where all scientific knowledge is asserted to be valid. The reduction of human knowledge to the three patterns of logic, ethics, and aesthetics raises a question of the whereabouts of religion. Cohen was a pious liberal Jew. He placed religion under the heading of ethics. In agreement with Kant, Cohen maintained that ethics had to be universal. According to Kant, ethics are centered in his categorical imperative. This law has its source in the autonomy of a rational being. The moral law confronts us as an “ought” demanding our will in conformity to the law. Morality requires a belief in the existence of God, freedom, and immortality.
Like Kant, Cohen was convinced that there would be moral progress of the human race in the teleology of history. The interest that the Marburg school aroused among Marxists was less due to its radical apriorism than to its attempt at grounding socialist ethics on Kant’s theory of the practical reason. Cohen and Natorp did not regard themselves as Marxists, but as socialists with a conviction that socialism could only be founded in ethical idealism. A striving for the ethical is an endless process toward complete social justice in our world. Because the goal of ethics is to attain universal global justice, we must have hope of attaining that goal. Therefore, Cohen argues that a socialist society would be established through moral progress.
For Cohen, God appears as the idea of the unity of three different patterns: logic, ethics, and aesthetics. The existence of God is not like people’s existence. God as Ursprung exists only in a logically pure sense, not in a personal-ontological sense. God as Ursprung is a mathematical zero point. The idea of God guarantees an eternal world and human capacity of achieving ethical justice. The worldview of the ordered world and voluntary ethics are integrated in the idea of God, which is called the religion of reason. At this point Cohen’s Jewish belief in the uniqueness of God becomes manifest. God transcends the physical world but at the same time provides us with the moral imperative to act ethically. Judaism provides a basis for Cohen to take in earnest the religion of reason, in other words, ethical monotheism. Therefore, Cohen’s program for ethically established socialism becomes manifest in the following: “Socialism is right, insofar as it is grounded in the idealism of ethics. And the idealism of ethics has grounded the socialism . . . Kant as an ideal politician explicitly based himself on Plato, and he is for the republic . . . he is the true and actual originator of German socialism.”21
Karl Vorländer (1860–1928), an outstanding representative of the neo-Kantian movement, attempted to combine Marxism and ethics by means of Kant’s philosophy of ethics and epistemology in order to support the neo-Kantian socialism that Cohen represented. According to Vorländer, socialism must not marginalize an epistemological-critical foundation and ethical enlargement, the aspect lacking in Marxism.22 In 1921 Vorländer was convinced that he would fight for a synthesis between Marx and Kant. In his interim report on Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus, he said that one cannot connect socialism historically with Kant: “I emphasize explicitly that the Königsberg Philosopher has not played a role of ‘originator of socialism’ historically, and that the development of the socialism in contrast has run into ‘under completely other philosophical auspices’. What is at stake is only the possibility of methodical, systematical, logical connection.”23 In Vorländer’s view, there would be no contradiction between Kant and Marx; thus Kantian philosophy of morality could be integrated into Marxism without violating the latter’s basic assumption. For Vorländer, historical materialism is understood to define consciousness rather than to become an economic determinism that produces social and cultural consciousness. Consequently there is an interaction between the base and the superstructure in which human will plays an important role.
According to Marquardt, in Vorländer’s book The New Kantian Movement in Socialism (Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus), Barth underlined the following sentence: “‘What is at stake is not whether Kant possibly already has had the socialistic idea, but whether his ethics can be really the point of departure to a socialistic ethics.’”24 However, the neo-Kantian way to socialism has been characterized by its idealistic ethical revisionism, in contrast to scientific socialism in a Marxist sense. All in all, during his student period between Berlin and Marburg, Barth’s approach to socialism is located between Marxist elements in Sombart and the neo-Kantian ethical socialism in Cohen and Vorländer.
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