Reflexionen über Marxismus mit Hermann Cohen, Erich Fromm, Emmanuel Levinas und dem Talmud

Abstract

This article takes Marxism as a model and example of a secular-humanist approach that, while lacking a dimension that can be characterized as divine, transcendent, spiritual, etc., is also a mass ‘secular-messianic’ movement that incorporates religious elements, primarily the universal aspiration for the redemption of humanity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen pointed out the danger of humanistic approaches with universal aspirations that lacked an intimate dimension towards one’s fellow human beings, a dimension that, according to Cohen, is fundamentally religious and stems from the transcendence of God.Erich Fromm’s approach is used in this article as a medium to present a Jewish socialist idea in the formulation and language of humanistic psychology. Fromm’s critique of Marx, whom he admired, includes the application of Hermann Cohen’s approach to the historical situation of the mid- and late twentieth century. Fromm’s call for personal involvement as a solution to alienation echoes Cohen’s concept of correlation. The position of Emmanuel Levinas presented in this article serves to present the claim that humanistic-universal approaches that reject the transcendent-divine dimension ultimately deny the transcendent element that defines human beings in general and the other person in particular, and according to Levinas, this is the epistemology and phenomenology of violence. Despite its socialist vision, Jewish messianism also embraces a personal element of the transcendent that gives it an ethical orientation that secular socialism lacks, as the Levinassian examination of messianism in rabbinic literature demonstrates.