PARADOX AND THE PROPHETS: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. First edition. New cloth bound in dust jacket.. 333 pages. Daniel H. Weiss offers an insightful new reading of Religion of Reason, arguing that the style and method of Cohen's final work have long been fundamentally misunderstood. Previous readers, puzzled by the seemingly incompatible perspectives within Religion of Reason, have tended either to uphold one or another of the text's 'voices' or to criticize the text for intellectual incoherence. Weiss demonstrates that the multiplicity of Cohen's text is an essential element of its rational and communicative purposes. Drawing upon Kierkegaard as a theorist of indirect communication, he shows how Cohen combines the 'incompatible voices' of philosophy and of Scripture in order to convey religious and ethical ideas-such as the unique God, the other as You, and the messianic future-that would be distorted in a fully consistent, single-voiced mode of thought and communication.