Hermann Cohen: Morale

Hermann Cohen was German philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on morale.

Hermann Cohen: 20 quotes1 like

“Only the idea of God gives me the confidence that morality will become reality on earth. And because I cannot live without this confidence, I cannot live without God.”

Hermann Cohen

Source: Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 5

“In the poor man I see humanity. I can't think of humanity without feeling sympathy for him, without feeling love for him. It is not the physical universe, but rather the moral universe, the social existence of mankind, that I must think and love, if my thought of God is to be called love.”

Hermann Cohen

An dem Armen geht mir der Mensch auf. Daher kann ich den Menschen nicht denken ohne das Mitleid mit ihm, ohne die Liebe zu ihm. Nicht das Universum, aber das sittliche Universum, das soziale Dasein der Menschen muß ich denken und lieben, wenn mein Denken Gottes: Liebe heißen darf. <br class="br">Source: The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy (1915), p. 81 http://books.google.com/books?id=rZ9RAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA81

“Ethics must not remain a lovely abstraction; it must be concretized into valid truth. At this point ethics joins forces with religion because ethics too has ultimately no other recourse but to hypothesize the idea of God: not for the personal redemption of the moral individual but as a guarantee for the eventual realization of morality in this world.”

Hermann Cohen

Source: Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 122

“Love of God implies love of religion. And religion exemplifies that creative spirit of God which is at work in history as well as in the mind of man. Thus, one ought to love any religion, that is, religion as such, and in any form—as a manifestation of the moral spirit, the divine spirit of mankind.”

Hermann Cohen

Source: Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 52