13 as the logical ground of thought, knowledge, and experience. It is scientific judgement, identified with the Platonic technai of mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and contiguous with the quantitative world addressed by physics, that Cohen utilises to advance this idealist claim.33 Once Cohen has removed the Aesthetic by resolving it entirely into the Logic, space and time become emphasised as categories of mathematical thought. As a consequence, the ‘logic of origin becomes the logic of pure knowledge’: that of an “originative” production which is both ‘the necessary beginning of thought’ and ‘the moving principle in every development’.34 What, in the Logic of Pure Reason, Cohen describes as Ursprungdenken – thinking based on the principle of origin – is a ‘pure, generating activity which has no beginning but is a primal leap, an act of origination’.35 Cohen presents the dialectical logic of origination as equally one of production and conservation [Erhaltung]: “There is no exchange, but conservation, at the same time, of separation and unification. Unification is conserved in separation and separation in unification…Therefore, it is to be expected that unity be conserved in manifoldness and manifoldness in unity”.36 The difference between this concept and Hegelian sublation [Aufhebung] is emphasised by Cohen, who regards it as rectifying what he takes to be the two fundamental errors in Hegel’s philosophy of identity, as Andrea Poma explains: ‘the elimination of the difference between concept and being, thought and reality, and the elimination of the difference between concept and idea, and thus the elimination of the difference between being and what ought to be, between reality and task, for the identity of concept with being’ (HC 77). In seeking to oppose himself to what he perceived as Hegel’s philosophy of identity, Cohen insists on maintaining the difference between the real and the ideal in the Kantian system.37 Whilst it is this concept of Ursprung and the dialectic that it introduces into experience which permits the transformation of a transcendental version of idealism into an outright logical idealism in Cohen’s thought, it is clear from the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to the Origin of German Tragic-Drama that the dialectical structure of Ursprungdenken is not abandoned by Benjamin. Along with Cohen’s analysis of the scientific theory of experience operating in Kant’s system, it therefore has an important
33 In his discussion of the education of the philosopher rulers, Socrates specifies the five mathematical studies of arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry, astronomy, and harmonics (Plato, Republic, op. cit., 524e-531c). 34 Hermann Cohen, ‘Logic der reinen Erkenntnis’, op. cit., p.36, trans. HC pp.85-6. 35 Hermann Cohen, ‘Logic der reinen Erkenntnis’, op. cit., p.36, trans. Reiner Munk, Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism, Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought Volume 10, (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Springer, 2005), p.275. 36 Hermann Cohen, ‘Logic der reinen Erkenntnis’, op. cit., p.62, trans. HC p.87. 37 cf. Klaus Christian Köhnke, op. cit., p.196.