"In Vindication of 'Satan's Methodology, or: How to Deal withe the Notion of the Real in Psychology"
When Gershom Scholem read Hermann Cohen, he got very angry. He was sure that
Cohen’s move to found the humanities on normativity alone was either a whim or
the methodology of Satan. To simply admit that nothing is more real than our
yearning for reality, seemed unbearable to him. And certainly the vast majority of
scholars, philosophers and psychoanalysts and psychologists, would rather follow
Scholem’s exclamation than dive deeper into Cohen’s idea. To bother too much
about the reality of the real, is either being described as the symptom of a serious
mental illness or a theorem in the very complex building of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
But what if the ethically founded epoché concerning our knowledge about the reality
of the psychic movements of the other is not a loss in reality but rather a gain? What
if abstaining from an ontology of the mind is indeed a more secure and rational way
of dealing with the intersubjectivity of psychic events than any ontology of the mind
could ppossibly be?
It is these questions that make me want to vindicate Cohen’s revolutionary
approach as a very promising way of coping with the conceptional limits to anything
the brain can achieve by reflexion on itself and the brains of his fellowmen. Classical
Kantianism seemed to reduce the faculties which could be conquered by sound
reasoning to an almost unbearable degree in the eyes of Kant’s believing
contemporaries. Yet, in the end, it opened a wide space for new types of
knowledge. Couldn’t it be that Cohen’s Neo-Kantianism, that seems so much to
humiliate and restrict the spheres of knowledge about ourselves, will in the end
widen the space in which knowledge concerning our minds can move?
