“La laicità e il pensiero d’Israele”. Appunti per un confronto tra Cohen e Lévinas

In spite of their quite different theoretical approach, Cohen and Lévinas are both interested in defining a form of relationship which guarantees the reciprocal separation and autonomy of related terms. Although in his main works Lévinas rejects the concept of “correlation” to define this relationship, in La laïcité et la pensée d’Israël (1960) he speaks of the “true correlation between man and God”. This is not the only aspect that suggests a proximity to Cohen. Especially the chapter about the concepts of the stranger, the Noachide and the righteous gentiles contains several elements pointing that Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism might be the underlying source of Lévinas’s arguments. This is the case also of the main thesis: the Noachide was the precursor of natural right. Cohen’s and Levinas’s universalistic interpretation of jewish particularity expresses itself in this statement. The ethical rationalism which becomes here noticeable doesn’t refer, nevertheless, to an unhistorical “lumen naturale”. On the contrary, it summons up the messianic horizon of history, from which human pesuasions arise. In this sense, jewish laicism is founded on the concept of “continuous revelation” inherent in rabbinic exegesis.