The Ethical Idealism and Prophetic Messianism of Hermann Cohen

The Ethical Idealism and Prophetic Messianism of Hermann Cohen

Part One of a series on Hermann Cohen

Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and intellectual precursor to the 20th century Jewish existentialist humanism of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. Starting from the proposition that ethics had to be universal, Cohen outlined a Kantian (and non-Marxist) ethical socialism rooted in the prophetic vision of the Hebrew bible.

The Ethical Idealism and Prophetic Messianism of Hermann Cohen

Universal ethics

Hermann Cohen agrees with Immanuel Kant that ethics must be oriented toward the well-being of all humanity, and he takes this universality to be the defining mark of moral life. Cohen holds that Kant’s categorical imperative is the rational foundation of moral progress, binding both present and future humanity and claiming validity for the entire human race. Such progress unfolds as an ever‑expanding inclusion of persons within the sphere of justice. In the modern world, this trajectory points — or at least ought to point — toward universal suffrage and a form of democratic socialism grounded not in class struggle but in the moral equality of rational beings. Ethical life, in other words, advances as society and its institutions learn to recognize every person as a bearer of rights, with an equal stake in the ethico‑judicial architecture that orders our common life. It is through this ever-growing circle of recognition and participation that moral progress becomes concrete rather than merely aspirational. 

Judaism as the religion of reason

According to Cohen, the human longing for a universal ethics is itself the ground of religious belief. Judaism, he argues, is the historical matrix from which the Kantian conviction arises — that humanity can be unified under a single, universally binding moral law. On Cohen’s reading, Judaism is not a repository of dogma but a system of rational principles anchored in God as the eternal source of moral legislation, the one who confers upon humanity the imperative to act ethically. As Kenneth Seeskin puts it in Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy, “God represents the highest moral standard possible: a being who wills the moral law for its own sake all the time.”

Proclaiming Judaism as the historical source of the Kantian idea that humanity can be unified by a single set of ethical laws, Cohen thus defines Judaism as a “religion of reason” — a form of rationality that is revealed rather than constructed. Because revelation occurs through reason, a rational religion is necessarily a moral religion. And since reason is a universal human capacity, a religion grounded in reason must posit a single God for all peoples.

In short, a religion of reason is intrinsically monotheistic. By extension, to know this single unique God is to acknowledge the obligation to fulfil the moral law that issues from Him — an obligation realized through the imitation of God’s attributes, above all mercy and forgiveness. In this sense, morality and holiness coincide: to act ethically is already to participate in the divine work given to humankind.

Monotheism, messianism and love of the stranger 

According to Cohen, since Jewish monotheism has an ethical dimension, it inevitably culminates in what he characterizes as prophetic messianism, which is “the dominion of the good on earth”:

Morality will be established in the human world. Against this confidence, no skepticism, no pessimism, no mysticism, no metaphysics, no experience of the world, no knowledge of men, no tragedy, and no comedy can prevail.

For Cohen, messianism is no longer a hope for God to intervene in history. In fact, he dismisses the notion of a messianic individual. Rather than being a supernatural or eschatological event, messianism is simply a factor in world history; it is an expression of faith that humanity is making progress towards the end of injustice. (If the messianic future is thought of as eternal, it is only in the sense that the progress of mankind and world history are eternal.)

Cohen sees it as the duty of the Jewish people to teach universal ethics and he cites the Seven Laws of Noah as an example of a universally-applicable moral code that is rooted in the bible and in rabbinical thought. It is Judaism’s role, argues Cohen, to point to the ideal of fulfilled humanity and to draw others to it. Integral to Jewish teaching is love for humankind, which Cohen believes is “the messianic consequence of monotheism, for which the love of the stranger paved the way.”

Interestingly, Cohen plays down the notion of brotherly love as the underlying principle of the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbor. Although “neighbor” has generally been understood as “one who is near,” Cohen argues that it should be translated as “Other” or “Another.” As such, a man’s neighbor is the stranger and the foreigner.

Cohen’s identification of law as the very ground of moral subjectivity makes it unsurprising that he emphasizes the command to protect the stranger. Because all persons stand equally before the law, the stranger — the one without kinship, status, or protection — becomes the decisive test of Judaism’s ethical universality. In safeguarding the stranger, Judaism affirms the legal and moral equality that constitutes us as ethical subjects in the first place.

Ethics, law and autonomy

If the ethical subject is a legal subject, then ethics must be law-based. As such, Cohen calls for legal rights to be the duty and goal of economic and cultural life. Indeed, in Cohen’s system of ethical jurisprudence, morality, rights and the law are very closely intertwined. Ethics must find its completion in the philosophy of law.

Men and women qualify as moral agents because their actions can be held to account before a court, and because they possess the standing to claim rights and initiate legal actions on their own behalf. It is this capacity for juridical responsibility and juridical self‑assertion that marks them as ethical subjects. As Robert Gibbs explains in his essay “Jurisprudence is the Organon of Ethics,” “action means not a claim simply to a right, but a claim to bring the claim to court.” Cohen’s assertion that every person has a right to have his case adjudicated in a court of law should be interpreted in light of the Noahide Laws, particularly the commandment to establish courts of justice, which provides a traditional normative backdrop for his position.

Cohen is concerned that legality has been misconstrued as empty of ethical content, partly due to the polemics of Paul the Apostle and subsequent Christians who denigrate law in the name of grace or spirit. Indeed, Cohen is highly critical of those who pursue a definition of legality that is divorced from what Gibbs terms “the inner freedom and ethical insight of duty done for its own sake.” By creating a suspicion of law by splitting it away from ethics, Paul the Apostle and his interpreters (Martin Luther, for example) have contributed to an unfortunate (and often anti-Semitic) caricature of the Torah as purely legalistic, even unethical.

Cohen holds that once legality is severed from ethics, the resulting law becomes internally contradictory, for it can sustain itself only through force rather than through its own moral legitimacy. Once a law ceases to live in our hearts and minds, it must inevitably be imposed from without. Severing legality from the duty to act for its own sake leaves the State with only one instrument — coercion. But a subject who obeys merely because he is compelled cannot at the same time be a free moral agent, for coerced ethical action is no ethical action at all.

Ethics, then, must unite inner freedom and law. Cohen makes numerous references to “autonomy” in his writing. Autonomy means we are free, but with respect to our will this means only that we may “impose on it a universal law” — the Kantian law of the categorical imperative. As Kenneth Seeskin points out, “[I]n the [Kantian] kingdom of ends, where everyone is rational and every subject’s humanity is respected, no one will follow any orders other than the ones she imposes on herself [sic].”

So it seems that for Cohen the ethical condition is where the will of the individual finds the full meaning and expression of his or her freedom, protected from compulsion by the State. Andrea Poma, in Yearning for Form, explains it thus:

From the ethical viewpoint, however, this individual is, in the situation described, the bearer of the authority of the law; therefore he represents the State, and opposes any powerful, violent subject, though devoid of all authority, since the law only receives authority from itself: it produces the ethical subject and only this task justifies it.

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Coming soon: The Correlation of Science and Ethics in Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy