The Ethical Idealism and Prophetic Messianism of Hermann Cohen

The Ethical Idealism and Prophetic Messianism of 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 the philosopher Immanuel Kant that ethics must be directed towards the well-being of humanity. The essential feature of this is its universality. As Cohen sees it, progress was (or at least it ought to be) moving towards universal suffrage and democratic socialism.  

Following Kant, Cohen defends the categorical imperative: that we should treat humanity in our own person and in other persons always as an end and never as a means only. (Kant’s famous definition of the categorical imperative is, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”) 

The categorical imperative contains, in Cohen’s words, “the moral progress of a new era and the entire future world history.” Although Cohen’s socialism owes more to Kant and the Hebrew prophets than it does to Karl Marx, he is nevertheless critical of capitalism because, as he sees it, the individual worker is treated as a means only, a mere means for the ends of the employer.   

Judaism as the religion of reason 

According to Cohen, the human desire for universal ethics is the foundation for religious belief. God is the eternal source of moral law and provides humankind with the imperative to act ethically, that is, to treat people always as an end and never as only a means.  

Cohen proclaims Judaism as the historical source of the idea that humanity can be unified by a single set of ethical laws. He defines Judaism as a “religion of reason” -- a revealed type of rationality. And since reason is something that belongs to all people everywhere, a religion of reason must therefore posit a single, unique God for all humanity. In short, a religion of reason must be monotheistic. 

Judaism, as interpreted by Cohen, is a set of rational principles for living that are grounded in God. Not only is revelation is given through reason, but a rational religion is necessarily a moral religion. As Kenneth Seeskin describes it in his book 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.”  

To know God is to accept the duty of fulfilling the moral law, and this involves imitating God’s attributes of mercy and forgiveness. In other words, holiness is morality.  

Messianism 

Cohen believes that it is the duty of the Jewish people to teach universal ethics and he cites the Seven Noahide Laws as an example of a universally-applicable moral code that is rooted in the bible and in rabbinical thought.  

Israel is the messianic people whose task it is to strive towards the fulfillment of the divine ideal. It is Judaism’s role to point to the ideal of fulfilled humanity and to draw others to it. Cohen writes, “the general love for mankind is the messianic consequence of monotheism, for which the love of the stranger paved the way.”  

(It is worth noting that Cohen plays down brotherly love as the underlying principle of the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbor, and instead identifies law as the basis of the moral subject. Although “neighbor” in German has generally been understood as “one who is near,” Cohen argues that “neighbor” should be translated as “Other” or “Another.” As such, a man’s “neighbour” is actually the stranger or foreigner. We are commanded to protect the stranger because we are all equal before the law. As Jean-Paul Sartre was to later write in Being and Nothingness, “To live in a world haunted by my neighbour is … to encounter the Other at every turn of the road.”) 

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”. “This view, which even Plato did not have, is the new teaching that the one God brings to messianic humanity,” said Cohen in his masterwork Religion of Reason. Out of the Sources of Judaism.  

“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 and he dismisses the notion of a miraculous coming of the messiah. Instead of 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.  

And as Rory Schacter explains in his article, “Hermann Cohen’s Secular Messianism and Liberal Cosmopolitanism,” if the messianic future can be thought of as eternal, it is only in the sense that the progress of mankind and world history are eternal.  

Ethics, law and autonomy  

Convinced that ethics must be law-based, and that law and the State must be restored to the realm of ethics, 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.  

For Cohen, the ethical subject is a legal subject. Man is a moral actor when his actions can be held accountable in court and when he can claim or bring an action for his rights. 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.”  

(When Cohen says that each person not only has a claim to his rights but “the claim to a court’s judgement,” he was perhaps thinking of the Seven Noahide Laws, one of which is the commandment to establish courts of justice.) 

Cohen is concerned that legality has for too long been emptied of its ethical content, partly as a result of the Apostle Paul’s polemics. Cohen is highly critical of those who apparently 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.” Indeed, this is how Christians, such as the Apostle Paul and Martin Luther, have caricatured Jewish Law when they create a suspicion of law by splitting it away from ethics. 

When we understand law as severed from ethics, we are left with laws arising through force. An example of law divorced from ethics is the treatment of the English suffragettes at the hands of the British authorities in the first part of the 20th century. It may be the case that the State had the law on its side, even as it harassed women and girls, but many people would argue that the State acted in a manner that was devoid of ethical duty and human feeling. The use of coercive power used against these women and girls was ethically unacceptable because it in no way conformed to the categorical imperative (i.e. the idea that standards should be applied categorically, with a person's actions in any given context serving as the model for the actions of all other people under comparable circumstances). 

As Gibbs explains, law becomes self-contradictory when ethics and legality are severed. When legality is split off from the notion of duty done for its own sake, the only recourse by the State is coercion. In other words, when divorced from ethics, the law has to be imposed coercively from the outside because it is no longer in our hearts and minds.  

Only when we understand law as stemming from morality do we have true ethics. And it is because Cohen believes that ethical action should not be coercive (least of all by the State), that the ethical-legal subject is necessarily a free moral agent. 

In Cohen's view, ethics must unite inner freedom and law. Autonomy means we are free, but with respect to our will this means only that we may “impose on it a universal law” -- the law of the categorical imperative. As Kenneth Seeskin points out in his book Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy, “in 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.”  

The ethical state, then, 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 her excellent book 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."