The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen

The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen

This is a collated version of parts one, two and three of my mini-series on the Jewish neo-Kantian ethicist Hermann Cohen. 

The Messianic Imperative: Reason, Law, and the Ethics of Hermann Cohen

Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and an 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. 

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.

Science and ethics

Cohen makes a distinction between the logic of science and the ideal of ethics, and notes that the natural world and the world of ethics are perceived very differently. This is because the order of the physical world is unchangeable (for example, the sun sets in the west, night follows day, etc.), while in the ideal world ethical rules can be accepted or rejected. It seems there should be one explanation for science, which is empirically self-evident, and another for ethics, which is something that is open to debate. Cohen reasons there must be something that allows science and ethics to coexist and interrelate.

Cohen’s answer was to call on God as the inevitable and ultimate ideal coincidence of what is (science, nature) with what ought to be (ethics). Or to put it another way, God is the eventual coincidence of human culture with nature; the real with the ideal. And because God stands outside nature and ethics, He points to the rapprochement between is and ought, thereby helping to bring about moral action in the world, the same moral action that is recommended by the Hebrew prophets as seen through the prism of the Kantian categorical imperative.

The advantage of having a transcendent God is that neither nature nor morality can claim priority over the other, meaning that just as ethics must conform to science, so science must conform to ethics. Thus, just as ethics must answer to the findings of science, science must remain accountable to ethical reason. In this way, God guarantees not only the distinct integrity of nature and morality but also the necessary relation that binds them.

For Cohen, then, scientific praxis and moral praxis must become reciprocal. Furthermore, and congruent with Cohen’s own prophetic messianism, it is in the future that ethical principles will be fully realized, at which time the ethical will merge with the ontological, so that being and morality no longer contradict each other. As Phillip Homburg remarks, Cohen aims “to assign ethics a status that raises it to the same level of dignity as the concepts of logic or mathematics.”

Beyond mediating between science and ethics, Cohen’s notion of correlation also structures the relation between humanity and God. Because humans are rational beings, our capacity for inference — to move from the contingent to the universal — requires a distinctive mode of relation to the divine. For Cohen, the very awakening of reason in us is God’s revelation: reason is the medium through which God addresses humanity, the point at which the human mind becomes capable of receiving and responding to the universal.

It is important to note that the correlative relationship between God and humanity, for which Cohen borrows the biblical concept of the Holy Spirit or Spirit of Holiness, is respectful of God’s separateness. As Norman Solomon explains in an essay on Cohen’s theory of atonement, God and man are “the inevitable counterpart of the other, mirroring but not merging.” Solomon goes on to say that merging “would obliterate the distinctiveness of God and human; it would verge on pantheism. God’s holiness demands human holiness as its correlate.”

Indeed, Solomon is right to refer to the bogeyman of pantheism because Cohen is markedly antagonistic towards the pantheistic doctrine that identifies God with the universe (or regards the universe as a manifestation of God). Cohen is adamant that while God is the capstone of both logic and ethics, He nevertheless transcends both. For this reason, Cohen rejects every form of pantheism or mysticism that collapses God into the world; such views, he argues, erase the very transcendence that makes ethical obligation possible. In this respect, Cohen was very different from Spinoza, for whom God and Nature are virtually synonymous.

Cohen therefore conceives God as a transcendent synthesis of nature and ethics — the unifying ground that guarantees their correlation without reducing one to the other. This transcendent God is also the horizon toward which humanity is historically summoned: the ultimate realization of a Kantian kingdom of ends, a world in which every human being is treated as an end in themselves, never as a mere means for others. The realization of the ideal, which is grounded in God and finds its ultimate fulfilment in Him, is mankind’s historic task, his ethical project.

Since the ethical task is not dictated by the logic of being, it is not predetermined but projected, envisioned, and urged by the Hebrew prophets — a work of liberation that human beings are free to realize. Whereas Sartre holds that indeterminate consciousness can never coincide with immutable being, Cohen maintains that the closing of the gap between the ideal and the real is humanity’s historical vocation, and he sees Judaism as integral to this mission.

The redemptive potentiality of sin

Anticipating Martin Buber, Cohen says we must recognize the living, breathing individual as a thou and not just as a generic example of humanity. As significant as the universal ethical ideal is for Cohen, he recognized that ethics is concerned with individuals only insofar as they are members of the human community. Ethics cannot always deal with individual moral feelings or with sin. In other words, it is religion rather than ethics that is concerned with the sin of the individual.

It is the prophet Ezekiel whom Cohen singles out as bringing a new and important aspect into early Judaism: the sin of the individual for which he alone stands responsible before God. This is Cohen’s interpretation of Ezekiel’s “Cast far away from yourselves all the transgressions that you committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit” (Ezekiel 18:31; my translation). Whereas ethics offers a collective but not individual self-transformation, Ezekiel promises personal liberation from sin through repentance. Indeed, it is Ezekiel who bequeaths to Judaism what Cohen calls “the God of the individual man.”

It is only when the individual acknowledges his or her own moral failings that it is possible to atone and to strive for moral improvement, Cohen argues. This act of atonement establishes an intimate and personal relationship between the individual and God. And in so doing, the individual becomes a unique moral and religious self:

The apex of monotheism is Messianism, but its center of gravity lies in the relation between God and the individual. At this point Ezekiel deviates from the mainstream of Messianism, insofar as he ceases to look at the world and turns to an inward look into the individual.

Moreover, it is through Ezekiel that God informs the Jewish people (and therefore the world) that the fateful correlation between sin and punishment is now broken, and so the punishment of death is abolished. Cohen states that “to sever the connection between suffering and guilt – to discard, that is, the notion that suffering is a punishment for guilt – is one of the most far-reaching consequences of monotheistic thinking.” Indeed, it is of momentous significance, Cohen adds, for how society deals with and responds to suffering. 

Ezekiel not only breaks the traditional link between sin and punishment; he also declares that repentance now takes the place of public sacrifice. With the rejection of burnt offerings, the locus of atonement shifts from the public ritual to an inner work: the individual undertakes an inward sacrifice of self‑examination, contrition, and moral renewal. It is through this disciplined inward gaze that a person comes to know themselves in a way no external ritual — or indeed no other person — ever could. “In myself, I have to study sin, and through sin I must learn to know myself,” says Cohen. “I am permeated by the thought that I do not know any man’s wickedness as deeply, as clearly, as my own.”

Interestingly, Cohen offers the view that sin and the atoning work that follows has the effect of making a person unique: it lifts him or her out of the impersonal totality of nature. Indeed, it is through sin — and in the recognition of sin — that man first becomes an authentic individual. Nevertheless, the sinner has a choice: stay unique in your sin (we are uniquely bad rather than uniquely good, it seems), or repent and return to the ethical community.

For Ezekiel, “the individual raises himself up out of his social environment, and indeed through his own sin,” Cohen explains. But this sin “is not an end-station for man, but rather an ever repeated beginning of an ever-opening new life.” Repentance culminates in a reorientation toward the world — a renewed readiness to step back into history with a clarified and heightened sense of responsibility. It marks the transition from inward reckoning to outward ethical engagement, and a renewed commitment to the messianic imperative of elevating humanity, alleviating suffering, and widening the sphere in which human beings may live freer and better lives. Ezekiel’s injunction to “turn yourself around and live” thus becomes, in Cohen’s system, a summons to re‑enter the public sphere as an agent of ethical transformation through which the ideal becomes progressively realized in the real.

Bibliography

• Cohen, Hermann. Jewish Writings. Ed., Bruno Strauss. C. A. Schwetschke (1924).

• Cohen, Hermann. Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen. Tr., Eva Jospe. Norton (1971).

• Cohen, Hermann. [1919] Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Tr., Simon Kaplan. [2^nd Edition]. Scholars Press (1995). 

• Gibbs, Robert. “Jurisprudence is the Organon of Ethics.” Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism. Ed., Reinier Munk. Springer (2005). 

• Homburg, Phillip. “Towards a Benjaminian Critique of Hermann Cohen’s Logical Idealism.” Anthropology & Materialism, Special Issue [I] (2017). 

• Kant, Immanuel [1785]. Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals. Tr. James W. Ellington. (3rd ed.). Hackett Pub. Co. (1993). 

• Poma, Andrea. Yearning for Form and Other Essays on Hermann Cohen's Thought. Springer (2006). 

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Tr. Hazel Barnes. Philosophical Library (1956). 

• Seeskin, Kenneth. Autonomy in Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge University Press (2014). 

• Solomon, Norman. “Cohen on Atonement, Purification and Repentance.”  Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism. Ed., Reinier Munk. Springer (2005).