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Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 20, Issue No.1, (2008)

HERMANN COHEN’S SECULAR MESSIANISM AND LIBERAL

COSMOPOLITANISM

Rory Schacter

Abstract:

The German Jewish thinker Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) had interesting

perspectives on messianism, liberalism, and Zionism. Despite the great

changes that the nature of Jewish life on the one hand, and the conceptions

of liberalism on the other, have undergone since Cohen wrote, many

modern thinkers continue to frame their political positions on strikingly

“Cohenian” grounds. Hence the theoretical basis of his attack on Zionism

and nationalism in the name of liberal universalism remains relevant today.

Introduction

In a world forever changed by World War II, the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of

Israel, an encounter with the thought of Hermann Cohen can produce a strangely dual effect. On

the one hand, Cohen’s thought seems to suffer from an inexcusable optimism, a near-blindness

to the precarious position of European Jewry that gives no warning of the horror to which it

would soon be exposed. Emil Fackenheim, in the introduction to his respectful but highly

critical lecture on Cohen on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, asserts, after but a brief

mention of the Holocaust, that Cohen’s “is the language of an outworn, abstract idealism.”1

On the other hand, one cannot help but be impressed by Cohen’s attempt to unite, on the highest philosophical plane, the achievements of European culture and thought with the faith of his

forefathers. Cohen’s loyalty to the Jewish people and Jewish tradition ! despite both his deep

intellectual commitments to philosophy not Jewish in origin and his political commitments to

the German nation of his birth ! is a virtue worthy of great respect.

One way in which that virtue manifested itself was in Cohen’s view of the concepts of

messianism, liberalism, and Zionism. Cohen addressed what he called the “messianic idea” and

its philosophical and political implications. He viewed such messianism as “the culmination the

touchstone of religion.”2

As a great Jewish thinker, Cohen’s work is in itself worthy of study. But the theoretical basis ofhis attack on Zionism and nationalism is today particularly relevant, since Cohen criticizes these

notions in the name of liberal universalism and neo-Kantian ethics. Despite the extraordinary

changes that the nature of Jewish life on the one hand, and the conceptions of liberalism on the

other, have undergone since Cohen wrote, many modern thinkers, both Jewish and non-Jewish,

continue to frame their political positions on strikingly “Cohenian” grounds.

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Cohen on Plato and the Prophets

In approaching Cohen’s thought, a good place to start is his lecture on “The Social Ideal in

Plato and the Prophets.” As he asserts at the outset, “Plato and the Prophets are the two most

important sources of modern culture.”3

Cohen gave that lecture in the midst of World War Iand repeated it shortly before his death. Hence it seems as good a statement of his “final

position” as one is likely to find.4

Cohen believed that truth must be arrived at through rigorous scientific reasoning. He viewed

Plato’s philosophy as a unique and enduring historical event because Plato was the first to apply

scientific-rationalist criteria to the realm of ethics. Generally speaking, a serious problem

confronts any system of thought that attempts to give an account of the whole, of nature and of

man. This problem concerns the relationship between scientific knowledge of nature on the one

hand, and knowledge of ethics and right human behavior on the other—or as Pascal called it, the

contrast between esprit géometrique and esprit de finesse.

Cohen can be seen as responding directly to this problem. Unlike the pre-Socratics, whose

inquiry into nature led to turning away from questions of ethics if not the entire realm of human

affairs, Cohen believed that Plato’s thinking overcame this forbidding gap. Plato’s thought, he

remarked, was animated by a “thrust of science which moves beyond the realm of nature into

the realm of ethics.”5 It is in Plato’s theory of the forms, and above all in what he called the

“idea of the good,” that this scientific account of ethics takes shape: “the Idea, born as a

mathematical idea, matures into the idea of the good.”6

Cohen has very high praise for Plato. He asserts that Platonism is “an absolutely coherent

system.”7 Indeed, his praise is so high that one begins to wonder why Cohen did not consider

himself an outright Platonist. Cohen supplies the answer by pointing out what he sees as

Platonism’s one fatal flaw: “Plato is wrong only in his denial of the masses’ capacity tounderstand philosophy.”8

This denial has drastic implications for Cohen. Plato’s presentation of the philosopher in his

dialogues, perhaps above all in the Republic, indicates to Cohen that for Plato the philosopher

was a very rare flower. Only in the city ruled by the philosopher kings is there true justice and a

cessation of evils, and this regime is at best only the result of chance, a coincidence of wisdom

and power more to be hoped for than planned for.9

What Cohen objects to above all is Plato’s conception of a fixed human nature and a

corresponding order of rank among human beings that precludes the vast majority of them from

ever enjoying true knowledge of the good. Cohen asks: “must we assume that the sharp division

of men into those who govern and those who are governed is really to perpetuate forever?

Should not all men, at some future time, participate in their government, so that all will be rulers

as well as ruled?”10

It is in recognizing this limit of Platonism that Cohen introduces what he considers the other

source of modern culture: the Hebrew Prophets. As Cohen asserts, “the prophets are no

philosophers.” They do not possess a scientific rationalism, and they speak of “knowledge,” in

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the true philosophical sense, only metaphorically.11

But whereas, according to Cohen, “Plato

does not delineate an idea of man” and therefore maintains a distinction between Greek and

barbarian, the Prophets introduced into the world what Cohen calls “the discovery of man as

fellow man.”

Thus, the Hebrew Prophets are the discoverers and articulators of the concept “man” andtherewith of the idea of a universal “mankind” united through reason by their knowledge of the

good ! namely, through a universal cosmopolitan morality.12 The defect of Plato’s system is

remedied by the Prophets “precisely because they lack the idea of science and hence the idea of

nature, and hence they can believe that men’s conduct toward one another can undergo a change

much more radical than any change ever dreamt of by Plato.”13

Notably, the Bible does not

contain a word equivalent in meaning to the word nature, or physis in Greek. Rather than seeing

in this difference between Plato and the Bible a fundamental antagonism, Cohen sees the

opportunity for a synthesis on the highest level.

Messianism as Progressive World History

The Prophets provide the remedy to Platonism’s shortcomings through what Cohen understands

as their articulation of the idea of a “messianic future of mankind.”14 For Cohen, this messianic

call of the Prophets is epitomized in the motto “All the people a nation of priests,” which Cohen

acknowledges as an allusion to Numbers 11:29, where Moses exclaims “Would that all the

Lord’s people were prophets!”15

Cohen considers Plato’s “pessimism” about the masses’ ability

to partake in scholarship and scientific knowledge a “basic evil inhibiting and making illusory

all true progress.”16 The ultimate aim of such progress is, in Cohen’s view, the universal social

state, where there are “no class distinctions anywhere” and all men have the capacity both to

conceive in thought and to achieve in practice what Plato called “the good.”17

Cohen agrees with Plato that “without Philosophy, mankind’s suffering cannot be ended.”18 Butunlike Plato, he does not draw the conclusion that such suffering is inevitable and eternal.

Although the Prophets offer an insight that is “merely a vision,” this vision, with the aid of

philosophy, can foster the political actualization of a just order through historical progress. Both

Plato and the Prophets point, according to Cohen, to “the social ideal,” which Cohen

understands as the ultimate goal of Western civilization and culture.19

Cohen understands culture ! both the philosophy of Plato and the theology of the

Prophets ! historically. Understanding Cohen’s conception of messianism requires taking full

account of his “historical sense.” According to Cohen, “all ideas, even the most profound which

eventually conquer the world, originate within the narrow confines of nationality and are

conditioned by the spirit of the times.”

20

These ideas undergo a process that Cohen calls“spiritualization,” whereby their highest ideal is actualized.

Cohen views the history of Judaism in this way, and believes the Prophets occupy a unique

place in this historical progress of spiritualization. Cohen maintains that the Prophets were

inspired by their nonuniversal nationalistic predicament ! by the “decline of their state.”21

However, the Prophets, far from merely speaking of a messianism that might rescue their

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particular nation, extended this call to all the nations of the earth. The Prophets were able to turn

their historical circumstances into a basis for universalism.

The highest and most significant element in the Prophets’ thought is their discovery of a

“historical concept of time,” and this “discovery” of the historical sense is directly linked to the

concept of progress.22

Judaism is therewith viewed as a historical process whereby it becomesdemythologized, freed from the anthropomorphic tendency to understand messianism as the

hope for a personal being and king to reestablish the political nation of the Jews.

Hence Cohen speaks of messianism in terms of the “messianic idea” (a term reminiscent of

Plato’s theory of the ideas). This “idea” has undergone a historical transformation and

transmutation. From its original particularistic political connotation where “the messiah” means

“the anointed” and a divinely selected king, it grew into a hope for the emergence ! through

“the people as a whole” ! of “a nation of priests.”23

Thus, what Cohen views as the primitive

hero worship of the messiah gives way to a universal notion of mankind progressing toward a

moral ideal.

Ethical Monotheism and Cohen’s Kantianism

Cohen viewed Judaism as being the “purist” monotheistic religion. His thought, which he

understood as itself the continuation of the process of the “idealization” of Judaism, sought to

expound a religion of reason that completes the break with paganism and myth, which the

earliest Judaism began and the Prophets continued and revolutionized through their “discovery”

of a world history and a universal morality.

Cohen’s understanding of Judaism is often referred to as ethical monotheism. There is no doubt

that ethics forms the center of his thought; in this respect he was decisively influenced by Kant’s

philosophy. Cohen’s concern with messianism is directly linked to his desire to place ethics at

the core of his philosophic system, for he viewed messianism as the “final stage in thedevelopment of Jewish social ethics.”

24 In turn-of-the-century Germany, he was the renewer of

Kantian philosophy, a movement that became known as neo-Kantianism.

In Cohen’s thought, which sought to “rescue the German of his time from arid positivism and

scholasticism,” Emil Fackenheim sees “an ongoing dialogue between his Kantian and Jewish

commitments.”25 In his essay “Affinities between the Philosophy of Kant and Judaism,” Cohen

articulates what he sees as the inner similarities between Kantian ethics and “the basic ideas of

Judaism.” According to Kant, the human mind discovers through proper reasoning the necessity

of a priori basic truths that function as principles of cognition. From the necessity of these a

priori principles Kant distinguishes “reason” and more particularly “pure reason” in

contradistinction to simple sense perception and empirical knowledge.

26

In Cohen’s thought, the “God-idea” is very reminiscent of a Kantian a priori principle of reason.

The God-idea, for Cohen, is necessary insofar as God is the being who creates reason. Cohen

acknowledges a crucial difference between Kant’s moral philosophy and Judaism: whereas in

Kant’s view reason itself must create the eternal law anew, in Judaism the One God would

become “a useless machine” were he not the eternal source of moral law.27

However, according

to Cohen,

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the difference between Kant’s and Judaism’s view concerning the

autonomy of the moral law only points up towards another accord

between them. For though Kant upholds the autonomy of the moral law,

he does not at all deny the existence of God, to whom he refers as “the

sovereign in the realm of morals.” Thus, self-legislation of human reasonin no way implies, let alone impels, an abdication of this sovereign.

28

This passage is especially striking because it is hard to discern any difference at all between

what Cohen considers the Jewish God and Kant’s moral God, a God whom Kant’s categories of

reason force him to posit as a necessary hypothesis for preserving Kant’s autonomous self-

governing moral individual (a type of individual one feels hard pressed to give an example of

anywhere in Jewish holy scriptures). According to Cohen, on the highest “idealized” plane of

thought Kant and Judaism can be synthesized.

It is important to note that Cohen’s God-idea is, in his own view, a reinterpretation, or

correction, of Kant’s system. This correction entails two central transformations of Kant’s

position. First, Cohen transforms Kant by understanding the critique of reason “completely in

terms of absolute idealism,” thereby excluding any notion of a transcendent reality. For Cohen,

unlike Kant, the world of experience is not a manifestation of a metaphysical reality beyond

knowledge but simply consists of the totality of being of experienced objects.29

Second, and in accordance with the denial of this metaphysical realm, Cohen rejects Kant’s

doctrine of the postulates of practical reason. According to these, the existence of God and the

immortality of the soul are necessary insofar as they are required to ensure the unity of virtue

and happiness required by ethics. Cohen views this doctrine as a relapse of Kant into

eudemonism—action on the basis of a desire for happiness, a tenet of Aristotelian ethics. Cohen

believed that eudemonism violated the basic principles of Kantian ethics rightly understood (i.e.,

better understood than Kant himself did).

In this sense, Cohen believed his system represented a purification of Kant’s, which provided a

true and consistent grounding of ethics.30

In asserting ethical monotheism, Cohen rejected a

pantheistic conception of God. As Julius Guttmann rightly stresses, for Cohen the God of ethics

cannot be the God of pantheism as in Spinoza. According to Cohen’s interpretation of

Kantianism, “nature and ethics are not identical, but correlated” and therefore “God, as principle

of this correlation, must stand outside both spheres.”31

Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace” also clearly had a great influence on Cohen’s thought,

particularly with respect to Cohen’s conception of a messianic future for mankind. Like Kant,

Cohen believed in a natural progression toward a universal state where war would be abolished

and the potential for each individual to become a fully autonomous moral being would be

actualized. Kant attempted to articulate a complete philosophy of history grounded in this idea of

progress. Cohen regards the essence of Jewish faith to be, as Guttmann puts it, the “messianic

futurism of the prophets” reinterpreted in the spirit of modern liberalism “as a continual progress

towards the messianic kingdom of ethics.”32

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Yet Cohen, like Kant, conceives of mankind’s progress as asymptotic: mankind never arrives at

a state of perfection or total cosmopolitan unity but is ever approaching this state at an ever-

increasing rate of progress.

Cohen’s Anti-Zionism

Cohen believed that the Jews, as the creators of monotheism and the Bible, must act as the

educators of mankind. According to Franz Rosenzweig, Cohen’s understanding of messianism

led him to hope, for instance, for the conversion of Christians to the “pure monotheism” of his

Judaism, a conversion “which he thought the liberal protestant theology of his day was

initiating.”33

From this view of the Jewish people come Cohen’s arguments justifying the Jews’ loss of their

state, their suffering, and Jewish martyrdom. According to Cohen, the meaning of Israel’s

statelessness and its election is therefore

to be an eternal witness to pure monotheism, to be the martyr, to be the

suffering servant of the Lord. The misery of Jewish history is grounded

in messianism, which demands humble submission to suffering and

hence the rejection of the state as the protector against suffering…the

freely accepted suffering makes manifest the historic worthiness of the

sufferer. For the prophets and by the prophets Israel became the rest or

remainder of Israel, the ideal of Israel, the Israel of the future, that is to

say, the future of mankind.34

It is through this understanding of the Jews’ messianic mission that Cohen comes to reject the

modern solution to the Jews’ statelessness known as Zionism. Cohen did not accept either

purely political Zionism (that of Herzl’s Der Judenstaat) or what became known as cultural

Zionism (represented most significantly by the thought of Ahad Ha’am).

Cohen’s rejection of Zionism as derived from his idea of Jewish messianism is perhaps

nowhere more bluntly stated than in a letter he wrote in response to Martin Buber, who had

written to Cohen of his reasons for supporting Zionism. Here Cohen considers the Jewish

question in the modern age as concerning the relationship of the Jewish people, dispersed

throughout various nation-states, to each of these individual nation-states. In Cohen’s view, the

Jewish people must “establish and explain its political relationship to each individual state.”35

Cohen accuses the Zionists of misrepresenting the history of Judaism as “mere ideology,” of

disregarding the messianic ideal of Judaism.36 The Zionists, Cohen claims, view the Jews’ long

history of suffering and statelessness as a “ghetto mentality,” something to flee rather than take

pride in.

But according to Cohen, “the ghetto mentality is not the ghost, but the true spirit of Judaism and

of Jewish reality.”37

Cohen did not favor Jews assimilating into their respective nation-states

but, instead, maintaining themselves as an ethnicity within each. He therefore did not accept

Herzl’s and other political Zionists’ arguments that the liberal state could not protect Jews

against all anti-Semitism since it necessarily allowed for hatred within a private sphere

safeguarded from state control and coercion. On the contrary, Cohen saw the modern liberal

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state as a solution to the Jewish problem and maintained that Jews had a “moral obligation” to

the liberal state.

Thus he declared that “no restriction of civil rights must be allowed to make us waver in our

sense of obligation to the country we claim as our own.” 38 In Cohen’s view the state is the “hub

of culture,” and modern history demonstrates that the liberal state is undergoing a universaltransformation into a world state. As he asserts in his book Religion of Reason: Out of the

Sources of Judaism:

The state matures before our eyes into a confederation of states.

Messianism becomes a factor in world history. The state, as an individual

state, based on the nation, is built up into a confederation of states…this

is the intrinsic logic of the development of the state, against which no

opposition can arise.39

The Jewish people are to be like “divine dew in the midst of many peoples.” Cohen thus favors

the Jews’ integration into the modern nation-state; “the moral world, as it evolves in history, is

our true promised land.”40

Cohen declares in his letter to Buber, on behalf of all good liberal Jews who acknowledged this

messianic mission: “we are free of all discord between our Judaism and our Germanism.”41

He

would repeat this avowal in his notorious pamphlet Germanism and Judaism, which he

published in the midst of World War I in an effort to urge Jews worldwide to support Germany

against the Allied powers. That “no opposition” could arise to challenge the universal spread of

liberalism and the confederation of liberal states is a prophecy of Cohen’s that proved tragically

false. The weakness of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism in Germany

give, in historical hindsight, an eerie and tragic quality to Cohen’s optimism; one can hardly

help calling it blind optimism.

Cohen’s Divergence from Traditional Judaism

Key elements of Cohen’s conception of messianism and his anti-Zionism are serious departures

from traditional Judaism and previous Jewish thought. Perhaps most striking is that Cohen sees

no conflict between modernity and Judaism. Not only are the two in no way in conflict, but

Judaism in his view supplies two fundamental elements of modernity: through the Prophets’

discovery of world history and mankind and through the idealization of monotheism into ethical

monotheism. Moreover, Cohen does not view the liberal state with its separation of church and

state, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, and its basis not in man’s duty to God but

in man’s natural rights and human dignity, as a challenge to Judaism or religiosity generally.

In Cohen’s thought, messianism is no longer a hope for God to intervene in history and through

a miracle usher in the messianic age. Just as Cohen dismisses the belief in a onetime historical

revelation at Sinai, so he dismisses the hope for the miraculous coming of the messiah. For him

the messianic age is a natural result of historical progress, an age not beyond all time but in the

future. It can be thought of as eternal in the sense that the progress of mankind and world

history is eternal.

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Cohen argues that “man himself, assisted by religion, must accomplish his salvation.”42 And

this “religion” is an ethical monotheism stripped of the biblical law. Traditional pious Jews

would, of course, consider the idea that man is the author of his own salvation blasphemy.

Cohen also dismisses the idea of a messianic figure, a king or ruler of the earth; the “messiah”

is thus completely depersonalized by Cohen, idealized into a historical process. Furthermore,Cohen dispenses with the traditional understanding that with the coming of the messiah the

Temple will be rebuilt and the Jews will recover their state. For Cohen, not merely Zionism as a

modern political movement but the idea of Zion itself, the hope for a return to Jerusalem in

deed and in spirit, is not part of the highest Jewish ideal.

Cohen’s depersonalization of the messiah mirrors his depersonalization of God generally.

Cohen’s thought dispenses with the idea of a loving and holy God who is active in history while

also transcending it. Instead Cohen speaks of the God-Idea, a concept that seems half-Platonic,

half-Kantian, but certainly not the God of mercy and jealousy who parted the Red Sea and

revealed the Ten Commandments to Moses. All this has been “idealized” out by Cohen.

Indeed, unlike the God presented in the Bible, who is in a crucial sense radically mysterious,

who will be what he will be, Cohen’s God-idea seems to suggest that the human mind can gain

true and complete intellectual knowledge of God. Furthermore, Cohen’s Kantian belief that the

individual should achieve absolute autonomy seems a clear break with the Jewish idea of

humility and loving devotion to the Law. If the individual can become a self-regulating

autonomous moral agent, where is the need for a holy and redeeming God? Cohen’s religion of

reason seems to leave “no place for absolute obedience or for what traditional Judaism

considered the core of faith.”43

Furthermore, Cohen, with his Kantian loathing of all eudemonism, rejected traditional Jewish

concepts associated with hell. He also found unacceptable to his natural and nonmiraculous

vision of a messianic future otherworldly ideas of the immortality of the soul and theresurrection of the dead, which had been prevalent in traditional Judaism and were defended by

Maimonides.44

On the other hand, elements of Cohen’s thought are still indebted to traditional Judaism. He

opposed Jewish assimilation and did not convert to Christianity. He saw in assimilation neither a

dignified nor a philosophically coherent doctrine. He rejected Christ as the messiah, and was

firmly on the side of this-worldly messianism as opposed to a Christian otherworldliness.

According to Cohen, Jews, unlike Christians, do not seek to conceive of God in a mystical sense

but instead to know God through their will and acts. Christianity, by contrast, because of the

Incarnation, struggles to resist a temptation toward full pantheism and a “folding of God back

into the world.” Cohen maintains that making an identity of God and the world fundamentally

undermines true morality.45

Furthermore, unlike the political Zionists, Cohen does not abandon the traditional sources of

Judaism. True, his process of “idealizing” from the sources of Judaism produces significant

deviations from Jewish tradition, but still he did not think these sources, and above all the

Prophets, should be abandoned. Furthermore, as Gershom Scholem points out, Cohen’s anti-

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Zionism preserved, albeit with different justifications, the ancient tendency of Orthodox Judaism

to proclaim historical passivity as a commandment flowing from Jewish messianism.46 In

addition, Cohen’s liberalism was not in keeping with the most famous liberalism advanced by a

Jew before him, that of Spinoza, who had been excommunicated by the Jewish community. As

Leo Strauss argued,

Far from rescinding the excommunication, Cohen confirmed it acting as a

judge in the highest court of appeal…. He condemned Spinoza because

of his infidelity in the simple human sense, of his complete lack of

loyalty to his own people, of his acting like an enemy of the Jews and

thus giving aid and comfort to the many enemies of the Jews, of his

behaving like a base traitor.47

Cohen opposed Spinoza for the additional reason that there is no place in the latter’s thought for

the enlightenment of the people: Spinoza “cannot admit a Messianic future of mankind when all

men will be united in genuine knowledge of God.”48 In Cohen’s view, as in the traditional view,

“by denying that the God of Israel is the God of all mankind Spinoza has blasphemed the God

of Israel.”49

Guttmann argues that there are indeed key elements of Cohen’s mature system that may be

labeled Jewish either in origin or in substance. He sees Cohen as purposefully and doggedly

formulating a place in his neo-Kantian system for “the Jewish faith in the divinity-grounded

moral order of being.” Guttmann asserts, for example, that Cohen’s doctrine of atonement

“corresponds completely to Judaism’s view.” Yet, as Guttmann adds, “along with the

purification of man, Judaism posits the grace of God, and within Cohen’s system the idea of the

forgiving God can only hint at that faith which provides man with the power moral renewal.”50

Guttmann’s final word on the issue is that the “methodological bases of [Cohen’s] thoughtrestrain him from the possibility of interpreting God as a reality.”51 Guttmann, like many others,

saw in Cohen the man, and his individual intellectual example, a transcendence of these

methodological restraints. Guttmann had no doubt that God, at some primary level, was a reality

for Cohen.

Cohen’s Thought and the Contemporary Situation

As a historical subject—a fascinating, if tragic, chapter in the history of ideas and one of the

most important German Jewish interpretations of Judaism in the modern period—Cohen’s

thought is of clear interest. It must be asked what, though, is still alive in Cohen’s oeuvre, given

the unavoidable sense that his political optimism and faith in modern culture seem now in

crucial respects “extraordinarily naïve,” as Mark Lilla, echoing many others, puts it.52

As Alan Mittleman rightly points out, an overall evaluation of Cohen’s project today is less a

matter of the “internal Jewish argument between Reform and Orthodoxy than the ‘robust faith’

in progress that Cohen shares with his Enlightenment forbearers.”53 Rosenzweig once stated that

Cohen believed “in the messiah of the nineteenth century.”54

Today, with a full century having

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transpired since late-nineteenth-century optimism, the perspective on Cohen and the ideals he

prized is complex.

Indeed, after World Wars I and II and the Holocaust—to say nothing of Soviet tyranny with its

horrific fusion of scientific atheism, European philosophy, and Eastern despotism—thoughtful

contemporary citizens of the West, Jews and non-Jews alike, have at times expressed the feelingthat they now stand “on the other side of an abyss” (in Fackenheim’s language). But the bloody

experiences of the twentieth century can have a dual effect on one’s overall orientation.

On the one hand, the shattering of earlier, more “naïve” modern notions of progress and

universal culture as a cure for human evils creates a feeling of disorientation and doubt. Well-

known historical events, of which the introduction of nuclear weaponry into warfare is the most

significant, have called into question the basic worth not only of modern culture but of modern

science as well. On the other hand, those same bloody experiences have only strengthened the

resolve of great numbers of thoughtful Jews and non-Jews to defend modern liberal democracy,

both politically and theoretically, as an extraordinary accomplishment that has weathered the

storms of modern tyranny and must continue to do so. Such loyalty to liberal democracy can be

said to transcend traditional nationalist patriotism.

It is not merely a matter of a stern sobriety founded on the realization of the dangers of utopian

visions, where democracy is defended in some Churchillian spirit as “the worst type of regime,

except for all the others.” On the contrary, for many, the experience of Hitlerism and Stalinism

made the flourishing of the “bourgeois” Western democracies seem by comparison like a new

golden age. Mittleman is rather understated when he concludes in reference to Cohen’s legacy:

“The modern Western faith in a rational and immanent solution, in a horizon of political and

moral progress, while tattered, is at least residual. It has not lost its hold on the imagination,

although it has perhaps lost its right to have such a hold.”55

What, then, is questionable in this “right to have such a hold”? The question involves therelationship between philosophical truth and historical experience. The most significant issue in

evaluating Cohen’s project seems to be the status of history itself; that question is at once moral,

philosophical, and political. Has twentieth-century political history dethroned Kantian (and for

that matter, Hegelian) history—making any philosophy that places historical progress at its

center seem a delusion, a dream violently cut short?

Scholars of Cohen such as Mittleman, as well as Kenneth Seeskin, point out that Cohenian or

Kantian hope in progress is not merely a theory to be disproved by empirical—i.e., historical—

considerations.56 Indeed, the a priori theoretical basis of Cohen’s liberal theology stands in

sharp contrast, for example, to his critic Rosenzweig, who called his own theology a form of

radical empiricism.57 Cohen presents faith in progress as a belief based on a synthetic, a priori

requirement of morality. To this observation David Novak adds:

To dismiss [Cohen] in toto because some of his premises are now unacceptable is

as foolish as dismissing Maimonides in toto because his Aristotelian cosmology is

now unacceptable…. A philosopher is as important, maybe more important, as a

guide to show us how to understand a datum as he is in showing us what he

conceives as its essential properties.58

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On the whole, however, this type of defense is unsatisfying. Novak’s example—that

Maimonides can be of interest today despite the invalidation of Aristotelian cosmology and

teleology—begs the central question. The connection between Maimonides’ teleological

account of man, which draws on both Aristotelian and the biblical cosmology, and his ethical

teaching ought to be of fundamental rather than secondary interest to any serious student ofMaimonides.

Likewise, it hard to see how one could bracket off, as Novak suggests, Cohen’s manner of

understanding “a datum” from his conclusion as to its essential properties. What is involved is a

philosophy of history based on a priori Kantian principles, and which issues in a synthesis of

Plato and the Prophets. Cohen is not like Nietzsche, or like Buber or Levinas, for that matter;

his philosophy cannot be mistaken for a thoroughgoing skepticism or an enigmatic mysticism.

Cohen asks that his thought be embraced as a project of realizing the religion of reason on earth.

There is a deep fusion of history and philosophy, of theory and practice, that is arguably

inherent in any robust philosophy of history that, like Cohen’s, issues in an idealist, optimistic

political vision of the future. This entanglement of theoretical postulates and predicted empirical

results seems to make it untenable to exempt Cohen’s system from the tribunal of empirical

(historical) experience.

The alleged dethroning of Kantian and Hegelian history inevitably led certain thinkers to

reconsider a much older vision of history, or what they hoped was a sturdier understanding of

the fate of the human race. But here the question of naïveté once more arises. For the return to a

pre-Enlightenment faith, to an orthodoxy with its accompanying supernatural eschatology,

seems no less naïve than a resurrection of the nineteenth-century belief in progress to large

numbers of “educated humanity” (to use Mittleman’s phrase).59

What, then, is still sturdy, still

worth holding on to, among the alternatives Cohen’s (failed) synthesis opens up and a simple

return to orthodoxy it rules out? Here again the issue is modern liberalism, with which all ofCohen’s dreams were bound up.

Regarding liberalism’s ambiguous yet ubiquitous status today, the theorist Raymond Geuss is an

excellent guide. In an important essay, “Liberalism and Its Discontents,”60 he points out that, on

the one hand,

we seem to have no realistic alternative to liberalism; that is, we know of no other

approach to human society and politics that is at the same time as theoretically

rich and comprehensive as liberalism and also even remotely as morally

acceptable to wide sections of the population in Western societies, as they are

now in fact constituted.

Yet, on the other hand, he admits a common feeling:

There are signs of a significant theoretical, moral, and political disaffection with

some aspects of liberalism. Liberalism has for a long time seemed to lack much

inspirational potential; it is good at dissolving traditional modes of life and their

associated values, but less obviously good at replacing them with anything

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particularly distinctive or admirable.61

Geuss’s conclusion is interesting and relevant to the issue of Cohen. Although Geuss resigns

himself to the fact that the discontent with liberalism cannot be completely dispelled “as long as

the real social, economic, and political institutions and circumstances of our life do not change,”

he takes this as a kind of “vindication” of liberalism—though a pared-down liberalism of a moreclassical sort that is “reflexively anti-utopian and asserts that no system either of action or

thought is perfect. This should hold as much for liberalism as for anything else. This kind of

discontent, then, might not necessarily be an objection but a sign of the continuing vitality of

this tradition.”62

Reassessing Liberalism

Discontent with Cohen’s messianic liberalism, then, can constructively lead back to reassessing

a more limited, yet perhaps more realistic, form of liberal politics that sees liberalism not as a

palliative for all problems but as a philosophy that begins by granting that certain problems are

insoluble at the merely political level. In other words, the modern state, even if it is becoming

some kind of universal state, cannot perfect our souls.

Dissatisfaction with Cohen’s project can be of help in soberly reassessing liberal-democratic

positions. At the same time, Cohen himself stands as a philosophic thinker to be emulated in

intensity and devotion, if not in direction or result. The noble sentiments expressed in 1918,

shortly after Cohen’s death, by Gershom Scholem—who sharply opposed Cohen’s critique of

Zionism—still ring true nearly ninety years later:

Like all men, Cohen misunderstood himself, and many of his obscurities (which

perhaps now dominate our view) sprang from his false interpretation of his own

essence. And yet it is still this existence which made his life of teaching palpablein the world…. The demands of such a life are that it be comprehended and

completed, and he who does this, cannot go astray.63

The place and future of the individual Jew, and of the Jews as a nation, in a modernity now

spread to all corners of the globe is by no means certain. The problems Cohen grappled with

have not been solved either politically or philosophically. At most it has become clear that some

of them do not admit of solution—or at any rate, of a merely human political solution. To

become mature, or wise, is to have a greater awareness of one’s own ignorance. As Cohen

declared in a speech toward the end of his life: “One must unlearn. One must begin again from

the beginning.”64

Such is the spirit with which Cohen and the liberal Jewish hopes that he

embodied must be approached today—lest our scorn for naïveté become a source of our own.

Notes1 Emil Fackenheim, Hermann Cohen: After Fifty Years, Leo Baeck Twelfth Memorial Lecture (New York:

Leo Baeck Institute, 1969), 5.

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2 Hermann Cohen, Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, trans.

and ed. Eva Jose (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1973), 127.3 Quoted in Leo Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections,” in Studies in Platonic

Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 167.4 Ibid.

5 Cohen, Reason and Hope , 66.6 Ibid., 67.7 Ibid.8 Ibid., 76.9 Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” 167.10 Ibid., 74.11 Ibid., 76.12 Ibid., 72, 74-77.13 Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens,” 167.14

Cohen, Reason and Hope , 120-21, 75-76.15

Ibid., 76.16

Ibid.17

Ibid., 75.18

Ibid., 74.19 Ibid., 74-75.20 Ibid., 124.21 Ibid., 120.22 Ibid.23 Ibid.24 Ibid., 141.25 Fackenheim, Hermann Cohen, 11.26

Cohen, Reason and Hope , 71.27

Ibid., 81.28

Ibid.29 Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, trans. David W. Silverman (New York: Schocken Books, 1973),

401.30 Ibid., 402.31 Ibid., 405.32 Ibid., 404.33 Franz Rosenzweig , “Zion and the Remnant of Israel ,” in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought , ed. Nahum H. Glatzer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 351.34 Strauss, “Introductory Essay” to “Hermann Cohen: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,” in

Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 242.35

Hermann Cohen and Martin Buber, “A Debate on Zionism and Messianism,” in The Jew in the Modern

World , ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995: Cohen’s

response, [regarding this phrase in blue, same query as in note 34; also same query in note 40, 572.36 Ibid., 573.37 Ibid., 573-74.38 Ibid., 573.39 Hermann Cohen, Relig ion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism , trans. Simon Kaplan (New

York: Frederick Ungar, 1972), 361. 40 Cohen and Buber, “Debate,” Cohen’s response, 574.41 Ibid., 574.42 Cohen, Reason and Hope , 122.43

Strauss, “Introductory Essay.”44

Ibid., 243.45

Alan Mittleman, “The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity’ by Hermann Cohen:

An Introduction and Translation ”, Modern Judaism , Vol. 24, No. 1 (2004): 41.

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46 Gershom Scholem, “Reflections Jewish Theology,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed.

Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 289.47

Strauss, “Preface” to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken Books,

1965), 19. For a detailed discussion of the place of his critique of Spinoza in Cohen’s thought as a whole, and

its development, see Franz Nauen, “Hermann Cohen’s Perceptions of Spinoza: A Reappraisal,” AJS Review,

Vol. 4 (1979): 111-24.48 Ibid., 19.49 Ibid., 18.50 Guttman, Philosophies of Judaism, 416.51 Ibid., 415.52 Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2007), 242.53 Mittleman, “Introduction,” 42-43. 54 Rosenzweig, “Zion,” 351.55

Mittleman, “Introduction,” 43.56

Ibid, 43. For a critical appraisal of Cohen as an articulate spokesman for what Seeskin sees as the central

place of the “notion of autonomy” in the Jewish philosophic tradition, see Kenneth Seeskin, Autonomy in

Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Ch. 6, esp. 150-51, 157-58, 178-80.

Seeskin notes that Cohen’s neo-Kantianism is, as a philosophical position and not merely a political program,resistant to strictly empirical (historical-political) observations and criteria. As Seeskin puts it regarding

Cohen’s ethical worldview: “We need only recall that the validity of the moral law has nothing to do with our

attempts to realize it. Even if everyone should fail, it would be the same stern, unindulgent principle that Kant

described in the Critique of Practical Reason” (160).57 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame

University Press, 1983), 214.58 David Novak, “Universal Moral Law in the Theology of Hermann Cohen,” Modern Judaism , Vol. 1, No. 1

(1981): 113.59

Mittleman, “Introduction,” 43.60

Raymond Geuss, “Liberalism and Its Discontents,” Political Theory, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2002): 320-38.

Reprinted as Ch. 1 of Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 61 Ibid., 320-21.62 Ibid., 336. Geuss elaborates on his view regarding the relationship of “Kantianism” to “classical” forms of

liberalism:

What I do wish to assert…is that as a matter of fact the majority of liberal theoreticians inthe nineteenth century, and a not insignificant number in the early twentieth century, saw

Kant as an opponent of their basic project and that this is a fact that liberals who wish to be

Kantians should recognise and take some kind of position on rather than ignoring. (326)

Later he states his criticism of “Kantianism” more precisely:

Which parts, then, of classical liberalism deserve to be further developed and cultivated? In

the first place the criticism of theocratic conceptions of society or, what is another form of

the same thing, of absolutist (that is, explicitly or implicitly theocentric) forms of ethics.

Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularised version of such a theocratic

ethics, with ‘Reason’ in the place of God. This does not amount to much more than a changeof names. (329)

63 Gershom Scholem, “In Memory of Hermann Cohen” (speech translated from a previously unpublished

copy), Modern Judaism, Vol. 5, No. 1, Gershom Scholem Memorial Issue (1985): 1-2.64

“The Significance of Judaism for the Religious Progress of Humanity” (trans. Alan Mittleman), Modern

Judaism , Vol. 24, No. 1 (2004).

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