Jewish neoKantianism Hermann Cohen

CHAPTER 33
Jewish neo-Kantianism: Hermann Cohen
Kenneth Seeskin
Although his published works indicate that he was not enamored of Judaism, no
philosopher in modern times had as profound an effect on Jewish self-understanding as
Immanuel Kant.1 This is true not only for those who look at religion in Kantian terms but
for those who do not. Love him or hate him, there is no getting around the fact that for
the past two hundred years, a lot of Jewish philosophy has been a dialogue with the sage
of Königsberg.
History books record that it was Kant who changed the orientation of philosophy from
a study of things as they are in themselves to things as they are constituted by an
experiencing subject. This shift led Kant to deny that we can have certain knowledge
about God, the soul, or the origin of the universe. But lack of certainty about the truths of
metaphysics does not mean we have to reject them altogether. In Kant’s words,
transcendental philosophy limits knowledge in order to make room for faith (Glaube).2
This faith does not involve a leap in the sense intended by existentialists but a rational
belief based on our awareness of and aspiration for the highest good.3 According to Kant,
God is not a necessary being or first cause that we infer from the world around us. To
extrapolate from knowledge of the world to God, we would have to prove that this world
is the best possible. To make such a judgment, we would have to compare this world to
all other possible worlds—a feat that would require infinite intelligence.
Kant therefore concludes that the only content we can ascribe to our idea of God is
moral: “It was the moral ideas that gave rise to that concept of the Divine Being which
we now hold to be correct—and we so regard it not because speculative reason convinces
us of its correctness, but because it completely harmonizes with the moral principles of
reason.”4 The important point is not that the world has a creator but that, to fulfill our
obligations under the moral law, we must assume that it does. In a word, all legitimate
theology is moral theology.
It is easy to see why the practical dimension of Kant’s philosophy appealed to Jewish
audiences. The metaphysical speculation Kant decries is not indigenous to Judaism.
Rather than a first cause, the Jewish understanding of God is that of a merciful agent
ready to forgive iniquity (Exodus 34:6–7), a protector of the disadvantaged
(Deuteronomy 10:18), a judge who insists on righteousness (Deuteronomy 16:20), and a
redeemer who will not be appeased by outward shows of piety (Amos 5:21–4; Micah
6:6–8; Isaiah 1:11–17). As Emmanuel Levinas put it in an interview, the omni-predicates
so familiar to students of medieval philosophy are inadequate to describe the Jewish
conception of God; rather than look to the almighty first cause of creation, we should
look to the persecuted God of the Prophets.5
On the issue of morality, Kant is often viewed as an opponent of traditional religion. It
is well known that, in the Groundwork, he rejects the idea that morality can be derived
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from a system of divine commands, and, in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone,
proclaims that everything we do to please God above and beyond morality is religious
delusion and spurious worship.6 Still, there is a respect in which the Kantian revolution in
morality not only allows for participation in a religious tradition but encourages it. In the
Critique of Practical Reason, he asks: “Who would want to introduce a new principle of
morality and, as it were, be its inventor, as if the world had hitherto been ignorant of what
duty is or had been thoroughly wrong about it?”7 Kant’s modesty is not accidental. If, as
he insists, moral judgments are a priori, if every rational agent has the ability to act
autonomously, legislating for himself or herself, it would be absurd for him to argue that
he was the first person in history to understand the duties incumbent on a human being.
Thus the purpose of Kantian moral theory is not to invent the idea of duty but to
formulate a principle from which all existing duties can be derived.
In Religion Within the Limits, he enlarges on this idea by pointing out
that:
There exists meanwhile a practical knowledge which, while resting solely
upon reason and requiring no historical doctrine, lies as close to every
man, even the most simple, as though it were engraved upon his heart—a
law, which we need but name to find ourselves at once in agreement with
everyone else regarding its authority, and which carries with it in
everyone’s consciousness unconditioned binding force, to wit, the law of
morality.8
Although it is unclear whether the mention of a law engraved upon the heart is a
deliberate reference to Deuteronomy 30:14, where Moses uses the same metaphor in
giving the Torah to Israel, it is clear that Kant has a real interest in showing that historical
religion did not develop in ignorance of the moral law. He wants to claim that actual
religions have in one way or another approached the ideal of a pure faith founded on a
universal conception of humanity and a commitment to its moral improvement. Unless
actual religions approached this ideal, it would be impossible for Kant to argue that it is
engraved on each of our hearts.
The purpose of Religion Within the Limits is to present an idealized picture of
Christianity, by which I mean a picture that emphasizes the moral necessity of its
teachings. According to Kant, these teachings include the conviction that the disposition
of our hearts is more important than obedience to statutory laws, the need to repair
injuries done to our neighbor by going to the offended party himself or herself, and the
hope that the natural propensity of the human heart to evil can be overcome. Kant
believes that these teachings constitute valid principles whatever the historical record
may show about their application. In this respect, he is and claims to be a Platonist. If the
fact that there are no absolutely perfect circles or parallel lines in the physical world does
not refute the ideas of circularity or parallelism, why should the fact that no historical
religion has lived up to the ideal of a rational faith show that such a faith is illegitimate?
As Kant puts it: “Nothing is more reprehensible than to derive the laws prescribing what
ought to be done from what is done, or to impose upon them the limits by which the latter
is circumscribed.”9
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There is always a danger in thinking that, because he offers an idealization of
Christianity, his real purpose is to provide a glorification. Certainly there are passages
where he falls prey to the latter, as when he argues that Jesus is the founder of the first
true Church.10 But despite occasional slips of parochialism, Kant’s intention is to show
that, amidst all the dogmas, rituals, statutes, and historical accidents that make up
Christianity, there is a thread of moral truth. That the practices of Christian Churches may
not always recognize this truth, and in some instances renounce it, Kant is the first to
admit. His picture is a model to which historically specific examples may aspire but of
which they invariably fall short.
The legacy of Kantian philosophy is therefore a gap between reality and ideality.
Although it is instructive to see Hegel and Marx as attempting to close this gap, we can
agree with Steven Schwarzchild that, from a Jewish perspective, the suggestion that the
real world already embodies the ideal was bound to seem implausible.11 In the first place,
many Jews continued to live in conditions that were a long way from ideal. In the second
place, Judaism holds that the messiah has not come and therefore the world, though
redeemable, is not yet redeemed. Kant himself argued that morality presents us with an
infinite task or puts us on an infinite future trajectory. In the Critique of Practical Reason,
he maintains that: “The thesis of the moral destiny of our nature, viz., that it is… in an
infinite progress toward complete fitness to the moral law, is of great use, not merely for
the present purpose of supplementing the impotence of speculative reason, but also with
respect to religion.”12
Without doubt, the greatest thinker to take up the idea of the infinite task and “reopen” the gap between reality and ideality was Hermann Cohen. Cohen (1842–1918) was
a prominent follower of Kant, and in some ways responsible for the revival of his
thought. He founded the Marburg School of philosophy, which came to have
considerable status in the German-speaking world, and which advocated a particular
approach to Kant, one which emphasized his ethical principles. As he got older he
became more interested in Judaism, and sought to use Kantianism to explore some of the
main themes of religion. In a nutshell, Cohen tried to do for Judaism what Kant had done
for Christianity. Although the title of Cohen’s most famous work, Religion of Reason
Out of the Sources of Judaism, is often taken to mean that Judaism is the religion of
reason, this impression is highly misleading. By “religion of reason,” Cohen meant an
idealized, rational faith stressing the same principles Kant stressed. According to Cohen,
this faith can be constructed out of Jewish sources, Christian sources, or others.13 So
while Judaism may not be the religion of reason, Kant was wrong to think it was not a
religion of reason.
Like Kant’s Christianity, Cohen’s Judaism puts heavy emphasis on the idea of duty.
Behind the development of monotheism, he sees the belief that all humanity has a
common origin in God. Thus the biblical injunction (Leviticus 24:22): “You shall have
one law for the stranger and for the homeborn, for I am the Lord your God.” Cohen
argues that this sentiment permeates the whole Torah and substantial portions of rabbinic
literature as well.14 It can be found in the idea of the Noachide Covenant (Genesis 9:11–
16), a pact that God makes with all humanity to prohibit the shedding of innocent blood
regardless of the nationality of the victim.15 It can be found in the conviction that not just
Jews but the righteous of every nation will share in salvation. Finally, it can be found in
the repeated injunction (Deuteronomy 23:8) that Israel cannot hate or take advantage of
Jewish neo-Kantianism
701
the stranger because it was once a stranger in a foreign land. Cohen concludes that the
idea of universal humanity arose not in Plato or Aristotle but in the Hebrew Prophets.
For Kant, religion is the recognition that all duties can be seen as divine commands.16
Cohen’s effort to construct such a view from Jewish sources is long and detailed, with
more textual references than most philosophers of religion would think possible. Rather
than summarize the entire project, it would be better to take up a single idea: revelation.
In the Torah, revelation is an historical event in which God descends on Mount Sinai and
addresses a single person, Moses. In Cohen’s hands, the historical dimension of
revelation is transformed so that, instead of a miracle occurring in the desert, it becomes
the discovery of reason in the broadest sense. Put otherwise, revelation is not an event but
a principle: the awareness that moral reason is the highest human calling and the faculty
that brings us into contact with the divine.
We can better understand Cohen’s view of revelation by comparing it to a related idea:
the social contract. As originally formulated, social contract theory was an account of the
historical origin of society. Interpreted this way, the theory is not only implausible but in
many ways irrelevant. Why should actions undertaken by a group of unnamed ancestors
put moral restrictions on people living in the present? It is not until we free the social
contract of its historical associations and regard it as a principle for explaining ideas like
freedom or citizenship that its philosophic significance can be grasped. In Cohen’s terms,
the social contract does not become valid until we realize that it is not an actual
occurrence forced on us by the historical record but a rational construction arising out of
our idea of a just society.
To return to revelation, the mechanics of the process—“What sounds did God utter?”
or “What exactly did the people hear?”—become unimportant when compared to the
content: the call of duty engraved on each of our hearts. According to Cohen, God is the
source of moral reason not in the way that Homer is the source of the Iliad but in the way
that a generative principle is the source of the consequences that follow from it. There is
simply no way for us to conceive of a perfect being except as a being who wills the moral
law: that every rational agent must be treated as an end in himself or herself.
The moral law is therefore the crux of revelation. Anything other than the moral law
would be unworthy of a perfect being and could not be part of the teaching that God
gives to Israel. Like Maimonides, Cohen admits that there is more to religion than an
abstract principle.17 If the moral law is the supreme principle of human conduct, it is not
necessarily the most immediate. In addition to the moral law, people require symbols to
remind them of it, institutions to help them promote it, festivals to encourage them to
follow it, and a host of statutory legislation to help them conceptualize it. His point is that
the symbols, festivals, and statutory requirements are not heteronomous commands
imposed by an arbitrary will but necessary prerequisites for obeying the commands of a
rational one. Again, Cohen insists that divine commands not be understood in a historical
fashion. From the recognition that all moral duties can be seen as divine commands, it
does not follow that there was a specific moment in which God gave them to Israel in
fact. This means that the discovery of moral reason leads to imperatives that are worthy
of a perfect being, not that a perfect being shouted them from the mountain top.
The issue of commandment leads straight to the issue of autonomy. The standard
criticism of Kantian morality is that autonomy makes the individual supreme and
undermines respect for authority. If the only commands that have moral authority are
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702
those that I impose on myself, autonomy is synonymous with independence.18 But here,
too, we must make a distinction between legislation in principle and legislation in fact. It
is noteworthy that, in his best-known formulation of the principle of autonomy, Kant
does not say what generations of philosophy students have been told that he says: I am
subject only to those laws of which I am the author. This principle, if true, would make
me the supreme moral legislator for myself and take away any obligation to obey
commands that originate with God, the state, the family, or anything else. What Kant
actually says is that I am subject only to those laws of which I can regard myself as
author.19 Surely the fact that I can regard myself as the author of a law is compatible with
saying that I am not the author in fact. Although I did not write the Fifth Amendment to
the US Constitution, which claims that a person cannot be forced to testify against
himself or herself, I have no trouble regarding myself as if I did. So, even though I
learned about the law by reading a history book, I can appropriate it in an autonomous
fashion.
According to Cohen, there is no possibility of a conflict between God’s law and the
law our moral reason imposes on itself.20 The imperative to treat all of humanity as an
end in itself is valid for all times and all places. We can view it either as a law worthy of
a perfect being or as something we could write ourselves, as God’s attempt to educate us
about our highest calling or our attempt to discover how God is to be served. In the end,
the issue is not who wrote the law but its moral necessity.
Another way to see this point is to recognize that, when we talk about self-legislation,
we are referring not to the empirical self but to the noumenal one, the self that responds
to the causality of reason. Cohen is one of a long line of neo-Kantian thinkers who
emphasize that the noumenal self is not a “given” of experience.21 It is not something we
can reach out and touch or discover by introspection. Like God or revelation, the self is a
rational construction, something we come to on the basis of argument, historical
experience, literary analysis, and every other research tool at our disposal. A rational
construction is therefore a task we must strive to fulfill. In virtually all of his writing,
Cohen emphasizes that the task is infinite in the sense that it can never be fulfilled
completely but must be approached as a mathematical function approaches its limit.
Though one generation may be closer to the limit than its predecessor, the gap between
reality and ideality remains open for all time.
The result is that contrary to popular misconceptions, autonomy need not imply that I
am a rational monad, acting in isolation from everyone else around me. To learn about
laws of which I can regard myself as the author, I need a family, friends, religious and
secular institutions, and, if Cohen is right, a conviction that, in discovering the demands
of moral reason, I am coming to know the will of God. In religious terms this means that
revelation is not a one-time event but an ongoing process. In Cohen’s view, we are as
much a part of the process as Moses and the generation of the Exodus.
A typical criticism of Cohen is that his account of revelation is so abstract that it is not
really a Jewish theory at all. But oddly enough, the text of Torah is more amenable to
idealization than one might think. Although the story of revelation occurs in the book of
Exodus, it is re-enacted in the book of Deuteronomy, hence the title deuterosnomos
(second law) which is a Greek rendering of the Hebrew mishneh Torah (repetition of the
law). Immediately before the re-enactment of the giving of the Ten Commandments
(Deuteronomy 5:3), Moses claims: “It is not with our fathers that the Lord made this
Jewish neo-Kantianism
703
covenant but with us, all of us who are alive here this day.” Why would Moses say “it is
not with our fathers” when any reader of the Torah knows that it was? The people
addressed in Deuteronomy are the children of the people who stood at Sinai. Long before
Cohen, commentators argued that the passage should be taken to mean “it was not with
our fathers alone” and went on to say that the covenant extended not only to the
generation of the Exodus but to that of Deuteronomy and to all future generations as
well.22
Further support can be found in the fact that throughout Deuteronomy
(11:13, 11:32, 27:9), Moses claims that God is entering into a covenant
with Israel “this day” even though the actual agreement was struck forty
years before with the generation of the Exodus. Again, the traditional
commentators took “this day” to refer not to a particular point in history
but to any day; in other words, they understood revelation to be an
eternally renewable process. In Cohen’s words, the historical thread was
broken, and the process of idealization was under way.23
Another noteworthy feature of Deuteronomy is that the law revealed to Israel is
described as a body of wisdom that must be taught and learned (Deuteronomy 4:6–8).
Instead of a herald who communicates marching orders from the commanding officer,
Moses is portrayed as a teacher whose job is to awaken the people’s understanding. This
theme reaches its climax at Deuteronomy 30:14, when Moses claims the law is no longer
in heaven but in our mouths and written on our hearts. According to Cohen, the fact that
the law is no longer in heaven, no longer shrouded by mystery, indicates that even in the
Torah there is an attempt to demystify revelation and internalize the law. Rather than an
arbitrary command that comes to us with a bolt of lightning and a blast of thunder, the
law is so close to us that we can regard it as the product of our own will.
It is clear, as Cohen himself remarks, that it is lucky for him that the book of
Deuteronomy was written, for, once we accept Deuteronomy as part of God’s revelation
to Israel, we have grounds for saying that idealization is not just a neo-Kantian obsession
but part of the way the Jewish people understood itself. In his own mind, Cohen
embarked on a path that had its origins at Sinai. Like Kant, he claims he is not really an
innovator but someone trying to illuminate the sources of an already existing morality.24
It would be fair to say, then, that both Kant and Cohen see idealization as a hermeneutic
exercise. Both are convinced that if we get past the mythical level of religion, replacing
temporal relations with logical ones, we will see how the sacred texts of Judaism and
Christianity express the unconditioned necessity of the moral law.
Cohen’s influence can be seen in such diverse thinkers as Ernst Cassirer, Julius
Guttmann, Yechezkel Kaufmann, Leo Baeck, J.B.Soloveitchik, and Steven
S.Schwarzschild.25 The fact is, however, that for a long time Cohen’s critics received
more attention than his followers. We have seen that Kantian philosophy rejects any
attempt to investigate the nature of a mind-independent reality. According to Hilary
Putnam, any reference to “things in themselves” or “facts independent of conceptual
choices” is incoherent.26 That is why Cohen does not discuss God but our idea of a
perfect being, not my personality but our idea of a finite moral agent. It is also why
revelation is not an historical event but an abstraction: the connection between a perfect
being and a finite agent. In Cohen’s words: “Man, not the people, and not Moses: man, as
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704
rational being, is the correlate to the God of revelation.”27 Thus all of Cohen’s discourse
takes place in the realm of ideas.
By the 1920s, two of Cohen’s most famous disciples, Martin Buber and Franz
Rosenzweig, began to protest that idealized religion was too abstract and that philosophy
had to break through the circle of ideas by returning to the concrete reality of everyday
life. For Rosenzweig this meant recognition of the ineluctable fact of death, for Buber
reaching out to the living God of antiquity rather than a philosophic conception of
divinity. By the time Heidegger and Cassirer had their infamous meeting at Davos in
1929, Jewish neo-Kantianism was regarded as an historical relic.
There is some evidence that, in today’s world, neo-Kantianism has regained some of
its former glory. With the demise of logical positivism, Kantian themes have been
rediscovered by people like Thomas Kuhn, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, and Jürgen
Habermas. In the Jewish world, the universalist/particularist debate, not to mention the
ongoing discussion of freedom and autonomy, revolves around the Groundwork and
Second Critique. And while many of Kant’s critics take issue with claims of
transcendental necessity, there remains a widespread conviction that Kant is right on at
least one point: the gap between reality and ideality. One of the central ideas of Judaism
is that the world was created in an incomplete state so that God and humans must work
together to finish the job. Thus the fundamental human task is that of mending the created
order (tiqqun olam). As long as the gap remains open, the task requires renewed effort.
The question is: will the gap remain open for ever? Will ideal justice always be
beyond the reach of imperfect beings or will there be a time when the striving of
imperfect beings reaches fulfillment and the moral law is realized on earth? The orthodox
Kantian answer is that the gap will never be closed. Thus Cohen is fond of quoting
Ecclesiastes 7:20: “For there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth good, and
sinneth not.” Looking back on a lifetime of philosophic activity, Schwarzschild expressed
deep sympathies with Rav, who argued that all the messiahs have come and gone, and,
from now on, everything turns on repentance and good deeds.28 Can there be enough
repentance and good deeds to usher in a new age? On this point, Schwarzschild
demurred, arguing, with Cohen, that the task is infinite in individual human life, in
history, beyond history, and into the world to come.29 No matter how much progress is
made, there will never be a time when the human race achieves complete coincidence
between what is and what ought to be. In religious terms, the messianic age will never
come but always be in the process of coming.30
The problem is that, if perfection is always ahead of us, and an infinite gap
can never be closed by a finite being, perfection will always be beyond our
reach. Ought, as Kant never tires of pointing out, implies can. To say that I
ought to strive for something implies that I am capable of achieving it.
How, then, can I be obliged to strive for an ideal that is infinitely far away,
for no matter how much finite progress I make, the distance between me
and the end I seek will remain infinite?
The way out of the puzzle is to see that repentance and good deeds are ongoing tasks
in the sense that our obligations under the moral law never end. Doing one’s duty is not
like winning a race or being elected to the Hall of Fame. Even if we act for the purest of
motives today, we will be under an obligation to do the same thing tomorrow. So it is fair
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705
to say that there is no limit to the effort I am required to put forth. As Kant puts it,
morality is always in progress and yet always starts from the beginning.31 But does it
follow that because the demands of morality never end they are infinite in the sense that
no finite agent can ever fulfill them? I suggest it does not. I can be obliged to do only
what, in the present circumstances, my nature allows me to do. If I am obliged to treat
every rational agent as an end in himself or herself, it must be possible for me to do so
without assuming infinite moral progress or another life.32 The moral law may require me
to act like a saint or sage, but it cannot require me to act like an angel.
Let us return to the critical text for the Kantian account of revelation:
Deuteronomy 30:11–14:
For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not too hard
for thee, neither is it far off.
It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say: “Who shall go up for us to
heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?”
Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: “Who shall go
over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make us hear it, that we may
do it?”
But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy
heart, that thou mayest do it.
This is the passage that supports Kant’s claim that the moral law is engraved on our
hearts and Cohen’s contention that the Torah itself begins the process of demystification.
Surely the passage implies that the law is not intended for angels or people of
superhuman strength. Contrary to Paul’s contention (Romans 7:13–25) that the law is
unfulfillable, the passage seems to say that, in principle, it could be fulfilled by anyone,
for it is nothing but the dictates of our own heart. This does not mean that the law is
likely to be fulfilled tomorrow or anyday in the foreseeable future. We can agree with
Cohen and Schwarzschild that the human condition leaves much to be desired. All we
have to admit is that we do not need infinite time or infinite power to perfect it.
Eschatology is, of course, a difficult subject. Even a cursory look at
Jewish history will show that the tradition is full of false messiahs, false
proclamations about the messianic age, and foolish speculation about what
the age will be like. But here, as elsewhere, it is difficult to discuss
eschatology without distinguishing between reality and ideality, the is and
the ought. Once the distinction is made, it is difficult to say anything
important without coming to grips with Kant.
NOTES
1 See for example, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone 2.2,
3.2, 4.2; 74, 116–18, 154 (Greene and Hudson).
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706
2 Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxx: 29 (Kemp Smith). For the
connection between Kant’s view of the limit of human knowledge
and Maimonides’, see Fox 1990, pp. 83–4.
3 Critique of Practical Reason, 138–9:143–5 (Beck).
4 Critique of Pure Reason A818/B846:643 (Kemp Smith).
5 “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Levinas 1986, pp. 31–2.
Also see Baeck 1961, pp. 34–41 (Howe).
6 Foundations, 443:61–2 (Beck); Religion Within the Limits 4.2:158
(Greene and Hudson).
7 Critique of Practical Reason, 8:8 (Beck).
8 Religion Within the Limits 4.2:169 (Greene and Hudson).
9 Critique of Pure Reason, A319/B375:313 (Kemp Smith). Favorable
references to Plato occur in the preceding three pages.
10 Religion Within the Limits 3.2:118 (Greene and Hudson).
11 Schwarzschild, “Modern Jewish Philosophy,” in Schwarzschild
1990, p. 230.
12 Critique of Practical Reason, 122:127 (Beck).
13 Religion of Reason, chapter 16, p. 364 (Kaplan).
14 Religion of Reason, chapter 8, pp. 113–43 (Kaplan).
15 On the Noachide covenant, see Sanhedrin 56a. The best recent
commentary on this aspect of Jewish law is Novak 1983.
16 Critique of Practical Reason, 129:132 (Beck). I say “can be seen
as” because, according to Kant, God’s existence is a postulate of
moral reason and cannot be known for certain.
17 Religion of Reason 16:p. 346 (Kaplan), cf. Maimonides, Guide
3.32.
18 Cf. Novak 1992, pp. 46–8.
19 Groundwork, 431:49 (Beck).
20 Cohen 1971, p. 81 (Jospe).
21 For Cohen’s view of the construction of the self, see
Schwarzschild 1975; cf. Allison 1990, pp. 3–5, 141–3.
22 See Rashi’s commentary on Deuteronomy 5:3, 11:13, and 27:9.
23 Religion of Reason, chapter 4: p. 76 (Kaplan).
24 Religion of Reason, Introduction: pp. 24–34 (Kaplan).
25 See, for example Cassirer 1981; Guttmann 1973; Kaufmann 1972;
Baeck 1961; and Schwarzschild 1990. For Cohen’s influence on
Soloveitchik, see Ravitzky 1986; for his influence on later Kant
scholarship, see Martin 1955, p. v. For a modern attempt to defend
Jewish neo-Kantianism, see Seeskin 1990.
Jewish neo-Kantianism
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26 Putnam 1987, pp. 33–6.
27 Religion of Reason, chapter 4, p. 79 (Kaplan).
28 “Afterword,” in Schwarzschild 1990, p. 254. The reference to Rav
is taken from Sanhedrin 97a.
29 “On Jewish Eschatology,” in Schwarzschild 1990, p. 225.
30 Ibid., p. 211.
31 The Metaphysics of Morals, 409:209 (Gregor).
32 Both Kant and Cohen believe that there is infinite moral progress
in the next world. See Critique of Practical Reason, 122–3; 126–8
(Beck) and Religion of Reason, chapter 15, pp. 307ff. But how can
moral progress be made in a disembodied state? We are never told;
cf. Allison 1990, pp. 171–9.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts
Cohen, H. (1971) “Affinities Between the Philosophy of Kant and
Judaism,” in Reason and Hope, translated by E.Jospe (New York: Norton).
——(1972) Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, translated
by S.Kaplan (New York: Ungar).
Kant, I. (1958) Critique of Practical Reason, translated by L.W.Beck
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill).
——(1959) Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by
L.W.Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill).
——(1960) Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, translated by
T.M.Greene and H.H.Hudson (New York: Harper & Row).
——(1965) The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N.Kemp Smith
(New York: St Martin’s).
——(1991) The Metaphysics of Morals, translated by M.Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Studies
Allison, H. (1990) Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Baeck, L. (1961) The Essence of Judaism, edited by I.Howe (New York:
Schocken).
History of Jewish philosophy
708
Cassirer, E. (1981) Kant’s Life and Thought, translated by J.Haden (New
Haven: Yale University Press).
Fox, M. (1990) Interpreting Maimonides (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press).
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