Against the Heteronomy of Halakhah: Hermann Cohen’s Implicit Rejection of Kant’s Critique of Judaism

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was arguably the only Jewish philosopher of modernity whose standing within the general philosophical developments of the West equals his enormous impact on Jewish thought. Cohen founded the influential Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism, the leading trend in German Kathederphilosophie in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century. Marburg Neo-Kantianism cultivated an overtly ethical, that is, anti-Marxist, and anti-materialist socialism that for Cohen increasingly concurred with his philosophical reading of messianic Judaism. Cohen’s Jewish philosophical theology, elaborated during the last decades of his life, culminated in his famous Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, published posthumously in 1919.
While Kant says moral laws are human duty as if they were divine commandments, Cohen says moral laws are divine commandments. Cohen would not adopt the Kantian distinction between morality and (political) legality, based on the heteronomous nature of compulsion. For Cohen autonomous acts are compelled, too – not by external forces, however, but by the power of human reason. Concerning the divine source of halakhah, Cohen’s view would consequently mean that there is no heteronomy involved. If divine Jewish law is followed not for reward, and if divine here means the transcendent idea of the infinite realization of the good in the world, ideally halakhah is but a religious instantiation of autonomous moral law.