The Function of the Idea of Messianic Mankind in Hermann Cohen's Later Thought

The thought of Hermann Cohen represents one of the most important German Jewish interpretations of Judaism in the modern period. This article explores Cohen's idea of a universal messianic humanity, which the author considers to be central to Cohen's later religious thought. It is clear, especially in the Ethik des reinen Willens, that Cohen puts forth the idea of a universal humanity as a postulate of the moral reason in the Kantian sense. He rejects Kant's own postulate of personal immortality along with the concomitant notion of the final conjunction of virtue and happiness and argues that the idea of universal humanity opens up a this-worldly future and thereby properly specifies the infinity of the moral task. In an attempt to work out the implications of this ideal, Cohen projects it into the juridicalpolitical sphere. The second major section of the article seeks to demonstrate that there is a systematic link in Cohen's philosophy between the unity of mankind and the unity of God. The author explains that, for Cohen, the idea of the unity of the one supersensible God opens up the future to the reality of one universal humanity. Attention is given to the mode of ideality which characterizes both God and universal humanity in Cohen's thought. Finally, the article turns to a discussion of how Cohen has derived the idea of universal messianic mankind from the sources of Judaism through a process of "idealization." This discussion includes a consideration of Cohen's views on the particular status of the Jewish people and of the degree to which his idea of messianic mankind is in harmony with the messianic idea current in rabbinic-Talmudic Judaism from the second to the nineteenth century. Wendell S. Dietrich (Ph.D., Yale) is Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University, where he teaches nineteenthand twentieth-century Christian thought and comparative Judaic and Christian theology. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.255 on Wed, 25 May 2016 05:34:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 246 Wendell S. Dietrich H ermann Cohen is a towering figure in the procession of modern German Jewish interpreters of Judaism-a procession which stretches from Mendelssohn to early nineteenth-century Hegelians like Samuel Hirsch and to Rosenzweig and Buber./ 1 / Each of these interpreters stresses a positive symbiosis between Judaism and elements of modern German culture and proposes to restate the content of Judaic tradition in terms of the thoughtforms and, in some measure, the content of modern philosophical movements, whether Enlightenment, Kantian, Hegelian, or existential. Cohen's particular proposals for the reconstruction of the Judaic tradition are initially introduced in the context of his late nineteenth-century revisionary Kantian philosophical program. In his mature religious thought, especially as it comes to final expression in the Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, a central notion is the idea of universal humanity as ideal end. This idea operates as a postulate of the moral reason, and it is intended to express in modern concepts the classic rabbinic-Talmudic messianic idea. I propose in this paper to explore Cohen's employment of this idea of messianic mankind. As an interpretation of Judaism, Cohen's mature thought is noteworthy in its selecting for special prominence the messianic idea as a Judaic religious category and in further making that idea an organizing principle for his system as a whole. Cohen assumes the shift executed by nineteenth-century Reform teaching in general from an expectation which couples a personal messianic figure with the coming of a messianic era to an expectation of a messianic age. This age is envisaged as a future historical state of affairs characterized by just relations among men and a universal recognition of the one true God. The dawning of the era of Jewish emancipation and the emergence of democratic organizational society are taken as provisional actualizations of the messianic state of affairs. But Cohen moves far beyond conventional Reform teaching in the rigor of his working out of the idea of universal (messianic) humanity as an ideal end and in his systematic linkage of the notion of the messianic unity of mankind with the idea of God's unique oneness. I propose to pursue these issues initially by probing the idea of universal humanity as an ideal end in Cohen's later ethical thought. Here I have in view especially the Ethik des reinen Willens (1904), which must be interpreted in close conjunction with the Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919), since both bear the imprint of Cohen's distinctive idea of messianic mankind. I will next attempt to show the linkage between the idea of the one God and the idea of universal humanity with special attention to that mode of ideality characteristic both of God and the ideal end of universal humanity. I shall then make a fresh start in showing how Cohen derives the idea of messianic mankind by "idealization" out of the sources of Judaism with special attention to the prophetic messianism of what he calls the social prophets. Especially in focusing on the derivation of the idea of universal messianic humanity, Cohen is moved to a consideration not strictly implied by his philosophical analysis-a more extended reflection on the role and character of the Jewish people. Such reflection coincides with Cohen's This content downloaded from 157.55.39.255 on Wed, 25 May 2016 05:34:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Messianic Mankind in Cohen's Later Thought 247 deepening preoccupation from 1880 onward with the issues of Jewish assimilation and the problem of Jewish survival in the context of German culture. Such reflection also leads him to a reappraisal of his earlier conviction that Judaic monotheism and Christian monotheism in the neo-Kantian Ritschlian style are moving toward an ever greater convergence.