As human beings we are prone to pass judgment on all things. We either approve or we disapprove of the millions of phenomena that enter within the range of our experience. In most cases, the reasons for our value-judgments are the very evident one’s of self-interest. Adjectives such as pleasant, painful, enjoyable, boring, promising, ominous, reassuring, menacing, etc. are obviously conferred on things because of our concern with our own welfare.
Now, the question arises whether the judgments, good and bad, right and wrong, ethical and unethical, are similarly based on subjective considerations, or whether they are derived from our apprehension of the existence of some objective standards. Why do we uncompromisingly approve of charitable deeds and disapprove of acts of robbery, disloyalty and duplicity? Our own personal interest is, in many cases, unaffected by the deeds that we so warmly applaud or by those that we so heartily condemn. Since self-interest is not the source of these judgments and since, furthermore, they are characterized by the quality of objectivity, are we justified in assuming the awareness, on the part of men, of an impersonal moral law in accordance with which the judgments of right and wrong are made?
This question as to the source of ethical valuation is, of course, a very ancient one. It would take us far beyond the limits of our subject, if we attempted even a bare outline of its history. Suffice it to say that a large and respectable group of thinkers, headed by Aristotle, have maintained that all human judgments could be understood as variations of self-interest. Various ingenious explanations have been offered for the apparent objectivity and earnestness of “the voice of conscience.” Generally speaking, these theories may be classified as either materialistic or humanistic. In the former category belong all the explanations which “explain” morality away in the process of trying to understand it. The best known modern representative of this group is Friedrich Nietsche, whose apology for unbridled brutalitarianism was based upon his purported discovery of the origin of traditional morality in the thwarted will to power of the slave-peoples, primarily, the Jewish nation.2 In the latter category belong those doctrines which maintain that the ethical insight of human beings is somehow valid, though that insight is really a development of the instinct for self-preservation. The humanists take the civilized conscience of man as their standard of reference. All human interests are good and the ethical strivings of man are of essentially the same value or authority as other human desires and aspirations.
Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig and Kaplan—all agree in rejecting both materialism and humanism. They concur in maintaining that there is something about our experience of the moral law, which cannot be reduced to self-interest. You cannot analyze the voice of conscience in terms of selfish or indifferent impulses, without proving false to it. The moral law appears in consciousness as an absolute command, spurning all selfish and unworthy motives. It can only be understood on its own face value, as an objective law of action, deriving from the structure of reality. An essential part of ethical experience is the feeling that there is an outside source to our judgments of right and wrong, that the stamp of validity attaches to our apprehensions of the rightness and wrongness of things.
This conviction is not only common to the philosophers discussed; it constitutes the main vantage point of their respective philosophies. While they express this fluid intuition in radically different ways, they agree in founding their systems of thought upon it.
Cohen begins his system with the “basic law of truth” (Grundgesetz der Wahrheit). Truth, he then goes on to say, is the recognition that the two directions of spirit, logic and ethics, must be “pure.” The requirement concerning the “purity” of ethics in turn implies the assertion that the judgments of ethics are intrinsically valid and authoritative. We must not attempt to find the origin of morality in the consciousness of social pressure or in the sublimation and rationalization of some unworthy motive; the “basic law of truth” directs us to treat ethics as an independently authoritative and valid science.
If we should now inquire for the reasons that lead Cohen to accept his so-called “law of truth,” we shall be confronted with the answer that truth is its own final authority. In other words, Cohen’s philosophy of life is based upon an original insight into the objective validity of ethical judgments. To be sure, Cohen insisted that philosophy must not start with anything “given” by experience or intuition. But, then, that insistence was an impossibility, to begin with. Cohen’s initial axiom, the requirement that logic and ethics should be “pure,” must itself be assumed. In the final analysis, then, Cohen’s system is based upon the conviction that our ethical experience contains the seal of objective validity. The concept of God, which logically belongs at the beginning of Cohen’s system, further supports this observation that the intuition of the authoritativeness of the moral law and of its ultimate vindication is the starting point of his thought.
Buber’s “Thou-relation” may also be classified as an ethical experience. As we have seen before, this relation is the concentration of the individual in the feeling of love. Whenever this relation appears, communion with the Deity, to a limited extent, is established. “The extended lines of relations meet in the eternal Thou; by means of every particular thou, the primary word addresses the eternal Thou.” It is through love, then, that man reaches out toward the Deity. Without doubt the impulse of non-sexual love should be regarded as ethical in character. Many thinkers viewed the feeling of love as the highest culmination of ethical experience. Buber’s claim that reality can only be attained through the Thou-relation, involves, therefore, the conviction that the road of ethics alone leads to God. Ethical thought and life are the response of man to the call of God. “Dialogue-living” is real, valid and authoritative.
The sense of the omnipresence of God, breaking through the “It-world” with overwhelming suddenness and power, is, to Buber, a valid intuition of reality. Yet, this mystical apprehension of God’s presence is attained only through the long sustained practice of concentrating and directing our entire fund of devotion upon the needs of our fellow-men. The Thou-relation is at once, and essentially both, ethical and religious. It is religious not only in the superficial sense of being commanded by God, but in the deeper and more intimate sense of a direct communion with God.
The philosophies of Cohen and Buber appear to be so contrasting in character that it is difficult to realize that they derive from similar intuitions concerning the objective validity of ethical experience. The assurance of objective reality in the feeling of rightness may be expressed in two ways. It may be construed as arising from our awareness of the reign of a cosmic law or a series of laws, according to which the right acts and attitudes in every conceivable situation are determined with inflexible definiteness. Or, the source of validity of ethics may be identified as the Will of God, and the answer in every situation is accordingly sought through a fresh orientation to the Being of God.
The systems of Buber and Cohen represent extreme developments of these two alternatives, respectively. Cohen began with the recognition of the “lawfulness” of ethical judgments. He noted the similarity in development of both logic and ethics and, in his “Grundgesetz der Wahrheit,” he set forth the requirement of “purity” for both these directions of spirit. “Purity” is, clearly, a technical designation for absolutely perfect and self-sufficient lawfulness. While in his “Ethics,” Cohen stressed this aspect of the ethical will, in his later writings, he came to recognize more and more the importance of the reference to God, which is vaguely implied in the apprehension of ethical values. Buber, on the other hand, chooses to ignore the element of rational lawfulness in ethical experience altogether. The validity of ethical insight is not due to any agreement with a cosmic law, but to the call of the Divine Voice. The reference to God, implied in the Thou-relation, is the one essential element of the ethical, or, as he would say, of the real life.
Cohen’s interest is essentially that of cognition. Hence, in dealing with the meaning of the ethical values, he expressed the intuition of their validity, from the viewpoint of knowing, as “truth.” In his later writings, Cohen conceived of this basic certainty as the guarantee of God. It cannot be emphasized too often that the concept of God is the most central idea in Cohen’s philosophy. Though God is an “idea” and a “methodological concept,” He is nevertheless a real Being, unique and transcendent. We must