Several scholars have noted the affinity of the German Orthodox thinker Isaac Breuer (1883–1946) for the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.Footnote ¹ In fact, legend has it that Breuer had two large pictures hanging over the desk in his study: one of his grandfather Samson Raphael Hirsch and, next to it, a picture of the philosopher from Königsberg, as if in perfect harmony. Just as Maimonides, eight hundred years earlier, had tried to reconcile the biblical Moses with Aristotle in the Guide of the Perplexed, Breuer attempted to explain Hirsch's theology using Kantian terminology. But if Maimonides interpreted the Torah of Moses to fit the needs of Aristotelian metaphysics, Breuer did the opposite: he had Kant's epistemology yield to the needs of his own interpretation of the Torah.

The present paper will focus on this very process; while others have pointed out the surprising use of Kantian terms and concepts in Breuer, a thorough analysis of the validity of Breuer's interpretation of Kant is still missing.Footnote ² I will explore whether Breuer's incorporation of theorems from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason into his own theology can be harmonized with Kant's original intentions, as I seek to determine whether Breuer's use of Kant in his writings is legitimate, at least in the technical sense of correctly applying Kantian terms. I will clarify whether Breuer is offering an original reading of traditional Jewish theological doctrines in the light of Kantian methodology or, instead, simply adopting Kantian language to foster his own theological agenda. This is a decisive distinction, and Breuer's own answers to this question are more than ambiguous: the words he uses in his praise of Kant's epistemology could almost be called “pathetic”;Footnote ³ on the other hand, he claims that he wants to use Kant “as a weapon for the mobilization of the Jews” of his time and specifically not as an enlightening “torch to the understanding of Judaism.”Footnote ⁴

Another dimension of this distinction relates to context. In Breuer's day, Kant was the favored philosopher of important Jewish thinkers, several of whom published influential essays that claimed a close agreement between Kantian philosophy and the rational essence of Judaism in general and the ethical teachings of Jewish literature in particular.Footnote ⁵ Furthermore, Hermann Cohen, the first Jewish ordinarius of humanities at a German university, led the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and published several books paving the way for a radical reinterpretation of Kant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But while those liberal neo-Kantian thinkers tended to place the inner conformity between Judaism and Kant in the field of ethics, the Orthodox Breuer identified it exclusively within Kantian epistemology. In this field, Breuer claims, Kant “advanced as far as the threshold of the Torah.”Footnote ⁶ The Critique of Practical Reason, however, says Breuer, disappointed him greatly. Compared to his revolutionary experience in studying the first Critique, according to his autobiography Breuer found Kant's moral philosophy to be not in the least revealing.Footnote ⁷ He accuses Kant's Categorical Imperative of supplying only the formal requirements of a moral law, not its content, adding that the content of the law of freedom resides exclusively in the divine revelation of the Torah, in which Kant had no share.Footnote ⁸

Despite this important difference between Breuer and the liberal Jewish followers of Kant vis-à-vis the importance of Kantian ethics, Breuer and the liberals also have something in common: both sides agree that Kant himself was more or less ignorant of the essence of Judaism. Moreover, Kant's oft-quoted advocacy of the “euthanasia of Judaism,”Footnote ⁹ which for obvious historical reasons earned considerable attention from his Jewish interpreters,Footnote ¹⁰ interests neither Hermann Cohen nor Breuer. Cohen compares Kant's writings about Judaism to Newton's commentary on the Book of Revelation and writes that we should take both thinkers seriously in their fields of expertise—which is not “Bibelforschung” (biblical scholarship) but philosophy. Breuer, on the other hand, does not even expect Kant to understand Judaism “since he has not stood before Mount Sinai.”Footnote ¹¹

Breuer's Theology

Concerning epistemology, Breuer basically draws on the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, i.e. things as we perceive them with our senses versus the things-in-themselves, the Dinge an sich. Breuer posits three concepts in Judaism that cannot be understood properly if referred to as phenomena: God, God's Torah, and the process of the creation of the world ex nihilo. God, Torah, and creation are things-in-themselves for Breuer; what we perceive of them is not their true essence (which we will never be able to understand), but a projection of the supersensory world into the world of our senses. The Torah as appearance must not be confused with the Torah an sich, and similarly the world of nature should not be confused with the world of creation, where, for example, miracles and prophecy are possible on a transcendent, metahistorical level.

For Breuer, metahistory is the mediating theological link between reason and mysticism. It is basically an exclusivist vision of Judaism where “Jews survive and flourish on a plane of history distinct from the ephemeral plane on which the rest of the nations of the world rise and fall,” as David Myers put it.Footnote ¹² Because only the Jews continuously experience revelation, Breuer argues, they are able to comprehend history an sich, that is, metahistory. Israel is the only nation aware of God's action in history—his selective interference with human history—and therefore Israel can act according to God's will, which is above history as experienced by other nations. Metahistory is thus not timeless but above time—because time, following Kant, belongs to the world of the senses—just as the Torah an sich is timeless and eternally valid, while every new generation of Jews puts it into practice as it appears to them.

Breuer's idea of God himself as ultimately a noumenon suggests an ontological reality, beyond our understanding yet nevertheless imposed on us as appearance by way of the creative act; and the purpose of creation, for Breuer, is revelation. In Maimonidean fashion, he writes that the transcendent God an sich is an “incomprehensible puzzle, the eternal mystery, no relationship is able to penetrate Him, thoughts tumble into confusion whenever they wish to approach His nature”;Footnote ¹³ his essence is not revealed in creation. The God as appearance is the God who is revealed in the world, thus revealing not his essence, but only a particular kind of relationship with which he enters the world.

Breuer introduced this concept of God-in-himself in his book Elischa from 1928.Footnote ¹⁴ The distinction between the world of nature, where natural law and scientific knowledge are valid, and the world of creation, where divine law rules instead, is already developed in The World as Creation and Nature from 1926,Footnote ¹⁵ but the Kantian language does not appear until Breuer's major work, The New Kuzari, in 1934Footnote ¹⁶; from this point forward, the two worlds are identified as the world as appearance and the world-in-itself, respectively.

Moreover, Breuer extends the same terminology to the Torah. Torah an sich thus turns out to be the true essence of God's law, whose basic feature is a “creation-like givenness…which is removed from our perception and has to remain completely unscathed.”Footnote ¹⁷ While here the ontological aspect of Breuer's Torah-in-itself is only hinted at by the word “givenness,” later in the modern Kuzari dialogue it becomes obvious that Torah-in-itself has “unimpeachable objectivity.”Footnote ¹⁸ With all this, Breuer is not consistent in the use of his concepts: sometimes it seems that “Torah as appearance” is specifically identified with the Oral Law of Judaism (Breuer also calls it “Torah of the spoken word”), as when he says that the “Torah of the spoken word contains the constitutive rules according to the application of which the Torah-in-itself can be ‘perceived,’”Footnote ¹⁹ leaving open the possibility that the Written Torah is identical with the Torah an sich—yet he sometimes distinguishes between the comprehensible Torah of the written word and Torah an sich, to which we simply “have to surrender ourselves with our intellectual powers.”Footnote ²⁰

Breuer's Concept of Reason

My examination of the legitimacy of Kantian terminology in Breuer's theology will require a short excursion into the underlying concept of reason, in the light of the last quote. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has often been misunderstood as degrading reason by demonstrating its limitations to overenthusiastic rationalists. But in fact, the word critique here means nothing but analysis, and Kant's groundshaking efforts are directed at the opposite: he wants to save the rule of reason in philosophy precisely by finding and defining the spheres where reason can achieve trustworthy results and thereby exiling others from this island of truth to the wide and stormy oceans where we are misled by empty hopes and drawn into adventures that we cannot bring to an end, but are also unable to cease from.Footnote ²¹ In terms of epistemology, this would mean that all human cognition must be based on sensual perception—counterbalanced, categorized, and connected to judgments by those parts of reason that are limited to the understanding of the world of appearances. Without this indispensable supervision by the intellect, cognition (Erkenntnis), according to Kant, would be impossible.

Breuer, though, does not follow this path. In his New Kuzari, a skeptical young Jew asks the book's hero (with whom Breuer clearly identifies) for a proof of the divine origin of the Torah that would make his doubts about the truth of revelation disappear. Breuer's hero emphatically answers this request in the negative, because the only source for such a proof could be reason. If such a proof were possible, “reason would be judge over God and Torah; then the Torah's claim of giving directions to reason would be an instance of ludicrous presumption.”Footnote ²² Therefore, asserts Breuer, we have to be grateful to Kant because he once and for all refuted all possibility of proving the existence of God metaphysically—a futile attempt in the first place that only amounts to blasphemy.Footnote ²³

This deliberate renouncing of the rule of reason when it comes to Torah places Breuer at times within the Jewish mystical tradition, despite his Kantianism and his many attempts to mediate between the mystical and philosophical elements of his theology, as in the concept of metahistory. As Alan Mittleman points out, “before long, Breuer will blend the Kantian an sich with the cabbalistic ein sof to explicate the foci of Judaism.”Footnote ²⁴ Interestingly, Gershom Scholem noted this tendency in Breuer's theology early on in a contemporary review of Breuer's New Kuzari, written in 1934 for the Jüdische Rundschau. Without even mentioning Breuer's Kantian tendencies in the book, Scholem praised it—maybe against the true intention of the author (but very much in accordance with his own)—as a “triumphant re-entry of kabbalah into orthodox thought” and calls it “the most resolute effort to recover this rejected cornerstone” of Judaism.Footnote ²⁵

But even apart from mysticism, by Breuer's time there was already a long tradition in modern Jewish thought of what might be called an agnostic use of Kant for the purposes of religious Judaism. One of the first and most important thinkers of this school was Manuel Joel, the first philosopher to teach at the Breslau Rabbinical Seminary and later the chief rabbi of the town. In 1857, Joel wrote in his review of a book by another Jewish Kantian, Salomon Ludwig Steinheim, that with the Kantian critique of reason “religion has lost its only enemy, or at least its only dangerous enemy: metaphysical speculation.” This thought, which in fact presupposes the impossibility of a true harmony between philosophy and religion, soon became the credo of a more conservative trend of Jewish interpretation of Kant. Joel fears that “if reason can, under its own power, explain the supernatural and formulate provable definitions about it, as if it were a given object, then no positive dogma of belief will be able to keep reason within bounds—to the contrary, the dogmas of belief will receive both their form and content from the single authority of philosophical demonstration.” But, contrary to the later view of Breuer, Joel suggests that in cases where religion and philosophy stand in antagonistic contradiction we take refuge in “Kant's sobriety” and simply leave the question unresolved, because it is beyond our intellectual abilities. He writes that Kant's central question regarding the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori, that is, about the possibility of a scientific metaphysics, suddenly revealed all the false pretenses of reason. Both those who were talking about the supernatural with apodictic certainty and those who denied its existence altogether were exposed by Kant as intellectual imposters who extended the use of reason beyond its possible limits. But, again contrary to Breuer, Joel was content, even satisfied, with the result of this Kantian liberation of religion: eternal uncertainty about the very existence of God—except in the subjective belief of the religious individual.

This agnostic reading of Kantian epistemology facilitated the view, according to Joel, “that religion could again run up its victorious banner,”Footnote ²⁶ in the sense that the religious rationalist is relieved by Kant of the necessity of winning the intellectual battle regarding metaphysics, or in other words, that there is no longer a necessity to convince one's opponents of the existence of God by way of speculation. This does not mean however, as Breuer seems to understand it, that Kant's famous phrase “I must therefore abolish knowledge to make room for belief”Footnote ²⁷ refers to the belief in supernatural revelation. What Kant meant by belief here was “Vernunftglaube,” belief in and based on reason, for he argues that objective religious truth, first and foremost the existence of God, can never be established with certainty. All proofs of God's existence confuse secure knowledge (Einsicht) with the subjective need (Bedürfnis) for reason to explain, for example, the apparently well-ordered world with a first cause. In order to orient itself in the dark night of the extrasensory, reason, according to Kant, tends to assume or to presuppose what can never be demonstrated objectively. Thus, for Kant, there is never more than a sufficient but subjective reason to assume that God exists. To be sure, pure Vernunftglaube can never be turned into knowledge, but it is also no superstition—it is a hypothesis of reason. Kant calls it also “a compass or signpost in the field of the supernatural” and determines explicitly that this “belief of reason” (Vernunftglaube) “must be taken as the basis for every other form of belief, even for every revelation.”Footnote ²⁸ The concept of God springs from reason for Kant: every supernatural appearance one might experience must first be tested against an autonomous, rational concept of God to assume the character of an epiphany. If reason is denied the right to speak first, superstition is the inevitable result.

With this background, we should now be able to take a closer look at two aspects of Breuer's use of the famous Kantian concept of the Ding an sich: first, whether or not this concept in Kant is methodologically the same as that applied by Breuer to God, Torah, and creation; and second, the transformation the concept of Ding an sich underwent in Jewish thought, starting after Kant and through Breuer's time, given that fundamental philosophical developments were taking place of which Breuer was most likely aware.

Kant's Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena

At the end of Transcendental Analytics, in a summary of his teachings on how cognition is possible and what can safely be known, Kant inserts a long and oft-quoted chapter called On the Basis for the Division of All Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena. It is here that we find one of the best definitions of the famous thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich. Cognition is, according to Kant, twofold, comprising both sensuality and understanding: “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.”Footnote ²⁹ But, Kant adds later, although it is impossible to know an object if we remove all thought from empirical perception, the opposite—to think of an object without perceiving it with our senses—is not impossible. At the same time, things we know this way do not increase the number of objects, because we cannot assume that there is another form of intuition (Anschauung) than that perceived through our senses.Footnote ³⁰ Thus we end up with the same total number of given objects, all of them at the same time perceived by sensuality and thought of by the intellect, with (or without) empirical correspondence. This latter concept, the “empty” thoughts of an object, is what Kant calls a noumenon, a concept that, though it does not contain logical contradictions, has no objective reality. It is an object of pure reason with the whole purpose of limiting the given things to the empirical world:

In other words, we need the concept of the noumenon, according to Kant, only in order to limit to the world of the senses what we can know of the objects in it. Reason demands, nevertheless, that there is more than that—but the nature of this more is beyond our understanding. Thus, the Ding an sich is only of negative use; it tells us what parts of the objects we are not able to know.

It is interesting to note that this concept of the noumenon has been misunderstood from the time of the first Kant recipients. We have a remark in a text written by Heinrich Heine in 1834 pointing to a misunderstanding similar to what we will find in Breuer. Explaining German idealistic philosophy to a French audience, Heine writes in the section about Kant that “some teachers” (whom he is not willing to name) made the mistake of believing that the distinction between phenomena and noumena in Kant is a distinction between “things that exist for us and things that don't exist for us.” But this is an “Irish bull” of philosophy, says Heine, who adds that Kant in fact was giving only a limiting concept.Footnote ³²

The original Kantian distinction is thus not between two homonymous objects with different characteristics, as Breuer seems to understand it. In Kantian epistemology, there is no room for two distinct worlds, i.e., a world of nature and, parallel to it, a world of creation where a different law, the law of God, rules. Within Kantian epistomology, consequently, Breuer cannot save the biblical miracles in the Torah an sich, as opposed to the Torah as appearance, because according to Kant a Torah an sich cannot have positive cognizable content; it would be only of negative employment.Footnote ³³ “The division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and the world into a world of the senses and a world of the understanding,” writes Kant unmistakably, is “quite inadmissible”; and, to make it even clearer, in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he has added, in spaced characters, “with a positive meaning.”Footnote ³⁴ But this “positive division” seems to be exactly what Breuer is undertaking when he claims to be able to give his Torah an sich a positive content of miracles and superhuman prophets.Footnote ³⁵

At the basis of this claim is probably Breuer's assumption that the objective reality of his concepts of God and Torah is unchallengeable.Footnote ³⁶ From this starting point of Torah's objectivity, Breuer deduced the sensible world, where we only perceive the appearances of those concepts—with all the well-known shortcomings of human intuition. In Kant, however, the process goes in the opposite direction: it begins with what we can positively know and only later introduces a concept that would limit this knowledge from the outside. This concept though, the idea of the Ding an sich, can only define where sensibility ends, but cannot affirm anything positive beyond it.Footnote ³⁷

Post-Kantian Jewish Philosophers and the Ding an sich

Whatever the reason that Breuer adopts the Kantian concept of the things-in-themselves as objective reality, it is striking that this very concept had previously been attacked by the first Jewish critics of Kant, only a short time after the first Critique was published. From the autodidactic genius of Salomon Maimon to the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and Hermann Cohen there is a consistent rejection of the independent Ding an sich. While there always existed a group of thinkers that assumed (like Breuer) the reality of things-in-themselves to be independent of the subject as transcendent entities, Jewish Kantians generally belonged to the school, originating with Maimon, that directed its efforts toward resolving the contradiction such an assumption posed for the essential doctrine of the Critique of Pure Reason, i.e., restricting knowledge to the realm of the appearances. In this regard it might be interesting to analyze how much Orthodox religious views affect the respective thinkers' relation to the two differing schools, for, at least according to Samuel Atlas, the originator of the first group was Kant's friend Johann Schulz, the Königsberg pastor and court chaplain. But this analysis is beyond the scope of the present study.Footnote ³⁸

When Salomon Maimon returned to Berlin after Mendelssohn's death in 1786, he decided to study the Critique of Pure Reason, a book that he had often heard mentioned but had never personally seen. Reading the work several times, he made notes and explanations until, at last, he had completed his answer to Kant, a book called Versuch über die Transscendentalphilosophie.Footnote ³⁹ Seeking an evaluation, Maimon submitted his interpretation of Kant to Marcus Herz, an early Jewish follower of critical philosophy, but Herz recommended sending the book straight to Kant himself. The reply from Königsberg became famous: none of my adversaries has so well understood me and my main question as Herr Maimon, wrote Kant, and only a few of these have so much brilliancy that they could compose such a profound analysis.Footnote ⁴⁰ What, among other points of disagreement, made Maimon an “adversary” was obviously his rejection of the Kantian concept of the Ding an sich. In his Philosophical Dictionary from 1791, Maimon summarizes this rejection thus: “According to Herr Kant, the Ding an sich is something beyond our knowledge to which our concept [Begriff] or our perception of the same Ding refers. I maintain, however, that it is in this sense that the Ding an sich is only an empty word without any meaning inasmuch as we can neither prove the existence of such a Ding nor conceptualize it. According to my theory, the Ding an sich, as well as the concept and the perception of this Ding, are all one and the same in an objective sense, and differ only when seen from the subjective point of view, that is, concerning the completeness of our knowledge.”Footnote ⁴¹ Since both conditions for the cognition of objects must be met—sense perceptions as well as understanding—Maimon redefines the meaning of the Ding an sich as the ideal end of the infinite approximation of both conditions. Interestingly, he uses the medieval terminology, “matter” and “form,” in this context, instead of the Kantian terms “concept” and “intuition”: “For the actual thinking of a form, or for a rule of understanding, matter to which this form refers must necessarily be given. On the other hand, though, the completion of the thinking of an object requires that nothing in this object be given anymore, but rather all be thought. Since we can reject neither of these conditions as illegitimate, we are obliged to meet both of them. The solution to this antinomy is that we constantly complete our thinking—which causes matter to approximate form into infinity.”Footnote ⁴²

Maimon thus reinterpreted the thing-in-itself to be nothing but the idea of completed knowledge, attained in a process of permanent increase through the activity of human understanding—a new thought that would become very important for post-Kantian speculation and the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen. Albert Lewkowitz even saw Maimon's doctrine as “the very origin of the Marburg philosophy of pure cognition.”Footnote ⁴³

Cohen himself dedicated an entire chapter of his first book interpreting Kant to the concept of the Ding an sich.Footnote ⁴⁴ This chapter's ultimate goal was, as Cohen himself declares, to finally silence this “shallow talk”Footnote ⁴⁵ that Kant limited knowledge to appearances of the objects, but nevertheless left, next to the appearances, the unknowable Ding an sich. There exists no thing-in-itself corresponding to each and every knowable object, says Cohen. The Ding an sich is rather (as in Maimon) the “epitome of scientific knowledge”Footnote ⁴⁶ and hence is infinite, since the number of objects of experience is endless—it generates itself again in every object. But there is more in that Kantian concept, according to Cohen. Scientific knowledge is never completed: it contains not only what has already been ascertained, but also open questions and unsolved problems that point infinitely toward the future; every true concept is a new question. The Ding an sich, says Cohen, must therefore also be the expression of these unsolved problems that are contained in the answers of our knowledge. As such, it is also a challenge.Footnote ⁴⁷

At the same time, according to Cohen, the Ding an sich is epistemologically a postulate of pure reason; it is not an object of experience but is inevitable for the understanding. For this reason, Cohen argues, the thing-in-itself is, essentially, the same as the Kantian “unconditional,” i.e., it is one of the “regulative ideas.” Ideas, according to Kant, have the same characteristics as the Ding an sich, if they are understood as the infinite challenge to complete our knowledge (and not as equivalent to each and every appearance). “Transcendental ideas” in Kant are “concepts of pure reason, in that they view all knowledge gained in experience as being determined through an absolute totality of conditions. Such ideas are not arbitrarily invented, but are imposed by the very nature of reason itself, and therefore stand in necessary relation to the whole employment of understanding. Finally, …no object adequate to the transcendental idea can ever be found within experience.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Breuer and Hermann Cohen

Regarding Cohen's identification of the Ding an sich as an idea, it might have been tempting for Breuer to agree with him.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Breuer assumes both a God and a Torah an sich, there is good reason for him to accept the classification of the thing-in-itself as idea. After all, it is Kant (at least in the first Critique) who declares God to be a regulative idea of absolute necessity for reason that is nevertheless without adequate expression in experience. But such an agreement would have required Breuer to give up his claim of the “unimpeachable objectivity” of God and Torah, a concession he was neither willing nor able to make. For Cohen (and also for Kant), the idea of God as well as all other ideas are first of all transcendental and not transcendent,Footnote ⁵⁰ meaning, they do not point forward, beyond all knowledge, but backward: the idea is a “condition for the possibility of knowledge.”

We know that Breuer was aware of the option to accept God as an idea: In one passage of his Elischa, Breuer even directly refers to this point, making it unmistakably clear that, for him, the concept of God as an idea—in which direction his Kantianism would urge him—is out of the question. In his discussion of the uniqueness of God, Breuer refers to Maimonides' radical negative theology in the Guide of the Perplexed,Footnote ⁵¹ and explains correctly that, for Maimonides, “it seemed to be an offence against the ‘oneness’ of God should one wish to comprehend God even only as the unity of the multiplicity of essential characteristics.”Footnote ⁵² In Maimonides' eyes, adds Breuer, “the same was valid for the assumption of a unity in the manifoldness of conditions, even indeed for a unity in the contemplative confrontation of subject and object.”Footnote ⁵³ But since Breuer seems to have realized that this interpretation of the Guide would lead him straight into Cohen's concept of God, he is quick to add that Maimonides “did not wish to thereby sublimate God into an ‘idea,’ but quite the contrary.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In the explanation that follows of what the contrary of an idea might be, Breuer is clearly preoccupied with saving God's ontological objectivity to such an extent that all Kantian epistemology gets temporarily suspended. An idea in Kant is more or less equivalent to Breuer's in situ description of the contrary of an idea: “the absoluteness…above each and every synthesis”Footnote ⁵⁵—and thus one can readily surmise that Cohen would have hardly felt defeated by this argument.Footnote ⁵⁶ Just as abruptly, in fact already in the next sentence, Breuer returns to the terminology of the Critique of Pure Reason, saying of Maimonides that “it is with supreme intellectual lucidity that he differentiates between God-in-Himself and the relations between God and the world and man.”Footnote ⁵⁷

But in spite of this negative allusion, Breuer's relation to Cohen is more complex, at least before World War I, when Cohen was still alive. A further elaboration on this relationship might provide insight on Breuer's motives for using Kantian language. In 1906–07 Breuer studied for two semesters in Marburg, but prided himself on never having attended one of Cohen's lectures. This is not because Breuer personally rejected Cohen as a philosopher, and some textual evidence even supports the opposite view. In 1909, Breuer wrote what should actually become his doctoral dissertation, a work about the concept of law in Rudolf Stammler.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this work, he refers approvingly to Cohen several times, at one point calling the philosophical theory of contracts (Vertragstheorie) “a regulative principle in the sense of Kant,”Footnote ⁵⁹ and substantiating this statement with a reference to Cohen's Ethics of Pure Will, where Cohen indeed correlates political and even interpersonal ethics with the theory of legal contracts.Footnote ⁶⁰ In addition, in 1911 Breuer published in the Orthodox weekly Der Israelit an article about Cohen's interpretation of Judaism, writing that Cohen's “ethical idealism in his concept of history cannot be praised enough, and must absolutely be taken to heart, especially in times like ours.… His unconditional trust in the future of Judaism, based on his deep understanding of the meaning of Judaism for the history of the world, and the manful pride of the philosopher who is not only an agent of this tradition but also committed to it—all these are traits that we are not used to finding anymore in our Jewish notables [Geheimräten].”Footnote ⁶¹

The key to understanding the difference between Breuer and Cohen is thus not the interpretation of Kant or of Judaism—but the very relatedness of Judaism and Kant. What Breuer fundamentally disagrees with is Cohen's use of Kant to interpret Judaism. In a 1915 review of Cohen's Deutschtum and Judentum, Breuer writes that, in contrast to Mendelssohn, who saw the essence of Judaism in the law, Cohen emphasizes the doctrines of Judaism: “God, the soul, atonement and messianism are the foundation pillars of his religion for him—and concerning those four elements he finds absolute agreement with the ethics of Kant—and that of Cohen.”Footnote ⁶² But this Kantian view would remove Cohen even further from traditional Judaism than Mendelssohn was, Breuer declares. Breuer's own approach to Kant was “to study Kant as a Jew would,” and in particular to find “in his arsenal the weapons…to effectively defend the holy terrain of Torah, its nation and its Jewish character.”Footnote ⁶³ With such an approach, Breuer's reading of Kantian epistemology must naturally be influenced by the goal of harmonizing it with his apologetic purposes, thus substituting a systematic analysis of Kantian concepts with an eclectic adoption of ideas suitable for what Breuer saw as necessary to defend Judaism against the “spies” who use only “their hearts and their eyes” to understand the world.Footnote ⁶⁴ What emerges is a self-fulfilling prophecy, an interpretation of Kant as if he were intrinsically opposed to the empirical world of the senses and emphasized instead the higher importance of a spiritual world—which Breuer calls the world of creation, the world-in-itself.

The Concept of Freedom in Kant and Breuer

Surprisingly, a prooftext for Breuer's concept of freedom exists in Kant's work—but this passage occurs in the Critique of Practical Reason, a book that Breuer completely rejected for its alleged paucity of results and the absence of any reference to the Torah of Israel. The context of this passage is Kant's defense of his belief in creation against Spinozism, “in which space and time are essentially determinations of the original being itself.” By contrast, space and time for Kant have an idealistic character and thus belong in the realm of thinking; they do not apply to the things-in-themselves. If this is true, says Kant, then the creation of sensible beings in this world “is a creation of things-in-themselves, since the concept of creation does not belong to the sensible way of representing existence or causality, but can only be referred to as noumena. Consequently, if I say of beings in the sensible world that they are created, I so far regard them as noumena.”Footnote ⁶⁵

While this statement could have come from one of Breuer's books, its actual background is the shifted philosophical focus in Kant's second Critique, as compared to his epistemology. While the Critique of Pure Reason is dominated by the doctrine of transcendental ideas whose reality is nonobjective (that is, their essential meaning is to relegate our empirical knowledge to the contemplation of the unconditional), in Kant's ethics these considerations are discontinued and replaced by the theory that belief in reason can make it possible to affirm the existence of God, freedom, and immortality as absolute realities in the sphere of intelligible being. In this sense, the passage quoted above must be understood using the idea of creation, with Kant attempting to lift the concept of freedom above the empirical world, where strict determinism and causality rule. The passage continues, “…if it is now possible to affirm freedom without compromising the natural mechanism of actions as appearances …, then it cannot make the slightest difference that the acting beings are creatures, since creation has to do with their intelligible but not their sensible existence….”Footnote ⁶⁶

While the sudden introduction of two distinctive forms of existence of objects in this passage might be of interest to Breuer, the underlying Kantian concept of freedom is in no way acceptable to him. It is this very idea of a free will determined only by pure reason that Breuer cannot accept as a moral law—and at this point he is making essentially the same argument as he did regarding theoretical knowledge: if Kant's Categorical Imperative was the law of freedom, human beings would be in the place of God.Footnote ⁶⁷ According to Breuer, Kant's ethics advanced only to the threshold of Judaism and not beyond: Kant realized “on his own” that “the world of covetousness is a world of human slavery, that the will to become free cannot find its motives in covetousness, [and] even that freedom of will can only be based on law—a law, of course, that is independent of the empirical world—this decisive point, where everything cries for the law of freedom of the Torah, Kant has reached—but here he imploded.”Footnote ⁶⁸

This strong language could probably be construed as the result of a difficult process in which Breuer had struggled to come to terms with Kantian ethics—as opposed to what he writes in his autobiography: that he has read the second Critique only for reasons of completeness.Footnote ⁶⁹ As I have pointed out, in his earlier works Breuer seems to be much closer to the Categorical Imperative than he would have us believe toward the end of his life. In his essay on Stammler, for example, he argues as follows against Stammler's opinion that moral law isolates man: “Moral law postulates as the only possible criterion for the benevolence of an action that this action is considered as required by all intelligent beings. Only this action is good that happens because it should be subject to an all-embracing rule.”Footnote ⁷⁰ And in the review article on Cohen he goes as far as conceding that he fully agrees with Cohen “when Cohen finds that the main features of Kantian ethics are rooted in Judaism.” Breuer writes that he himself is “far from denying the intrinsic relations that connect Judaism with Kantian ethics, relations that are palpable for everybody who knows.”Footnote ⁷¹ Where Breuer originally found fault with Cohen was only in that his “ethical extract of Judaism represents a half-truth—and half-truths are in general more dangerous than complete lies.”Footnote ⁷²

But ethical law as such is also for Breuer universal and necessarily true. Concerning the concept of law in general, Breuer distinguishes between secular civil law and Jewish law. While the former is a classical ius positivum—expedient, always changeable, and constantly adapted to circumstances and social needs and interests—Jewish law is eternal, God-given, and above the influence of shifting human interests. The distinction itself is again supposed to be Kantian, but of course it ignores Kant's decisive emphasis on the source of the law in human reason alone: “We shall not look upon actions as obligatory because they are the commands of God,” Kant famously wrote, “but shall regard them as divine commands because we have an inward obligation to them.”Footnote ⁷³ Nevertheless, here one might find another (perhaps unintentional) affinity between Breuer and Hermann Cohen, who always tried to downplay the difference between autonomous and heteronomous ethics in Judaism.Footnote ⁷⁴ Cohen holds that there is no contradiction between the law of God and the autonomy of the moral will, but rather “there is only a difference in the formulation of this concept, the same difference as there is between religion and ethics.”Footnote ⁷⁵ For Cohen, Judaism as a religion simply denies that any contradiction exists between its God and rational ethics, for the Jewish God is both the originator and the guarantor (Bürge) of moral law. To be obedient to this God is not forcing heteronomous principles upon human reason.

When Breuer formulated his own ethical theory in 1926, however, little remained of the idea of Kantian ethics being rooted in Judaism. In the eleventh chapter of his The World as Creation and Nature, Breuer writes that the seat of morality in man is the soul, but the soul does not belong to the body and therefore not to the “world as nature”; it belongs rather to the world of creation (the world an sich), which means it is not knowable for us. When it comes to ethics, “the intellect in man is silent, it knows no ought.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Ethical law must be revealed to man, according to the mature Breuer, who calls the Torah the “constitutional law” of the world of creation, that is, of the kingdom of God. This, of course, is the ideal world. It follows that the world of appearances is removed from the ideal world to the precise extent that we disregard the divine commandments. As opposed to Kant, Breuer now holds that we cannot understand the law of morality; the human soul—where this law is preserved—is unable to replace God, as was the case for Kant. On the contrary, the soul is itself a creation of God, which makes human beings reliant on revelation for everything that concerns morality—without even the possibility of verifying the truth of this revelation.Footnote ⁷⁷ Since Breuer is not interested in the Kantian question of what makes a law divine, he can simply substitute Torah for the Categorical Imperative. Kant's complex response to the question of how man can be extricated from the determinism of the world of nature is replaced in Breuer with the divinity of the Torah, which in itself is demonstrated per definitionem.