The Essential Agus. Steven T. Katz
as the Source of ethics.
Buber’s interest is practical. Scanning the wide field of ethical experience, he concludes that the life of ethics cannot be expressed either in cold principles, or in bare maxims. Ethics is neither thought, nor will, nor feeling, but life, the fulness of life, which is all-inclusive. Wherever self-less love is expressed, there Buber finds the perception of ultimate reality and a reference to God, as the final focus of all earthly Thous—the eternal Thou.
The common elements in the basic insights of both Cohen and Buber are, first, the state of mind in which both the good and the true are sought as one. They start with the feeling that these two goals are somehow one, that there is a common core, accessible to the heart of man, which is at once valid and right. In the “Thou” relation, the will to serve God and the will to know God are merged. Similarly, the “law of truth” stands at the borderlines and unites the processes of thought and will. Secondly, there is a sense of the “reality” of the ethical life—that is, the feeling that the good life is in accord with the eternal structure of things. To Buber, the “dialogue” life is the only “real” life and the reward of morality is the knowledge of being real. Cohen, too, sees no sanction to ethics. The good man has the satisfaction of knowing that his life is steered in the direction of the three “pure” processes of Being. Thirdly, both believe that the ultimate validity of ethical motivation is due to the Will of God. Buber’s thought is expressed in the belief that all love is love of God; every Thou-relation is an address to the eternal Thou. Cohen’s belief takes the form of the principle that the validity of the direction of pure will and its eternity are guaranteed by the God of truth.3
Rosenzweig’s basic intuition is similar to those of Cohen and Buber. It will be remembered that Rosenzweig’s philosophy is based upon the experience of revelation. The love of God streams into the heart of man, who is, thereupon, constrained to reply with love to his fellow-man. Rosenzweig believes that human love is derived from the love of God and that the love of man to his fellow-man is an integral link in the eternal triangle of creation, revelation and redemption. Clearly, then, there is no essential difference between Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s versions of the nature of the ethical-religious experience.
Kaplan’s one belief is, as we have seen, the affirmation that ethical rightness and wrongness are rooted in the ultimate structure of reality. God is the Being, Who assures the final triumph of the ideals of mankind. Kaplan does not describe the line of demarcation between the consciousness of ethical and non-ethical ideals, nor does he indicate how God functions in the world. Obviously, if ethical values are to be accorded supreme ontological status in the scheme of existence, they must be conceived as endowed with distinguishing characteristics, which mark them off decisively from the stream of ordinary phenomena. Nevertheless, in spite of his failure to draw such a line of demarcation, Kaplan, in his own way, bases his religion upon the assertion that our awareness of ethical values includes a perception of their objective validity and a reference to God as their Guarantor.
Thus, we see that the four greatest and most typical exponents of recent Jewish thought agree in basing religion upon the perception of ethical values. Though they represent widely differing philosophical movements, these thinkers agree that, at bottom, religion and ethics are one and that the voice of conscience is somehow also the voice of God. In this belief, modern Jewish philosophers continue to cultivate the original insight of their ancestral faith.
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