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| A REFORM JEWISH QUARTERLY |
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Autonomy has been the battle cry of Reform Judaism since the inception
of our movement, for a good reason: it is the philosophical tool we used to
relieve ourselves of the traditional understanding of a binding, obligatory
mitzvah system, many of whose components were uncongenial to modern living.
Autonomy as an important modern moral category is usually ascribed to the German
philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). His locus classicus on the subject is
his short but eloquent Groundwork for the
Metaphysic of Morals, published in 1785.
According to Kant, any system of right or wrong imposed on an individual
from the outside cannot be deemed moral or ethical because freedom must be a
condition of morality.1 Moreover, in order for a duty to truly
obligate a moral agent, that person must think through the duty to the point of
willing it to be a universal obligation.2 Kant formulated all this in
his famous categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim through which you
can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” 3
Nowadays this is known as the principle of universalizability. 4
Moral principles and rules must be knowable in theory universally. To be sure,
autonomy can have many different meanings, such as self-governance, spontaneity,
authenticity, and rational obedience. 5 For the purpose of this essay
I will follow Kenneth Seeskin’s view of autonomy because it stays close to
Kant’s: “An action is autonomous if the maxim one imposes on oneself
conforms to an objective, universal law.” 6
Revealed morality, by definition, is not universally knowable. Only the
recipient of the revelation, like the Israelites at Sinai, knows the content of
revealed morality; therefore it cannot be universalizable, and cannot be moral
on Kantian terms. Any heteronomous system, that is, any behavior system whose
origin is outside the moral agent, like the mitzvah system, is
ipso facto nonmoral. It may be legal, constitutional, conventional,
but not moral. The issue of autonomy cuts to the heart of the mitzvah system:
either we do mitzvot because God commands them in some way (in which case the
mitzvot cannot be moral by Kant’s definition) or we do mitzvot because they
are morally right (in which case their divine origin is irrelevant to their
rightness). This is the dilemma Kant’s theory of autonomy presented and
continues to present to Judaism.
Kant exercised considerable influence on eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century liberal German Jews through such thinkers as Solomon Maimon,
Lazarus Bendavid, and Solomon Steinheim. Kant’s impact on liberal Judaism was
magnified by the late-
nineteenth-century neo-Kantian revival of Hermann Cohen and Ernst
Cassirer. Thus the founders of Reform Judaism in the early- and mid-nineteenth
century operated in an environment saturated with Kantian philosophical thought.
They appreciated his understanding of religion as, essentially, a system of
ethics.
The early Reformers began to apply the principle of autonomy to Judaism.
If the individual Jew cannot accept a mitzvah as right, that is, cannot
self-appropriate or self-legislate a mitzvah as right for him or her, then it
must be rejected as non-moral, if not immoral, and not obligatory. Sometimes
autonomy was discussed in terms of individual conscience, but it all came down
to the same thing: tradition cannot command a Jew; only a Jew can freely command
himself or herself. Thus autonomy provided a very powerful intellectual tool,
coincident with Jews’ emancipation into the modern world.
Radical reformer Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860) illustrated the embrace of
autonomy in the extreme. Michael Meyer has argued that Holdheim’s intellectual
career may be characterized as a search for religious authority. 7
“Authority lay not in the texts at all, but in reason and conscience.”8
In 1847 Holdheim wrote, “Conscience is that indubitable revelation of
religion to which Judaism attaches its teaching. . . .
Every revelation must be verified by the inner voice of conscience.
Reason not only has a weighty say in [individual] matters of religion, rather it
is the most certain touchstone of everything that is taught in the name of
religion.” 9 While few
Reformers went so far as Holdheim in his assertion of Kantian autonomy, Kant’s
ethic of self-legislation has permeated the early movement.
In recent years, among Reform Jewish thinkers, Eugene Borowitz has
devoted the most energy to the issue of autonomy. Chairing the CCAR’s
Centenary Perspective Committee, Borowitz helped to shape the San Francisco
Platform of 1976 to emphasize the role of autonomy in Reform Jewish life:
Reform Jews respond to change in various ways
according to the Reform principle of the autonomy of the individual. . . .
Within each area of Jewish observance Reform Jews are called upon to confront
the claims of Jewish tradition, however differently perceived, and to exercise
their individual autonomy, choosing and creating on the basis of commitment and
knowledge.10
In such writings as “The Autonomous Jewish Self,”11
“Autonomy and Community,”12 and Renewing
the Covenant,13 he
has argued for a highly nuanced understanding of autonomy, in which the freedom
of the individual Jew is balanced against the demands of covenant and community.
Drawing largely upon Buberian categories, Borowitz holds that the self must be
conceived as both individual and social at the same time. Thus he writes,
“[K]nowing that my selfhood is indissolubly involved with God and the Jewish
people means that my sense of Jewish duty now comes with God’s presence behind
it and as part of what I must do as part of the people covenanted to God, albeit
interpreted through my specific individuality.” 14
We in the 1990s are postmodernists, whether we like
it or not. Partly that means that we are acutely aware of our own historical
situatedness, as well as the historical situatedness of all people and all
thought systems. It is ironic to note that at the same time that Kant was
writing, the areas of central and western Europe were experiencing the
diminution of royalty, the emergence of bourgeois culture, and the rise of early
capitalism. In other words, politically, economically, and socially the
individual emerged as the focus of cultural power, at the same time that Kant
was creating a philosophical system of morality which also located all power in
the individual over and against the church and the state. In other words, this
thing we call autonomy is a piece of ideology, not philosophy. It is a thought
system in defense of a particular social order. Autonomy is not an absolute
truth, contrary to what most of modern philosophy has said. 15
And if you don’t believe that the ethic of autonomy
is suspect on these grounds of intellectual history, take a lesson from analytic
philosophy. In analytic philosophy, any time a proposition creates linguistic
problems, there must also be logical and ontological problems as well. Take this
proposition: “Haim ought to be autonomous.” That is a paradox: I am placing
a heteronomous judgment on Haim. Theoretically, only Haim can say “Haim ought
to be autonomous.” For me to say “Haim ought to be autonomous” is a
self-contradiction. In imposing autonomy on Haim, I am violating his autonomy.
16
Or take this proposition: “Haim chooses not to be autonomous.” This catches us in another paradox: in choosing not to be autonomous, Haim is exercising his autonomy. All of this is to demonstrate that this simple philosophical truth of autonomy, upon which Reform Judaism has staked so much, isn’t so straightforwardly truthful after all. 17
Many other difficulties are embedded in this notion of autonomy. Let me
focus on one more as it pertains to kashrut. Let’s say I make this statement:
“I promise to meet Haim tomorrow for lunch.” In so saying, I sacrifice my
autonomy. I give up my freedom in order to meet Haim for lunch tomorrow. I am no
longer free to do what I want at lunchtime tomorrow. Indeed, most of our lives
are made up of commitments, loyalties, communities, and traditions, and they
necessarily restrict our freedom. That is, autonomy is inconsistent with very
important acts of human living. Really, were we to insist on autonomy now and
always, we would strip ourselves of the most basic, fulfilling, and important
facets of our lives––our marriages and friendships, our jobs and our
affiliations, our beliefs and our communities. 18
This brings us to kashrut and Reform Judaism. People are not born into
nothing. “Nobody begins everything anew; each generation relies on what has
been accumulated, in theory as well as in practice, by former generations.”
19 We are born into a family,
a community, a culture, and a tradition. These inheritances of ours do a lot of
good work for us before we get here. They give us holidays, modes of behavior,
and ways even to eat. These are not bad things. Thank God no new child has to
reinvent culture. We are spared having to repeat mistakes of our ancestors and
we are given the building blocks of creating new forms. Even subscription to the
notion of autonomy can take place only within the context of a tradition. In
philosophical circles, autonomy can occur only within a philosophical tradition
that teaches the rightness of autonomy; in other words, the truth of autonomy is
partially heteronomous. Community––philosophical, religious,
political––always constitutes obstacles to autonomy, or, more exactly,
community provides the boundaries in which autonomy can be selectively
exercised.
Here is the dilemma in terms of kashrut and autonomy. In choosing between
keeping kashrut and not keeping kashrut the individual Jew is not choosing
between Jewish dietary rules and his or her own freely invented rules. Rather,
the Jew is choosing between competing heteronomous systems of eating. If an
individual Jew decides not to keep kashrut, then whose system of eating rules
will he or she follow? In American society we enjoy a variety of systems to
choose among, but they all share common, baseline rules that are codified in
public health regulations. These include, for example, prohibitions on the meat
of dogs, horses, rats, and human beings. Ultimately a person’s selection of
eating systems is not freely chosen. These decisions are shaped by a complex
matrix of heteronomous, social rules about eating.
In other words, to my way of thinking, the claim that calling upon Reform
Jews to keep kashrut is a violation of their autonomy is foolish. When it comes
to eating, we are choosing within competing rule-systems about food. Autonomy is
irrelevant. The proper question is: Which community’s rules about eating do
you wish to accept?
1. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the
Metaphysic of Morals. Trans. by H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and
Row, 1964), pp. 99–100.
2. Ibid., 98–99.
3. Ibid., 88.
4. William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973), p. 25.
5. Kenneth Seeskin, “Autonomy and Jewish Thought,” in Daniel Frank
(ed.), Autonomy and Judaism
(Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1992), p. 21. See also Gerald Dworkin,
The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 34–47.
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Meyer, Response to
Modernity, A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 81.
8. Ibid.
9. Quoted in Meyer, p. 413, note 70.
10. Meyer, pp. 392–393.
11. Eugene Borowitz, “The Autonomous Jewish Self,” Modern
Judaism, vol. 4 (1984), pp. 39–55.
12. Eugene Borowitz, “Autonomy and Community,” in Frank (ed.),
Autonomy and Judaism, pp. 9–20.
13. Eugene Borowitz, Renewing the
Covenant (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1991),
especially chapter 12, “The Social Side of Self-hood,” pp. 170–181.
14. Borowitz, “Autonomy and Community,” p. 20.
15. Postmodern ethics has as its hallmark “post-autonomy.” See Susan
E. Shaprio’s rumination on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical category of the
heteronomous Other in her “Toward a Postmodern Judaism: A Response,” pp.
85–86, in Steven Kepnes, Peter Ochs and Robert Gibbs (eds.), Reason
after Revelation: Dialogues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1998).
16. Dworkin, p. 39.
17. Ibid.
18. Dworkin, pp. 21–33.
19. Ze’ev Levy, “Tradition, Heritage and Autonomy in Modern Jewish
Thought,” in Frank, Autonomy and Judaism,
p. 41.
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