 Yet this contrast with Kant actually betrays a deeper similarity. Kant sees ethical action as the route to autonomy precisely because it is through practical reason that we transcend our own nature and make contact with the noumenal realm. In effect therefore, and despite Kant’s wish to keep religion and ethics apart from a motivational perspective, Kant and Leibowitz are in agreement that human autonomy requires that man transcend his phenomenal nature. The difference is that while for Kant ethics is, in a certain sense, transcendent – at least transcending man’s empirical if not his rational nature – for Leibowitz ethics remains a function of human nature and therefore mired in the “phenomenal” realm destined never to escape. Leibowitz’s view of autonomy appears to depend again on his thoroughgoing “naturalism” in regard to the physical and human world. Only the realm of mitzvoth can effect the sort of Leibowitzian “transcendence” that yields autonomy.