Kant on God

Peter Byrne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351924405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Peter Byrne presents a detailed study of the role of the concept of God in Kant's Critical Philosophy. After a preliminary survey of the major interpretative disputes over the understanding of Kant on God, Byrne explores his critique of philosophical proofs of God's existence. Examining Kant's account of religious language, Byrne highlights both the realist and anti-realist elements contained within it. The notion of the highest good is then explored, with its constituent elements - happiness and virtue, in pursuit of an assessment of how far Kant establishes that we must posit God. The precise role God plays in ethics according to Kant is then examined, along with the definition of religion as the recognition of duties as divine commands. Byrne also plots Kant's critical re-working of the concept of grace. The book closes with a survey of the relation between the Critical Philosophy and Christianity on the one hand and deism on the other.

Chapter 1

God and Kant's Critical Project

The aim and the problem

The theme of this book – the status of claims about God in the Critical Philosophy – gains its importance from a number of facts. One is that the Critical Philosophy displays an obvious bi-valence or paradox in its use of the concept of God. One the one hand, God and related concepts are used, appealed to and depended upon by Kant in many key passages of thought and argument. On the other hand, the Critical Philosophy tells us that we can have no knowledge of the divine nature and existence. Early on in the first Critique (in the Preface to the second edition) we encounter the famous statement concerning the notions of God, freedom and immortality: ‘I therefore had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith’ (Bxxx). We will come across many such statements to this effect as we proceed. Further, readers of the first Critique will be familiar with other passages that entail that statements about a transcendent divine being are without sense. So Kant not only denies that we can have knowledge of God; he also appears to deny that there is any meaning to talk about God. This latter point is controversial. Many commentators on Kant’s philosophical theology ignore or deliberately discount Kant’s apparent commitment to the meaninglessness of claims about transcendent entities such as God. And one can see why they do. If the interpreter of Kant on God takes this commitment seriously, then the problem of making sense of Kant’s dependence upon, and positive use of, the concept of God becomes that much more difficult.

It is my contention that Kant’s Critical account of God cannot be properly interpreted unless Kant’s account of the meaning and reference of religious language is taken seriously. The effort must be made to disentangle the threads in it and present it as both coherent and intimately connected with other facets of the Critical Philosophy. I do not claim that I am the first on this particular scene – indeed what I have to say on this score is indebted to others (notably to Keith Ward – see Ward 1972:81ff.). But I will focus on this issue to a greater extent than is usual in English-speaking commentaries on Kant’s philosophy of religion.

I will contend that there is a real sense in which, for Kant, talk about God is meaningless – albeit he thinks we can give it a sense! There is in the Critical treatment of God a passage of thought of the following form: ‘try to construe talk about God in the “normal” way and its meaning evaporates in our hands; to restore that meaning re-interpret it in a radically new (and subjectivist) way’. This is to say that he is a radical revisionist in the philosophy of God: his own account of the limits of knowledge, thought and meaning block off traditional uses of the God-concept, so he must construct a new understanding of what it means to talk of God. The reconstruction Kant offers is undertaken in the spirit of trying to retain key features and uses of the traditional concept of God, but there is radical change nonetheless. Thus my interpretation of Kant on God will yield the conclusion that he was not a theist or a Christian in anything like the standard ways those stances are understood. If we must use modern jargon, we can say he was a post-Christian and post-theistic thinker. Something like this verdict must be entered at the same time as we give due acknowledgement to the fact that the concept of God (and allied concepts such as immortality) played a key role in his Critical system. Here is the tensive, paradoxical character of his philosophy of religion again.

From the above it will be seen that this study will set itself in opposition to a certain trend in recent English-speaking philosophy of religion. This is a trend that turns to Kant and discounts the religious scepticism that I and others see in the Critical Philosophy. Kant is reclaimed for theistic and Christian philosophy. An article in a leading philosophy of religion journal proclaims in its title 'Immanuel Kant: a Christian Philosopher’ (Palmquist 1989; see also Palmquist 2000). In a clutch of articles, John E. Hare contends that Kant had (contrary to virtually all standard interpretations of his moral philosophy) a divine command theory of ethics (Hare 2000a, 2000b, 2001). Here it is implied that Kant’s ethics actually demands a personal deity who commands, rewards and punishes. Note what is at issue here between Hare and earlier interpreters of Kant with whom he is in dispute. There is an abundance of textual material in post-1780 Kantian texts that show Kant thinks we must use the idea of God, and which indicate that this idea includes in its content the notions of a holy lawgiver, a beneficent world-governor and a just judge of all human conduct (see, e.g., Critique₂ 5:131_n). The interpretative question concerns what Kant thinks the use of the idea amounts to. Is the use literal or metaphorical? Is it assertoric or does it merely have the force of an ‘as-if’ posit?

Palmquist and Hare on Kant on religion may be styled ‘revisionists’. They are going against a consensus that has seen Kant as a powerful religious sceptic. The sceptical side to his Critical metaphysics and philosophy of religion serves as a standing challenge to the many philosophers who think that, now Positivism is dead, rationalist philosophical theology can be launched again. Some contemporary philosophers want to do ‘old-style’ philosophical theology. They also respect Kant. So they want to show that he is on their side. There is in addition a very powerful movement in contemporary English-speaking philosophy of religion that is Christian philosophy. Some Christian philosophers want to reclaim Kant. They want to show that Kant was much more religiously orthodox than older interpretations allowed.

Let us return to the topic of Kant as a religious sceptic. Interpretations of Kant on God that see him as an arch-sceptic are very old. Heinrich Heine’s 1835 book Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland signals a common view of Kant as the ultimate religious sceptic. Heine contrasts the quiet external life of the scholar Kant with his destructive, world-crushing ideas (Heine 1979:81). Kant is the great destroyer in the world of thought (82). In contrast to the destructive power of Robespierre, who merely killed a royal family, Kant produces the greater terrorism. Kant killed God (82). This act of assassination was completed in the Critique of Pure Reason through the means of confining human thought to that which may be encountered in experience. The Critical boundary on valid thought leaves us like the prisoners in Plato’s myth of the cave. Plato’s prisoners only know shadows and images of the real things that make up reality outside the cave. Kant’s prisoners can only know of things as they appear to, as they are reflected in, the human mind. Things in themselves, independent of us, are unknowable. God, as a putative thing in itself, thus becomes nicht anders als eine Dichtung (‘nothing other than a work of fiction’, 86). Thus Kant’s message to humanity on the front of his great work should have echoed those of Dante: ‘Abandon hope’. (Heine’s suggestion is unwittingly ironic: it is one of the aims of the Critical Philosophy to assure its students that there is an answer to the deep human question ‘What may I hope?’) Kant, the Robespierre of thought, is, according to Heine, not content with his deicide. He cannot forget about his old servant Lampe and the ordinary good-hearted people he represents. Lampe stands before his master, tears in his eyes at the prospect that the consoling thoughts of traditional religion are delusions. Kant has pity on him. He says to himself: old Lampe must have his God and so I will give him his God back by letting practical reason vouch for God. Thus Kant, having killed God with theoretical reason, tries to enliven God’s corpse through the magic wand of practical reason (89). This is Heine’s reference to Kant’s claim that, though God be unknowable (and perhaps unthinkable) through theoretical reason, practical reason needs to postulate God in order to meet our deep-seated ethical needs. This does not impress Heine. It reminds him of his Westphalian friend who destroys all the street lamps on the road and then, standing in the dark, waxes at length on the practical necessity of street lamps on a dark night. He has only destroyed them in order to show how necessary they are (90–91).

Kant has destroyed God, for Heine. The reintroduction of God through appeal to ethics does not really complete a resurrection of the corpse. It is merely a sop to those with the human weaknesses of his old servant.

We have got two tensions in front of us up to this point. There is the primary tension: on the one hand, we have bucketfuls of religious scepticism in the Critical Philosophy, and, on the other hand, we have a plethora of seemingly positive uses of the notion of God. There is the further tension among his interpreters: between those who accept the scepticism at face value, explaining away the positive uses of ‘God’, and those who accept the positive uses of ‘God’, while ignoring or mitigating the scepticism: Heine versus Hare. I will come down closer to Heine as this study proceeds, but with one major qualification. Any credible study of Kant on God must acknowledge and demonstrate that the positive uses of the notion of God post-1780 are grounded in concerns integral to the Critical Philosophy. They are certainly not there because Kant was worried by the tears of the lower classes, or even because he was anxious about the Prussian censor (though he was worried about him). This desideratum evidently increases the first tension.

Sources and strategies

Consider some strategies for dealing with the primary tension. One such is the invocation of inconsistency. Kant just is an inconsistent writer – some may contend. The negative and positive statements about God in the Critical Philosophy indicate a thinker who cannot make his mind up on the truth and coherence of theism. But this clearly will not do. Critique₁ Bxxx has already been quoted: Kant places limits around what may be known and cognised in order to make room for faith. The Critical limits on cognition do rule out forms of dogmatic religious and metaphysical claims. Yet from the beginning those same limits are there to rule out dogmatic materialism, fatalism and atheism (Critique₁:Bxxxiv). This philosopher’s aim was actually to set up a tensive account of God. The atheists and their allies are defeated not by proving religious dogmas, but by showing that no one has any right to dogmatic assertions, negative or positive, in this area. Religion is saved through a meta-scepticism that undercuts the religious sceptic’s claims, while at the same time it deprives the believer of objective certainty that his or her beliefs are true (or even, perhaps, meaningful). It is intended to be a defence through a kind of undermining of all previous positions on the nature and reality of God.

Having made this point, it must be said that Kant tests the patience of any interpreter committed to a principle of hermeneutical charity. There are things in his philosophy of religion that reveal a mind unresolved or unable to enunciate a single perspective. My discussion of Kant on the so-called ‘moral proof’ in Chapters 5 and 6 will illustrate this point. On this topic he says things which are difficult to make consistent and in some places he does not seem to realise the plain entailments of what he has written elsewhere. While violations of interpretative charity must be kept to a minimum, for otherwise they undermine the very notion of a correct interpretation, we shall not be able to avoid some such violations in what follows.

The issue of the consistency of the post-1780 Kantian corpus on religion raises the important question of what counts as belonging to that corpus. The three great critiques obviously do: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, second edition 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of Judgement (1790). The major and minor works from 1780 to 1800 whose production was actually overseen by Kant must also be included. There are legitimate debates, however, over the relevance of other sources. One such set of sources is the texts created by Kant’s colleagues and students from his lectures. The Academy text of Kant’s Schriften contains lectures on, amongst other topics, ethics, logic, metaphysics and rational theology. The notable lectures on ethics and metaphysics are compilations of notes taken by Kant’s pupils at one or other of his annual lecture series on the relevant subject. Some of these pupils were very eminent thinkers in their own right (the Lectures on Ethics includes a set of notes by J. G. Herder). Most of them were not. It is obvious that we cannot rely on them 100 per cent for completeness and accuracy. The status of the notes on Kant’s lectures on rational theology is relevant to interpreting Kant on God, particularly the Philosophische Religionslehre nach Politz. These lectures date from the early 1780s and were edited by Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz and first published in 1817. They contain some affirmations that are more religiously conservative, less sceptical, than those found in the critiques. They are thus ammunition for those interpreters of Kant’s philosophy of religion I have crudely called ‘revisionists’. This portion of the lectures on rational theology show a Kant apparently more content with traditional, rationalist metaphysics about God than one would expect from the author of the Critique of Pure Reason. A. R. Wood accordingly uses these lectures to suggest that the Critical Philosophy is to a large extent compatible with traditional, rationalist philosophical theology (see Wood 1978, especially 149). The problem we will find in Chapter 4 is that there is one place where the account of religious language in these lectures contradicts that contained in the three critiques, and in numerous other places in the Critical corpus. It seems evident to me that a broad interpretation of Kant on God must be established from the post-1780 writings that he saw to press, and within those particularly from the three critiques, and that this interpretation must take priority in any conflicts with such sources as the lectures on religion. There are comments on God as the legislator of the moral law in notes taken by C. C. Mongrovius of lectures on ethics from the session 1784–85 that provoke similar issues of consistency – this time in relation to Kant’s rejection of theological morality. In the case of Moral Mongrovius II, ways can be found of harmonising Kant’s reported comments with those on the same issues in the critiques.

My interpretation will emphasise the subjectivist strands in Kant’s treatment of religion, even while it acknowledges contrary tendencies toward objectivism. These are strands that make the truth and meaning of religious affirmations relative to human needs. In the jargon of contemporary philosophy of religion, there is a strongly anti-realist thrust in Kant on God. That anti-realist thrust is strikingly supported by the Opus Postumum. This is a set of loose, unbound, remarks written by Kant largely between 1796 and 1803 which were to be the basis for a statement of his final metaphysics. He did not complete the remarks or bring them to an accomplished order. They abound with ‘subjectivist’ comments on God, comments that identify God with the moral law and deny that he is a reality independent of the human mind. To interpreters of Kant who wish to see him as within mainstream theism, the Opus Postumum must be dealt with. It can be seen as embodying a radical change in Kant’s view of God (as did the first editor of the notes, Erich Adickes – see Ward 1972:160). Or it can be dismissed as the unfinished ramblings of a man who was clearly very weak in mind and body in his last years. A contrary tale will be told by those who want to interpret Kant’s account of God in the completed Critical works as being radically subjectivist. Thus Paul Guyer claims that the Opus Postumum makes explicit what is implicit in Kant’s prior writings and that it is wrong to suppose that he would undertake a radical break from earlier views in the last years of his life (Guyer 2000:405). My use of the Opus Postumum will in general terms follow Guyer’s lead.

Does Kant's life settle the interpretative questions?

If there is some tension within and controversy over Kant’s religious views, may one sort matters out by reference to his life? Do biographical materials enable a clarifying light to be shone on his philosophy of religion? The answer to these questions is: there is some light to be shed from study of Kant’s life, but it is not as decisive as we might hope for.

We must first acknowledge the usefulness of the extensive private correspondence of Kant’s that has been preserved. One thing that the correspondence does for us is show that this man set great store by sincerity in speech. In a letter to Moses Mendelssohn of 6 April 1766, Kant stated that the greatest evil that could befall him was losing the self-respect that comes from a sense of honesty. He would never become a person who indulged in fraud. He distinguished between, on the one hand, lacking the courage to affirm in public all the things he was completely convinced of and, on the other, making statements in which he did not believe (Correspondence 10:69).Kant must therefore be read as capable of holding things back in his writings on religion, but we should be wary of accusing him of deliberately saying what he did not believe.

Does a study of his further correspondence tell us what he believed in matters of faith? Kant’s Correspondence is remarkable for the lack of letters in which he writes directly about his religious faith. There is, however, a notable exception in the case of a letter to J. C. Lavater of 28 April 1775 (10:175–9). In response to Lavater’s request for Kant to comment on his (Lavater’s) account of faith and prayer, Kant distinguishes between the teachings of Christ and the report that we have of them. To see these teachings properly we must separate out the moral instruction of the New Testament from its dogmas: ‘These teachings are certainly the fundamental doctrines of the Gospels, what remains can only serve as auxiliary teachings to them’ (10:176). Thus Kant seems to commit himself to a fundamentally deistic view of Christ: he was but a moral teacher. The similarity is strengthened by Kant’s equation of the non-fundamental doctrines with those that we could only know through knowing a historical revelation (10:177–8). Thus: the essential truths of Christianity are its moral teachings and no reliance on historical revelation is necessary to know these. The unspoken but obvious implication is that these moral doctrines are truths of reason, and as such accessible to anyone, anywhere and any time. The letter then adds the thought that we will be conscious of the gap between our evil doings and the holiness of the law and must rely upon some inscrutable means or other by which God will justify us in despite of that evil. In a follow-up letter to Lavater, Kant summarises the essence of his account of true faith as: ‘the sum of all religion consists in righteousness and that we ought to seek it with all our power in the faith i.e. unconditional trust that God will then supply the good that is not in our power [to bring about]’ (10:180). In both letters Kant says we need not strive to know any more about how God might supplement our efforts. We should equally not venerate the teacher of this simple message (Jesus) rather than the message itself or think that anything other than moral conduct will do in orienting ourselves toward God. We should not think that religious ceremonies or confessions of faith are any help in this task...