Subjectivity and Irreligion

Atheism and Agnosticism in Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

Matthew Alun Ray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351897105
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book asks specific philosophical questions about the underlying structure of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's thoughts on atheism and agnosticism; thoughts that represent one of the most concerted attacks on monotheistic religion in modern philosophy. Yet commentators interested in philosophical atheism have ignored frequently this tradition. Matthew Ray concludes that Kant's moral theology is largely undersupported; Schopenhauer's metaphysical and ethical atheism is flawed in several areas; and Nietzsche's naturalistic attack on Christianity is only partially successful. Taking a critical stance toward the atheistic orthodoxy in modern philosophy, Ray argues that the question of God's existence remains characteristically unresolved in post-Kantian philosophy.

Chapter 1

Apologia

Man shows remarkable powers of mind and reason in the satisfaction of his aims, even though they may be unnecessary, or even dangerous and harmful; and those powers are evidence of the blessings he enjoys in his natural powers which enable him to discover, to learn, and to practice those arts. Think of the wonderful inventions of clothing and building, the astounding achievements of human industry! Think of man’s progress in agriculture and navigation; of the variety, in conception and accomplishment, man has shown in pottery, in sculpture, in painting; the marvels in theatrical spectacles … Finally, the wit shown by philosophers and heretics in defending their very errors and falsehoods is something which beggars imagination! It must be remembered that we are now speaking of the natural abilities of the human mind, the chief ornament of this mortal life.

St Augustine, City of God

I Historical Background and Scope

Generations of humanists, historical materialists, psychoanalysts, feminists and (more recently) sociobiologists have all seemingly immeasurably cheapened the concerns of religion in modern times. Inspired, it appears, to free us from the supposed constraints of dogma, their results have more often than not never really engaged with religious concerns themselves (such interests are automatically screened off) but only their political or social effects: liberating us to enter a politically charged world only to now discover it framed within an existentially incomprehensible universe. It is arguable that, in the terms of the history of modern philosophy, the birth of this tendency has been most obviously observable in the influence – though not necessarily the substance – of Immanuel Kant’s thought.

Kant’s construal of the relationship between humanity and divinity is more complex and less assured than that to be found in the work of most of those of his major modern predecessors concerned with the same kind of questions in philosophy. Although Rene´ Descartes at least seemed to break with the medieval scholastic tradition in the Meditations when he consciously detached philosophy from theological postulates and from a scriptural base (preferring instead the autonomy of reason as authenticated by methodological doubt), the theistic conclusion of the initially sceptical Meditations, reached by means of an ontological argument for God and also a very specific kind of causal argument, turned out not only to be a venerable ontological conclusion largely in keeping with the previous scholastic framework but also an epistemological guarantee of truth; a divine guarantee that now made God central to what was no longer considered to be a religious philosophy and left the atheist – at least on one particular construal of Descartes’ escape from doubt – knowing little or nothing.¹ Or, take the subsequent example of George Berkeley. Berkeley, whilst denying that anything material exists independently of our perception, nevertheless defused any overtly solipsistic or sceptical implications of this by arguing that the ideas that we perceive must be caused by a spirit capable of producing far more vivid and coherent ideas than we as humans are able to produce in our dreams, imaginings and reveries: the infinite spirit, God.² The culmination of Berkeley’s philosophic vision might be said to be a picture of us as spirits in a divinely ordered intersubjective perceptual network. It can be seen that Kant moved way beyond both Descartes and Berkeley by arguing that there could be absolutely no theological backing for epistemology (God was himself unknowable) or for ontology (since God was also theoretically unprovable).³ In this advance beyond what Kant – long before Feuerbach and Heidegger – explicitly called ‘onto-theology’ is laid the immediate roots of an overall project of marginalising the role of monotheistic religion within epistemology, metaphysics and philosophical ethics that then took a dramatic turn in the writings of the grandly systematic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the classical philologist turned ethical philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Kantian religious thought, of course, did not give birth to just one subsequent tradition: Kant’s philosophical legacy is as diverse as it is profound. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s singular development of Kantian thought seems to be notable among post-Kantian philosophies for its self-conscious antagonism toward the Semitic monotheistic religions from the very outset. Other immediately post-Kantian thinkers, such as G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling, were overtly concerned to square their philosophy with the revelations of the Christian religion (albeit with questionable success). And post-Hegelian phenomenology, whether in its Husserlian or its Heideggerean variety, effectively presents no sophistication of the fundamentally agnostic Kantian response to the question of God. This, needless to say, was only to be expected: a return to the basic experience of the world can be of no help in determining answers to questions of a determinately other-worldly nature. Much the same agnosticism can be found both in analytic philosophy – where various logical-positivist authors have maintained that atheistic theses, being neither empirical nor analytic, are as meaningless as theistic ones – and in the very different movement that flourished at around the same time on the continent, existentialism; especially since this latter movement’s emphasis on the absolute freedom of human choice gave it the requisite conceptual tools for a relapse into the (Kierkegaardian) fideism from whence it was, in any case, partly derived. Similarly, ‘ordinary language philosophy’ can be seen to leave atheism without any effective conceptual tools with which to attack religion. Those heavily influenced by the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, for example, frequently argue that religious discourse, like all (non-philosophic) discourse, belongs to a ‘form of life’ that is effectively uncriticisable and needs to be understood only ‘from the inside’, as it were. According to some, this Wittgensteinian standpoint renders atheism an impossible position to hold, since the atheist can only be regarded as someone who has failed to understand the way certain concepts are used within a given form of life (that is, within a certain religion).

It would nonetheless be asinine to deny that there are significant post-Kantian atheists outside of phenomenology, existentialism, ordinary language and analytic philosophy; the most significant probably being Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner and Karl Marx, who all belong to an important and closely connected neo-Hegelian tradition. But even though Feuerbach, Stirner and Marx seem to be important modern atheistic thinkers disfavoured – but by no means entirely neglected – here, in mitigation of this shortcoming it may fairly be said, first, that these specific thinkers seemed to have been mediated through the singular philosophy of Hegel rather than directly belonging to the immediately post-Kantian generation and so do not illustrate so clearly the important atheistic possibilities intrinsic to the development of Kantianism itself. Secondly, Feuerbach’s attempt to discredit Christian theism whilst remaining true to its moral involvements and Stirner’s immoralising response to Feuerbach’s (indeed, to the whole of European modernity’s) attachment to ethics and to the value of truth in itself without God are in any case strikingly, if only partially, paralleled in the atheisms of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, respectively. It is a Stirner-Nietzsche parallelism that seems most open to elaboration (and only partly because Schopenhauer’s nihilistic pessimism is profoundly alien to the tone and substance of Feuerbach’s enthusiastic writing). In particular, one would be able to point out that Stirner’s attacks on the ideal of truth for its own sake, his attacks on an unquestioning attachment to the morals of one’s own age, and his endorsement of an assertive – even, at the limit, criminal – individualism all find strong parallels in Nietzsche’s thought (the threads of this will be taken up in the second chapter on Nietzsche, Chapter 6). Further mitigation might also be sought in the fact that fairly recent books on the history of modern philosophical atheism such as P. Masterton’s Atheism and Alienation and G.E. Michalson’s Kant and The Problem of God, cover pretty much this neo-Hegelian ground that has to some extent been disregarded here.⁴ According to the argument of Atheism and Alienation, modern philosophical atheism stems from the character of modern philosophy itself as initiated by Descartes, wherein a pervasive attention to subjectivity (and to the autonomy of reason) replaces the former interest in divinely formed being. Masterton follows the course of philosophical atheism from Descartes through Kant to Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and beyond. Michalson’s thesis, on the other hand, begins not with the Cartesian cogito but rather with Kant and argues that since Kant’s theistic commitment is, within the context of the critical philosophy, basically subordinated to human autonomy, then its natural legacy is to be found in the atheistic work of Feuerbach rather than in the liberal tradition of modern Protestant theology. Whilst being both scholarly and provocative, the argument of both books, however, by either only cursorily mentioning Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as forerunners to existentialism or, as in the second instance, by failing to mention the Schopenhauerian fork of the Kantian legacy in what is presented as an explicit attempt to ‘build historical perspective’, omit what seems to me to be the most markedly atheistic response to Kantian thought to be found in the nineteenth-century post-Kantian generation: that of Schopenhauer and, at one remove, Nietzsche.

II Structure

The chapters that follow will be asking philosophical questions about the underlying structure of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s thoughts on atheism and agnosticism; thoughts that represent one of the most concerted attacks upon monotheistic religion in the whole of modern philosophy. In anticipation of my conclusions, it might be stated that Kant’s tentative and quasi-existential moral theology will be found to be largely unsupported, philosophically; Schopenhauer’s metaphysical and ethical atheism will be found to be intriguing but flawed in several respects, and Nietzsche’s peculiarly naturalistic attack upon Christianity only very partially successful. The question of God’s existence will therefore be found to be characteristically unresolved even in this aggressively atheistic fork of post-Kantian philosophy.

We begin with the work of the mature Kant, explaining how his innovative epistemology in the Critique of Pure Reason treats the question of the sense experience of God and how his essentially moral theory of biblical hermeneutics – most explicitly articulated in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone – treated the question of divine revelation through scripture, before examining Kant’s moral proof of the being of God. We begin with Kant because, although not himself an atheist, he nonetheless argued for a restrictive epistemological approach to the question of God, which obviously has important implications for thought on questions of religion and faith. Moreover, his historical importance for Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s work is beyond question. This is especially true for Schopenhauer. In one sense, Kant thus belongs to the pre-history, or to the backdrop, of that branch of philosophical atheism treated here. Nevertheless, examining this backdrop will prove to be indispensable.

After Kant, the atheistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer will be considered. Sketching the unusual presentation of his atheism and the possible explanations for this, the methods by which Schopenhauer excludes God from his vast and despairing ontological picture will then be illuminated. Fundamentally, Schopenhauer’s initial argument against the existence of God will be seen to be an argument from exclusion. Schopenhauer accepts a version of transcendental idealism – to the extent that Schopenhauer’s atheistic project may be said to be pursued, as it were, from within a Kantian parenthesis – but then protests first that Kant’s opposition to the objectivity of space and time should have lead him to deny the possibility of separating creator and creation, and second that Kant’s misidentification of the subject with the thinking mind alone forced him to neglect a way to determine the world of the thing in itself in a way fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Considerable difficulties will be seen to beset Schopenhauer’s atheistic endeavour, however, and certain of the main problems will be marked out. Schopenhauer’s metaphysical thought will not emerge wholly unscathed and we will have to conclude that – irrespective of its possible philosophic successes in other areas – it is unable to substantiate his strong atheistic claims. In the second chapter on Schopenhauer (Chapter 4), he will also be seen to construct an intentionally un-Kantian moral philosophy – a moral philosophy which in several respects harks back to the methodology of some pre-Kantian British empiricists in ethics – which he then turns against God. This moral philosophy will be examined in some detail and will be seen to be essentially metaphysical, both on exegetical grounds and because without a metaphysical element it would succumb to deep theoretical problems concerning ethical disagreement amongst moral agents. Since Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy is intrinsically metaphysical in this way, his moral objection to God has to be construed as relying upon the prior introduction of an element of his atheistic metaphysics and to that extent is an expression of, rather than argument for, atheism. We close our discussion of Schopenhauer’s atheism by briefly answering the question of how far Schopenhauer’s emphasis on redemption from this world, which forms a highly important part of his philosophical system as a whole, allowed him to re-engage with the supposedly discredited religious tradition. This part of the book, which aims to introduce the Nietzschean notion of the ‘ascetic ideal’ in one of the precise locations where Nietzsche himself first discovered it, will be primarily elucidatory. We shall discover that this area of the Schopenhauerian philosophy shares a core commitment with the Christian religion, a commitment that is critically, at times perhaps even obsessively, considered at great length in the later writings of Nietzsche, who was alerted to the phenomena of pessimism, which he then related to the deeper historical movement of nihilism, by an early intimacy with Schopenhauer’s thought.

Two chapters (Chapters 5 and 6) are devoted to a writer who is unarguably one of the foremost atheists of the European literary and philosophical tradition. In the detailed reading of Nietzsche’s poetic and polemical attack upon theistic religion that will be undertaken here, what will prove to be of surprising importance will be his largely implicit proto-Austinian theory of language; a theory which Nietzsche uses to expose certain of the deleterious effects of religious speech in On the Genealogy of Morals. In this and other texts, Nietzsche also elaborates a metapsychological and physiological analysis of the type of person allegedly inclined towards believing in the monotheistic tradition, famously arguing that theism is deeply connected with a yearning for escape and for the moralisation of the socially unaccountable. But Nietzsche also analyses types of atheism in his writing, strongly suggesting that some of the pathological motives which lay behind theism were also to be found in atheism. This peculiarly Nietzschean typology of atheism, along with a consideration of Nietzsche’s speculative historical remarks concerning secularisation, will be the subject of my second and final chapter (Chapter 6) on that author. It will be concluded that Nietzsche only achieves some of his aims and further that those of his aims that are achieved themselves rely on empirical assumptions which are, anyway, controversial.

Essentially, then, the three central claims of the present work can provisionally be said to be; first, that at a certain moment of the history of post-Kantian philosophy it seemed as though the question of the existence of God was definitely resolved; second, that it is demonstrably no longer possible to agree with this estimate; and third, that the question of a personal religious faith is, in principle, consequently just as pressing now as it was in pre-modern times, even if today that question appears largely to have been forgotten.

Notes

1 R. Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 59: ‘If we did not know that all that is in us which is real and true comes from a perfect and infinite being, we would have no reason which would assure us that, however clear and distinct our ideas might be, they had the perfection of being true’. This position – wryly described as ‘a very unexpected circuit’ by Hume in the Enquiries – seems to involve a certain methodological circularity however: it is from the premise that whatever I perceive clearly and distinctly is true (such as the cogito) that God’s existence is eventually derived – but it is then the nature of this very existence (that is, the fact that God is no deceiver) that then vouchsafes our reliance on clear and distinct ideas. Some Cartesian commentators still attracted to this foundationalist project have accordingly sought to present clear and distinct ideas as self-validating – which would leave the atheist at least knowing something.

2 G. Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, in Works (London: Dove, 1890), p. 163–4. M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Apologia
• 2 Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum
• 3 Darker Presences
• 4 Questionable Features of Life and Imaginary Benefits of Death
• 5 An Experiment in Strength
• 6 Abandoned Truth
• 7 Doubts About Doubt
• Bibliography
• Index