Kant, God and Metaphysics

The Secret Thorn

Edward Kanterian

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367873486
• eBook ISBN: 9781351395816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Kant is widely acknowledged as the greatest philosopher of modern times. He undertook his famous critical turn to save human freedom and morality from the challenge of determinism and materialism. Intertwined with his metaphysical interests, however, he also had theological commitments, which have received insufficient attention. He believed that man is a fallen creature and in need of 'redemption'. He intended to provide a fortress protecting religious faith from the failure of rationalist metaphysics, from the atheistic strands of the Enlightenment, from the new mathematical science of nature, and from the dilemmas of Christian theology itself. Kant was an epistemologist, a philosopher of mind, a metaphysician of experience, an ethicist and a philosopher of religion. But all this was sustained by his religious faith.

This book aims to recover the focal point and inner contradictions of his thought, the 'secret thorn' of his metaphysics (as Heidegger once put it). It first locates Kant in the tradition of reflection on the human weakness from Luther to Hume, and then engages in a critical, but charitable, manner with Kant's entire pre-critical work, including his posthumous fragments. Special attention is given to The Only Possible Ground (1763), one of the most difficult, interesting and underestimated of Kant's works. The present book takes its cue from an older approach to Kant, but also engages with recent Anglophone and continental scholarship, and deploys modern analytical tools to make sense of Kant. What emerges is an innovative and thought-provoking interpretation of Kant's metaphysics, set against the background of forgotten religious aspects of European philosophy.

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1 From Luther to Hume

The weakness motif in the tradition

Introduction

Science and philosophy aim for knowledge and understanding. In the modern period these were not free floating projects, pursued for their own sake, but connected to overarching goals of their practitioners. An important goal was to place human cognition on a secure foundation, to allay ‘the worry about already acquired knowledge’.¹ The development of modern philosophy, from Descartes to at least the early phase of analytic philosophy, provides numerous examples of this race for certainty. But it is not enough to understand this development merely as a project of theoretical reason. Knowledge and understanding are themselves subservient to deep-seated passions, desires, fears and hopes. Among these ranks highest, as the first modern anthropological theory pointed out, the desire for self-preservation, the wish to remain alive and in motion, accompanied by the fear of destruction and the hope of avoiding it.² The stakes of these passions were particularly high at the intersection between morality and religion, especially with the onset of the Reformation in the early sixteenth century. Without accounting for the existential drama unfolding from Luther on, modern philosophy might become, for us, a mere kaleidoscope of wax figures.

To understand Kant we must of course relate him to his great philosophical predecessors, to Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Hume and others. But since the Reformation and the reactions to it shaped the metaphysical-theological currents leading up to him, especially in the German lands, we also need to obtain a better grasp of figures such as Luther and Calvin, and of the tradition of Protestant philosophy and theology they inaugurated.³ This is not to claim any direct influence by Luther on Kant, or to make Kant into ‘the philosopher of Protestantism’, as a once-famous essay by Friedrich Paulsen was entitled,⁴ but to propose a useful hermeneutic principle. The eighteenth century was in the German lands not just the Age of Reason, but also the age of ‘consolidated Pietism and of the Francke Foundations’.⁵

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Kant was educated at the Collegium Fridericianum in Königsberg, a Pietist college run on the model of the Francke Foundations in Halle, and headed by F. A. Schultz (1692–1762), a Pietist theologian, Enlightenment thinker and follower of Wolff. Schultz supported not only Kant during his high school years, but also Martin Knutzen (1713–1751), who became professor of logic and metaphysics in Königsberg in 1734. Knutzen was a committed Pietist, but also open to Wolff’s natural theology, to Locke’s epistemology and to the study of nature.⁶ He too accorded special attention to the aspiring student Kant, introducing him to Newtonian physics, Lebnizian metaphysics, Protestant orthodox theology and Pietist ethics. Knutzen attempted to mediate between these positions, as did other contemporaries and Kant himself in his early period. Leibniz and Wolff were themselves not just metaphysicians, but also steeped in the Christian theology of their time, to which they contributed significantly. They, and other major German influences on Kant, such as Baumgarten and Crusius, had been formed by German Schulphilosophie (school orthodoxy or orthodox philosophy),⁷ a nowadays little known intellectual and educational current, which dominated the German lands for some 150 years and had its roots in the Lutheran and Calvinist reformations. This school orthodoxy deserves our attention, since Kant was more closely connected to it than we realise today.⁸

The period between Luther’s beginnings and Kant’s earliest phase spans well over 200 years. It was an enormously rich period, philosophically, theologically, scientifically. This chapter will deal with the preoccupation with religious questions and the ubiquitousness of the Christian faith, as manifested within the wider intellectual context of this period.⁹ It will proceed in four concentric circles, discussing first the problem of the certainty of salvation after the Protestant revolution, second the development of a corresponding metaphysical and theological orthodoxy, third the rise of the new science and its philosophy and fourth the triumph and peril of reason in the Enlightenment.

1.1 The first circle: the certainty of salvation

Luther’s Reformation had external and internal causes. To its empirical pre-conditions belonged the long-standing tendency of the German princes to subject the Church’s institutions to their power on their territories and construct their own regional Church rules (‘landesherrliche Kirchenregimente’), and the initiatives of the city magistrates to reduce the scope of the legal jurisdiction of bishops to the boundaries of their communes.¹⁰ Also decisive was the reform of the Reich, pursued especially by Emperor Maximillian I, which led to constitutional centralisation and a pacification of the German territories. Equally important was the invention of the printing press around 1455, which triggered a demand for popular devotional texts, including German editions of the Bible. No less than 18 complete translations were published even prior to the Reformation, testifying to the growing interest of the predominantly urban laity in reading the holy texts for themselves.¹¹ This led to the establishment of special sermon chairs (‘Prädikaturen’) for more cultivated preachers, financed by urban laymen to satisfy their demands for better religious education, chairs which later contributed to the rapid distribution of the writings of the Reformers. The success of the Reformation was in no small part owed to a massive media machine, which could print and distribute sermons, pamphlets and illustrated didactic books.¹²

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The inner causes of the Reformation lay in its intellectual and spiritual roots, which go back to theological developments in the late Middle Ages, the devotio moderna and the emergence of humanism. Each of them stressed, in different ways, the weakness of man, of his reason or his will, or of both, vis-à-vis God. For a number of reasons, of a historical and theological nature, pessimism and apocalyptic expectations were on the rise from the fourteenth century onwards.¹³ In the fourteenth century, one of the forerunners of humanism, Petrarch, fully aware of the fallenness of man, stressed that the real object of philosophy ought to be man and his problems, the solution to which is the cultivation of a good will and knowledge, however imperfect, of (the Christian) God.¹⁴ Also in the fourteenth century Ockham defended the absolute power of God’s will, stressing the individual’s total dependency on it. This was especially the case for grace, which was no longer seen as located in the human soul, but as a relation between God’s omnipotence and man.¹⁵ The dependence of everything created on the divine will turned the world into a contingent construct, undermining any claim to certainty and hence speculative metaphysics. Stressing ‘the frailty of human knowing’, especially in the so-called via moderna school of theology, ‘loosened the church’s grip on speculation’; now, every ‘conclusion in theology, even if correct, is an artefact of the divine covenant, a worrisome thought for the church as stewart of divine science’.¹⁶ All of this resonated with a revival of Augustianian pessimism about man’s ability to save himself, paving the way for Luther’s theology.

Erasmus

Humanism contributed to, but also contrasted with, Protestantism. The leading, hugely influential humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) professed a rather unstable theological position, oscillating between optimism and pessimism. He was raised in the spirit of the devotio moderna movement, which focused on a more intimate relation with Christ himself, de-emphasised the role of the ritualistic aspects of faith and cultivated the ardour of inner religious emotion in combination with the ideals of sincerity, modesty, simplicity, industry and self-observation.¹⁷ This pietistic movem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Kant, God and Metaphysics
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From Luther to Hume: The Weakness Motif in the Tradition
• 2 The Early Works
• 3 Intermission: The Period 1756–1762
• 4 The First Fortress: The Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of the Existence of God
• 5 First Cracks in the Wall
• 6 The ‘Sceptical’ Period
• 7 Religious Roots and Sources of the Critical Turn
• Epilogue: An Unfinished Drama
• Appendix
• Literature
• Names Index
• Subject Index