Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

Lawrence R. Pasternack, Lawrence Pasternack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415507844
• eBook ISBN: 9781317984290
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Throughout his career, Kant engaged with many of the fundamental questions in philosophy of religion: arguments for the existence of God, the soul, the problem of evil, and the relationship between moral belief and practice. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is his major work on the subject.

This book offers a complete and internally cohesive interpretation of Religion. In contrast to more reductive interpretations, as well as those that characterize Religion as internally inconsistent, Lawrence R. Pasternack defends the rich philosophical theology contained in each of Religion's four parts, and shows how the doctrines of the "Pure Rational System of Religion" are eminently compatible with the essential principles of Transcendental Idealism. The book also presents and assesses:

• the philosophical background to Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
• the ideas and arguments of the text
• the continuing importance of Kant's work to philosophy of religion today.

1

FAITH, KNOWLEDGE AND THE HIGHEST GOOD

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attacks the ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological (design) arguments, challenges the grounds used for the existence and immortality of the soul, and even contends that we cannot, through theoretical reason alone, formulate an adequate conception of anything within the realm of the supernatural, including God. On the basis of these and related objections, many have come to see Kant as no friend to religion, having created, so it seems, substantial barriers to any credible positive theology.¹ This, however, was not his intention. Although his writings contain numerous arguments against many religious tenets, they are not actually against these tenets as such, but against how they have been appropriated by the metaphysical tradition.

According to Kant, metaphysics is inherently flawed, a product of theoretical reason’s illicit extension of concepts that should be limited to experience alone. Hence, when religion is approached as if it were a form of metaphysics, building argument through the powers of theoretical reason, it too must be dismissed as an illegitimate intellectual enterprise. Just as Kant argues that theoretical reason has failed, and by necessity will continue to fail in its various metaphysical endeavors, it will likewise fail to prove that God exists, that there is a soul, and so forth. Many have taken this to mean that Kant is, in the end, an Atheist or Agnostic, or perhaps at best, an Error Theorist, who sanctions self-imposed religious illusions for practical purposes.² But these misread Kant’s intentions. His criticisms of religion were not meant to deny its tenets, but rather to liberate them from theoretical reason so that they could be given a more legitimate footing. This agenda has, in fact, considerable similarities to Martin Luther’s own views on reason and religion – a point that should hardly be taken as coincidence since Kant was brought up in a Lutheran Pietist household and his childhood education was at the Collegium Fridericianum, a Lutheran Pietist institution (Kuehn 2001: 24–60).

Just as Luther himself asserts that reason is limited to our experience and “not able to apply itself to invisible things” (Luther 1883: 1.40III.51),³ so likewise, a cornerstone of Transcendental Idealism is that knowledge is confined to the scope of possible experience. When we employ theoretical reason in our attempt to grasp a reality beyond experience, we fall into error and illusion. This holds for both metaphysics in general as well as for theology. So, just as Luther claims that “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has” (Luther 1883: 2.3.68), Kant too regards religious belief as requiring a basis outside of theoretical reason.

Their similarities can be pressed even farther, for they not only see theoretical reason as incapable of warranting our assent to religious doctrines, but that such an approach occludes their true significance. Both the Lutheran understanding of Original Sin and Kant’s rendering of it as an innate Propensity to Evil represent human beings as fallen creatures, fractured within, as our relationship with God is also fractured. This is not something that can be solved by reason, at least not in its theoretical mode. It is, rather, through faith that we must confront our state of sin and find our way to redemption. Religion is not, for either Luther or Kant, an intellectual enterprise, but a matter for the heart, a practical problem that demands a practical rather than theoretical solution.

The title, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, hardly suggests this Lutheran passion, but this is precisely what the text is about, as is Kant’s overall philosophy of religion. He stands with Luther in a shared belief that there is a tension between faith and reason, though for Kant, this tension is specifically with reason in its theoretical employment. Practical reason, by contrast, is an ally of faith, and unlike its theoretical counterpart, it recognizes our fallen nature. In fact, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant acknowledges that even if we had all of eternity to improve ourselves, we would still, through our own powers, fall short (CPrR: 5:123n). If we were morally perfect, were unencumbered by sensuous inclinations, and had a “holy will,” our actions would necessarily accord with moral laws. But this is not what we humans are. Our self-interested pursuit of happiness will always agitate against the moral incentive; and, as Kant declares on numerous occasions, this conflict can only be resolved through a turn to religion. He advocates for such a turn in all three Critiques, such as can be seen in the Critique of Pure Reason’s famous statement that we must find the limits to knowledge in order to “make room for faith” (Bxxx). It underlies his commitment to the Highest Good, and is manifest in the declaration of Religion’s First Preface that morality “inevitably leads to religion” (6:6).

We will begin our commentary on Religion in the next chapter, but before we move on to the text itself, it is important to understand the place of religion within Kant’s overall Critical Philosophy, as well as what tenets of the latter are most important to his positive philosophy of religion. Hence, in this chapter, we will explore some of the key philosophical issues that underlie Kant’s Religion and why he believes that practical reason must turn to religion. More advanced readers may find themselves tempted to skip over some of these discussions, but I want to emphasize that my commentary on Religion is guided by various stances on these underlying issues and familiarity with them will prove helpful as we progress through the many analyses to come. We will begin with a brief overview of Transcendental Idealism in order to set the stage for Kant’s distinction between faith and other modes of assent. We will then turn to his understanding of faith as a propositional attitude. Lastly, we will begin our examination of Kant’s doctrine of the Highest Good, a doctrine that in my view resides at the heart of his positive philosophy of religion.

TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM AND THE CRITIQUE OF METAPHYSICS

Kant interpretation has long suffered under the yoke of the so-called “two-worlds” interpretation. This interpretation dates back to some of the earliest reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason (see Feder and Garve 1782, as well as Garve 1783); and through the writings of H. A. Prichard and Peter Strawson, it came to dominate the Anglophone reading of Kant. According to this view, Kant proposes two metaphysical domains: things as they appear to us in experience versus things as they are in themselves, independent of us. The former’s objects have such characteristics as being in time and in space, having unity and limit, and existing within a nexus of causal connections. The latter, by contrast, lack all the properties of the former, are unknowable as they are in themselves, and yet only become available to us once “filtered” or shaped by the a priori structures of our consciousness.

Many “two-worlds” interpreters see Kant’s project as little more than a version of Subjective Idealism, of the sort we most commonly associate with George Berkeley.⁴ They take Kant’s position to be a sort of phenomenalism – that is, the world for us is nothing but a series of inner states, with the addition of an unknowable metaphysical ground behind phenomenal experience. Under this interpretation, Kant’s philosophy languished through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like so many others, Strawson too thought that despite Kant’s intentions, the Critique of Pure Reason presents just a more ornate version of this familiar philosophical model. However, unlike other Anglophone readers, he saw in Kant’s writings resources that could be separated from their metaphysical encumbrances and be brought into the service of analytic philosophy.

The real value of Kant’s philosophy, according to Strawson, comes from what he calls “the Principle of Significance.” Strawson defines this as “the principle that there can be no legitimate, or even meaningful, employment of ideas or concepts which does not relate them to empirical or experiential conditions of their application” (Strawson 1966: 16). The conceptual aspects of experience (i.e., the determination of objects as unities, as bounded by limits, etc.), as well as time and space, are contributions provided by our faculties, whereas things-in-themselves are to be understood as the way things are once we abstract away from all that our faculties have contributed. Thus, as the latter is defined by its independence from our cognition, it is also defined by its independence from the concepts provided by our faculties. Hence, things-in-themselves would not be temporal or spatial, unities, bounded by limits, causally related, or, perhaps, even countable.

So, even though Transcendental Idealism holds that there can be no knowledge of things-in-themselves, it is still (putatively) committed to there being a reality of unknowable things-in-themselves as well as to the mysterious “transcendental affection” through which things-in-themselves transmit data to us. Thus, according to Strawson, Transcendental Idealism remains a form of metaphysics, and so is in violation of the Principle of Significance (Strawson 1966: 41), even though we can still extract this principle from “analytic argument” of the Critique and then use it to both bar any further metaphysical indulgences as well as the Cartesian-type skepticism that is predicated upon the distinction between experience and a reality beyond it.

Since Strawson, various alternative interpretations have arisen, the most prominent of which appears in Henry Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (2004). Unlike most other interpretations of Kant, Allison’s “methodological” or “two-aspects” interpretation rejects the notion that things-in-themselves have any positive metaphysical standing. It rejects the view that there are two distinct sets of objects (one phenomenal, one noumenal) and, instead, maintains that Kant only discusses things-in-themselves in order to clarify that the epistemic conditions for possible experience presented in the Critique should not be mistaken for metaphysical claims.

The notion of things-in-themselves has only a negative function: to clarify to the reader what is not being examined. When Kant discusses our forms of intuition and pure concepts, he wants us to understand that they are constitutive conditions for how we experience objects (and are determinative of objecthood as such). They pertain to how we experience the world and are not to be taken as about the world independent of how we experience it. Hence, references to things-in-themselves serve to distinguish between what these conditions do and do not concern. This is most clear in the section of the First Critique explicitly devoted to the phenomena/noumena distinction.

In “On the Ground of the Distinction of All Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena,” Kant states that the “noumenon must be understood to be such only in the negative sense” (A252/B309); “this concept is necessary in order not to extend sensible intuition to things in themselves” (A254/B310); and, “The concept of a noumenon is therefore merely a boundary concept, in order to limit the pretension of sensibility, and therefore only of negative use. … The division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and of the world into a world of sense and a world of understanding, can therefore not be permitted at all in a positive sense” (A255/B311). These passages help to illustrate that the Critique does not carry the metaphysical commitments proffered by the two-world interpretation. Rather than a metaphysical treatise about two domains of objects, the text should be read as an inquiry into and demonstration of the a priori conditions that govern our experience, how we sense, think, and judge.

These conditions set out what is built into experience for beings such as ourselves. They provide, on the one hand, what may be considered subjective conditions (since they pertain only to finite beings), while on the other hand, should still be understood as objective in that they determine what objects are like for us, for all of us. That is, unlike the phenomenalist reduction found in the two-worlds interpretation, the methodological interpretation presents the objects of experience as there for one and all – as intersubjective and as part of a shared empirical reality of matter dwelling within time and space.

To concretely illustrate the intersubjective character of this reading of Transcendental Idealism, imagine a group of individuals who (per their experience) are sitting around a table with a sculpture at its center. Some will see the sculpture’s face in profile, while others will see it from a frontal view. Each spectator will, therefore, have a different experience. For a Subjective Idealist, the object of experience is merely phenomenal, existing just in the minds of each perceiver. Their objects will be qualitatively different, but more significantly here, they will also be numerically distinct since there is no shared physical object, presented to each relative to their viewing angles. Each observer rather just has his own mental contents, a bundle of colors and shapes. These contents may be qualitatively similar (similar shades of color for example), perhaps even qualitatively identical (in ideal lighting), but there is no quantitatively identical thing that is common to the observers.

By contrast, the Transcendental Idealist who takes time, space, limit, unity, etc. as the epistemic conditions through which experience is constituted, will take the object as one that is shared, just as these conditions for experience are shared; and rather than foundering upon the fact that the numerically identical sculpture will take on qualitatively distinct appearances for each observer, the Transcendental Idealist will rather regard the latter as simply illustrative of the Euclidean nature of shared space. In other words, the conditions upon which each experience is made possible likewise set out how the object will be experienced by others, including how the singular object in a shared space and time will appear differently to each observer, depending upon the present angles, lighting, etc.

It may be hard for some readers to get away from the psychological and phenomenalist reductions of Kant’s forms of intuition and pure concepts, but they are not like filters we each apply to an undetermined noumenal object affecting us. Rather, they are features of a shared space and shared objects determined not by the discrete psychological processes of each observer; they are features of the world for beings such as ourselves. It is, thus, best to read each step of transcendental analysis found in the Critique of Pure Reason, not as stages along a psychological assembly process, but rather as an analysis that penetrates into how the world is given to us: what Empirical Reality is like.⁵

Returning to the metaphysical question, where does this leave things-in-themselves? It is tempting to answer this question by reference to Kant’s caution that we should not mistake the conditions for possible experience as metaphysical claims about a transcendent reality. This is, at least, the dominant point made in his comments about things-in-themselves in the Critique’s Transcendental Analytic.

As for its Transcendental Dialectic, Kant likewise continues to oppose any positive use of things-in-themselves by showing the folly of trying to gain knowledge of them through the application of the epistemic conditions presented in the Analytic. It is not that we cannot think about things-in-themselves by way of our pure concepts, but rather, as illustrated in the Dialectic’s Antinomies, we cannot adjudicate between the plurality of speculative metaphysical projects that have been developed over the centuries. Concepts alone may be able to generate internally consistent metaphysical models, but once untethered from experience, there is no way to determine which model is correct.

The Antinomies thus serve to illustrate why we cannot have knowledge of things-in-themselves. Although our conceptual apparatus makes empirical knowledge possible, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction
• 1 Faith, knowledge and the Highest Good
• 2 Religion’s two prefaces and the moral foundations of pure rational faith
• 3 Part One of Religion: Good, evil, and human nature
• 4 Part Two of Religion: The change of heart
• 5 Part Three of Religion: The kingdom of God on earth
• 6 Part Four of Religion: Authentic and counterfeit service to God
• 7 Conclusion
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX