Kant's Rational Religion and the Radical Enlightenment

From Spinoza to Contemporary Debates

Anna Tomaszewska

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350195868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Moderne Philosophie

Kant's defence of religion and attempts to reconcile faith with reason position him as a moderate Enlightenment thinker in existing scholarship. Challenging this view and reconceptualising Kant's religion along rationalist lines, Anna Tomaszewska sheds light on its affinities with the ideas of the radical Enlightenment, originating in the work of Baruch Spinoza and understood as a critique of divine revelation. Distinguishing the epistemological, ethical and political aspects of such a critique, Tomaszewska shows how Kant's defence of religion consists of rationalizing its core tenets and establishing morality as the essence of religious faith. She aligns him with other early modern rationalists and German Spinozists and reveals the significance for contemporary political philosophy. Providing reasons for prioritizing freedom of thought, and hence religious criticism, over an unqualified freedom of belief, Kant's theology approximates the secularising tendency of the radical Enlightenment. Here is an understanding of how the shift towards a secular outlook in Western culture was shaped by attempts to rationalize rather than uproot Christianity.

1

Towards the radical Enlightenment:
Setting the stage for a debate

1.1. Two Enlightenments

Since Margaret Jacob’s The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (1981) and Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (2001), followed by a series of volumes on different aspects of the radical thought in the long ‘Age of Lights’, Enlightenment scholars have gained extra resources by means of which they could conceptualize the intricate relations between reason and religion in an epoch in which modern culture can be judged to have its roots. The dichotomy between the radical and the moderate Enlightenment, exploited by these scholars, would encourage a picture of the epoch as intrinsically polemical. Religion would figure in the centre of the polemics, with the advocates of the radical Enlightenment seeking to curb or even destroy its influence on morality and politics, and the advocates of the moderate Enlightenment trying to reconcile religion with ‘enlightened values’.

With religion in focus, the radical vs. moderate Enlightenment distinction parallels the distinction between the secular and the religious Enlightenment, which also enlivens recent debates among intellectual historians.¹ The aim of this chapter is to suggest that, in the long run, the aforementioned dichotomies are untenable as they considerably oversimplify the dynamic of the relation between religion and the Enlightenment. Taking Kant as an example, we shall see that religious criticism, verging on the radical, would mingle with attempts at preserving religion by interpreting or ‘reforming’ it in light of rational principles, resulting in a new conception of religion as well as its role in private lives and the public sphere.

Characterizing the emergence of the term ‘radical Enlightenment’, Frederik Stjernfelt has noted that it would initially appear ‘as a spontaneous, ordinary language construction’, denoting things as diverse as ‘deep revelation’, ‘thorough examination’, ‘progress’ and ‘critique of religion’. Throughout the nineteenth and towards the early twentieth centuries, the term ‘radical Enlightenment’ would develop into ‘a more principal concept addressing an anti-religious, science-oriented, critical mode of thinking . . . exemplifiable in antiquity and the middle ages, and in different religious contexts’.² The more recent uses of the term also differ across the wide spectrum of the accounts of the radical Enlightenment. Accordingly, whereas Jacob has emphasized the importance of the ‘new science’ and ‘secret societies’ for the emergence of the movement,³ Israel highlights monist materialism inspired by Baruch Spinoza (see below). For Martin Mulsow, the radical Enlightenment is not only an intellectual, but also a sociological category, designating socially estranged protagonists of ‘philosophical micro-history’ and marginal, ‘often only “experimentally” freethinking’ individuals unwittingly made into radicals by the public opinion.⁴ Gianni Paganini, in turn, has brought seventeenth-century ‘clandestine’ manuscripts to the fore, arguing that they were pivotal for the formation of the ‘radical’ trend as they would target official heterodoxy, both religious and political.⁵ Since much of the current debate on the radical Enlightenment has been shaped by Israel’s contribution, in what follows we shall take a closer look at his description of the movement.

Israel has captured the key features of the radical agenda as a ‘package of basic concepts and values’, summarized in ‘eight cardinal points’:

(1) adoption of philosophical (mathematical-historical) reason as the only and exclusive criterion of what is true; (2) rejection of all supernatural agency, magic, disembodied spirits, and divine providence; (3) equality of all mankind (racial and sexual); (4) secular ‘universalism’ in ethics anchored in equality and chiefly stressing equity, justice, and charity; (5) comprehensive toleration and freedom of thought based on independent critical thinking; (6) personal liberty of lifestyle . . . (7) freedom of expression, political criticism, and the press, in the public sphere; (8) democratic republicanism as the most legitimate form of politics.⁶

According to Israel, the above ‘package’ can be traced back to the thought of Spinoza, constituting ‘a comprehensive and consistent system of naturalism, materialism, and empiricism, eliminating all theism, teleology, miracles, and supernatural agency’.⁷ On Israel’s proposal, it is due to the influence of Spinoza and Spinozism, a set of ideas propagated by a clandestine, transnational, ‘fringe’ movement, that reverence for science and the scientific method, to be applied to virtually all domains of human theoretical and practical activity, would replace reverence for religious authority and ethics based on Christian metaphysics. ‘For the Radical Enlightenment’, Israel contends, ‘there is only one source of truth – science and scientifically based scholarship in the humanities – so that “science” understood as Wissenschaft . . . always and inevitably conflicts with and negates religious authority’.⁸ Thus construed, the radical Enlightenment is supposed to yield political consequences such as the secularization of the public sphere: ‘the elimination of theology from law, institutions, education and public affairs’.⁹ In this way, Israel largely recapitulates Max Weber’s claim about the development of science as the driving force of secularization that would thrive on the ‘disenchantment’ of the empirical world.¹⁰ This claim, promoting the idea that the growth of scientific rationality functionally corresponds to diminishing the importance of religious faith, seems to rule out the conception of religion as compatible with rationality, or the idea that the domain of reason and the domain of religion may overlap. Yet the Enlightenment abounds in examples of stances that in one way or another manifest reconciliation between reason and religion.

Israel admits that a number of thinkers intended such a reconciliation, but attributes this attempt to a current he labels ‘moderate Enlightenment’. The moderate Enlightenment would constitute a political project aimed at a thorough reform of thought and action on both the individual and the societal levels, to be executed primarily through education. However, despite aiming at a reform of thinking and mores, the moderate Enlightenment would strive to maintain the political and religious status quo, resulting thereby in an internally inconsistent set of ideas. The advocates of the moderate agenda ‘aspired to conquer ignorance and superstition, establish toleration, and revolutionize ideas, education, and attitudes by means of philosophy but in such a way as to preserve and safeguard what were judged essential elements of the older structures, effecting a viable synthesis of old and new, and of reason and faith’.¹¹ Israel says:

[T]he conservative moral and social theories of Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, and Kant were all expressly intended to avoid forging moral philosophy systematically on the basis of philosophical reason and nature, in the interest of salvaging major elements of tradition, custom, and theology. All these moral philosophers are by definition and by design not just inconsistent but wholly at odds with the consistent naturalism sought by Spinoza, Bayle, Boulainvilliers, Diderot, and d’Holbach. It was the moral theories of the hard-core French High Enlightenment . . . which follow Spinoza and Bayle in adopting a fully secular and universalist ethic based exclusively on the ‘common good’, equity, and equality, that were designed to be philosophically coherent and consistent.¹²

Israel charges the moderate Enlightenment with incoherence and attributes this incoherence to a discrepancy between theory and practice, the former based on rational principles and the latter on the ossified traditions of the pre-modern theological framework. In contradistinction to the moderate current, the radical Enlightenment would remain consistent, insisting on the scientific foundations of moral and political practice. Spinoza and Bayle would serve as paradigmatic instances of the radical, consistently rational, attitude, whereas the moderate thinkers would compromise on the requirements of reason, leaving out those domains which could be considered unfit for rationalization.

It seems, however, that Israel’s charge results from an oversimplification of what was going on in the relation between Enlightenment and religion. First, his assessment of a certain (heterogeneous) group of thinkers as promoting an incoherent agenda is based on a narrow conception of rationality: a conception which reduces rationality to its scientific breed. Second, integrating religion into the rational foundations of the Enlightenment would not always entail breaking with the ‘enlightened values’ in order to ‘salvage major elements of tradition, custom, and theology’. Rather, within the Enlightenment agenda striving to accommodate religion, or to make it compatible with reason, a breach in tradition would have to be undertaken. Third, and relatedly, Israel builds the distinction between the radical and the moderate Enlightenment on the dichotomy of reason and faith treated as two irreconcilable opposites. Yet, considering the tendency to rationalize religious faith, live among the late seventeenth-century and the Enlightenment heterodox Christians and religious reformers, Kant included, one of the intents of the enlighteners was to challenge the dichotomy. Some of these reformers would be inspired by Spinoza. Moreover, the distinction between reason and faith does not have to reflect the dichotomy of (scientific) knowledge and religion, as Israel is wont to urge; as we shall see in Chapter 5, for some radical reformers, such as Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, (true) religion could be a matter of knowledge, rather than mere faith.¹³

1.2 Does Kant belong to the moderate Enlightenment?

Israel’s ‘eight cardinal points’, excepting those that sound a bit too anachronistic, like point 6 dealing with ‘personal liberty of lifestyle’, may in fact capture more than the agenda of the radicals alone. At any rate, it seems that even Kant, whom Israel has pictured as one of the leading conservatives in the ‘Age of Lights’, would subscribe to a significant number of these tenets. For Kant limits legitimate knowledge claims to the domain of scientific cognition, including mathematical truths and historical facts (cf. point 1 on the list of Israel’s ‘cardinal points’; on the status of historical cognition in Kant, see Log, 9:68 and 72–3). He rejects metaphysical speculation as the source of the cognition of supernatural realities, though without denying the existence of such realities (cf. KrV, A 753/B 781). The moral agency of finite rational beings, rooted in their capacity for self-legislation and in their dignity as ‘ends in themselves’, underlies the egalitarian tenor of Kant’s critical thought (cf. 3; GMS, 4:434–6). Locating the ‘supreme principle of morality’ in rational autonomy, Kant endorses universalism in ethics (cf. 4; GMS, 4:440) and in the political domain regulated by the principle of innate freedom: ‘the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity’ (MS, 6:237).¹⁴ He also defends freedom of thought exercised in the ‘public use of reason’ and conditioning humanity’s ‘emergence from . . . self-incurred minority’ (cf. 5 and 7; WA, 8:35–7).¹⁵ Kant’s support for republican rule, which guarantees the division of responsibilities between the legislature and the executive, not only lies at the core of his projected conditions of global peace (cf. ZeF, 8:350–2), but is reflected in his tripartite ‘moral concept of God’ as legislator, ruler and judge (cf. 8; RGV, 6:139; V-Phil-Th/Pölitz, 28:1073).

Yet Israel contends that Kant’s views qualify him as an adherent of the moderate Enlightenment. In support of this contention, Israel adduces the opinions of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, who would hold that Kant ‘not only crushed atheism, materialism, and Spinozism, but discredited Voltaire’s irreverence and Hume’s corrosive scepticism’. Accordingly, goes on Israel, quoting Kant’s contemporaries, his ‘breakthrough meant the philosophical restoration of Christianity and accepted morality to hegemony over learning, science, and the Enlightenment’.¹⁶ Heinrich Heine, in the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1833/4), who famously compared Kant to Robespierre, calling him ‘the great destroyer in the realm of thought’ and executor of the deist God,¹⁷ also admitted that, eventually, Kant had to side with the defenders of Christianity. Feeling for the ‘old Lampe’, who after all did deserve to have a God, Kant would set out to restore theistic metaphysics under the guise of moral-practical philosophy.¹⁸ Yet, in Heine’s ironic description, Kant figures as a radical tormented by scruples, hence insincere in both his radicalism and his attempts to mitigate it. Was he then more radical or rather moderate along Israel’s lines? In the remainder of this section, I will explore the second option, while examining the first one has to wait until section 1.4.

Accordingly, Kant’s doctrine of postulates (cf. KpV, 5:122–134) – in particular, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul – presupposes the distinction between practical and theoretical reason, with the pretence of the latter to metaphysical cognition being curbed. Theoretical reason, with its ideas and principles, regulates empirical cognition (cf. KrV, A 669/B 697–A 702/B 730), but the fact of its competences regarding the cognition of the supersensible being transferred to practical reason makes it look as if for Kant it was not the case that ‘there is only one source of truth – science and scientifically based scholarship’. Kant’s ‘postulates’ are motivated by a ‘need’ of reason, and the beliefs this doctrine gives rise to are warranted by subjectively but not objectively sufficient grounds (cf. KpV, 5:144–6; WDO, 8:139–141). Against this background, Kant’s claim about the primacy of practical reason (KpV, 5:119–121) may seem to involve diminishing the authority of science as the source of cognition. On the other side, the distinction between practical and theoretical reason, and connecting religion with the domain of the practical, has enabled a framework within which religious faith would find its place next to scientific developments. This position, according to Gordon Michalson, would be attractive for modern liberal Christians and ‘progressive theologians’, because it has provided them ‘with a strategy for mediating between Christianity and the powerful new intellectual currents set in motion by the Enlightenment’.¹⁹

Apart from allowing a defence of the rationality of religion, as well as its relevance for individual lives, Kant’s critical thought apparently delivers an argument against secularization understood as separation between religion and the state; that is, against ‘the elimination of theology from . . . public affairs’. The argument assumes that a religious institution may serve as a ‘vehicle’ for introducing and maintaining ‘the pure faith of religion’ whose ‘true end’ consists in ‘the moral improvement of human beings’ (RGV, 6:106–112). Though Kant clearly sets moral and political laws apart (RGV, 6:95–6), he supports the idea that the ‘visible church’ promotes an ethical community and, to the extent that the moral and the political states (Zustände) overlap, religious institutions ‘insert’ morality into the public sphere.²⁰ Of course, this ‘Kantian’ argume...