Returning to Tillich

Russell Re Manning, Samuel Andrew Shearn

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783110532852
• eBook ISBN: 9783110532869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Fifty years after his death in 1965 the essays in this collection return to Paul Tillich to investigate his theology and its legacy, with a focus on contemporary British scholarship. Originating in a conference held in Oxford in 2014, the book contains 16 original contributions from a mixture of junior and more established scholars, most of whom have a connection to Britain.

The contributions are diverse, but four themes emerge throughout the volume. Several essays are concerning with a characterisation of Tillich's theology. In dialogue with recent emphases on the radical Tillich, some essays suggest a more conservative estimation of Tillich's theology, rooted in the Idealist and classical Christian platonic traditions, whilst in constant engagement with changing existential situations.

Secondly, and perhaps reflecting the context of religious diversity and theories of religious pluralism in Britain, many essays engage Tillich's approach to non-Christian religions. Thirdly, some essays address the importance of existentialist philosophy for Tillich, notably via an engagement with Sartre. Finally, a number of essays take up the diagnostic potential of Tillich's theology as a resource for engaging contemporary challenges.

Marc Boss

Chapter 1

Which Kant? Whose Idealism? Paul Tillich’s Philosophical Training Reappraised

Which Kant? Whose Idealism? In an essay on Tillich’s early connections with classical German philosophy, the first of these two questions can hardly be separated from the second. Anyone who claims to be indebted to German Idealism, as Tillich repeatedly did, is by the same token indebted to Kant.8 As Chris Firestone perceptively observes, “the German Idealists generally” thought of themselves “as the true heirs of the best of Kant,” they were all “responding to problems left in the wake of Kant,” and they all relied on Kant’s work for help in resolving them.9 Moreover, since the so-called neo-Kantian reaction to German Idealism displays the very same characteristics, Firestone’s observation proves relevant far beyond the circle of philosophers it is meant to describe; the fact is that almost every German intellectual born in the nineteenth or early twentieth century might be considered as indebted to Kant in one way or another. So the question is: which way was Tillich’s way?

In the past twenty years various attempts have been made to show that, like Rudolf Otto—and in close intellectual kinship to him—Tillich has appropriated Kant’s philosophical program as it applies to religion in a way that essentially rests on the Critique of the Power of Judgment. This claim was notably made, in different but convergent ways, by the late Adina Davidovich in 1993 and by Brandon Love in 2012.10 In a quite opposite vein, Claude Perrottet has recently claimed that Tillich looked for the Kantian philosophy of religion “where no one had looked for it before”, namely in “what appears to be the most secular part of Kant’s work,” the Critique of Pure Reason.11 I shall contend that both claims are partly misguided insofar as they neglect the neo-Fichtean frame that shapes Tillich’s early reception of Kant’s philosophical program as a doctrine of freedom rooted in the Critique of Practical Reason. It is true that Tillich’s affiliation with neo-Fichteanism has not yet received much attention, but if we look at the course of his philosophical training up to 1916, a period now well documented by the considerable amount of archival material published in the past fifteen years,12 it becomes unmistakably clear that Tillich’s early writings, including his two doctoral dissertations on Schelling, find their impulse and purpose in the so-called Fichte-Renaissance introduced to Halle by his philosophical mentor Fritz Medicus.13

This chapter has four sections. The first three sections are mainly concerned with Tillich’s evaluation of the trilogy formed by the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790); they sequentially argue that neither the Third nor the First, but the Second Critique had the deepest impact on Tillich’s assessment and reconstruction of Kant’s philosophy of religion. Finally, the fourth section reappraises the perplexing issue of Tillich’s alleged “existential turn” in the light of his early interpretation of Fichte’s “doctrine of science” and Schelling’s “positive philosophy” as two contending and yet complementary realisations of Kant’s philosophical program as it pertains to religion.14

1The Third Critique hypothesis

In his 1926 book Die religiöse Lage, Tillich gives a colourful description of the change that occurred in the German philosophical landscape during the first decade of the twentieth century, as the neo-Kantian slogan zurück zu Kant (back to Kant), which dominated the second half of the nineteenth century, suddenly gave way to the neo-idealistic watchword über Kant hinaus (beyond Kant): “It was naturally suggested,” Tillich says, “that in seeking a way beyond Kant one trace the same path which his immediate successors pursued.”15 This is how the German Idealistic philosophy on which the older generation had “heaped its scorn” was reappraised and “won increasing influence” on the younger generation to which Tillich himself belonged; in this new generation, he says, “Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Fries won disciples and continue to win them.”16 It is worth noticing that alongside the three canonical authors of German idealism, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, Tillich also mentions the name of Jacob Friedrich Fries, Hegel’s chief rival at Jena. Tillich furthermore praises “the brilliant manner in which Fries, while remaining very close to Kant, made the transition to intuition.”17 Again it is worth noticing that while Tillich daringly counts Fries among the classical heroes of German idealism, he still underscores the particular position Fries holds within this group by insisting on his close proximity to Kant, a quality which has led some advocates of the “back to Kant” movement to celebrate Fries as an early champion of their cause.

The question of how Tillich relates to the Friesian or neo-Friesian tradition has gained major significance in recent discussions about his reading of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. Before we examine the issue at stake in these discussions, it seems appropriate to say some words about Fries’s so called Third Critique centred reading of Kant and about the school that claims his philosophical legacy.

1.1Jacob Friedrich Fries and the neo-Friesian school of Göttingen

Fries owes his reputation as a philosopher of religion to his 1805 book Wissen, Glaube und Ahndung18 . In this seminal work, he looks at the Critique of the Power of Judgment for conceptual resources and guidelines to bridge the gap between “knowledge” and “faith” implied in the Kantian dichotomy of theoretical and practical reason. The divide Fries ambitions to overcome is well known and vehemently discussed among Kant’s early commentators. While the First Critique imposes drastic limitations to religious knowledge within the theoretical sphere, the Second Critique explains the beliefs in “Immortality, Freedom, and God” as “postulates of practical reason,” attempting thereby to reestablish some rational justification for religious faith within the moral sphere. This sort of faith, it must be reminded, is supposed to rest on our absolute conviction of duty and on our no less firm confidence that, insofar as morality is no chimera, we are justified in assuming a suprasensible world, a world in which accomplished duty would be ultimately rewarded with bliss. In Kant’s life-time this doctrine of the postulates of practical reason has been highly admired by some of his interpreters, for instance the theologians of the so-called older Tübingen school,19 but it has also perplexed many others, for instance Schelling, who sarcastically wondered how the God thrown out of the front door of Kant’s theoretical philosophy could be allowed to return through the back door of his practical philosophy.20

Fries saw himself as a respectful disciple of Kant in many ways, but he was hardly more impressed than Schelling by the Second Critique’s case for religious belief based on the postulates of practical reason. Instead he made an alternative case based on the Third Critique. According to Fries, the twofold discussion of aesthetic judgment and teleological judgment, which form the two main parts of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, provide some of Kant’s deepest insights into what a true philosophy of religion might or should actually be. The central argument of this philosophy is that “the power of judgement alone can grasp the Eternal in the Finite.”21 Friesian Kantianism has justifiably been labelled “romantic Kantianism”22 insofar as it construes the power of judgment as a power of “pure feeling” (reines Gefühl).23 This pure feeling provides a particular kind of religious knowledge that is meant to overcome the limitations of discursive reason by an intuitive grasp of the divine order and purposiveness concealed in the beauty and sublimity of nature. Fries has a special name for this “knowledge by pure feeling” (Erkenntnis durch reines Gefühl);24 he calls it Ahndung, an old form of the German word Ahnung, which can be translated by a variety of English terms such as “presentiment,” “inkling,” “intimation,” “surmise,” “presage,” or “divination,” but whose technical content in Fries’s philosophy is perhaps best rendered into English by the expression “aesthetic sense,” as Kent Richter’s translation suitably suggests.25 By way of this presentiment proceeding “from the union of knowledge and faith in the same consciousness” we contemplate the Eternal in the Finite, the Eternal as manifesting itself in the Finite, and thereby we recognize, in a deep but ineffable way, the essential nature of the world, its unity and necessity as well as its ultimate aim.26

As Fries died in Jena in the Summer of 1843, the so-called First Friesian school gathered around his disciple Ernst Friedrich Apelt, who became the main editor of the journal Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule (Proceedings of the Friesian School).27 After two years of existence, from 1847 to 1849, the journal disappeared, and the school itself soon faded into oblivion. But in 1904, the philosopher Leonard Nelson created the Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule, Neue Folge (Proceedings oft the Friesian School, New series),28 whose edition lasted until 1937. Nelson became one of the chief promoters of the so-called new Friesian school of Göttingen. Next to Nelson, Wilhem Bousset and Rudolf Otto, who illustrated themselves for their contributions to the so-called school of the history of religion, played also a major role in the development of the new-Friesian school of Göttingen. After the First World War Otto became by far the most eminent representative of this school in Germany as in the rest of the world. His widely acclaimed book Das Heilige (1917) was rendered into English in 1923 as The Idea of the Holy,29 and an English translation of his earlier book Kantisch-Fries’sche Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie (1909) followed in 1931 under the title The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries.30

In his own systematic account of the nature and purpose of religion, Otto explicitly endorses Fries’s claim that the Third Critique “offers a far sounder basis for a philosophy of religion than is afforded by the strained and artificial products of the theory of the Postulates.”31 In The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries—as later in The Idea of the Holy32 —he discusses at length another Thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Returning to Tillich
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Epilogue: A Dinner Speech
• Contributors’ Details
• Bibliography
• Index