Kant and the Meaning of Religion

The Critical Philosophy and Modern Religious Thought

Terry F. Godlove

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848855281
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

Without Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) there would probably be no modern discipline of 'the philosophy of religion'. Kant's considerable influence has ensured that philosophers, in addressing religious questions, have focused on such issues as arguments for and against the existence of God; the question of immortality; the compatibility of human evil and transcendent goodness; and the relationship between morality and the divine. Many books already explore the nature of his influence. But this one goes further. It argues that Kant's theoretical philosophy, also called 'the critical philosophy', contains resources that have much wider implications than just for Christianity, or for those philosophical issues that relate only to monotheism and its beliefs. For Terry F Godlove, Kant's insights run deeper, and properly applied can help rejuvenate our understanding of the general study of religious thought and its challenges.
The author thus bypasses what is usually considered to be 'Kantian philosophy of religion', focusing instead on more fundamental issues: on Kant's account of experience, for example, and on his arguments that human perception of incomplete and finite concepts can nevertheless yield genuine knowledge and insight. Kant and Religion is a subtle and penetrating attempt, by a leading contemporary philosopher of religion, to redefine and reshape the contours of his own discipline through sustained reflection on Kant's so-called 'humanizing project'.

1

CONCEPTS

The world shapes our concepts and, in turn, is shaped by them. This truism is reflected in some of our best thinking about religion, both classical and contemporary. Hume takes the former route, tracing the content of religious ideas and concepts to external, material forces. He takes “religion” to mean “belief in invisible, intelligent powers”—a belief caused by fear of unknown causes in combination with our tendency toward anthropomorphism. Durkheim also writes in this spirit. He finds that the alternation of density and dispersion in social life gives content to the general term “religion,” and to the sub-concepts “sacred” and “profane.” For Schleiermacher, religion is “a sense and taste for the infinite”; content shaped, apparently, not so much by the infinite as by his desire to inoculate religion—he insists not only Christianity—against what he saw as encroachment from science and ethics.¹ Other critics, reversing this polarity, track the effects of religious concepts on the world. Thus, we have Max Weber’s claim that the Protestant concepts of a calling and of predestination helped capitalism take root in parts of Europe and North America.

A third option also tells a causal story, but is suspicious of the contrast between religious concepts and the world. It finds that, on examination, “religion” and its kin—“world religions,” “Hinduism,” “Islam,” and others—are vague to the point of vacuity, that they as much as have no content. For these critics, the search for causes is in the service of explaining why so many of us have taken such concepts, or apparent concepts, to represent smooth, well-formed, objective features of the world. One line of thought has them having been “manufactured” to support the rise of such institutions as university departments, professional journals, and academic conferences.² Another has them constructed to serve “the interests of American power,”³ and yet others find them serving “the logic of European hegemony.”⁴ Here the search for forces is less about understanding the meaning of religious concepts and more about dissolving the illusion of meaning. Such doubts are all the more striking for having arisen in the midst of what is widely seen as a resurgence of religion world-wide.

Surveying this scene we may not know whether we are confronted by richness or confusion. In part, this is to be expected. Sorting out the interplay between concepts and the world—what Robert Brandom calls the dynamics of conceptual behavior⁵—is a tricky business. After all, even the most innocent-seeming empirical term may be unexpectedly complex; apparently there is no single test for the hardness of both metal and plastic.⁶ If “is hard” resists regimentation it is hardly surprising that “is religious” does, too. And, to some extent, no doubt our authors are talking past each other: Are Hume and Durkheim referring to the same phenomena? What about Durkheim and Schleiermacher? How can we even go about deciding? Are the skeptics looking at what the rest of us see?

I suspect there are no fully satisfactory answers to these questions. Certainly I do not have them. But the wager here is that we will come to some clarity about the behavior of “religion” by asking how concepts work in general—what Brandom labels “statics.” Thus, we will begin with what astronomers call exercises in averted vision. In dimly lit conditions we take best advantage of the physiology of the eye by looking just to the side of the object of inquiry. In the present case, we must look away from dynamics—away from history, from social institutions and practices, indeed away altogether from the material basis of the study of religion. Instead, we will focus on the nature of concepts, on the internal structures and processes whose contributions to meaning may be well hidden but are no less real. As compared to dynamics no doubt these structures and processes can seem pale and antiseptic. But any account of conceptual content must reflect the interrelationship between the material world and the nature of concepts themselves. Kant offers a powerful diagnosis of the conflicting pressures that shape such general terms as religion. According to Kant, the conflict goes as deep as human discursivity itself; that is, to the way in which we generate and use concepts.

I. Enough is Not Everything

Let us approach Kant’s diagnosis by way of a familiar passage from Fielding.

When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.⁷

Two elements of Parson Thwackum’s remark put us on the right track. First, concepts—whatever else they are—are composed of further sub-concepts. The sphere or extension of a concept is not the class of individuals to which it applies; you don’t give the content of Christianity or Protestantism or the Church of England by pointing to all the people or artifacts belonging to or falling under them. Rather, you give further sub-concepts. Second, there is in principle no absolutely lowest concept. Thwackum’s purposes were served by stopping at the Church of England, but a moment’s thought shows that we can go on as far as we like, meaning not just the Church of England, but just that portion of it believing in gay ordination, and not only that portion of it believing in gay ordination, but that portion of it believing in gay ordination and in the ordination of women, etc.

By facing it in the opposite direction, toward higher genera rather than toward lower species, this picture of concepts yields some insight into how the general term “religion” is sometimes used today. Beginning with Fielding’s highest genus, Christianity, we need only add species of equal generality alongside it—Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and so on, so that “religion” will be composed of smaller parts in the way that species are parts of a genus, in just the way the extension of the general term “automobile” is composed of smaller parts—“sedan,” “convertible,” “compact,” and so on. Since concepts are not composed of individuals, this account puts no weight on numbers; convertibles and sedans are on par, as are Santería and Islam and Judaism and Hinduism. It appears to be on this basis that many academic departments of religion are structured today.

Armed with this preliminary story about concepts, let us examine some familiar doubts about “religion.” Jonathan Z. Smith has famously remarked that “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. . . . Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.”⁸ We can see that, in at least one good sense, he is right. “Religion” is a concept. Concepts are composed of further concepts, and not of existing individuals. As existing individuals are not, concepts are the products of human cognition. So, “religion” is a human invention and has no—or, perhaps, allowing for leakages of various sorts—limited existence outside the academy. In fact, this claim is generalizable across the conceptual board: “Buddhism,” “Judaism,” “Islam,” and all the rest are human inventions. We have made them all up. If anything, Smith is underestimating the vast cosmic power wielded by scholars of religion. Of course, the fact that we have made up the concept religion does not mean that there are no religious persons or artifacts, it just means that when we judge of some existing person or artifact that she or it is religious, we must place the person or artifact under some sub-concept (some subspecies), some part of the concept religion. That person must be Buddhist or Jewish or Sunni or Shia, etc. From the point of view of the theory of concepts, the existing individuals to whom the concepts apply are as points—they are extensionless, they take up no space. Thus, we have hit upon one good sense in which the term “religion” is, as Willi Braun says, “substantively empty.”⁹ It is empty in the sense that it is not composed of individual religious persons or artifacts or indeed of any-thing. But this emptiness implies no deficiency in the general term. All concepts are empty in the antiseptic sense that none are composed of existing individuals but rather only of further sub-concepts.

At this point we may be ready to proclaim our general concept vindicated. The hierarchical nesting of conceptual genus and species may seem to guarantee “religion” a perfectly respectable meaning, and we may then be tempted to take a very short line with the critics. We may be tempted to echo Hilary Putnam’s memorable assessment of Count Alfred Korzybski’s program of General Semantics:

Korzybski used to claim that to say of anything that it is anything—for example, to say of my car that it is an automobile—is to falsify, since . . . there are many automobiles and my car is not identical with any of them. . . . He recommended that one should use the word etcetera as often as possible. In his view, it would be highly therapeutic to say, “That is an automobile, etc,” and not, “That is an automobile,” in order to keep in mind that the “that” referred to (my car) has infinitely many properties besides those mentioned in my statement.¹⁰

Like “automobile,” “religion” is a general term, and so may be thought to invite Korzybskian analysis. Korzybski would presumably recast Weber’s claim that “Catholics like to sleep well, Protestants to eat well,” to a series of observations about the eating and sleeping habits of many, many individual persons. We can imagine a suitably hedged reconstrual of Marx’s slogan about religion as opiate. Durkheim’s claim that social density produces religious representations at most describes a group of perhaps several thousand Australian aborigines—and at that only partially and with qualifications, etcetera.

Putnam diagnoses Korzybski’s error as follows:

That everything we say is false because everything we say falls short of being everything that could be said is an adolescent sort of error. “Enough is enough, enough isn’t everything,” John Austin wrote, and that applies to interpretation as much as to justification.

True, universal judgments about religion fall short of saying everything that could be said—most of us know Protestants who like to sleep well, it is hard to think that religion was an opiate for the American civil rights movement, and collective effervescence does not always produce religious representations. But this again implies no criticism of the general term. Enough is enough, enough is not everything.

Putnam and Austin are making an important point, but it does not engage the present critics at a deep enough level. The more serious doubt is not about the legitimacy of general concepts (in general) but about the legitimacy of this one in particular. One way to bring out the deeper doubt is to press the analogy between “religion” and “automobile.” When, under normal circumstances, a competent English speaker asserts, “That’s an automobile,” she has fairly specific expectations about what she would encounter in the course of experience—four wheels, an engine, headlights, a roof, etc. “That’s a convertible” will yield all of these except that the roof will be found to be retractable. Furthermore, she can count on her English-speaking listeners to share those expectations (and for them to expect that she in turn shares them, and expects them to be shared). To be sure, ordinary vagueness is very much in the picture—a three-wheeled vehicle can’t be an automobile? What if there is no roof? Still, we smile at Korzybski’s suggestion because we know we can be precise enough about the meaning of “automobile” and “convertible” for the purposes of conversation and further inquiry. Can we say the same for the term “religion” as it is used in my first paragraph?

To the extent that we hesitate in answering we raise the prospect of a deeper form of emptiness than the one contemplated several paragraphs ago—the sort of emptiness we reserve for concepts directed at no object, what Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason calls “usurpatory concepts, such as fortune or fate, which, though allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence, are occasionally called upon to establish their claim by the question: quid juris?, and then there is not a little embarrassment about their deduction because one can adduce no clear legal ground for an entitlement to their use either from experience or from reason” (A84/B117).¹¹

II. The Spatial Theory of Concepts

Kant’s challenge is aimed at a set of a priori concepts—a priori in the sense that, so the claim, we must call them into play if experience is to be possible at all. We cannot then, without circularity, “establish their claim” by calling upon experience. Kant tells us that such concepts as these require a special form of justification, a “transcendental deduction,” in which we argue that either we have the right to employ them or we have no experience. By contrast, such empirical concepts as “religion” require only empirical support. Indeed, the hierarchical account of empirical concepts presented in the preceding section is essentially the one Kant advances in several places in the Critique, first in the “second observation” on the Table of Judgments (A72–73/B97–98; added in the second edition), and later in more detail in a particularly dark section titled Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic (A642/B670–A668/B696; preserved from the first).¹² Here is the key passage:

From the sphere of the concept signifying a genus it can no more be seen how far its division will go than it can be seen from space how far division will go in the matter that fills it. Consequently, every genus requires different species, and these subspecies, and since none of the latter once again is ever without a sphere, (a domain as a conceptus communis), reason demands in its entire extension that no species be regarded as in itself the lowest. For since each species is always a concept that contains only what is common to different things, this concept cannot be completely determined. It cannot, therefore, be related directly to an individual, consequently, it must at every time contain other concepts, i.e., subspecies, under itself (A655–56/B683–84).

We see here reflected several of Kant’s most characteristic doctrines. Since concepts are composed of what may be common to more than one thing they are all general. Thus, they cannot be directly related to individuals since, in the nature of the case, more than one object may fall under any given concept—say, “63 lime-green Mustang convertible with 74,359 miles and a two-inch scratch on the left rear fender.” No amount of conceptual detail can guarantee univocal reference. Rather, Kant argues that, for finite creatures like us, direct relation to objects involves being affected through sensation (Empfindung)—and then in applying general concepts to what strikes us. This is a central element in Kant’s humanizing of his Leibnizian heritage; it’s what he means when he says we have finite, discursive understandings.¹³ By contrast, a self-sufficient, infinite cognizer would presumably not require a contribution from sensation; an infinite cognizer would presumably bring its object into existence in the act of cognition.¹⁴ To give content to our concepts such finite creatures as ourselves must be able to exemplify them, as Kant likes to say, in concreto—in the world. This is generally not difficult when it comes to such directly perceivable middle-sized objects as automobiles; terms whose referents cannot be immediately perceived must be connected to objects that can be—thus, Kant writes of giving “magnetic field” its meaning through the immediate perception of the arrangement of iron filings (A225/B273).

In the first half of the quoted passage, Kant is laying out what has been variously termed the “conjunction”¹⁵ or the “spatial”¹⁶ model of the extension of a concept. The basic claim is that a concept’s extension (Umfang) should be conceived as a sphere, the parts of which are further concepts or further spheres. Just as bounded spaces admit of division without end, so there is no absolutely lowest element, no infima species, in the hierarchy of concepts. Every concept (except that of the highest genus) is composed of a hierarchically nested and indefinitely extended series of subspecies (sub-concepts), even as it itself forms part of a larger genus. The conjunction or spatial model of concepts in turn plays a crucial role in Kant’s larger picture of discursivity. The larger picture says that creatures like us must apply general concepts to what strikes us in sensation, and—appealing now to Kant’s concept of concepts—it specifies the structure of those general conc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface & Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Concepts
• I. Enough is Not Everything
• II. The Spatial Theory of Concepts
• III. Preliminary Implications
• 2. Definition
• I. Varieties of Definition
• II. Religion in General
• III. Criticism
• IV. Essentialism
• 3. Reason
• I. The Theorizing Mind
• II. Regulative and Constitutive
• III. Reconstruction
• IV. A Ptolemaic Capstone
• 4. Experience
• I. Kant’s Non-conceptualism
• II. On Religion
• III. Proudfoot’s Criticisms
• IV. The Christian Faith
• V. Dependence and Illusion
• 5. Self
• I. James, the subjective, and the social
• II. Kant on self-awareness
• III. The social construction of apperception
• IV. Varieties of conformity today: social, religious, epistemic
• 6. Meaning
• I. Explanations of meaning in terms of use
• II. A deflationary account of “God”
• III. From philosophy of religion to religious studies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography