Comprehensive Commentary on Kant's Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason

Stephen R. Palmquist

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781119090236
  9781118619209
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118619315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Palmquist's Commentary provides the first definitive clarification on Kant's Philosophy of Religion in English; it includes the full text of Pluhar's translation, interspersed with explanations, providing both a detailed overview and an original interpretation of Kant's work.

• Offers definitive, sentence-level commentary on Kant's Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason
• Presents a thoroughly revised version of Pluhar's translation of the full text of Kant's Religion, including detailed notes comparing the translation with the others still in use today
• Identifies most of the several hundred changes Kant made to the second (1794) edition and unearths evidence that many major changes were responses to criticisms of the first edition
• Provides both a detailed overview and original interpretation of Kant's work on the philosophy of religion
• Demonstrates that Kant's arguments in Religion are not only cogent, but have clear and profound practical applications to the way religion is actually practiced in the world today
• Includes a glossary aimed at justifying new translations of key technical terms in Religion, many of which have previously neglected religious and theological implications

Part I
Human Nature’s Transcendental Problem
Evil and the Boundary of Goodness (First Piece)

1
The Original Goodness of Human Nature
Introduction, Comment, and Section I (R 19–28)

1. Untitled introduction: Is humanity good or evil by nature?

The main text of Kant’s Religion starts with an untitled introductory section. Despite its unassuming placement, this section, which appears to be little more than an additional preface, establishes a crucial context for the whole First Piece. The section (and with it also the main body of the book) begins with a paraphrased allusion to a verse from the Bible, followed by an interpretation highlighting several themes that appear regularly throughout the book.

19.01–16
First Piece
On the Inherence of the Evil alongside the Good Principle: Or on the Radical Evil in Human Nature

That the world is in bad /shape\¹ is a lament as ancient as history, even as the still more ancient art of poetry—indeed, just as much so as the most ancient among all poetic expressions,² the religion of the priests. Nonetheless,³ all [of these traditions]⁴ have the world start from the good: from the Golden Age, from life in Paradise, or from a still more fortunate⁶ life in communion with heavenly⁵ beings. But they soon make this fortune⁶ vanish like a dream, and ⌞they⌟ now make the lapse⁷ into evil (the moral /aspect\, with which the physical /aspect\⁸ always went in the same pair)⁹ hasten toward the [ever] worse¹⁰ in an accelerated fall^*—so that now (but this Now is as ancient 〈alt〉 as history) we live in the final age, the Last Day and the end of the world are knocking at the door,

Wasting no time, Kant reveals in the book’s opening sentence that one of his main themes will be the “poetic” character of religious power structures, or “the religion of the priests.” As we shall see in examining the Fourth Piece, when Kant calls such religion poetic he does not mean it is meaningless or promotes untruth any more than poetry itself or history does; rather he means that any truth found therein has a symbolic, hypothetical status, inasmuch as we human beings are the source of any meaning that resides in it (see PSP IV.3–4 and PCR V). The lament Kant borrows from 1 John 5: 19b says nothing about priestcraft; rather the context (1 John 5) focuses on the inward certainty that every genuine religious believer can obtain. Such certainty is not contrary to what might be called “poetic truth,” for it is the final goal of symbolic or hypothetical reasoning.

All three of the disciplines Kant mentions in the first sentence (history, poetry, and priestcraft) share such a hypothetical character. Kant likewise notes the consonance between pagan, Greek and Hebrew myths about the origin of the world: they all hypothesize an original goodness at the foundation of the world. Yet, as Kant adds in the third sentence, they are equally univocal in depicting this original, dream-like state as giving way almost immediately to corruption and evil (both moral and physical) that is so serious that, for as long as we have recorded our own history, we human beings have pictured ourselves as being on the brink of final destruction.

In support of the common tendency to regard this “fall” as an ever-accelerating moral decline, Kant adds a footnote to that word, quoting three Latin verses from Horace’s Odes:

19n.24–26

Aetas parentum peior avis tulit

Nos nequiores, mox daturos

Progeniem vitiosiorem.¹¹

By citing an ancient text to support the notion that each generation tends to view itself as worse than the previous and better than the next, Kant shows that this tendency is nothing new. Not only is such pessimism “as ancient as history,” but it also crosses cultural barriers, as Kant further emphasizes in the main text by referring to an alleged tendency among some Hindus to view the destroyer god Shiva as the most powerful component of their divine trinity.

19.16–20

and in several regions of India¹² the World Judge and Destroyer Rudra (otherwise also called Shiva or Siva) is already being venerated as the god now reigning, after the World Preserver Vishnu, weary of the office he took over from the World Creator Brahma, has already resigned it centuries ago.

Putting aside questions regarding the historical accuracy of Kant’s sources for such comments (cf. note 1.12), we can appreciate this passage as foreshadowing his later emphasis on the Trinity (see App. III); it also illustrates how Religion draws examples from a wide variety of religious traditions other than just Christianity.

In contrast to the various traditions that view the course of world history pessimistically, Kant now calls attention to a more optimistic tendency, characteristic of Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that education can reverse evil’s influence.

19.21–23, 20.01–03

More recent, but far less proliferated,¹³ is the opposite, heroic opinion, which has probably¹⁴ found its place solely among philosophers and, in our times, above all among pedagogues: that the world advances incessantly {20} (though scarcely noticeably) in precisely the reverse direction, namely from the bad 〈Schlechten〉 to the better; [or] ⌞that⌟ at least the predisposition to this [[advance]] is to be found in human nature.

Here we find Kant’s first use of the technical term “predisposition” (Anlage), t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Hermeneutic Background to Kant’s Religion
• Part I: Human Nature’s Transcendental Problem
• Part II: The Individual’s Logical Struggle
• Part III: The Community’s Empirical Victory
• Part IV: Religion’s Hypothetical Application
• Glossary
• Works Cited
• Index
• End User License Agreement