Abstract for the paper 'Kant’s Silently Protestant Philosophical Last Stand Against the Demonic Pure Empiricism, Global Scepticism and Secularism of the Enlightenment'

Philosophy students of analytic philosophy are often told, by other philosophy students and teachers of analytic philosophy, that their papers are too 'historicist' in nature, or even that they contain examples of ad hominem arguments. This paper, then, may well be taken as 'one long ad hominem' against Kant. So why choose Kant? He was chosen because he provides the best example of a metaphysician who is motivated by his prior religious and moral beliefs. There are many other metaphysicians who have been much more forthright about their moral and religious predispositions and how they have affected and determined their metaphysics. Take the cases of Berkeley, Hegel, Bradley and various other 19th century British idealists. On the other hand, there have been many philosophers who have either tried to hide or disguise such motivations and determinations from  the public, or simply didn't mention them. I take Descartes, Locke, Plantinga, Swinburne, Tom Nagel and even Wittgenstein (at least in his early work) as examples. Kant falls between these two approaches to one's own philosophy. He is not as forthright on these issues as Berkeley or Bradley. Or as taciturn as Descartes, Nagel and early Wittgenstein. The reasons for this Kantian ambivalence towards the role and source of his own philosophy  should become fairly clear as one reads the paper.

The first section of this paper portrays Kant in the 'historicist' light of seeing him as the perfect Enlightenment (or Rationalist) man. However, one does not need too much historical fluff to make that point. Instead I would say that Kant's own words, and those of his contemporaries, provide enough evidence to substantiate the general tenor of this paper.

Particularly I stress the forwards and backwards movement of Kant between his pure faith in pure reason and his pure faith in faith. This psycho-philosophical movement is made clear in the paper by considering the moral, philosophical and socio-political disputes between the sceptics and reactionaries who questioned the legitimacy of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e., vis-à-vis religion/morality and its relationship with Kant's transcendental idealism's anti-sceptical credentials). Finally, Kant's failure, as many have seen it, to fuse philosophy with religion/traditional morality can be seen when one scrutinises the logic of Kant's moral philosophy. It can be seen that there is a logical chasm between the faith we must have in certain transcendent entities and also in the moral logic that purports to tie together logical argumentation and the necessity of believing and acting on the 'moral law'. When taken as bereft of ontological and moral content and commitments, Kant's moral logic can indeed be seen as almost airtight and powerful.

The last section, 'Kant as Extreme Protestant', is the most 'psychologistic' and 'historicistic' of all the sections. Here I concentrate exclusively on Kant's Protestantism. This section, therefore, is the backbone of evidence for the claims made in the other sections. In that sense, then, perhaps it would have been better to place it at the beginning of the paper. Despite that, even here the psychologisms and historicisms are not multitudinous. And, again, Kant often speaks for himself on the issues. (And there is only one quote from his private correspondence!)

Kant’s Silently Protestant Philosophical Last Stand Against the Demonic Pure Empiricism, Global Scepticism and Secularism of the Enlightenment

Introductory Defence of the Paper: Kant as Victim of This Paper’s

‘One Long Ad Hominem’

… philosophy must consider an idea in relation to the arguments that support it, and is distracted by too great an attention to its more vulgar manifestations… It is surely right for the historian of philosophy to study Kant’s ethics, and to ignore Luther’s Bondage of the Will... [Roger Scruton, in his A Short History of Modern Philosophy, 1981]

It may well be said that all that follows this introduction is nothing other than an elaborate ad hominem directed towards Kant. The only thing that matters, my critics may say, is whether or not Kant's system is true or false (or perhaps only certain of its propositions and tenets are so). They may continue:

Someone may have an ‘ulterior motive’, as you would probably call it, for believing that 2+2=4. That doesn't thereby stop 2+2 equalling 4.

Perhaps, for my own defence, it will be wise to come down somewhere in the middle between extreme philosophical historicism, for want of a better term, and the argumentative preciousness of much Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Of course we shouldn't believe that if a philosopher says or believes p, and that that philosopher is also culpable in some way, that it somehow makes p false.  On the other hand, we shouldn't ignore the various aetiologies of belief and ideas. One reason why it is unwise to do so is that from the context, whether it is psychological, historical, political, etc., we can gain a better understanding of p, not only a better understanding of the context of p. The contexts, in these cases, would be means to various philosophical and argumentative ends. For example, by learning more about Kant's ‘ulterior motives’ (to use my critic’s term ), we may actually gain an insight into the ideas, arguments and propositions themselves. For example, if we come to know that Kant wrote that he was reigning in reason to ‘make room for faith’ (in both his metaphysics and moral philosophy), then we may also come to know what, in purely philosophical terms, Kant was attempting to do (when taken very broadly), not just why he wrote what he wrote. This latter option would be the case, for example, with an exclusively historical or sociological/psychological analysis of Kant’s work. Indeed in certain respects I am willing to say that with most historical/contextual or sociological/psychological ‘analyses’ of philosophers’ work are not actually analyses at all. They are, instead, commentaries, explanations, or contextual/historical accounts.

Kant as Supreme Exemplar of the Enlightenment Man

To go into detail on Kant’s self-reflexively critical philosophical theology (an apt but cumbersome phrase), we can say that, initially, he was trying - in both editions of the Critique (1788) and in many of his other works - to create an Aristotelian ‘mean’, as it were, between religious/theological ‘dogmatism’ (primarily based on the power of sacred authority) and a morally and philosophically destructive scepticism. (The scepticism was primarily based upon the ideas of the Greco-Roman sceptics and Hume.) Kant’s centrist position, against this ‘scandal of philosophy’, was sustained and justified, according to himself, primarily because there exist ‘eternal laws of reason’. These laws were would provide the equivalent - or alternative - to the eternal truths and laws of the religious morality of his day. Like the truths and laws of religious moralists, Kant’s ‘laws of reason’ were also universal - not forgetting metaphysically necessary and knowable a priori.

Kant’s internalist philosophy of theological criticism would not be ‘dogmatic’ either. Not only because of its critiques of tradition faith and reason, but also because of its critiques of the very same rationality that wanted to take traditional morality and faith to the ‘tribunal of reason’.

Yes! Post-modernists/structuralists, philosophical ‘radicals’ and religious/moral conservatives were - and still are – quite correct in their analyses of Enlightenment reason – it did take itself on. This situation is not unlike the case of the logical positivists of the 1930s and 40s (or of former positivists). They too logically destroyed their own prior logical positivism (i.e., without much help from the derided metaphysicians)

Nonetheless, unlike the views of many of his religious and philosophical critics, Kant fervently believed that his own version of Enlightenment rationality would succeed in driving back the tides of scepticism and secularism (not to forget also pure empiricism and, less so, pure rationalism). And he would succeed in doing so precisely because of the aforementioned ‘eternal laws of reason’. More precisely, these laws would not only provide the metaphysical ‘conditions’ of experience (as Frege and Wittgenstein provided us with the conditions of describability), but also the conditions - or the ‘necessary presuppositions’ - of every kind of human discourse. This would also include, of course, religious, moral and theological discourse. From these foundational and fundamental factors of reason, morality and religion would find their own axioms of belief and duty. In that sense, all of Kant’s non-moral philosophy, primarily his metaphysics, is but a ‘prolegomena’ or ‘grounding’ (to use Kant’s own terms) for the later moral philosophy – his First Philosophy.

That last claim can be seen in two ways. It is usually thought that First Philosophy (i.e., in the tradition of Western philosophy) must come first in the sum total of all other philosophical disciplines. Nevertheless, it can be argued that Kant’s metaphysics (i.e., in his Critique of Pure Reason) provided the argumentative grounding for the later positions advanced in his moral philosophy; and therefore moral philosophy must have been his true First Philosophy. We can respond in two ways to this. Kant’s religious and moral views still came first. The metaphysics expounded in the Critique primarily provided the ‘metaphysical backbone’ (W. James, 19) for them. In addition, the term ‘First Philosophy’ does not necessarily - or always - mean that it must come first in any literal sense. The ‘first’ in ‘First Philosophy’ applies just as much to its primary importance and continuing relevance than it does to literally coming first before all other acts of philosophising. Thus Kant’s First Philosophy can be compared to Descartes’ epistemology. Epistemology didn’t literally coming first in Descartes’ religious psyche; even if it did do so in his published philosophy. Epistemology, as Descartes’ First Philosophy, lead Descartes to religious beliefs that he came to see as being based on his philosophical proofs of God’s existence (e.g., ‘ the cause being greater than the mental effect’). That is, he continued to adhere to the religion he had chosen long before he practised epistemology or wrote his Meditations on First Philosophy.

Still, reason’s own lower-level, as it were, metaphysics (in Kant’s scheme) could only ‘make room for faith’ if reason itself could only show us, with rational arguments, that it, or transcendental idealism, could neither prove nor disprove certain fundamental tenets of the Christian religion. More specifically, Kant showed this to be the case on his well-known ‘antinomies’ (found primarily in the ‘Deduction’ of his Critique of Pure Reason). These antinomies purport to show that when it comes to the existence of God, the nature of human freedom, the reality of immortality, the ancestry of the world (all of which ‘transcend experience’), we have powerful reasons to accept arguments on both sides of these traditional cosmological, ontological and theological controversies.

All this may seem strange, at least for the Kant novice, if taken in the knowledge that Kant’s philosophy ended in what he took to be this situation: he had made reason finally ‘make room for faith’. This, even to non-Kantians, is a fantastic achievement and a brilliant testament to the powers of human reason; even if one does not accept all - or even many - of its ideas and conclusions. More importantly and specifically, Kant showed his contemporaries that there are no proofs of God’s existence, of our personal immortality, and of the freedom of the will. Nevertheless he provided what he took to be proofs of the un-provability of these traditional antinomies. The problems were proven to be un-provable. They were not proven in a first-order sense. We can compare these Kantian conclusions to Gödel’s theorems. They too provided proofs that certain propositions in all mathematical systems could not be proven within them. Here again, as with Kant’s antinomies, we have higher-order proofs of un-provability; not first-order proofs of the truth of propositions. Of course for Kant his realm of ‘higher criticism’ was not metamathematics, as with Gödel, but (pure?) reason itself; to which religion, theology and morality must submit and offer up their beliefs for criticism at its ‘tribunal’. Not only that, but Kant’s theology of internal philosophical criticism is even more courageous when we consider that even then, in the 1780s/90s (e.g., around 200 years before post-modernism), it was realised that if reason – or Kantian reason – must evaluate religion and morality (along with everything else), it must also, ultimately, become self-reflexive in nature. And if that came to be the case, then - as Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, and many others argued did eventually become the case - the end result would be nothing more nor less than rampant nihilism and  destructive global scepticism.

To get back to Kant’s First Philosophy. Despite all that has been said so far, is not the case that Kant’s philosophy is but theology in disguise (as Feuerbach wrote of Hegel’s metaphysics [1839]. Feuerbach argued  that Hegelian metaphysics is ‘the last refuge, the last rational support of theology’. In addition, fifty years later William James also wrote this on Hegel’s philosophy:

I think that his philosophy will probably have an important influence on the development of our liberal form of Christianity. It gives a quasi-metaphysical backbone that this theology has always been in need of. [W. James, quoted in (1966)]

Of course all that was written in the 19^th century. And written about Hegel not Kant. Nonetheless, even as late as the 1860s the well-known cry ‘Back to Kant!’ could be heard [e.g., in the (1866)]. This too - as also with late 18^th century reactions and responses to Kant - was a response to the rise of the physical sciences and the seemingly parallel rise of secularism and ir-religiosity. The men who uttered this cry had  taken Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788) to be an attempt to place science in second place behind traditional morality/religion. Many also took Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) to provide the philosophical arguments, on ‘ends’, ‘purposes’ and ‘values’, that would help the German people both understand and be able to defend their religion.

Despite all that, Kant was still a child of the Enlightenment, not the child of ‘Hegelian theology’ (or neo-theology). For example, in the first edition of his Critique, Kant famously put matters straight when he wrote:

Our age is… the age of criticism, and to criticism all our beliefs must submit. Religion in its holiness… cannot exempt [itself] from its [i.e., reason’s] tribunal without arousing just suspicion against themselves. [1781]

If Kant’s work was indeed, like Hegel’s, ‘the last rational support of theology’, it was a philosophically self-conscious and highly self-critical support. It was a support offered by a philosopher who well knew that all those of a religious nature (living during the German/European Enlightenment) required or demanded a faith and morality grounded on reason and argumentation; not on mindless belief, or on the ‘instinct of faith’, or on the contingent beliefs of convention or history. (All that must have been a little similar to the radical self-reassessments of Catholicism in the late 19^th century and in the early 1960.)

If anything, Kant was the supreme exemplar of the Enlightenment Man; if only because his work is so dense with argumentation. It is also, as we have said, a superb testament to the power of human reason – not forgetting, to the power of reason to question reason. One journalist (well-known in contemporary England for her conservative and anti-Enlightenment missives) recently recognised and well captured Kant’s attempt to provide religion/traditional morality with what W. James, quoted earlier, called its ‘metaphysical backbone’. Nonetheless, Kant also provided, according to this journalist, the means that brought about those ostensibly self-destructive and negative  outcomes of this very endeavour:

The looming disaster of the loss of moral authority was recognised by philosophers such as Kant. He tried heroically to construct an absolute morality constructed on rationality and the authority of the individual, who was to be the measure of all things. Kant believed that in doing so he would be shoring up the moral order; but like so many others, his contributions was a powerful force for destroying it. [Melanie Phillips, 1996]

Kant as Transcendental Idealist and Anti-Sceptic

As is well known (even outside of philosophy), Hume was both Kant’s primary philosophical target and his primary philosophical influence [see Hume’s 1739]; on par, we can say, with the Rousseau who Kant much admired.  To get this point across it is worth mentioning all those thinkers, in Kant’s day, who took the sceptical and empiricist baton over from Hume: namely, Solomon Maimom, Ernst Platner, Thomas Winzenmann, J.G. Hamann and so on. All these notable ‘men of letters’ conjured up the ghost of le bon David, as Kant himself well knew. Maimom, or more specifically Maimom’s scepticism, was particularly important in the immediate Kantian and post-Kantian period. In terms of Kant’s posit of a free will, Maimom provided powerful arguments against Kant’s position. In metaphysical - or ontological - terms, Kant’s understanding/sensibility dualistic problems simply correspond, if in a new form, to Descartes’ previous problem with the mind-body interactions that his substance dualism took to occur. Yet Kant’s own duality is fundamental to his entire philosophical oeuvre. Kant’s sceptical contemporaries sceptics argued that he had no metaphysical or epistemological right to his idea that free will, or the un-caused volitions or originations of the Transcendental Ego, is similar in nature to his own external noumena (i.e., will being an internal noumenon). If Kant had taken his own arguments to their logical conclusions, they argued, he would have had no justification to posit either external noumena or the internal noumenon that miraculously helps us escape from empirical causality and necessity. Kant too, then, found himself - or made himself become - adrift from the safe shores of empirical phenomena; just as Kant himself had said, ironically, about the Plato who once reached  his own state of ‘pure reason’ and thereby began to fly into the transcendent sky.

Scepticism also arises within Kant’s philosophical system because of the threat of the solipsism and ‘psychologism’ (to use a favourite word from the analytic tradition) it engenders. That is, even though the transcendental ego is replete with universal and necessary laws and truths, it is still the case that the individual ego, the empirical self, calls all the shots - not God or, in Hegel’s case, a self-transcending I. Consequently, if only in terms of his moral philosophy, Kant’s transcendental idealism, according to his contemporaries and future critics, had not taken us much further than the pure empiricism of Locke. (So perhaps Melanie Phillips is right about what she claimed earlier!)

Heinrich Jacobi (also a Pietist), provides us with other good examples of the scepticism levelled against Kant’s transcendental idealism vis-à-vis its relations with - or lack thereof - traditional religion and morality [see Jacobi’s 1787). Jacobi epitomises the late 18^th century counter-Enlightenment’s (religious) worries about Kant ‘subjectivist’, as he took it, idealism. Indeed K.L. Reinhold, mentioned earlier, thought he could get around such problems by not taking Kant ‘letter-for-letter’, but, instead, in terms of the general sweep the works’ ‘spirit’. Many commentators took Kant’s later Critique of Judgement (1790) as providing a successful way out of the sceptical problems engendered by earlier transcendental idealism. For example, this work was taken to fully account for the nature/freedom dichotomy. This is how Kant himself puts his own position in the aforementioned work:

Reason forever demands that we assume something or other (the original basis) as existing with unconditioned necessity… [Kant, 1790]

But was Kant aware that his own theology of internal philosophical critique could or would reawaken Descartes’ demon and let it run riot in the realm of philosophy? And did he realise that the Devil himself would follow the demon and wreak his own brand of havoc on the realm of morality/religion? The Enlightenment was certainly seen by many later writers to be the beginning of the end of religion and traditional morality. Many later philosophers - from the 19^th century idealists to Heidegger; from Heidegger to Derrida - came to see the Enlightenment as being essentially pernicious in nature. In that respect, Enlightenment philosophers had it in both ears, as we have said. Into their right ear came the cries of religious conservatives. And, many years later, into the left ear came the screams of radical Continental philosophers (i.e., of those still sympathetic to the Enlightenment).

Despite all the above, Kant took his own work to have acceptably accounted for the Geist/nature dichotomy. Some commentators take the Judgement to reverse Pure Reason’s prior binary relation, thus:

i) Our a priori principles and categories must be thus and so in order to account, explanatorily, for our moral and metaphysical demands.

or

ii) Nature itself must be thus and so in order to account for our freedom (amongst other things).

This, in certain senses, can be taken to correspond to similar debates engendered by the logic of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In that book we have:

i) The world must be thus and so in order to be fully describable by us in strictly logical terms.

or

ii) Logic itself that imposes its form and structures on the world in order to make it describable in any natural language.

More specifically, the logical forms and structures of natural language provide the world with its scaffolding, so to speak. And this is a very Kantian position from Wittgenstein. We could then fill in the remaining empirical content by acknowledging the empirical truths of the natural sciences. For Kant, on the other hand, that scaffolding is provided by our a priori principles and categories that are fill in with empirical phenomena (that are not dependent on the stipulations of the natural sciences). Thus with Kant we have both form and content. Nonetheless, we must state again:

world Þ contents of the transcendental ego

or

contents of the transcendental ego Þ  world

In terms of moral, not ontological, logic. The first sceptical argument can level against Kant’s moral philosophy is that the ‘moral law’, or the moral law ‘within us’, does not in and of itself contain the normative power to say, of itself, that it must be obeyed no matter what. As Kant himself admits at certain pints, we need religion to back-up the moral law and its duties/imperatives. Thus we do not have a case of strict logical implication thus:  p É q. Where ‘p’ stands for ‘If there is a moral law…’; and ‘É q’ stands for ‘then we must obey it’. Religion, therefore, would provide the material, as it were, which could make the conditional schema above an example of a strict logical implication. Thus

i) Our religion tells us that there exists a moral law. ii) Because of that, we must obey it duties and imperatives.

In other words, we must take p to be true before we can infer q. But this still does not have the force of a strict logical implication.

Kant himself argues that it is precisely because of our cognisance of the ‘moral law’ that we come to cognise our own freedom - another ostensible case of p É q, thus:

i) If we are cognisant of the moral law. ii) Then we must also be cognisant of our free will.

On Kant’s own account, we cannot prove God’s existence; or providence; or our own personal immortality. Nonetheless, we must believe in these things in order to sustain our religious faith and philosophical morality. Yet this very same religious faith, in Kant’s system, itself sustains our obedience to reason’s - not in this case to God’s -  imperatives and duties. As many commentators have said, belief in the trinity (with a small ‘t’) above must be stipulated or made purely conventional in nature because the proof of the each is not forthcoming and neither is there a logical connection set up between the moral law and our obedience to it. The foundation of Kant’s ‘practical’ moral philosophy is that we should simply take the existence and reality of these things as given . To put it blatantly. We must not only act as if God, providence and immortality are realities, but also as if the moral law itself is a reality. This means that although Kant’s arguments for the moral law, and our consequent obedience to its imperative, may be iron cast, this does not automatically mean that we must also take it, or even take conscience, as the actual entities of some ontological realm. Kant’s valid logic does not entail the truths of his ontology as it is taken vis-à-vis religion and morality. His moral logic, then, can be taken purely formerly by substituting ‘p’s’ and ‘q’s’  (as autonyms, plus the logical symbols for the linguistic connectives, etc.) for the theological sentences – but taken to be ethical and ontological - that  (in many but not every case) we in fact have. They would still work qua formal logic. Of course, a Kantian would find such an exercise in logical reduction as being pretty much pointless, which, in one sense, it would be.

. 

Conclusion: Kant as Extreme Protestant

We can't be sure how honest Kant is being, about what could indeed be called his ‘ulterior motives’, in the following passage:

… there can only be one ultimate end of all the operations of the mind. To this all other aims are subordinate, and nothing more than means for its attainment…  The superior position occupied by moral philosophy, above all other spheres… [1787, Transcendental Method]

This seems to be a frank and explicit account of his own ‘ulterior motives’ (though, of course, he wouldn't have used these words). That is, ‘all the operations of the mind’ (including, it must be assumed, all his philosophising, etc. – i.e., everything outside moral philosophy) were nothing more ‘than means for [the] attainment [of the] ultimate end [of] moral philosophy’. The common conception of Kant, on the other hand, is one of a systematic and objective system builder (which he was). In terms of this popular account of Kant, it seems that Kant must have worked from the bottom up (from the foundations), as it were. Yet perhaps he worked from the top down. Kant’s moral philosophy was not given birth to by his metaphysical philosophy; his moral philosophy gave birth to and determined his overall philosophical system. (As said in the second section, this hierarchical relation between substructure and superstructure must not be seen in temporal terms.) No matter how systematic, coherent and internally valid (or indeed true) Kant’s philosophical system is, its casui sui, so to speak, was his moral philosophy. In consequence, who's to say that his moral philosophy was not itself determined by his Christian or Protestant religious beliefs. That is, just as Kant's moral philosophy determined his entire philosophical system, similarly, perhaps something completely outside philosophy determined his moral philosophy. Let's not beat around the bush here. Only Christian theology and morality could have been such determining factors. That is, if they were determining factors at all. Perhaps it was Kant's Pietist Protestantism that determined his moral philosophy; which, in turn, determined his entire philosophical system.

There is more evidence of Kant's a priori, as it were, ‘ulterior motives’ when it come to his destruction of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God. (Kant, in this case, attempted to prove that ‘exist’ is not a predicate.) And by doing so he thought, and others did too, that the support underneath the Ontological Argument had been taken away. In addition, many commentators have said that this disproof itself also has the consequence of thereby disproving all the other well-known arguments for God’s existence. This is because of the logical, if not ontological, dependence of these arguments on the Ontological Argument’s proofs. Such proofs  became their presuppositions.

What were Kant’s ‘ulterior motives’ for refuting the Ontological Argument? Perhaps he himself should tell us:

No one, it is true, will be able to boast that he knows that there is a God… No, my conviction [that God exits] is not logical, but moral certainty…it rests on subjective grounds… [1787, Transcendental Method]

To ask a painfully obvious question: What have Protestants, historically, often argued when it comes to their religious beliefs and the arguments that purported to proof the existence of God? They believed that both their trust in the Deity’s existence, and the strength and fervency of their beliefs, should rest on ‘faith, not reason’. Kant, like a good Protestant, tried to ‘make room for faith’ by destroying the rational proofs of God's existence (as we seen). This too he - indirectly - confesses to:

… the principles of reason…do not conduct us to any theological truths…we recognise [reason's] right to assert the existence of a perfect and absolutely necessary being, [but] this can be admitted only from favour, and cannot be regarded as the result of irresistible demonstration. [1787, Transcendental Dialectic]

Kant's moral philosophy also squares very well with another important feature of Protestantism: the emphasis on personal morality. And, as all Kantians - and those knowledgeable about Kant - know, ‘the moral sense within us all’ is essential to Kantian ethics.

Kant wasn’t the only philosophical Pietist of the Enlightenment era. There is the well known – and still well known - Jacobi we mentioned in an earlier section. It just so happens that Kant and Jacobi take radically different approaches to the ‘excesses’ of the Enlightenment. Jacobi emphasises the necessity of faith and of ‘irrational belief’. Kant, on the other hand, knows that the Enlightenment mind, or at least many of them, will allow only reason to set limits on reason. And that is precisely what Kant did. Kant’s pro-Enlightenment position can easily be seen as an ultra-Protestant stance against Church authority. To Kant, perhaps the Enlightenment was a reaction against a Catholic past in which there was the ‘inability to use one’s reason without the guidance of another’. We can see this Kantian Protestantism, already hinted at in the other sections, expressed in forthright and clear terms when Kant himself writes:

Everything that man, apart from a moral way of life, believes himself to be capable of doing to please God is mere religious delusion and spurious worship of God. [1793]

Despite the aforementioned and much-commented-upon relationship between Kant’s rationalism and Jacobi’s purer, or more extreme, Protestantism, one couldn’t find a more unequivocal and absolutist statement of Protestantism’s prime tenet (i.e.,  ‘faith not works’) than that!

Kant, in parallel to his pure Protestant faith above, also takes his pure faith in rationalism to its (Protestant?) extreme in the following letter to Lavatar:

I distinguish the teaching of Christ from the report that we have of the teaching of Christ, and in order to get at the former I try above all to extract the moral teaching separated from all precepts of the New Testament. [1775]

And thus was born the beginnings of Hegelian theology and 19^th century theological hermeneutics?

In terms of Kant’s swing back to his faith in faith, rather than his return swing to his faith in reason, we can see many examples of this explicated in the Critique. We must stress again this backward and forwards motion on Kant’s part. A motion from a belief in ‘pure reason’ to a belief in pure faith and back again… We should also mention, again, the problem that this perpetual-motion swing between reason’s autonomy and faith’s autonomy had on the traditional morality and religions of his day. Both his faith in faith and his faith in reason ultimately brought about conflict with - and problems for - traditional religion and morality. This is the case despite Kant’s obvious – to everyone! - faith in faith. The aforementioned still only came to his contemporaries, and those who followed, as part of a binary package deal in which neither faith-polarity is autonomous vis-à-vis the other. Reason and faith could still, in a strong sense, be taken as autonomous vis-à-vis itself and the other. We can reasonably say all this even if it was the case that Kant himself never directed himself, philosophically speaking, against the nature of conventional religion and traditional morality and their relations to his own - or anyone else’s - philosophical system (except in his [1793], mentioned in the following).

In terms of things on one side of this divide it is worth stating, for example, that Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason (1793) failed to obtain the approval of the Berlin censors precisely because, according to the censors and many others, it took rationalism too far. In that work Kant writes:

Morality needs not the idea neither of another being above man for man to recognise his duty… Morality thus needs religion in no way for morality’s sake…

Indeed if one were to base one’s moral volitions solely on God’s commands and not on reason’s own, Kant argued, then this would make moral philosophy ‘heteronymous’ (to use his own technical term).

Again, when Kant is on the right side of reason he argues, for example, that although a belief in a most perfect being is metaphysically or theoretically vacuous, it is still not logically absurd  (as we saw earlier with Kant’s other ‘antinomies’). When Kant is on the wrong side of faith, as it were, he argues that ‘morality leads unavoidably to religion’ [1793]. It is still the case, for example, that an act of faith - or possibly a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ - is necessary in order to close the logical gap between moral action/duty and the idea of God as a ‘moral legislator outside man’ [1793]. Not only that, but Kant is explicit about his own take on religious faith. He writes:

There is only one true religion; but there can be many varieties of religious creeds. [1793]

One may justifiably wonder, then, if this ‘one true religion’ is 18^th century German Pietism, or at least a Protestantism of some stripe.

In terms of Protestantism and its historically well-noted ‘individualism’ vis-a-vis Kant’s parallel ‘subjectivist’ – even if still transcendental! – idealism, Melanie Phillips, in the earlier passage, made much of the pre-eminence of the ‘individual’ in Kant’s moral philosophy. Indeed that passage sounds almost like a Catholic’s take on the problems with ‘Protestant individualism’ when taken to be in opposition to his or her own beliefs in communalism, strict clerical/ecclesiastical hierarchies, and the subordination of the individual to the Church. It is surely interesting to note, then, that Kant was brought up in a Protestant environment – one of German Pietism. Not only did his internally-critical philosophy of theology take Protestantism to a further extreme (as did, for example, the Calvinists of the17th century) with its philosophical edification of the individual as both individual-qua-rational-agent (with his holy and autonomous reason) and as individual-qua-moral-agent (with his sacred and autonomous conscience), but Kant himself personally went further than that by ceasing to go to church... Indeed! Why go to Church if God is not only ‘within the heart’, but also within one’s reason – within one’s transcendental ego? And that non-natural ego or self is - like the tenets and beliefs of the Christian faith - a universal phenomenon full of universalisable categorical imperatives and duties that can be eased out if only one applied one’s literally God-given reason. None of this could be said, in Kant’s moral philosophy, about the ‘empirical self’.

And wasn’t much of the above Melanie Phillips’ own categorical conclusion – or at least one of them - in the passage quoted earlier?

References and Further Reading

Adorno, T.W. and Horkenheimer, M. (1947, Amsterdam) Dialektik der Aufklarung

Aquinas, T. (1963-75) Summa Theologiae, ed. T. McDermott

Beiser, F.C. (1988) The Faith of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant To Fichte

Derrida, J. (1967/76) ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on Levinas’, in Writing and Difference

Descartes, R. (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy

Feuerbach, L. (1843/1966) Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. M.H. Vogel

Jacobi, H. (1787) David Hume über den Glauben

Heidegger, M. (1927/1982) Being and Time, trans. Bloomington

-          (1961/1979-87, New York) Nietzsche

-          (1947) Letter on Humanism

Hume, D. (1739) Treatise of Human Nature

Kenny, A. (1980) Aquinas

Körner, S. (1955) Kant

Levinas, E. (1961/1971) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by A. Lingis

Phillips, M. (1996) All Must Have Prizes

Plato – Theaetetus

          - Protagoras    

Reinhold,  (1786/1923, Leipzig ed.) Letters on the Kantian Philosophy

Rousseau, J.J. (1762) Social Contract

Scruton, R. (1981) A Short History of Modern Philosophy

Wittgenstein, L. (1921/1961, London) Tractatus

                           (1953/1958, Oxford) Philosophical Investigations

Wolter, A.B. (1990) The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus