Lecture Eight Kant — Religion and Moral Reason
Scope:
Enlightenment thought reached a culmination in the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Provoked by the skepticism of Hume and seeking to find a way beyond the impasse between the rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge, Kant's "critical philosophy" made the radical claim that knowledge is based not in the passive reception of sense impressions but in the mind's active organization of sense experience. Thus, for Kant, although all knowledge is based in sense experience, we know the world only as the mind organizes it, not as it is "in itself." And because God is not an object of sense experience, Kant argued, we cannot know God. However, he also argued that, especially with respect to what he called moral or "practical" knowledge, we must "postulate" God: We cannot know God, but it is rational to believe in God.
Outline
I. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant is the most influential Enlightenment thinker on religion and, arguably, the most important Western thinker since Aquinas. He is most well known for the epistemological revolution whose effects we still feel today.
A. Kant's revolution owed much to the work of Hume, which led him to the conclusion that neither rationalism nor empiricism gave a satisfactory account of human knowledge.
B. For Kant, all knowledge of the natural world, that is, all scientific knowledge, begins in experience, in sense impressions.
1. However, our experience of the world is not just based in the passive reception of information from the world, as most empiricists claimed, but is the result of active processes of the mind in organizing these sense impressions.
2. This organizing is accomplished in large part by innate ideas, such as the rationalists had argued for.
3. Our experience of the world — and, thus, our knowledge of the world — happens only as the mind, specifically, the "understanding," organizes the information it receives from the world by imposing patterns on sense impressions.
C. In Kant's view, we know things in the world by virtue of the way our minds organize sense impressions, but we know the principles of this organizing activity in a different way.
1. Because knowledge is only possible given the organizing activity of the mind, we know these things as they appear to us, not as they might be apart from the organizing activity we bring to them.
2. And we know the categories of the understanding in a different way, "transcendentally," that is, as the necessary conditions for us.
II. For Kant, God is not an object in or above the world because we do not have sense impressions of God; therefore, we cannot know God
scientifically and cannot prove the existence of God as an entity.
A. Although we cannot know that God exists, Kant claims that it is, in fact, rational to believe that God exists, that it is rational indeed necessary—to postulate the existence of God.
B. With respect to theoretical reason, Kant treats this rational faith in God in terms of the regulative use of reason.
1. In addition to the categories of the understanding, crucial elements of reason for Kant are the regulative ideas— such as God, world, self — which bring unity at the highest level to experience.
2. Reason needs to postulate these principles in order to make sense of experience.
3. It is, therefore, legitimate — indeed necessary — to think God (which is different from knowing God) as the origin of all that is, but it is illegitimate to speculate about what God is like beyond this.
III. Kant's second and more influential approach to the question of God comes through his examination of moral or "practical" reason.
A. The main argument of Kant's Critique of Practical Reasons that to act morally is to bind oneself to a universal moral law and to ignore all other incentives or motives to action, such as tradition, emotion, or self-interest.
1. Reason gives the moral law to itself in the form of what Kant calls the "categorical imperative," according to which one should always act in such a way that the principle of the act is one that can be universalized.
2. To act according to the moral law is, for Kant, to act autonomously.
B. Although we are free with respect to the will as rational beings, we are also natural beings with desires and needs and limitations, most importantly, the desire for happiness.
1. This means that although reason demands virtue, as finite, limited beings, we always fall short of the demands of the moral law because our natural desire for happiness always affects our moral will.
2. We are left with the problem that virtue and happiness do not necessarily coincide, a realization that may lead us to despair.
C. To address these problems of practical reason, Kant says that we are obligated to postulate the existence of God and of immortality.
1. The postulate of immortality gives us confidence that we will have an infinite amount of time in which to make progress toward virtue.
2. The postulate of God gives us confidence that there is a power that will guarantee our virtue will be rewarded with happiness.
3. Without these postulates, we will despair and have difficulty following the moral law.
IV. Kant, like other Enlightenment thinkers, places enormous emphasis on the authority and demands of reason, but he is by no means unaware of other aspects of human life.
A. Kant goes beyond the Enlightenment in arguing that we can
never know, at least in this life, whether we are acting morally. Even if we think we are following the moral law, our desire for happiness is at work beneath the level of consciousness, influencing us and tempting us to act in ways that go against the law.
B. In Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone,particularly in two essays in which he treats what he calls "radical evil," Kant examines a kind of natural propensity to be seduced to
abandon reason for the hope of happiness.
C. Although in many respects Kant treats religion as what we have been calling natural religion, his awareness of the limits of reason and the reality of radical evil make his religious thought look more Christian than that of many other Enlightenment thinkers.
Suggested Reading:
Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason.
_________, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Kant, Weigelt, and Miiller, Critique of Pure Reason.
Questions to Consider:
1. What, for Kant, is the difference between believing in God or thinking God, on the one hand, and knowing God, on the other?
2. Why does Kant, from a moral perspective, think that we are obligated to believe in God?
Lecture Eight Transcript Kant — Religion and Moral Reason
We've spent the last two lectures discussing Enlightenment and efforts by thinkers such as Locke, Hume, and Diderot to articulate the relationship between religion and reason. One thing these thinkers and others argued about was whether it is rational to accept the major claims made by positive or revealed religions, such as Christianity, or whether only a rational "natural religion" could command the assent of reason.
Some, like Hume, suggested that not only could reason not defend religion, but religion's defenders were missing something crucial by even attempting to use reason in this way. As he declared at the end of his essay on miracles:
I think this method of reasoning may confound those dangerous friends or disguised enemies of the Christian religion who have undertaken to defend it by the principles of human reason. Our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason.
As I've said, there is good reason to think that Hume was being ironic here and not really that interested in persuading anyone to turn to faith. But if we take what he says at face value, he is simply making the point that probably seems reasonable to many of us — that something can be lost if we think about religion only in terms of reason. We will see in future lectures that this will become an important position in the 19'" and especially the 20 century. But we are still working through the Enlightenment and have not yet considered what is certainly the most important Enlightenment voice — that of Immanuel Kant. who, you will recall, wrote the book entitled Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Kant was the most influential Enlightenment philosopher — and arguably the most important Western thinker since Aquinas. His work was the culmination of Enlightenment thought — and, indeed, in many respects its overcoming, for he offered powerful answers to three of the questions we have been exploring in previous lectures, and in doing so, he set the agenda for much of post-Enlightenment philosophical and religious thought. These questions are: How do we ground human knowledge? What can we know about God? What is religion?
In some respects, it's not surprising that Kant would initiate a whole new way of thinking about knowledge and philosophy — for among the great Enlightenment thinkers, his biography is somewhat anomalous. Kant was born and lived his whole life in Konigsberg, a provincial town in East Prussia — what is now Kaliningrad in Russia. Where Hume, and Voltaire, and most other leading Enlightenment thinkers were cosmopolitan Europeans, Kant never left East Prussia, He led a sheltered, and as legend has it, extremely structured and disciplined life. One philosopher quipped that Kant was the "most regular of regular verbs."
Kant also — unlike Hume, or Voltaire, or Diderot — was a university professor. With Kant, we really see the beginnings of modern philosophy as a professional, academic endeavor — in this he would be followed by many of the figures we will examine in this lectures series, with some very notable exceptions.
Kant was also unusual in that he did not produce his greatest body of work until he 'was over 55 — publishing his first groundbreaking work, The Critique of Pure Reason,in 1781. This book was followed by a series of almost equally significant works over the next 15 years.
Our first task in this lecture will be to consider the epistemological revolution that Kant achieved in The Critique of Pure Reason.We will then go on to consider Kant's views on the knowledge of God and his definition of religion.
Kant's revolution owed much to the work of Hume, for as Kant reported later in his life it was Hume's skepticism that jolted Kant out of what he called his "dogmatic slumber." Shaken by the penetrating insights behind Hume's skepticism, Kant realized that philosophy did not have the tools with which to combat the skepticism — and so to really securely ground our knowledge about the world and ourselves. This led him to the conclusion that neither rationalism nor empiricism could do the job.
Let's consider Hume's skepticism in just a little more detail. The most important point to make here is that Hume was not just a skeptic with respect to religion, but with respect to reason more generally — as I've noted, that his questions about, for instance, the existence of God were particular applications of the kind of questions he raised about our ability to know anything at all.
This skepticism was directed particularly to concepts such as causality, as we've seen — also self, substance — that is, concepts that we employ to hold together various sense-impressions that help us understand, for instance, our observation of one ball striking another, and then the second ball moving; or our sense that my arms, legs, head, and consciousness are all parts of the same self.
Hume argued that we really do not have knowledge of these ideas that we use to hold together various sense-impressions they are, rather, simply conventions or habits of thought. Kant could not accept this way of thinking about knowledge, and so endeavored to more adequately ground the knowledge of complex ideas, such as causality. The result was, and continues to be to this day, enormously influential.
Kant called his philosophy "critical philosophy," which for him meant philosophy that employs reason to examine itself in order to determine its — reason's — proper function and limits. He called each of his three major works a critique. The Critique of Pure Reason examined the basis of our knowledge of the world. For Kant, "pure reason" meant what we might call theoretical or scientific reason, and he published this book in 1781, as I've said. The Critique of Practical Reason, which he published in 1788, examined moral knowledge. Finally, The Critique of Judgment,published in 1790, examined aesthetic knowledge, or knowledge of the beautiful.
The first thing to note here is that Kant, unlike most of his Enlightenment counterparts, distinguished between different kinds of reasons: The means by which we come to know things and events in the world is different from the means by which or the reason we use in coming to know what is right or wrong. In what follows, I will focus on two of these types of knowledge: on the basic arguments of The Critique of Pure Reason, and so Kant's understanding of how we know the world; and the arguments of his critique of practical reason, where we think about how we know what is right or wrong.
In its English translation The Critique of Pure Reason is over 300 pages of detailed and sophisticated argumentation — but for our purposes, Kant's basic claim is relatively easy to grasp. He' s attempting to forge a kind of synthesis between rationalism and empiricism. He argues that all knowledge of things and events in the world begins in experience, in sense-impressions—there is no knowledge of the world without them. In this, he is following the empiricist line of thought.
However, he also argues that our experience of things and events is based not just in the passive reception of information from the world, as most empiricists claim, but rather is the result of active processes of the mind that organize these sense-impressions. This organization is accomplished by innate ideas, such as the rationalists had argued for.
The fundamental point here is that we need this activity of our minds to organize our sense-impressions — for without this activity these impressions would result only in a chaotic blur. Thus, our experience of the world, and thus our knowledge of it, only happens as the mind organizes the information it receives from the world by imposing patterns on sense-impressions. Our minds bring a kind of grid, or a set of questions and categories, to the world. As Kant puts it, the mind is less like a pupil listening to the teacher — passively receiving facts from the world — and more like a judge interrogating witnesses, and thus actively producing facts.
So, for instance, Kant argued that space and time are not objective realities out there — but, in fact, are the mind's most fundamental organizing principles, made possible by a faculty he calls "intuition." He goes on to argue that the objects of experience and knowledge, appearing in the context of space and time, are organized — made to appear as objects and events — by virtue of innate principles that he calls "the categories of the understanding."
These include what he calls "the categories of quantity," such as unity and plurality; "the categories of quality," such as reality or the negative; "categories of relation," such as subsistence and causality; and "categories of modality," such as possibility or impossibility, necessity or contingency. These categories are innate — they are, as it were, hard-wired into our minds, but note that unlike the innate ideas of the rationalists, these are not innate ideas about things in the world, but rather they are principles for organizing sense-impressions we receive from the world.
To sum up then: We know the table by virtue of the fact that first, intuition makes it possible to receive sense-impressions against the backdrop of space and time — and because the understanding brings to bear categories, such as unity and substance, and thus organizes the set of sense-impressions that together make up the experience of table.
I want to make two further points about this way of thinking about knowledge of the world. Recall in the discussion of Hume's skepticism his claim that ideas such as causality and substance are conventions or habits — they' re not knowledge. But for Kant, we do know causality and substance, but we know them in a very specific way: We do not know them scientifically, the way we know about objects in the world — that this podium is white, for instance. We know them — and here I' ll invoke one of Kant's technical terms — we know them "transcendentally" — that is, we know them by means of the critical operation of the mind upon itself as reason turns around to look at itself. When it does, Kant argues, it sees that these categories are the necessary conditions for having any experience at all.
Let's think about it this way: Kant starts from basic kinds of experience or states of consciousness, our experience of objects in the world — experience of this podium here — and, as we will see, also our experience of moral obligation. He then asks himself: Given these experiences, what must the mind or reason be like for them to happen in this way'? What are the conditions of possibility of these experiences?
So, he is not saying that we know the mind like we know objects in the world. We do not have direct sense-impressions of the categories of understanding — they are not, then, matters of fact. That is, we can know that our minds engage in this kind of organizing activity not by virtue of any sense-impressions we receive from the world, but by virtue of the critical operation by which the mind sees that such organizing activity is necessary if things in the world are to appear to us at all.
But — and this is my second point about what Kant is doing here note a consequence of this way of thinking about our knowledge of the world: Kant has grounded knowledge in the organizing, or as he put it "synthesizing," activity of the mind. Therefore, we know things and events in the world as they are filtered through the grid of our intuitions and our categories. In other words, we cannot know the world independently of this organizing activity. We know the world as it appears to us — not as it might be apart from the organizing activity we bring to it. According to Kant, we can't know what he called "things-in-themselves"; we only know things as they appear to us. This, as we will see, will lead later thinkers to criticize Kant's epistemology.
What are the consequences of Kant's epistemological revolution for thinking about religion? Perhaps the most obvious point is that it changes the way we think about God. For Kant, God is not an object in the world or above the world, because we do not have, he says, sense — impressions of God. So, according to his epistemology, we cannot know God, and thus cannot prove the existence of God. For Kant, all the arguments for the existence of God — whether rationalist or empiricist arguments — are based in a fundamental misunderstanding of how knowledge works.
But this isn't the end of the story, for Kant does argue that although we cannot know that God exists, it is, in fact, rational to believe that God exists — or, as he also puts it, it is rational — and indeed, he will say it is necessary — to postulate the existence of God. One way he described his critical philosophy, in fact — and here we may detect an echo of something we just heard from Hume — was that he was limiting knowledge in order to make room for faith. But this is not faith as blind acceptance — it is, again, rational faith.
Kant defends this view of rational faith in two ways — first, from the perspective of theoretical reason, and he does this in The Critique of Pure Reason and elsewhere — and second, from the perspective of morality in The Critique of Practical Reason.Let's briefly look at the first, and then spend some more time on the second — which, for Kant, was the more important of the two ways of thinking about this rational faith in God.
With respect to his account of pure reason, Kant discusses God in terms of what he calls "the regulative use of reason." As we've already seen, Kant's epistemology identifies two levels at which our mind organizes the sense-impressions we receive from the world: Intuition brings to bear the forms of space and time in which events and objects appear to us; and the understanding brings to bear on sense-impressions the categories that allow us to constitute objects and events.
But Kant also identifies a third level of organization — what he calls "reason." Reason, in this sense, brings to bear very general "regulative" principles of organization — and Kant calls these the "ideas of reason" — and there are three: the idea of self, the idea of world, and the idea of God. As I' ve said, for Kant, the idea of God has no corresponding sense-impression, and he says the same about the ideas of world and self. Rather, these are ideas produced by our minds in an effort to place our experience in the most comprehensive and general context.
One way to think about what Kant is doing here is that he is presenting us with a picture of reason as something with its own needs and drives. Reason is not simply a matter of understanding, identifying, and knowing the objects in the world, but it is driven to think about how everything in experience fits together at the highest levels.
In other words, he argues, that concepts such as God, world, and self are concepts reason must give to itself in order to answer questions that it inevitably asks. So, for instance, the mind brings the categories of causality and infinity to experience, but in doing so, it pushes itself to think beyond experience. It can identify particular causes, but it is led to ask questions about the first cause of all that exists; it can identify the limits of all that exists, but this leads it to ask questions about the unlimited or the infinite.
We don't have any experience, any sense-impressions, of a first cause or of infinity, but Kant argues that reason employs the regulative idea of God to make sense of the ideas of causality and contingency by positing a first, unlimited cause. He argues that reason needs to give itself this idea in order not to undermine itself with metaphysical riddles.
He puts it this way:
For not only does our reason itself feel a need to make the concept of the unlimited the basis of the concept of everything limited — and hence of all other things; this need in fact also extends to the assumption that the unlimited exists, for without this assumption, our reason can find no satisfactory basis for the contingent existence of worldly things.
So, we don't just have the idea of the infinite, but we assume or postulate and are justified in doing so that the unlimited actually exists. Since the idea of God is a need of reason, a question that emerges from reason's operation on itself and not from some psychological weakness or particular hope, Kant determines that we are rationally justified in believing that God exists.
Keep in mind this is not a metaphysical proof that God exists. Although reason demands that we postulate God in this way, it must also recognize that it is a postulate—that God is a concept it produces in order to tie things together, not something we know through sense experience. Nor is the concept of God something that comes to us through revelation, from a kind of special or mystical knowledge that comes to us from beyond ourselves. As I've said, it is produced by reason.
Kant's whole approach to God and to religion more generally dispenses with the concept of revelation and is highly suspicious of religious enthusiasm or so called "blind faith." So, we do not know God, either through reason or revelation — rather, we have rational faith that God exists.
We find a similar approach to the concept of God in Kant's moral theory: Moral reason leads us to postulate God, and it also leads us to postulate the idea of an immortal soul. This is Kant's more influential treatment of God.
But the first thing to say about Kant's moral theory is that it focuses not on God, but on moral reason and the claim that to act morally is to bind oneself to a universal moral law — and to ignore all other incentives or motives to action.
Reason gives the moral law to itself in the form of what Kant calls "the categorical imperative," which basically says that one should always act in such a way that the principle of the act is one that you can universalize—that is,I know that I am acting rightly in a situation if I would be willing to say that everyone else, at all times, should act the same way in the same situation.
Here is how he puts it in The Critique of Practical Reason: "So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law." Another way to think about the categorical imperative is that it is a version — one defended by very dense philosophical argumentation — of the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; or, don't use or exploit others, but treat them as deserving of the same consideration you would want them to give to you. Though it's not quite right to say that you should treat others as you would want them to treat you since, for Kant, the moral law is not a matter of desire, of how you want to be treated, but a matter of reason. Kant's ethics require that our actions not be based on considerations of human happiness, but simply on the basis of the rule that reason gives itself: We should act according to reason, not according to any particular desire we might have — or might think that everyone has.
More generally, we should not act on the basis of revelation, God, religion, and its threats of eternal punishment or promises of eternal reward — or on the basis. of anything except reason and out of respect for the moral law that reason gives us. Respect for the moral law — Kant says — is therefore the sole and also the undoubted moral incentive.
I have to say at this point, that reading Kant's second critique seriously — that is, reading it very slowly and over and over (fortunately it's not quite as long as The Critique of Pure Reason) was one of the most bracing, and I have to say truly illuminating, philosophical experiences I've ever had.
There's something about the rigor and the intensity with which he argues for a conception of morality that is divorced from all contingent desires, needs, and feelings — it's really quite astonishing. On the one hand it's so dispassionate, so reasoned, so dry, yet something about the seriousness of his purpose and the intensity with which he pursues it gives his writing there a unique kind of passion. This makes those passages in Kant where he does let go a little bit rhetorically all the more effective — such as this one, where he' s talking about respect for the moral law as a sense of duty. He writes:
Duty! Sublime and mighty name that embraces nothing charming or insinuating but requires submission, and yet does not seek to move the will by threatening anything that would arouse natural aversion or terror in the mind but only holds forth a law that of itself finds entry into the mind and yet gains reluctant reverence ... what origin is there worthy of you, and where is to be found the root of your noble descent which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations, descent from which is the indispensable condition of that worth which human beings alone can give themselves?
The first thing to note about this passage is that acting morally, out of a sense of duty, is that which gives worth to human beings as far as Kant is concerned. He also will say that this is what it means to act freely or autonomously: To be free is to submit to the law that reason gives itself.
But we also see Kant pointing to a problem in this passage — namely, that although we can know what we should do, we are not always obedient to the moral law because our inclinations, our desires, often work against it.
So, we are reasoning human beings, but we also are human beings with insistent wants and deep desires. Although reason demands virtue, acting according to the moral law, as finite, limited beings we always fall short of the demands of the moral law. Does this mean that reason is unreasonable — that it places demands upon us that we can never realize?
Moreover, it's not as if Kant thinks that we should not want to fulfill our desires — we are again after all natural beings and he says that as such it is rational to want to be happy. But not only does morality for him mean that we cannot base our actions on our desire for happiness, it is also the case, as we all know, that the world constantly frustrates our desire for happiness — and that there is no guarantee that even if we always act virtuously that we will find happiness. Bad things happen to good people.
Kant responds to this problem by bringing us back to the idea of the postulates — that is, the "needs of reason." He says that in order to be able to see moral reason as reasonable, we must, he argues, postulate answers to these problems — we must assume things to be the case, even without sure evidence of them, or else the whole foundation upon which reason and morality are built will collapse. For Kant, when we're talking about practical reason, there are two postulates that we must assert: the postulates of pure practical reason, immortality of the soul, and God.
With respect to immortality of the soul, Kant argues that if the struggle for perfection is going to have any meaning, we must believe that we will at some point be able to do what the moral law demands — that ultimately our lives will progress to the point of perfection. Since we know this doesn't happen in this life, we must postulate immortality, an afterlife in which we can continue to pursue virtue.
With respect to God, we must be able to conceive of some sort of final end for all our moral behavior. We could still formulate the moral law and try to obey it, but we would not be able to see where the acting morally leads us. We need, then, according to Kant, to posit an all-powerful being who guarantees that in the fullness of time our morality and our happiness will converge.
So, in summary, we should say about these postulates that although we might be tempted to think that, for Kant, we are simply making up God and immortality, Kant is deadly serious about the fact that we must do this, and that this involves real faith that God exists. These postulates are not based on any kind of simple hope for happiness, but for him play an absolutely crucial role in the functioning of reason. In the end, he thinks, it is not possible to be either rational or moral without holding these ideas — and in this sense, he contends, we are, in fact, obliged to hold this rational faith.
From moral reason, then, we get the postulates of God and immortality — two central aspects for Enlightenment thinkers of religion. But Kant's view of religion is richer than this, for he also believes that the idea of the church, of the ecclesiastical organization of humanity, is important.
The reason for this goes back to the passage above that I quoted, where Kant writes of the secret ways that our inclinations work against the moral law. At the same time that Kant affirms our natural humanity and thus our desires, he also claims — influenced no doubt by Christian views of original sin — that we have a deep-seated, natural propensity to disobey the moral law. This he calls "radical evil."
He believes that as individuals, we are incapable of overcoming this radical evil and, therefore, that the lifelong effort to move toward a more virtuous state of being — which the moral law commands must be part of a collective effort on the part of the whole of humanity. Conceived as an effort of the whole of humanity, Kant refers to the "invisible church" — an ideal for the future — as the universal, ethical community of humankind.
But he also argues that the visible church, the actually existing churches, can serve as the means of preparing for the universal church. He argues that the Christian Church is the only church that can serve in this role because Christianity, and especially Protestant Christianity, is the first religion that bases itself on moral duty rather than on magic, superstition, or irrationality. Christianity, for Kant, has not been perfect in this regard, but he argues that we can see in the history of Christianity the slow emergence of a pure moral religion.
I'll offer a more complete summary of this discussion of Kant in the next lecture, but here I will conclude briefly by noting that we see in Kant's views on radical evil a significant qualification of the Enlightenment faith in reason. Acknowledging the existence of radical evil and admitting that we can never be sure, at least in this life, whether we are, in fact, acting morally, Kant marks the limits of reason even more forcefully than he does in The Critique of Pure Reason. He does so in a way that at once makes him more Christian than many Enlightenment thinkers — and in a way that anticipates the kinds of challenges to Enlightenment thinking that we will discuss in the next lecture.
