Abstract
Recent work on Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason 1 frequently begins by calling attention to the many unresolved interpretive problems that plague the careful reader of this influential yet perplexing book.2 Because the characteristic features of transcendental idealism do not play an obviously constitutive role in the exposition of Kant’s arguments in this text, for many years most Kant scholars simply passed it over as an optional appendix to his ethics, if not an outright aberration.3 A central focus of the so-called “affirmative” trend in interpreting Religion that has come to the fore over the past twenty years4 has therefore been to argue that these conundrums in Kant’s text are largely resolvable. The present chapter will draw from that recent literature an account of how four key components of Kant’s argument in Religion, often regarded as either incoherent or mistaken, actually make good sense if they are read against the backdrop of his transcendental idealism.
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Notes
The most prolific interpreter whose work focuses on these interpretive tensions is Gordon E. Michalson, Jr. See, for example, his book Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8–9, 28, where he refers to various “wobbles” that plague Kant’s exposition. On the influence that Kant’s transcendental idealism had on the whole subsequent development of German Idealism, with special reference to theology, see Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (West Sussex: Wiley, 2012).
For a lively discussion of one such “affirmative” interpretation of Kant, see the symposium published in Faith and Philosophy 29, no. 2 (April 2012), focusing on the book by Nathan Jacobs and Chris L. Firestone, In Defense of Kant’s “Religion” (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008); hereafter abbreviated IDKR. The problem that surfaced in that discussion is that affirmative interpreters themselves seem to disagree quite strongly on which aspects of Kant’s theory are coherent, and on whether affirming the coherence of the theory commits one to affirming it as a viable approach to religion. The authors make clear in their chapters that they do not accept Kantian religion, but seek only to affirm that the theory makes sense. Michalson’s contribution to the symposium, by contrast, affirms that, just because Kant’s argument is filled with “wobbles,” this does not make it unworthy of acceptance! Rather, he portrays such tensions as interesting traces of two incommensurable historical movements that were influencing Kant as he wrote Religion, with his attempts to unite them being as plausible as any union could be.
Firestone and Jacobs call this theory of the relation between Kant’s two experiments the “Religion-as-Translation thesis” (IDKR 69–81). It is the view that the first experiment just is Kant’s moral philosophy, while the second experiment is Kant’s attempt to translate the key theories of Christian theology into the terms of his moral philosophy (IDKR 104). They take John E. Hare’s book, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), as a key example of this approach. As such, it is not surprising that Hare ends up regarding some of Kant’s main arguments as a “failure” (The Moral Gap, 60–62).
For the fullest account of the distinction between traditional and affirmative interpretations of Kant, see Chris L. Firestone and Stephen R. Palmquist, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1–39. For some important qualifications on the use of the term “affirmative,” see my article, “To Tell the Truth on Kant and Christianity: Will the Real Affirmative Interpreter Please Stand Up?” Faith and Philosophy 29, no. 3 (July 2012): 340–46. See also KCR, ch. 6, and note 1, above.
See, for example, Philip J. Rossi, The Social Authority of Reason: Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and the Destiny of Humankind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), who claims that Kant fails to specify “the concrete means” for establishing the social authority of reason (e.g., 9, 60). Surprisingly, however, Rossi uses the term “church” only occasionally, preferring the non-religious term “ethical commonwealth.” For an analysis of one of the key arguments in the Third Piece that requires the latter to be conceived only in religious terms, see my article, “Kant’s Religious Argument for the Existence of God — The Ultimate Dependence of Human Destiny on Divine Assistance,” Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 1 (Jan. 2009): 3–22.
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© 2014 Stephen R. Palmquist
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Palmquist, S.R. (2014). Transcendental Idealism as the Backdrop for Kant’s Theory of Religion. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_8
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