Anna Tomaszewska’s Kant’s Rational Religion and the Radical Enlightenment is an attempt to reconsider Kant’s role in the Enlightenment project in view of his changing attitudes about God and religion. The book spans the entirety of Kant’s career, from his pre-Critical attempts to prove the existence of God, through his Critical attitudes towards our knowledge of the divine, and to Kant’s posthumously published writings on the relation between God and practical reason.
Tomaszewska begins with a discussion of the two main strands of Enlightenment attitudes toward religion. The so-called moderate Enlightenment is characterized by an attempt to bring science and religion together, and to show that, properly understood, both institutions ought to be a part of our society. The radical Enlightenment, represented in this book by the philosophy of Spinoza, claims that society has no room for organized religion. While the moderate Enlightenment aims to adapt the church to our more secular times, the radical Enlightenment aims to secularize society by removing the church altogether.
The central tenet of the radical Enlightenment is that there is something problematic about revealed religion. In particular, the radical Enlighteners held that there are three dimensions of our lives that ought to be freed from revealed religion: the epistemic, the moral, and the political. In the epistemic dimension, the radicals claim that revealed religion provides us with no knowledge of the supernatural, and that we ought not to form our beliefs about God on the basis of scripture. In the moral dimension, the radicals hold that revealed religion does not provide us with good moral guidance, and that we ought not to live our lives on the basis of the obligations prescribed by scripture. In the political dimension, the radicals believe that revealed religion does not provide us with good principles for the organization of society, and that our laws ought not to be based on those found in holy texts.
At first glance, Kant appears to be committed to all three of the radical Enlightenment positions. He holds that we can have no knowledge of things in themselves, and a fortiori that holy texts cannot provide us with knowledge of God; he holds that the moral law is grounded only in the will, and not on any empirically accessible objects; and he holds that the principles for political organization are to be based on a priori considerations that emerge from the application of the moral law. On a superficial reading, Kant is a radical Enlightener par excellence.
Tomaszewska’s main aim in this book is to problematize this apparently straightforward characterization of Kant’s attitude toward secularism. Tomaszewska argues, persuasively in my opinion, that Kant’s attitude toward the Enlightenment is not easy to classify as either moderate or radical. Kant’s rejections of the three dimensions of revealed religion are in fact more tentative than they would appear to be, and the story of Kant’s fit within the entire Enlightenment project is much more uncomfortable than our simplistic picture would suggest.
Chapter 1 notes the ways in which Kant frequently commits himself to what appears to be the radical Enlightenment project. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he explicitly claims that faith ought to be separated from knowledge (p. 16). In his Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone he refers to the following of religious practices as ‘a slavish and mercenary faith’, and argues that many of the church’s teachings recommend actions that are ‘morally indifferent’ (p. 17). In his ‘Perpetual Peace’ essay he labels religiously motivated politics as a ‘spiritual despotism’ (p. 18). In these ways, Kant appears to accept wholesale the radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and others.
Chapter 2 discusses how revelation’s epistemic role changes for Kant throughout his career. The chapter primarily involves a discussion of Kant’s pre-Critical proof of the existence of God. This is a proof that some have thought (and Tomaszewska tentatively agrees) brings Kant’s metaphysics very close to that of Spinoza. Most relevant is that the pre-Critical Kant, like Spinoza, holds that our knowledge of God is not through holy texts, but through reason alone.
Kant’s turn to transcendental idealism shatters this picture, as it denies us knowledge of the divine altogether. While Kant continues to deny scripture’s claim to truth, this is no longer because scripture is the wrong way to know God, but because there is no right way to have knowledge of the supernatural (pp. 43–4). In some ways, this makes Kant’s position even more radical than that of most radical Enlighteners. Revealed religion is epistemically undermined, but it is also no worse than metaphysical speculation.
Chapter 3 presents us with Kant’s uneasy approach towards atheism. From the perspective of the radical Enlightenment, there should be no problem admitting that an atheist can be just as moral as a Christian, or perhaps even more so. The two common examples given in the period were that of Spinoza, who was a good person despite (allegedly) being an atheist, and the philosophy coming from China, which arrived at reasonable moral views without the need to posit a God. Kant himself is made uneasy by this view. He thinks that God is a necessary postulate of practical reason, and thus that the atheist is committing some kind of practical irrationality (pp. 49–51). He also thinks that we should expect atheists to be less moral, as belief in God can play a motivational role in moral behaviour (pp. 51–4).
This is an uncomfortable position for Kant to hold, as God is supposed to be the object of the moral law, not its ground. This problem is resolved more directly in chapter 5, but the solution is that while belief in God should not motivate us to act morally, disbelief can motivate us to act immorally. This asymmetry allows Kant to explain why the atheist is less likely to be moral than the theist, while maintaining that belief in God is not necessary for acting morally.
Chapter 4 addresses the question of our knowledge of morality. Rather than claiming that religious (theoretical) knowledge gives us a basis for practical reasoning, Kant holds that practical reason has primacy over theoretical reason. Tomaszewska’s surprising thesis here is that this view is not far from the norm among radical Enlighteners. Spinoza himself held that the practical has some kind of primacy over the theoretical in human knowledge. And Tomaszewska identifies a common commitment between Kant and Spinoza which accounts for the primacy of the practical in both: the fact that human beings are finite creatures, often mired in metaphysical illusions (pp. 77–81).
Tomaszewska’s Spinoza holds that the limitations of finite beings require that we often form our beliefs on the basis of certain pragmatic considerations (pp. 74–5, 81–4). This seems compelling to me. Where things are a little more difficult is in the idea that Kant’s ‘primacy of the practical’ is to be understood in a similar way. Spinoza’s approach, from Kant’s perspective, is one in which empirical pragmatic facts place constraints on our belief formation. But Kant thinks that the practical (in particular, the spontaneity of the understanding) plays a transcendental role in limiting our knowledge. To confuse the two would be on a par with confusing empirical idealism for transcendental idealism.
Chapter 5 turns to the question of whether certain doctrines of revealed religion can instead be given a rational foundation. The result is mixed. Some Christian doctrines receive rational counterparts. For example, the doctrine of original sin is reconceived as the thesis of radical evil – the fact that human evil is rooted in a noumenal choice on our part (pp. 104–7). Yet other doctrines are deemed to be unsalvageable. For example, the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ must be replaced with a kind of dualism: Jesus qua idea is divine, but the historical Jesus was human (pp. 107–9).
Chapter 6 turns to the question of the church as an institution. As before, Kant’s position is nuanced. He does not believe that the existence of the church is incompatible with the highest good for human beings, but he also does not hold that it is necessary. This is because the church can play the role of a stopgap. Having a community of persons united by a standard set of practices will make it harder for the temptations of desire to override our willingness to follow the moral law (pp. 126–9). But this can only be the case if the church is reformed to have its foundations in rational principles (rather than on scripture): the existence of a church is only justified if its purpose is solely the pursuit of the moral law (pp. 133–5). We again see Kant leaning towards a moderate Enlightenment position while paying his dues to its radical counterpart.
Chapter 7 argues that Kant’s Opus Postumum contains an account of God that solves many of the problems generated by the previous chapters. The central problem is to answer the following question: ‘if there is to be a church dedicated only to the following of the moral law, what is God’s role in this church?’ In many parts of the Opus Postumum Kant appears to endorse the response that God is identical to the moral law. This is because Kant’s account of morality does not permit external influences: if God were the cause of the moral law, or in any way external to it, our will would be heteronomous. God cannot be what gives rise to our duties (p. 151)
But the view that God is the moral law has a different problem: it seems to make the idea of God ‘superfluous’ (p. 146). The comparison case here is the pantheist who claims that God is nature. On this picture, the concern is that the concept of God is disposable, as one could rephrase the pantheistic view as the claim that nature encompasses everything. A similar worry attaches to the identification of God with the moral law. Here Tomaszewska observes that for Kant binding oneself to the moral law requires a kind of ‘self positing’ (Selbstsetzung), where one affirms oneself as bound by the moral law (p. 158). The concept of God is not identical to the concept of the moral law, but the act of positing a God is identical to the act of binding oneself to the moral law. God thus has an ineliminable role to play in explaining the way in which it is legitimate for me to posit myself as a subject of laws. In positing myself as bound by duty, I must become aware of the divinity that is in me.
Kant’s Rational Religion makes a contribution to our understanding of how Kant is to be placed in relationship with the secularizing project of the Enlightenment. It also displays a new dimension in which Kant is the ambivalent figure with whom we are already familiar: one who attempts to adapt to the advent of modernity while trying to salvage, by transforming, the traditional spiritual conception of the world. In my opinion, the heart of the book can be found in chapters 5 to 7, where we see clearly the way in which Kant’s attitudes toward organized religion walk this interesting tightrope. These are also the chapters in which Tomaszewska is most in her element, weaving through complex debates in the literature to find a comfortable position that aligns with our understanding of Kant’s philosophy.
