Abstract
This is a conversation held at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. The conversation covers the claim made by Insole that Kant believes in God, but is not a Christian, the way in which reason itself is divine for Kant, and the suggestion that reading Kant can open up new possibilities for dialogue between Christian thinkers and contemporary forms of secular religiosity.
You argue in Kant and the Divine that Kant is a profoundly religious thinker, albeit not a Christian thinker; he finds that he has to reject Christianity because it leaves no room for that which he regards as having ultimate value, the project of free, harmonious end-setting. As you discuss, this represented a significant shift for Kant, who early on in his career regarded our highest good to consist in the contemplation of God. Can you explain for us why he thinks he must reject this older notion of the highest good? And is he right to think that freedom and morality are impossible given a Christian conception of God?
Thank you so much Jennifer for your questions. Certainly, I think there is a shift in Kant’s religious philosophy, across his life, but the shift is not really from Christianity to something non-Christian. My claim is that Kant never seems to be committed to Christianity, although, I argue, he believes (really believes) in God throughout his life.
It might help to begin my answer here by setting out some of my initial motivation for looking at Kant. When I turned, around eighteen years ago, to the work of Kant, I did so, I must confess, rather instrumentally: in order to investigate whether Thomas Aquinas (with whom I was enchanted) could withstand Kant’s critique of Christian belief. But, as I was led into the austere and non-egotistical demands of the history of philosophy, I discovered that Kant was hardly addressing Christianity at all. I came to understand and appreciate Kant’s puzzling claim, made in 1794 to the Berlin censor, who had instructed him to cease writing about Christianity, that he could not be guilty of denigrating Christianity, because he had never, in truth, offered any sort of evaluation of it. Notably, Kant makes this response after the publication of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, a text that offers an extensive discussion of Christianity, which has looked to many subsequent readers very much like an evaluation.
In the end, I think Kant’s response to the censor was correct. Kant, across his whole work, was speaking into a different space: philosophy that seeks the divine, without faith or revelation. Kant believes in God, and in a way that really matters, but Kant is not a Christian. Furthermore, Kant’s majestic conception of reason, freedom and morality itself has some divine features. In a nutshell, that is, if you like, my ‘pitch’: Kant is neither a lousy Christian, nor a secular atheist, but something else. He is a philosopher who believes in the divine.
This is true, I have argued, across Kant’s ‘early’ and ‘critical’ thought. Between the early and late Kant there is both a striking rupture, but also a surprising continuity. This distinction between the ‘early’ and ‘critical’ Kant is standard in treatments of the thinker. Broadly speaking, the ‘early’ period is considered to incorporate the 1750s and the 1760s. From around 1769, Kant begins to experience some ructions in thought which culminate in his ‘critical’ philosophy, where Kant insists on more epistemic discipline in how we form knowledge claims and rational beliefs.
So, the early Kant is fascinated by the harmony, order and teeming plenitude of the creation. This creation is itself an echo, an expression, of the Godhead itself, where, in God, all compossible realities are always and already fully actualized. Kant can even be quite lyrical about this, turning to poetry to express his wonder and delight in the way the creation mirrors and expresses divinity. I find that Kant draws on broadly shared Platonic conceptions that are widespread in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, which are fed by renaissance sources, independently of Christianity, as well as through medieval scholasticism.
If creation is the manifestation of the Godhead, contemplating the harmony, order and plenitude of creation is a type of contemplation of the divine nature itself. This is why the contemplation and understanding of the creation is, for the early Kant, our highest created good. It is also, indirectly, why Kant is so positive—enthusiastic even—about the type of determinism that he subscribes to at this stage. Kant, at this stage in his thought, is convinced that all our actions, along with everything that occurs, are determined by iron patterns of lawful determinism. He regards this as perfectly compatible with our being meaningfully free: as with other ‘compatibilists’, Kant thinks that what matters is that our actions arise from our nature and our desires, even if both are complexly determined. There is a distinctive atmosphere to Kant’s early compatibilism. It is not that you have to sort of ‘suck up’ the determinism: ‘yes, we’re determined, but, we can still (just about) talk about freedom’. Perhaps I’m wrong, but this seems to me to be the vibe of some recent defences of compatibilism. Rather, Kant finds determinism glorious and joyous, a source of consolation and hope. This is because the source of all the determinism, the ‘bubbling spring’ from which it all comes, is God. Determinism is spiritually consoling, stitching us into harmony and plenitude of the whole.
Even during this period, though, I doubt that it is helpful to consider Kant a Christian. Consider: there is no discussion of, or role for, Christ, or the Trinity. At most, we might say that the creation itself is a sort of analogy for the Christological self-expression of the Godhead. I find a letter from Hamann to Kant in 1759 really striking here. Hamann writes that the philosopher should not write about the Lord Jesus, because he ‘does not know the man’. 1 On this point, at least, Kant would seem to meet the approval of Hamann.
This is why I would not say that the shift in Kant’s thought is from Christianity to something else. But there is indeed a significant movement in Kant’s thought. We can understand what sort of change we are dealing by focusing on freedom. Across the late 1760s, and into the 1770s, Kant reaches out for a far more ambitious conception of freedom. He insists that unless we are ourselves an uncaused first cause of our actions, we are not free, and morality is impossible. This is a very strong demand: there must be no antecedent impact upon our actions whatsoever, and this includes there being no external ‘draw’ for our actions and desire. This is a much stronger demand than standard ‘non-compatibilist/libertarian’ accounts of freedom, which typically just require that we could have done otherwise than we did, and that we are, in some sense, some of the time, ultimately responsible for our actions. Such non-compatibilist accounts do not require that there are no external causes acting upon us, either through efficient or final causation. Kant really struggles during the 1760s and 1770s to find a home for this new conception of freedom in his wider account of the universe, which, at this stage, he still envisages in deterministic terms. He writes in the 1770s that the ‘only unsolvable metaphysical difficulty’ 2 is the question about the possibility of human freedom: how can a soul which has a cause be free?
The question naturally arises as to why Kant makes this shift. After all, it is a sheer conceptual shift, in what one requires from the universe in order to be free. It is not a shift required by some sort of natural discovery. The ‘why?’ question is a very good one, and, in the end, I am not sure that we have a very good answer, or, at least, I have not been able to find one, although I have spent a lot of time looking. At most we have a cluster of inspirations, concerns and anxieties: Kant is impressed by Rousseau’s account of political freedom, and personal development, with a horror of subjugation and slavery. Kant also has some concerns about Spinoza: he expresses the worry that unless we have some such radical freedom, we will be absorbed into a sort of pantheistic divine emanation, and fail to be separate from God. Kant also expresses some concerns around ‘culpability’, worrying that unless we have such freedom, we cannot ascribe actions to responsible agents. At no point, significantly, is there any hope that such an account of freedom will help with theodicy, or with a free-will defence to the problem of evil, although Kant does engage with the topic of theodicy.
So, that is the discontinuity between Kant’s early and late thinking. But the continuity is also striking. I argue that in his critical account of the highest good, Kant relocates the plenitude, harmony and order of the Godhead in the Kingdom of Ends. This is the state where all rational selves set ends, in freedom, ends which are harmonious with other rational agents setting their own ends. Where is such freedom possible? Well, outside of the structures of space and time, which is where our ‘proper selves’ reside. Although we have no knowledge or experience of these proper selves, we are required to believe rationally in the existence of these selves. These proper selves enjoy the freedom which is the ‘inner value of the world’, 3 where there is no passivity or receptivity.
Jennifer, you ask about all this: ‘is he right?’. I suppose, if put in those terms, I would say ‘no’, I do not agree with Kant. I would affirm, along with the mainline Thomist theological tradition, a non-competitive account of the relationship between human and divine agency, and I would accept that this is a proper consequence of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, where everything in creation is immediately, entirely and fully dependent on God’s gracious action. A non-competitive account of divine and human freedom affirms that God acts immediately and directly in our actions without destroying freedom. In a way, though, I prefer not to begin with the question of what I agree with, as I also wanted to put the ‘positive case’ for Kant’s own religious philosophy: to explore its coherence, beauty, explanatory power, and its capacity to offer a sort of spiritual consolation. There might be a comparison with how a philosophical theologian immersed in Christian intellectual history might approach a tradition such as Buddhism. It would be an unproductive starting point to go in asking, ‘what do I agree with here?’. Far better to ask: ‘what is it to live and love in a universe such as this?’. I wanted to get away from the binary options of treating Kant as either a secular atheist, or, as a sort of lousy and failing Christian, struggling to conform to a sort of Lutheranism, but failing, because of the demands of his wider philosophy. The figure who I think I uncover is a philosopher who seeks the divine, but who is not a Christian.
At the heart of Kant’s religiosity, as you unpack it, is the notion of reason as in some sense divine, or as participating in the divine. Can you explain this to us?
It is often said, at Kant conferences, and in both formal and informal settings, that there is ‘something divine’ about Kant’s conception of reason. I wanted to unpack what this might really mean, and to move from the level of vague gesture to something more precise and documentable. What I think I have found is this: that at the heart of Kant’s concept of divinity is an evocation of harmony, order and plenitude, which necessarily brings with it (as heat accompanies fire) happiness and delight. This includes the divine delight, God’s delight in God’s own nature. It also includes, in Kant’s early thought, our happiness and delight in the contemplation of the harmony, order and plenitude of God, as expressed in the creation.
When Kant develops his antipathy to receptivity and passivity, this moves into a different key. Rather than contemplating all possible reality, in its harmony, order and plenitude, we now enact this harmony, order and plenitude, by realizing ‘all sorts of possible ends’, 4 in the Kingdom of Ends. Kant tells us that, in some sense, freedom is identical with reason, which is identical with morality. I think this is a correct account of his own position, because freedom and reason both share the vital characteristic of setting ends, rather than being determined by antecedent causes, and morality is the culminative and full state of all compossible end-setting (which is both reason and freedom). This ‘deep identity’ is not disclosed in spatio-temporal experience, but it is uncovered by philosophy. Furthermore, there are intimations of the deep freedom underlying the world, in experiences ‘as-of’ freedom, such as when we overcome moral temptation, experiences which are then given validation by philosophy. The vital thing, for Kant, is that philosophy leads us to believe that we live in a world undergirded, in the end, by freedom, reason and morality, rather than in a deterministic and mechanistic world, even though the world that appears is deterministic and mechanistic. This reflects a characteristic way of thinking for Kant, which is ‘big’ and ‘binary’: Kant tends to push our thought always to a crossroads where we realize that the entire possible world is either this way or that way. In this case, the world is either mechanistic (and so determined), or moral (and so free and rational/intelligible).
In Kant’s early philosophy, we contemplate the harmony, order and plenitude that is the divine. In his later philosophy, we enact it, in our freedom, which we can believe in, without a direct experience of it. In his early philosophy, happiness is the consequence of contemplating the divine. In his critical philosophy, happiness is the consequence of living in a fully moral world (the Kingdom of Ends), the possibility of which is underwritten, for Kant, by God. In my book, I find that the manner of this underwriting is a little unclear: both in terms of why the divine action is necessary (given all that freedom and morality can give us), and how divine action can be effective without destroying human freedom, given Kant’s assumptions about what human freedom demands. What seems clearer to me is that our participation in reason, freedom and morality is a type of enactment of divine reason and understanding, including the willing of all compossible ends.
Why should Christians care about the idiosyncratic form of religiosity represented by Kant? And how might grasping Kant’s notion of harmonious end-setting as participating in the divine not only allow readers to understand Kant more fully, but also open up new possibilities for dialogue between Christian thinkers and contemporary forms of secular religiosity?
I’d be the first to admit that there is not a huge constituency of ‘Kantians’, in my sense, out there. (This is a point made forcibly by Sarah Coakley in the discussion afterwards. Sarah asked, quite properly, ‘where do you think the contemporary “Kantians” on God live these days—who and where are they?’). It is more that Kant witnesses and points to a neglected conceptual space, which is neither secular and atheist, nor fully and traditionally ‘religious’, conforming to one of the great faith traditions. Rather, there is philosophy oriented around the Socratic question, ‘how should I live?’, which philosophy might lean into the divine, believing in, and seeking, God. We have what we could call ‘alternative Enlightenments’, or, neglected strands of the Enlightenment: approaches that are not ‘anti-God’, or atheistic, but, rather, have reservations about tradition, authority and revelation. To an extent, I think this type of Enlightenment thought is, itself, a lost tradition. One could find something similar in the way in which Clare Carlisle explores Spinoza. 5
Why might this ‘lost strand’ be of interest? Here I have two different sorts of answer: one more ‘intellectual’ and ‘academic’, the other focused more on wider cultural considerations. To take the intellectual and academic first. Once one knows a little about the sweep, depth and scale of the concept of ‘God’ and the ‘divine’ (as evidenced in Kant’s notion of harmony, plenitude and order), it gives one a new perspective on the work of recent philosophers such as Nagel, Korsgaard and Parfit. In my current and ongoing work I’m interested in the way in which the conceptual space they lean into has features that look distinctively ‘divine’ or God-like.
Consider the example of Nagel, as he searches for a sense of harmony with the universe beyond simply ‘living in it’. The harmony that he reaches out for includes some sort of deep unity of the physical and the conscious, with intimations of reconciling the subjective and objective perspectives on human life. With his wonderful and explicit honesty, Nagel writes that he ‘hope[s] that there is no God’, whilst admitting that this widely shared ‘fear of religion’ has pernicious intellectual consequences, in his own case, and that of others. 6
As well as being interested in philosophy that believes in God in its own terms, I also want to reflect on what traditioned Christian theology might say about it. Philosophy that believes in God is a perennial topic in Christian theology: Augustine has to think about Plato, Aquinas about Aristotle, and Barth about Kant. This is quite different from conceiving of such philosophy as a type of ‘prolegomena’ to, or a defence of, Christian theology, or a positive natural theology, that delivers a certain percentage of truth about God, which is then topped-up by revelation. Philosophy that asks the ‘big questions’ about life, with a preparedness to talk about God, is, of course, far more like the ‘philosophy’ that Augustine would have encountered, than the philosophy that is sometimes taught in our universities, where some dominant strands of the discipline pride themselves on the analytical treatment of minute technical issues. It is striking to consider the way in which Augustine’s Confessions is really a series of mini-conversions: from Manicheanism to Stoicism, to Platonism, and then to Christianity. Augustine is clear that being a Platonist is a crucial formative stage and platform for his conversion to Christianity. All of this indicates that to generate a meaningful disagreement, you need some sort of shared conceptual space, where the holistic question of meaning, life and purpose can arise. Philosophy that seeks the divine shares some sort of conceptual space with theology, even where it comes to some very different conclusions or recommendations.
The wider cultural point is this: that a significant part of the population do not identify themselves as traditionally religious; a smaller percentage of this group confidently self-identify as atheists. Social attitude surveys of the UK population tend to find that far more people report as having ‘no religion’ than are willing to affirm that ‘there is no God’. There may be a group of people open to divinity and transcendence, who are not being served by philosophical theology, and who are unaware of philosophical traditions that may offer consolation, or, at least, stimulation.