Abstract
Although Kant is often interpreted as an Enlightenment Deist, Kant scholars are increasingly recognizing aspects of his philosophy that are more amenable to theism. If Kant regarded himself as a theist, what kind of theist was he? The theological approach that best fits Kant’s model of God is panentheism, whereby God is viewed as a living being pervading the entire natural world, present ‘in’ every part of nature, yet going beyond the physical world. The purpose of Kant’s restrictions on our knowledge of God is not to cast doubt on God’s existence, but to preserve a mystery in God’s reality so that God is always more than the world as we experience it. The same God who is theoretically unknowable is also an aspect of the moral substratum of the physical world. Kant’s moral Trinity (God as righteous Lawgiver, benevolent Ruler, and just Judge) permeates everything, as the ultimate unifier of reason and nature. This Paper was delivered during the 2007 APA Pacific Mini-Conference on Models of God, together with papers published in Philosophia 35:3–4.
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Notes
- 1.
Perhaps the best known recent example of this position is Allen Wood’s “Kant’s Deism”, in P.J. Rossi and M. Wreen (eds.), Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Re-Considered (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–21. For an argument against this way of reading Kant, see Christopher McCammon, “Overcoming Deism: Hope Incarnate in Kant’s Rational Religion”, in Chris L. Firestone and Stephen R. Palmquist (eds.), Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 79–89.
- 2.
See Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (Edinburgh: Macmillan, 1929), p. 661; hereafter abbreviated CPR. All references cite the pagination of the second (‘B’) edition, as provided in the margins by both Kemp Smith and the editors of the Berlin Academy Edition. See note 12, below, for a brief discussion of this passage.
- 3.
This is my preferred translation of the title of Kant’s Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft; hereafter abbreviated Religion. The use of “bounds” for Grenzen and “bare” for blossen can effectively counter the tendency to view Kant merely as an ethical reductionist. See Section 1 of my article, “Does Kant Reduce Religion to Morality?”, Kant-Studien 83:2 (1992), pp. 129–148, revised and reprinted as Chapter VI in Kant’s Critical Religion: Volume Two of Kant’s System of Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); hereafter abbreviated KCR.
- 4.
These and other relevant facts about Kant’s personal faith can be gleaned from any good biography, including the excellent effort by Manfred Kuehn, in his book, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a critical assessment of his account of Kant’s life, with special emphasis on his rather skewed interpretation of Kant’s personal faith (or alleged lack thereof), see my review of Kuehn’s book, in Metapsychology 5, Issue 41 (October 2001); online version at: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type = de&id = 722/.
- 5.
For a recent example of this tendency by a seasoned philosopher who rejects more recent trends in Kant scholarship, insisting the strictures of the first Critique simply disallow any meaningful theological affirmations (especially those involving any personal God), see Keith E. Yandell, “Who Is the True Kant?”, Philosophia Christi 9.1 (2007), pp. 81–97.
- 6.
Kuehn’s biography (see note 4, above) treats Kant this way, as do a number of other Kantians who would rather read Kant as conforming to their own, anti-religious preferences. For a thoroughgoing refutation of this option, see John E. Hare, “Kant on the Rational Instability of Atheism”, in Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, op cit., pp. 62–78.
- 7.
See Part Four of KCR. By “Critical mysticism” I do not mean that Kant explicitly accepted ‘mystical’ as a label for his own world view. Rather, I argue first that Kant’s own understanding of the word ‘mysticism’ was rather narrow (see notes 22, 31 and 33, below), and second, that a broader understanding of the word as it is used in the writings of mystics shows it to have many resonances with Kant’s own philosophical and theological disposition.
- 8.
For a brief introduction, see Arnulf Zweig, “Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich”, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1967), pp. 363–365, and the Encyclopedia of Britannica article (accessed 6 September 2007) at http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9046217/Karl-Christian-Friedrich-Krause. While he remained an obscure and largely neglected figure in Germany and throughout most of the world, Krause enjoyed a generation of popular (almost cult-like) influence in Spain. See Neil McInnes, “Spanish Philosophy”, Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1967), p. 514.
- 9.
Zweig, op cit., p. 363.
- 10.
As Zweig explains (op cit., p. 363), Krause developed a tortuously complex vocabulary with many compound German terms that were newly invented to serve Krause’s mystical purposes. The fact that ‘panentheism’ was simply one of Krause’s many neologisms may explain why the term was virtually ignored by English-speaking philosophers until it became popularized by Wolfhart Pannenberg and others in the last quarter of the twentieth century. That it was an almost unknown term before that point is evidenced by the fact that The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published in 1967, has no entry for ‘panentheism’ and lists only three brief mentions in the Index, including just one in the article on Krause himself.
- 11.
A brief look of some of the more than 136,000 web sites listed on Google (November 2012) as relating to panentheism reveals the wide variety of ways this term is now used. Many apply it to theologians or writers much earlier than Kant, including in some cases the biblical writers themselves. The current essay, however, is in no sense a review of the history of panentheism. My concern is only with the much narrower question of whether or not this label can describe Kantian theology. At this point in my argument all I am claiming is that the person who first used this term was more deeply influenced by Kant than by any other single philosopher.
- 12.
In an above-mentioned passage of the first Critique (see note 2) Kant distinguishes between deists, who uphold an abstract, theoretical belief in “a God,” conceived as the “supreme cause” of the universe, and theists, who believe “in a living God,” conceived as a “supreme intelligence” (CPR, p. 661). Whereas theism is the view that God exists and has an ongoing relationship with the world (i.e., God is “living”), deism is the view that God exists but remains separate from the world (i.e., God is “dead,” at least as far as the day-to-day lives of human beings are concerned).
- 13.
CPR, p. 856. The paragraph is worth quoting in full: “It is quite otherwise with moral belief. For here it is absolutely necessary that something must happen, namely, that I must in all points conform to the moral law. The end is here irrefragably established, and according to such insight as I can have, there is only one possible condition under which this end can connect with all other ends, and thereby have practical validity, namely, that there be a God and a future world. I also know with complete certainty that no one can be acquainted with any other conditions which lead to the same unity of ends under the moral law. Since, therefore, the moral precept is at the same time my maxim (reason prescribing that it should be so), I inevitably believe in the existence of God and in a future life, and I am certain that nothing can shake this belief, since my moral principles would thereby be themselves overthrown, and I cannot disclaim them without becoming abhorrent in my own eyes.”
- 14.
Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1956), pp. 122–132; hereafter abbreviated CPrR. All references cite the pagination in volume 4 of the Berlin Academy Edition.
- 15.
CPrR, pp. 119–121.
- 16.
For a lengthy discussion of Kant’s views on the moral nature of God, including his explanation and defense of this moral Trinity, see Chapter V of KCR.
- 17.
Near the beginning of Part Three of Religion, Kant develops a unique argument to the effect that the human race as a whole has a duty to bring about an ethical community, but that we cannot conceive of the possibility of such a community existing without assuming God works together with human beings to make it real. I have examined this much-neglected argument in “Kant’s Religious Argument for the Existence of God—The Ultimate Dependence of Human Destiny on Divine Assistance,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (January 2009), pp. 3–22.
- 18.
Kant defines an organism (or “organized being”) as a “product of nature … in which everything is a purpose [or end] and reciprocally also a means” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), p. 376 (German pagination); hereafter CJ).
- 19.
Probably the best example of a Kant scholar of this sort is Henry Allison, who has also published extensively on Spinoza. In Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), Allison treats this and several other key distinctions (especially the empirical-transcendental distinction) as depicting two sides of the same coin, or two perspectives on one and the same reality. While I agree with Allison’s approach as far as it goes, it errs to the extent that it fails to recognize a clear hierarchy or order of priority in Kant’s mind between the different perspectives. Kant’s claim that these two senses of reality arise as a result of rational beings adopting two different perspectives does not imply (or at least, need not imply) that the two realities have an identical ontological status. See René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics.
- 20.
Kant’s mature distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms has probably been responsible for more misunderstandings of his philosophical system than any other single theory he put forward. Anyone who takes these as referring to two separate worlds is likely to view Kant in much the way that Kant viewed Swedenborg (see below in the main text and Chapter II of KCR). But in Kant’s System of Perspectives: An architectonic interpretation of the Critical Philosophy (Lanham: University of America Press, 1993), especially Chapters IV and VI, I have shown that Kant intended these terms (like many of the subordinate distinctions that depend upon them) to be regarded not as names for two ontologically separate realities, but as alternate perspectives on one and the same human reality. Even the infamous ‘thing in itself’ makes sense when we view Kant’s System in this perspectival manner, for it then refers to nothing more than the world we live in, viewed as it is apart from any and all of the perspectives we adopt in coming to experience, understand and interpret it.
- 21.
CPrR, p. 6.
- 22.
Kant was a late bloomer. He wrote the entirety of his great Critical philosophy and supporting writings during a 20-year period starting at age 56. His last book before writing the first Critique was published 15 years earlier: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) was a poorly received and frequently misunderstood assessment of Emanuel Swedenborg’s mystical writings. What escapes the attention of many commentators on that book is that, beneath the shroud of ridicule he uses to cloak his concluding remarks (for example, comparing Swedenborg’s ideas to passing gas and saying he belonged in a mental hospital), Kant seriously examines the close correspondence between Swedenborg’s account of a “spiritual world” that is right here among us all the time, if we only have eyes to see, and his own belief in what he would eventually come to call the “noumenal” world in its relationship to the phenomenal world of science and everyday empirical knowledge. As I have argued in detail in Chapter II of KCR, many of the key themes and theories of Kant’s mature Critical philosophy are present in this early work.
- 23.
In CPR’s Transcendental Dialectic, Kant does argue that the ideas of reason (God, freedom and immortality) can have a positive use in science, but only when employed in a “regulative” (not a “constitutive”) manner. He presents this argument in an Appendix, so he obviously did not regard it as a crucial part of his system of theoretical knowledge.
- 24.
CJ, 353. The passage is worth quoting at length, given its emphasis on the interpenetration of the phenomenal and the noumenal: “Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good … The morally good is the intelligible that taste has in view … And because the subject has this possibility within him, while outside [him] there is also the possibility that nature will harmonize with it, judgment finds itself referred to something that is both in the subject himself and outside him, something that is neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible, in which the theoretical and the practical power are in an unknown manner combined and joined into a unity.”
- 25.
See, e.g., CJ, 176–179, where Kant describes the third Critique as “mediating” between the standpoints of the first two Critiques. See also Kant’s System of Perspectives, Chapter IX, for a thoroughgoing examination of this aspect of the third Critique.
- 26.
For an extended discussion of this point, see my article, “Kant’s Ethics of Grace: Perspectival Solutions to the Moral Problems with Divine Assistance,” The Journal of Religion 90:4 (October 2010), pp. 530–553.
- 27.
Religion, p. 83.
- 28.
See note 12, above. If choosing between theism and deism, most Kant-scholars would now regard Kant as a theist. See for example Fendt’s What May I Hope?, Hare’s The Moral Gap, my KCR, and a variety of other recent books and articles. For a synopsis of these and other relevant writings, see the second section of the Editors’ Introduction to Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, op cit., pp. 15–30; it provides an historical sketch demonstrating that in the past 30 years books that include lengthy interpretations of Kant’s philosophy of religion have almost exclusively adopted what the editors call the “affirmative” approach to interpreting Kant.
- 29.
Almost gone are the days when Kant can be viewed even as a conventional deist: while admittedly a few older scholars (see note 1, above) still present him in this way, the vast majority of younger Kant scholars now view Kant as a theist of some sort – though exactly what sort has proved to be incredibly difficult to pin down. The aforementioned Editors’ Introduction to Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion (see note 28, above) concludes by pointing out four specific issues on which the recent affirmative interpreters of Kant continue to disagree.
- 30.
Also almost gone are the days when Kant can be portrayed credibly as a qualified atheist, for in place of the lop-sided emphasis once given to his first Critique, scholarly attention to all his writings has revealed him to be a man of deep religious faith. Not so long ago, respectable teachers, well-informed of the latest trends in scholarship, could portray Kant as the “God-slayer,” the all-destroyer of metaphysics, who may have given lip service to “moral belief” in a divine being but who never regarded belief in a real God as a viable option. Such claims were first made by Heinrich Heine in Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland 2, 1852(1834), tr. J. Snodgrass as Religion and Philosophy in Germany (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959(1882)), p. 119. I respond directly to Heine’s claims in Section IV.1 of KCR. The first person ever to teach me Kant presented him in just this traditional way. For an account of my response, see my article, “Immanuel Kant: A Christian Philosopher?”, Faith and Philosophy, 6:1 (January 1989), p. 66. Although Kant-scholars over the past 30 years have tended to reject that once common view (cf. note 28, above), some scholars do continue to defend it. See, for example, George di Giovanni, Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), who not only affirms Mendelssohn’s portrayal of Kant as the “all-destroyer,” but even regards Kant as essentially an atheist (p. 203 and passim); for a reply to his approach, see my book review in Kant-Studien 101.1 (2010), pp. 137–141.
- 31.
Whereas atheism is the belief that God does not exist (i.e., nothing is God), pantheism is the belief that God exists but only in the sense that God is identical with the physical world and/or everything in it (i.e., everything is God). Those familiar with my book, KCR, might guess I would label Kant as a pantheist, for I there depict Kant as a (somewhat reluctant) “Critical mystic.” I hope the present essay demonstrates that the latter term is more justifiable than it seems at first to be, despite Kant’s frequently negative portrayals of mysticism (for examples, see KCR, pp. 393–395). Although mystics have often aligned with Kant (KCR, pp. 300–307), the term ‘panentheism’ might be even more suitable as a description of Kant’s new approach to theology.
- 32.
See CPrR, p. 161.
- 33.
See KCR, Section XII.1, for citations to numerous texts in Opus Postumum that employ this or a similar phrase.
- 34.
Immanuel Kant, The Only Possible Argument for the Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), tr. John Richardson in Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, Religious and Various Philosophical Subjects, vol. 2 (London: William Richardson, 1799), p. 151, first italics added; pagination refers to volume 2 of the Berlin Academy Edition. For quotations from many more passages in Kant’s writings that depict a similar theological orientation, see Part Four of KCR.
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Palmquist, S. (2013). Kant’s Moral Panentheism. In: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_33
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