Abstract
In the 1787 preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that among the goals of his critical project is to determine the “limits to knowledge” in order to “make room for faith” (Bxxx). Although this comment has long been treated as an empty bromide, recent “affirmative” interpretations of Kant’s philosophy of religion have come to take it more seriously. This chapter explores Kant’s views on the relationship between faith and knowledge. The first half of the chapter focuses on Moral/Pure Rational Faith as it relates to the Highest Good and Practical Postulates. The second half turns to Historical/Ecclesiastical Faith, particularly as it is employed in Kant’s religious writings of the 1790s.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
There has been a recent flood of publications on Kant’s understanding of assent, particularly religious assent. Representative articles include the following: Andrew Chignell, “Belief in Kant,” Philosophical Review 116, no. 3 (July 2007): 323–60; Andrew Chignell, “Kant’s Concepts of Justification,” Noûs 41, no. 1 (March 2007): 33–63; Lawrence Pasternack, “Kant’s Doctrinal Belief in God,” in Rethinking Kant, vol. 3, ed. Oliver Thorndike (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 200–218; Lawrence Pasternack, “The Development and Scope of Kantian Belief: The Highest Good, the Practical Postulates and the Fact of Reason,” Kant-Studien 102, no. 3 (Jan. 2011): 290–315; Lawrence Pasternack, “Kant on Opinion: Assent, Hypothesis, and the Norms of General Applied Logic,” Kant-Studien 105, no. 1 (April 2014): 41–82; Lawrence Pasternack, “Kant on Knowledge, Opinion, and the Threshold for Assent,” in Rethinking Kant, vol. 4, ed. Oliver Thorndike (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014), 55–74; Leslie Stevenson, “Opinion, Belief or Faith, and Knowledge,” Kantian Review 7 (March 2003): 72–101; and Joseph S. Trullinger, “Kant’s Two Touchstones for Conviction: The Incommunicable Dimension of Moral Faith,” Review of Metaphysics 67, no. 2 (Dec. 2013): 369–403.
- 2.
The German Glaube can be used either in the mundane sense of the English “belief,” or as the religious honorific “faith.” While Kant sometimes intends its more mundane use, we will be focusing primarily on those contexts where the latter is operant. Through this section of the chapter, we will use both “faith” and “belief” for Glaube, varying the English relative to whether or not the sense of Glaube in use is closer to the former or latter. However, later in the chapter, as we look more focally at Kant’s religious use of the term, we will primarily use the English “faith.”
- 3.
While there is nothing particularly unique about this triad of propositional attitudes, it is still worthy of note that Kant’s selection of the three as our fundamental modes of holding-to-be-true carries with it the convention common to Christian philosophers of distinguishing opinion from faith. The roots of this triad are often traced to medieval philosophy and can be found, for instance, in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, II/II Q.1. art 2 and Q.2 art. 1.
- 4.
Pasternack, “Development and Scope of Kantian Belief.”
- 5.
For an English translation of Meier’s Auszug, see Georg Friedrich Meier, Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, trans. Aaron Bunch, vol. 1 of Kant’s Sources in Translation, ed. Pablo Muchnik and Lawrence Pasternack (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
- 6.
Moralischer Glaube is likewise used by Kant as term for trust in various pre-critical correspondences of the 1770s. See for example, his 1775 letters to Johann Caspar Lavater, a Swiss pastor and theologian (C 10:175–80).
- 7.
Chignell, “Belief in Kant,” 345–54.
- 8.
For a more thorough discussion of doctrinaler Glaube, see Pasternack, “Kant’s Doctrinal Belief in God.”
- 9.
Leslie Stevenson holds that Kant believes that knowledge requires certainty. See his “Opinion, Belief or Faith, and Knowledge,” 99–100n21. Chignell, however, thinks otherwise. See his “Kant’s Concepts of Justification,” 43; and his “Belief in Kant,” 325–26. See also my discussion of the issue in “Kant on Opinion.”
- 10.
The achievement of (objective) certainty, for Kant, is no small task. He holds not only that the grounds of assent must be infallible, but that all competing “scruples” must be addressed. See my discussion of the issue in “Kant on Opinion.”
- 11.
For a discussion of these distinctions, see also Chapter 6 of this volume.
- 12.
I discuss the table of biases Kant draws from Meier in “Kant on Opinion.” See also Lawrence Pasternack, “Kant’s Touchstone of Communication and the Public Use of Reason,” Society and Politics 8, no. 1 (2014): 78–91.
- 13.
While one with an opposing bias may, of course, refuse to accept a properly justified claim, Kant nevertheless renders conviction under the ideal that “the grounds that are valid for us [should] have the same effect on the reason of others” (A821/B849). Similar to his portrayal of our expectation of agreement in aesthetic judgment, the expectation tied to conviction pertains “not so much to the actual as to the merely possible judgments of others” (CJ 5:294). That is, the “universal” agreement of conviction is normative rather than factive (i.e., de jure versus de facto).
- 14.
James J. DiCenso, Kant’s “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason”: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28.
- 15.
One may compare this to Chignell’s diagram of propositional attitudes on page 333 of “Belief in Kant.” Chignell also includes what he calls “mere conviction.” This is not obviously part of Kant’s taxonomy, but it fits well enough. The main difference between our respective taxonomies is that there is not just logical but also a moral/practical form of conviction, under which falls Glaube. Kant also states in a variety of texts that conviction comes in two forms, “logical” and “moral.” The former pertains to knowledge and the latter to faith (A829/B857). He sometimes uses “practical” instead of “moral.” See Rel 6:62; JL 9:72; Ak 28:1082. Evidence that Kant views faith as an instance of conviction is abundant. For example, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment he writes that when a proof is “based on a practical principle of reason (which is thus universally and necessary valid), then it can make a sufficient claim of conviction from a purely practical point of view, i.e., moral conviction” (CJ 5:463). See also, e.g., Rel 6:103; OT 8:142; NF 16:373 [R2450], 16:375–76 [R2454], 16:511–12 [R2789]; JL 9:72; BL 24:148–49.
- 16.
These views refer respectively to Gordon Michaelson, Adina Davidovich/James DiCenso, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
- 17.
Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970); and Stephen R. Palmquist, Kant’s Critical Religion (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000).
- 18.
Although the second half of Chris L. Firestone and Nathan Jacobs’s In Defense of Kant’s “Religion” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), where the authors seek to defend Kant as a Christian philosopher, is more questionable, the literature survey which comprises its first half is well crafted, and may very well be part of the catalysis for the recent increase in work on Kant’s philosophy of religion.
- 19.
Desmond Hogan, “How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves,” Noûs 43, no.1 (March 2009): 49–63; Chignell, “Kant on Belief”; Christopher J. Insole, Kant and the Creation of Freedom: A Theological Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Firestone and Jacobs, In Defense of Kant’s “Religion,” 155–70.
- 20.
The same criticism can be laid against DiCenso, whose reading of Kant was formerly offered by Adina Davidovich in Religion as a Province of Meaning: The Kantian Foundations of Modern Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994). The reductive/symbolic interpretation they promote fails to take account of the ample discussions of the nature of faith found throughout the critical corpus.
- 21.
Of course, one may say that transcendental idealism itself provides the core negative argument against religious knowledge. However, while most would accept this point, it would seem question-begging to the metaphysically friendly interpreter. Thus, besides the technical reasons for limiting knowledge to possible experience, we should explore Kant’s further arguments.
- 22.
We can also see here a response offered by Kant to the well-known criticism of Bishop Butler. According to Butler, Enlightenment theologians ultimately promote a religious elitism, for they too rely upon specialized texts and advanced instruction to disseminate their rendering religious doctrines. Hence, Butler contends, the most egalitarian path to religious truths is via the Gospels, which are more accessible both in terms of their contents and as physical artifacts, than the writings of his contemporary theologians. As Allen Wood likewise discusses, Kant’s alternative takes religious truths to be nascently available to one and all, rooted in our common moral needs. See Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Deism,” in Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, ed. Philip J. Rossi and Michael Wreen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1–21.
- 23.
This is a slight overstatement, for Kant does point out that no “theistic” miracle or revelation could violate the moral law (Rel 6:87). Nevertheless, were “demonic” miracles or revelation possible, Kant notes that of course they would not be similarly restricted (Rel 6:86).
- 24.
In the first Critique, Kant of course rejects the possibility of religious knowledge. However, Kant does not yet present our commitment to the authority of the moral law as the basis for our faith in the postulates. Even though the highest good and the postulates are discussed in the Canon of Pure Reason, the composition of the A-edition nevertheless indicates that Kant used the highest good in order to motivate our moral interest through our interest in happiness (see A813/B841). It is not until the second Critique that Kant begins to clarify faith’s roots in pure practical reason.
- 25.
As an empirical thesis, we see that the laws of nature do not follow the laws of justice. In addition, Kant’s earlier analysis of causality on a priori grounds excludes norms from nature: “In nature the understanding can cognize only what exists, or has been, or will be. It is impossible that something in it ought to be other than what, in all these time-relations, it in fact is.…We cannot ask at all what ought to happen in nature, any more than we can ask what properties a circle ought to have” (A547/B575). Of course, the Critique of the Power of Judgment turns to the question of a final end of nature, but even there, the judgment, as reflective, is a projection on our part onto nature. Moreover, there too we do not expect justice to be realized in nature and thus Kant repeatedly appeals to our “future life” (see, e.g., CJ 5:460, 469, 471n).
- 26.
Although some interpreters have sought to defend a “secular” version of the highest good, even claiming that this version can be found in the corpus, especially the third Critique, Kant actually never deviates from the “theological” version of the doctrine. The textual basis for the “secular” version is spurious and based upon weak scholarship. See the case against it in Lawrence Pasternack, Kant’s “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason”: An Interpretation and Defense (London: Routledge, 2014), ch. 1.
- 27.
For another treatment of the role of choice in faith and its moral significance, see Wood’s discussion of what he calls the “absurdum practicum” in Kant’s Moral Religion. More recently, Trullinger has sought to elevate Kant’s discussions of betting as it relates to faith in “Kant’s Two Touchstones for Conviction.”
- 28.
Note that I am not here differentiating between “historical faith” and “ecclesiastical faith.” Kant uses both terms and, while they may not be fully interchangeable, space does not allow me to examine the subtle ways in which they differ.
- 29.
I have recently argued that the standard First/Second Experiment distinction is based upon a translation error. See: Lawrence Pasternack, “The ‘Two Experiments’ of Kant’s Religion: Dismantling the Conundrum,” Kantian Review 22, no. 1 (March 2017): 107–31.
- 30.
This is, perhaps, an overstatement to some extent, for Kant looks forward to a time when “religion will gradually be freed of all empirical grounds of determination, of all statutes that rest on history” (Rel 6:121). However, this hope may be understood as eschatological in nature, for it concerns a time “infinitely removed from us” (Rel 6:122) when the church has finally realized its goal of making the species as a whole “well-pleasing to God” (Rel 6:133).
- 31.
It is important to note that where any individual doctrine resides will depend upon its interpretation. For example, Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac may very well place it as a vehicle rather than anathema. Similarly, as Firestone himself argues, there are ways of understanding the Trinity whereby it too can be understood as “mystical cover” for the PRSR. See Chris L. Firestone, Kant and Theology at the Boundaries of Reason (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), ch. 7.
- 32.
Although there is an unfortunate history of confusion regarding the above taxonomy, it should be evident that Kant’s pure rational faith and Pure Rational System of Religion are of a piece with pure rationalism as quoted here.
- 33.
In this we see as well the “voluntary determination” that Kant associates with pure rational faith. Although many people simply inherit the historical faith of their families, this form of faith too allows for choice insofar as each individual may (and should) choose which tradition’s vehicles and adjunctives he or she finds most inspiring.
- 34.
The faith at issue here should not be rendered as merely a belief “as-if.” Despite the popularity of this construal of the postulates in prior decades, the work that has recently been done on Kant’s conception of pure rational faith should now make it clear that in it there is a full-fledged holding-to-be-true, a conviction with certainty, rather than some sort of practically grounded self-deception. If such were true, then morality would not merely be threatened by self-deception, but it would also be a consequence of it. Such a reading, thus, collapses into absurdity.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pasternack, L. (2017). Kant on Faith: Religious Assent and the Limits to Knowledge. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_23
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54655-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54656-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)