Kant and Social Theory: The Metaphysics of Religion Revisited

By: Seyed Javad Meynagh

Abstract

There is no doubt that Kant brought a new vista in terms of religious quest in public square but it would be a grave mistake to view this modern version uncritically as his stance does not leave any room for knowledge beyond the phenomena. On the other hand, the entire discourse of religious intellection, including all the fundamentals of rituals and rites, is aimed at ‘going beyond’ and ‘reaching above’. In other words, by taking a Kantian position we may not be at odds with empirical understanding of science but surely we shall miss a great gamut of what religion is all about, namely an existential practice in spiritual ascending and eschatological journey. This essay is a brief venture into the world of great German Philosopher in relation to religion and metaphysics.

Introduction

On Kant there have been great many works written and in this essay we will not pretend to master all the secondary researches on Kant but what is the main point of this essay is the fact that no debates on religion within the context of modernity is complete without a thorough engagement with him. This essay is an attempt neither to appreciate nor deprecate the importance of Kant as a philosopher within modernity but to see the limitations of his paradigm and its impact upon social theory which via disciplinary psychology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy theorized about religion and its place within the context of intellectuality as a perennial quest of human intelligence.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Kant was born in Königsberg; he spent his life there; he died there. At the age of forty-six, Kant received an appointment as a professor of logic and metaphysics at his alma mater the University of Königsberg. His famous claim: "Though our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises out of experience." A philosophical classic is his work Critique of Pure Reason wherein he asserts that our perceptual apparatus is capable of ordering sense-impressions into intelligible unities, which, while in themselves cannot be proven, we are led to conclude through "pure reason," that intelligible unities, such as God, freedom, and immortality, do exist; and that the formation of such intelligible unities are practical necessities for one's life. An admirer of Rousseau, Kant's work gave rise to the Idealist school (Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer).

Kant was of the view that while the existence of God could not be proven, we ought to come to a belief in God's existence by way of "logical understanding." Kant concluded that this world was not sufficient in itself, that an external power, which he identified with God, was a regulative necessity; and that God was a requisite for morality, it gives meaning to our life here on earth. The existence of God was, for Kant, but one of three postulates of morality, the other two being freedom of the will, and immortality of the soul. These moral axioms, unprovable as they are, existed for Kant simply because they were the sine qua non of the moral life. (Kuehn, 2000)

Kantain Metaphysics and Religion

While Kant's scientific interests and the traditions of philosophical rationalism influenced the initial trajectory of his treatment of God as a key concept for metaphysics, other aspects of his historical and social context also played a role in setting the stage for his treatment of religion as a feature of human life and culture. (Walker, 1998) Among the most important was his upbringing in the milieu of Pietism, a reform movement within German Lutheranism that stressed inner religious conversion and upright conduct over doctrinal exactness. Kant retained an appreciation for the inner moral conscientiousness that Pietism sought to foster as fundamental to religion even as he reacted strongly against the external ritual and devotional practices of Christian public worship and prayer that Pietism continued to promote. A second important factor in the development of his philosophical approach to understanding religion was his long-standing interest in the variety of human cultures and the dynamics of human social interaction. This provided Kant with a perspective from which to view religion as principally a human phenomenon in which the various aspects of our human make-up — the sensible, the intellectual, the historical and the social — interact in ways that are significant for understanding humanity's role in the cosmos. (Kant, 1970)

One consequence of the interplay of these multiple elements in shaping Kant's thinking is that no single work of his on religion provides a comprehensive overview of his analyses and reflections on religion. No one work brings them together into a systematically organized “philosophy of religion.” Any account of Kant's philosophical treatment of religious concepts and of the human phenomenon of religion, moreover, must attend not only to the context in which his own thinking on these matters took shape but also to developments and changes in his views that occur in the course of five decades of philosophical reflection. Kant's treatment of the philosophical function of the concept of God, arguments for the existence of God, the relationship between morality and religion and the role of religion in the dynamics of human culture and history has been such that he can be considered one of the thinkers whose work helped to establish philosophy of religion as a distinct field for specialized philosophical inquiry. At the same time, his work on religion also placed important items on the agenda for subsequent theological discussions.

One of the most famous parts of Kant's philosophical theology is his critique of the traditional theoretical arguments for God's existence, in his first Critique. He states that there are three approaches: One, that which begins with determinate experience and the specific constitution of the world of sense as thereby known is the "physicotheological" argument form design; Two, that based on experience which is purely indeterminate, that is, form experience of existence in general is "cosmological" reasoning; Three, those which abstract from all experience, and argue completely a priori from mere concepts, to the existence of God are 'ontological.' He says that no other arguments for God's existence are possible, from a theoretical perspective. Kant tells us that, at some future time we shall show that the moral laws do not merely presuppose the existence of a supreme being, but also, as themselves in a different connection absolutely necessary, justify us in postulating it, though, indeed, only from a practical point of view. (Despland, 1973)

Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone considers the postulate of God that "arises out of morality" without being the basis of moral obligation. "Morality thus leads ineluctably to religion, through which extends itself to the idea of a powerful moral Lawgiver, outside of mankind, for Whose will that is the final end (of creation) which at the same time can and ought to be man's final end."

Kant's Philosophy

The keystone of Kant's philosophy, sometimes called critical philosophy, is contained in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in which he examined the bases of human knowledge and created an individual epistemology. Like earlier philosophers, Kant differentiated modes of thinking into analytic and synthetic propositions. An analytic proposition is one in which the predicate is contained in the subject, as in the statement “Black houses are houses.” The truth of this type of proposition is evident, because to state the reverse would be to make the proposition self-contradictory. Such propositions are called analytic because truth is discovered by the analysis of the concept itself. Synthetic propositions, on the other hand, are those that cannot be arrived at by pure analysis, as in the statement “The house is black.” All the common propositions that result from experience of the world are synthetic.

Propositions, according to Kant, can also be divided into two other types: empirical and a priori. Empirical propositions depend entirely on sense perception, but a priori propositions have a fundamental validity and are not based on such perception. The difference between these two types of proposition may be illustrated by the empirical “The house is black” and the a priori “Two plus two makes four.” Kant's thesis in the Critique is that it is possible to make synthetic a priori judgments. This philosophical position is usually known as transcendentalism. In describing how this type of judgment is possible Kant regarded the objects of the material world as fundamentally unknowable; from the point of view of reason, they serve merely as the raw material from which sensations are formed. Objects of themselves have no existence, and space and time exist only as part of the mind, as “intuitions” by which perceptions are measured and judged.

In addition to these intuitions, Kant stated that a number of a priori concepts, which he called categories, also exist. He divided the categories into four groups: those concerning quantity, which are unity, plurality, and totality; those concerning quality, which are reality, negation, and limitation; those concerning relation, which are substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, and reciprocity; and those concerning modality, which are possibility, existence, and necessity. The intuitions and the categories can be applied to make judgments about experiences and perceptions, but cannot, according to Kant, be applied to abstract ideas such as freedom and existence without leading to inconsistencies in the form of pairs of contradictory propositions, or “antinomies,” in which both members of each pair can be proved true.

In the Metaphysics of Ethics (1797) Kant described his ethical system, which is based on a belief that the reason is the final authority for morality. Actions of any sort, he believed, must be undertaken from a sense of duty dictated by reason, and no action performed for expediency or solely in obedience to law or custom can be regarded as moral. Kant described two types of commands given by reason: the hypothetical imperative, which dictates a given course of action to reach a specific end; and the categorical imperative, which dictates a course of action that must be followed because of its rightness and necessity. The categorical imperative is the basis of morality and was stated by Kant in these words: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law.”

Kant's ethical ideas are a logical outcome of his belief in the fundamental freedom of the individual as stated in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788). This freedom he did not regard as the lawless freedom of anarchy, but rather as the freedom of self-government, the freedom to obey consciously the laws of the universe as revealed by reason. He believed that the welfare of each individual should properly be regarded as an end in itself and that the world was progressing toward an ideal society in which reason would “bind every law giver to make his laws in such a way that they could have sprung from the united will of an entire people, and to regard every subject, in so far as he wishes to be a citizen, on the basis of whether he has conformed to that will.” In his treatise Perpetual Peace (1795) Kant advocated the establishment of a world federation of republican states.

Kant had a greater influence than any other philosopher of modern times. Kantian philosophy, particularly as developed by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, was the basis on which the structure of Marxism was built; the dialectical method, used by both Hegel and Karl Marx, was an outgrowth of the method of reasoning by “antinomies” that Kant used. The German philosopher Johann Fichte, Kant's pupil, rejected his teacher's division of the world into objective and subjective parts and developed an idealistic philosophy that also had great influence on 19th-century socialists. One of Kant's successors at the University of Königsberg, J.F. Herbart, incorporated some of Kant's ideas in his system of pedagogy.

Transcendental Idealism

The differences between reality as seen in science and reality as seen in morality and religion reveal that there are aspects to existence that are not revealed by either datum alone. The two sources are also unequal in the magnitude and ultimate significance of their content. What science can investigate and know is apparently all but endless, but it still leaves us wondering, "What is it all for?" Morality and religion have a far more limited rational content, returning to many of the same issues over and over again, but such issues happen to include, not just the questions about how to live, but the ultimate questions about the meaning of life and existence ("Life, the Universe and Everything," in the memorable formula of Douglas Adams). That our moral datum does not lead to direct, positive knowledge of things that we are able to conceive, like God, leads Kant to characterize his system as transcendental idealism, that we have a subjective representation of such things, without the real intuition that we have of physical objects. The reality revealed by morality is thus for Kant a matter of faith (Glaube), an inference from the Moral Law which is itself present to us with an inexplicable authority. "Transcendental idealism" is thus profoundly different from other forms of "idealism," like the "subjective idealism" of Berkeley (what Kant called "empirical idealism") or the "objective idealism" of Hegel, both of which offer speculative certainties about the ultimate nature of things, which Kant does not do. The nature of things that we can know about concretely, for Kant, is revealed by science. Hence, Kantian transcendental idealism is equally attended by empirical realism.

How Kant can be certain that reason connects us directly to things-in-themselves is an question that he cannot answer. All that the Transcendental Deduction aimed at was showing that particular concepts, like causality or substance, are "necessary conditions for the possibility of experience." If successful, the Deduction limits the application of the concepts to experience, which is fine for Kant's philosophy of science, but doesn't help when he turns to morality and the "Postulates of Practical Reason." There his basic, but unjustified, theory of reason emerges. This shortcoming is what was directly addressed and answered by Jakob Fries, whose epistemology thus could save the generality of Kant's theory without falling back, like Hegel, into speculative metaphysics. (Mohanty, 1989)

Kant and Social Theory

Before I begin my direct discussion of sacred as understood in the philosophy of Kant, it seems necessary to discuss the philosophical understanding which surrounded his beliefs on the topic of sacred in relation to particular sociological topics such as sacrifice. Discussion of his notion of the sacred or the noumenal will likely be of central importance to the discussion of the sacrifice, as even a brief examination show that the word sacrifice itself is related in meaning to the word sacred.

In order to develop an understanding of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy it helps to grasp the progression of western thought from which his proceeded. While I will not explain here the entirety of notable western philosophical thought which preceded him, I will briefly comment on the Rationalist and Empiricist movements which were the backdrop and groundwork for Kant’s philosophical writing.

The Rationalists, as the term suggests, were a series of philosophers who believed that reason was the only reliable source of philosophical disclosure, and the only way to make progress in understanding the world. They also proposed that because senses could be fooled, experience was not useful in generating reliable philosophical insights. A reaction to them came in the form of the Empiricists, who suggested that only experience in the world could teach you anything. From these two traditions of philosophy, Kant emerges as a kind of synthesizer.

In Kant’s transcendental idealism, we see a stark distinction between the phenomenal realm and the noumenal realm. In the phenomenal realm is found all phenomena. That is, it holds all that which is part of the material order of the world. The noumenal realm contains the moral law, reason, ideas, and anything which is not a part of the material order of the world and yet is still in some way present. This distinction afforded Kant a resolution to the discrepancy between the rationalist and empiricist traditions, without giving up the advantages of either tradition. For example, Kant now had the basis for a priori and a posteriori knowledge. That is, he could reconcile in a satisfactory manner why some things could be known independent of experience, and why some things could be known only after an experience. This distinction plays itself out in this discussion of the sacred and sacrifice, as the sacred, in Kant’s work, is found entirely in the noumenal realm. (Flikschuh, 2000)

However, in order to proceed further, I should lay forth what exactly is meant by “the sacred”. The sacred is a term describing that which is valued independent of material systems of valuation. Hence the significance of a wooden cross, piece of land or flag in the face of apparent material worthlessness.

While Kant does not discuss the sacred specifically nevertheless he does talk about the noumenal realm and its relationship to other topics (the church for example). I think that in these discussions of the relationship between the noumenal and other topics we see a description of the sacred. For my primary example I would point to his discussion in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. In a section on “Philosophical Account of the Victory of the Good over the Evil Principle in the Founding of a Kingdom of God on Earth”, he discusses the difference between ecclesiastical faith and pure religious faith. He makes the point that faith can either be centered on a noumenal understanding, or a phenomenal understanding. Phenomenal understandings of faith are characterized by adherence to doctrine. By contrast, noumenal understandings of faith are characterized by an attempt to do good independent of doctrine. For example, one of the long standing arguments in religion is between following the letter of God’s law or/and trying to get at the spirit of the law. The sacred is described to some extent in this account of pure religious faith. It is faith which is based to some extent outside the order of the material world.

Kant holds to the idea that the sacred is not something which is to be grasped in the way in which someone would grasp the profane or the phenomenal. Bataille, for instance, describes the sacred as containing spirits, angels, and other things which could be understood in a mythological sense, or to put it another way, in a supernatural-physical sense. However, I think by these terms he does not refer to physical entities so much as something of a more intangible nature. Intangible, felt (emotionally) rather than sensed, is the nature of Kant’s notion of the sacred. Even in the very concrete thought of Heidegger, mood and feeling are a part of that which is observed only in the introspective sense, or the sense of looking beyond the physicality of phenomena. Another way of explaining this is to say that the sacred is the realm of meaning. Bataille’s statement “Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form a real world with the bodies that control them, a world subject to and traversed by divine forces, but fallen.”^{^[1]} is an indicator of this.

What, for instance, sacrifice holds in terms of common meaning, both with Kant and Bataille and in terms of lexical definition, is that sacrifice is the giving up for the divine. In other words, sacrifice is the giving up of the materially valuable for that which is spiritually meaningful. In terms of a more precise philosophical definition, sacrifice is the act of exchanging that which is valued for meaning. This is why the objects of sacrifice are lost or destroyed in the sacrifice and why the best sacrifices are things of value. If nothing is given up, nothing can be exchanged. If much is given up, much is gained. This is very likely why Jesus says “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it.” (Mark 8:35)

This, put in more Kantian terms is sacrifice as an act which takes something phenomenal and lends some sort of noumenal value. However, though this is the same idea in Kantian terminology, it is so for purposes of comparison, not to indicate a Kantian perspective. While again, I have not come across a direct discussion of self sacrifice with respect to the moral law, as near as I currently understand Kant, I find that a particular quote sheds some light on how Kant would have addressed the issue. “When any one does, in conformity with duty, more than he can be compelled to do by the law, it is said to be meritorious (meritum). What is done only in exact conformity with the law, is what is due (debitum). And when less is done than can be demanded to be done by the law, the result is moral demerit (demeritum) or culpability.” I understand this to mean that Kant would hold that if someone exceeds their moral responsibility they gain what might be found as the value of sacrifice. However, the material impact of loss incurred while carrying out the moral law would be largely irrelevant. This seems to me to be the most significant difference between Bataille and Kant with respect to sacrifice and the sacred.

In conclusion it seems the Kantian conceptions of the noumenal realm and of the moral law leave no room for anything except duty. For Kant, only when sacrifice is the giving up of something for duty, will a sacrifice produce its intended result. Even then it is the consistency with duty, not with the giving up of anything that gives meaning. This is because the phenomenal realm is valueless and irrelevant to the moral law. The religious thiner, by contrast, integrates these two realms, and in the overlap is the possibility of sacrifice made meaningful.

But what makes Kant directly important within social theory is his notion of ‘sacred’ which has played very important role within the contemporary debates on religion. The notion of the sacred or the numinous as a category for understanding religion was substantially launched by Rudolf Otto. Otto, indeed, coined the term "numinous," which has now become part of common usage. Otto's influence on thought about religion extends from Jung to the "Chicago School" of history of religion founded by Mircea Eliade. On the other hand, Otto's influence on the philosophy and sociology of religion has been less strong, perhaps because he was professionally more of a theologian and is too easily misunderstood and dismissed as describing some kind of mysticism, which has become wrongly synonymous with occultism that within modernist historiography is tantamount also mistakenly with hocus pocus incantation. Even in the history of religion, Otto's own analysis often does not persuade because of his clear preferences for Christianity and his devaluation of religions that do not measure up to Christian paradigms.

But the idea of sacred employed by Otto and widespread within some parts of human sciences goes back to Kantian metaphysics about the basis of the concept of God in human reason. In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), Kant had reduced religion to a phenomenon of reason and morality. Kant believed, indeed, that morality was what religion was all about and that it provided a basis for rational belief in concepts like God, freedom, and immortality; but this provided no ground for any other aspects of traditional religious thought, practice, belief, or experience. In order to overcome Kantian rationalism Fries was able to add an important component, that the central aspect of religion was not so much reason as feeling. But Fries still provided little room for most of the traditional contents of religion. (Kant, 1960) Even though both Kant and Fries were, in some general and cultural sense, Christians, there was nevertheless no reason in their systems of philosophy to believe anything more than that the founder of their religion was a particularly good moral teacher. Fries might make Jesus some kind of poet in addition, but there was still no way that he could admit anything like traditional orthodox views about the status and function of redeemer in the nature of reality or the scheme of salvation. Indeed, Fries had a moral objection to the idea that Jesus might have suffered for our sins and redeemed us from damnation. Salvation itself could only remain an alien concept to both Kant and Fries, but it is hard to see what religion could possibly mean as a divine revelation without the idea of salvation or redemption.

In other words, although Kant saved religion from the onslaught of materialist philosophers who were gaining momentum by the advance of modernity nevertheless the very rescue of religion within Kantian philosophy became tantamount with its curtailment, namely its eschew from the public square. Today the distinction between the public and private has gained a political dimension which is backed up by a sociological reality that reins supreme within liberal-capital order but the metaphysical backbone of this distinction draws its strength from Kantian ideology (Guyer, 1997) that is endorsed by a materialistic metaphysic which needs to be assessed and compared with competing metaphysical systems such as those by Mulla Sadra, Avecinna, Suhrevardi, Sayyid Naghib al-Attas, Iqbal, Ku Hung-Ming and so on and so forth. In the forthcoming essay we shall develop this question (the relevance of modern metaphysic in relation to Existence) by comparing Kantian and Sadrian metaphysics and re-evaluate the foundations of social theory when viewed through Sadrian background assumptions.

References

Despland, Michel. Kant on history and religion. Montreal; London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973.

Flikschuh, Katrin. Kant and Modern Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Guyer, Paul. Kant and the claims of taste. 2nd ed.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the limits of reason alone; Translated with notes by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, with a new essay "The ethical significance of Kant's 'Religion'" by John R. Silber. New York: Harper & Row, 1960.

Kant, Immanuel. Kant on the foundation of morality: A modern version of the 'Grundlegung'; Translated with commentary by Brendan E.A. Liddell. Bloomington; London: Indiana University Press, 1970.

Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Mohanty, J. N. Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Walker, Ralph C. S. Kant: Kant and Moral Law. London: Phoenix, 1998.

1. Bataille, George, Theory of Relgion, Robert Hurley Translation., p.38. Bataille, George. Theory of Religion. New York: Zone, 1992.

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