In a recent, perceptive essay on Kant’s philosophy of religion, Richard Bernstein takes up Charles Taylor’s fundamental question in A Secular Age: “How did we get from a time when, at least in the West, virtually no one seriously questioned belief in a transcendent God, to a secular age where belief and especially unbelief have become ‘real options’ for millions of people?” Bernstein’s particular interest is in philosophy’s role in this transition. He claims that “Kant’s Critical philosophy has had the greatest philosophical influence on making unbelief a legitimate alternative to faith in a transcendent God.”1 Here Kant’s strategy is well known: first, scout the limits of human knowledge; second, determine that knowledge of the transcendent God of theism falls outside those limits (so, a pox on both atheism and theism); third, argue for the rationality of a moral faith. In Kant’s famous summation: “I had to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” (Bxxx).
Bernstein focuses on the third step—the one we sketched in chapter six under “God as moral lawgiver.” He finds “Kant’s practical moral argument so dubious that an unbeliever has good reason to remain skeptical.”2 For Bernstein, then, Kant is “the philosopher of our secular age” in two senses, one intended and one not: he exposes the knowledge-claims involved in both theism and atheism as mirror-image mistakes, and his moral theology prompts as much doubt as faith.
My concern in this book has been with step one. That is, I have been concerned with some of the connections between Kant’s theory of knowledge, his transcendental idealism, and religion—with both, as I put it in the introduction, religious questions and questions about religion. Kant’s transcendental idealism claims to limn the structure of the objective world, the world that presents itself to us in experience. The structure of what is so must be respected by theists and atheists alike; it is this neutrality that is supposed to allow Kant to criticize both for claiming to know what cannot be known. But it has seemed to many critics that transcendental idealism does not present a neutral playing field. One distinction in particular has attracted attention, namely that between the concept of objects of experience and the concept of objects considered apart from any possible human cognition.
In asking about Kant’s treatment of “things in themselves” we return to our starting point: Nietzsche’s accusation in the introduction. He writes: “Any distinction between a ‘true’ and an ‘apparent’ world—whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, a cunning Christian)—is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life.”3 Brandom provides a recent version of the same charge:
Normative structures are presupposed by the application of concepts in judgment and action—activity that counts as judging and acting only because and insofar as it is subject to assessment as correct or incorrect according to the standards set by the content of the commitments one has undertaken. Kant locates the origin of these normative structures in transcendental activity rather than empirical activity, in the noumenal rather than the phenomenal realm.4
And again,
Leibniz’s appeal to innateness is not an attractive response to the explanatory demand. And it would not be much improvement to punt the central issue of the institution of conceptual norms from the realm of the empirical into the realm of noumenal activity. I think it is a nice question just how Kant’s account deals with this issue.5
Probably Brandom does not have Christianity in mind, but he is with Nietzsche in finding that Kant’s philosophical commitments force him to claim knowledge of two “realms.” I take it Brandom’s “noumenal” and “phenomenal” maps directly onto Nietzsche’s “true” and “apparent.”
Anyone who has spent much time with the Critique of Pure Reason cannot be wholly unsympathetic. In the Transcendental Aesthetic Kant tells us that time “does not adhere to objects themselves, rather merely to the subject that intuits them” (A37–38/B54), and that “the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being” (A42/B59). Again, what we intuit “contains nothing that can belong to an object in itself but merely the appearance of something” (A44/B61). Melnick remarks of such passages as these that Kant is “implying that the things we intuit are something in themselves.”6 But of this claim we long ago learned to ask, How does Kant know even this much about how it stands with things in themselves? By what right is he able to assert anything at all about them? Such passages suggest that, to canvass the human point of view, one must somehow escape it—must somehow stand outside it. With a nod toward Nietzsche—and in view of our criticisms of Schleiermacher in chapter four—we may want to see this line of thought, if not in specifically Christian terms, then as religious in the narrow sense that it embraces another kind of reality over and above the one that presents itself to us in experience.
Alongside these passages runs another, apparently later train of thought. Thus, again in the Aesthetic, Kant writes that the representation of space “signifies nothing” except “that through which we may be affected by objects” (A26/B42). He continues, “This predicate can be ascribed to things only insofar as they appear to us,” and “space comprehends all things that may appear to us externally, but not all things in themselves” (A27/B43). About these passages Melnick comments,
This contrast . . . is between viewing or considering things under the condition of being intuitable vs. viewing or considering things in themselves. This is a contrast between two ways of considering or understanding the concept of a thing which, by itself, is neutral as to what a thing considered in relation to sensibility is.7
Here Kant is not saying of things in themselves that they are not what we judge them to be. That had been the burden of the passages cited in the previous paragraph. Here, by contrast, he is merely distinguishing between two concepts of a thing. We find Kant taking this same line in the Amphibolies: “Because in the mere concept of a thing in general we abstract from the many necessary conditions of its intuition, the conditions from which we have abstracted are, with strange presumption, treated as not being there at all . . .” (A281/B337). Here again Kant is drawing the distinction between appearance and thing in itself as between two species of a more general concept of a thing. Finally, from the section on Phenomena and Noumena: “The principles of pure understanding can apply only to objects of the senses under the universal conditions of a possible experience, never to things in general without regard to the mode in which we are able to intuit them” (A246/B303). To put the point in the terms we have been developing all along, Kant is decomposing the general concept “thing” into two further sub-concepts: “objects under the universal conditions of possible experience,” and “things in general without regard” to those conditions.
It is on the basis of this train of thought that Kant is best positioned to respond to Nietzsche’s accusation that his distinction between phenomena and noumena amounts to a theological distinction between the “true” and the merely “apparent” world. It is also the basis on which Kant can most effectively reply to Geuss’s assimilation of his transcendental philosophy to Plato’s doctrine of Forms. We cannot say that Nietzsche and Geuss are simply mistaking a distinction between concepts for one between objects; that would be conveniently to ignore those passages where Kant does in fact appear to be distinguishing between kinds of things. But we can say they are missing a line of thought on which Kant is up to something rather different and more philosophically compelling.
At least in intent, my portrayal of Kant’s epistemology throughout this book has been consistent with the second, and, I take it, more productive, line of thought. We have regularly been meeting with the “universal conditions of possible experience,” that is, with the rules motivating Kant’s distinction between the concept of things under such conditions and the concept of things apart from them. In chapter two, we saw that the principle of non-contradiction governs the structure of empirical concepts, and, in chapter three, that it governs the unity of thought—comprising a “negative touchstone of truth.” Again, in chapter three, we examined Kant’s claim that, in extending thought to objects outside me, I must conform to extra-logical rules governing the unity of experience—a constitutive or transcendental logic, required in order to make sense of the notion of merely regulative rules seeking ever greater unity and systematicity. Experience requires that I take time and locate objects at some distance from me, thereby, in chapter four, making for an element of non-conceptual content. (That Schleiermacher does not undertake an exhibition or Darstellung of these requirements forces him into an untenable choice between skepticism and naturalism.) And in chapter five we saw that I must incorporate all my representations into a single consciousness, a rule the depth of which cannot be captured by the rubric of normativity. I take it that without such rules as these Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena would remain unmotivated.
In outline, this is the answer on behalf of Kant’s transcendental philosophy to Nietzsche’s charge that its author is a “cunning Christian.” Brandom’s version of Nietzsche’s charge alleges a baseless appeal to “the realm of noumenal activity” in order to explain the normative structure underlying our use of concepts. Perhaps at this point what I take to be Kant’s reply is already clear. The main point—explicit in our discussion of the self in chapter five—is to deny Brandom’s claim of normativity. Kant’s idea is apparently that the rules that interest him are so basic that we cannot make sense of failing to observe them—not, at least, if failure is itself an accomplishment within the realm of discursivity. What Brandom dismisses as “noumenal activity” Kant sees as instances of unavoidable rule-following.
In recent years the academic study of religion has become increasingly focused on material culture—more committed to what Rorty, following Brandom, calls “the ontological priority of the social.”8 Partly as a result, the philosophy of religion—an academic sub-field Kant practically invents in the first two Critiques—has receded in prominence. Perhaps this is nothing more than academic fashion, or perhaps, as Rorty hoped, the grip on us of questions having to do with the nature and existence of a transcendent God has begun to loosen. It is instructive to note that the same issue apparently arose for Kant himself. The question is whether, at the end of his life, Kant’s views on religion changed so radically that he began to use the term in a fundamentally new way. Thus, Eckhart Förster puts a great deal of emphasis on the following reflexionen:
Religion is conscientiousness (mihi hoc religioni). The holiness of the acceptance [Zusage] and the truthfulness of what man must confess to himself. Confess to yourself. To have religion, the concept of God is not required (still less the postulate: “There is a God”).9
Förster comments, “In the end, then, ethics and religion coincide. In the Opus postumum, the classical doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason is finally laid to rest.” Writing in the same spirit, Bernstein, also citing the Opus postumum, says Kant “flip-flops” on the practical postulate.10
It is of course a vexed question how much weight to attach to any one of Kant’s remarks in the Opus postumum. For my purposes, it is enough that Kant wrote the words—never mind whether they represent his settled view. What interests me is not Kant’s frame of mind, but, as in chapter two, the forces that tug, drag, and stretch the content of concepts in such cases as this. Recall that, from 1788–1798, Kant defined Religion as “the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.” And let us say, following Förster and Bernstein, that he now wants to remove the reference to the divine. Recall, too (from chapter six), that Kant is anti-descriptivist about reference: We can quite well maintain referential contact with an aspect of the world even while making mistakes and revising our beliefs about it. In chapter two we asked how far, without changing the subject, the nascent humanities and social sciences could stretch Kant’s definition of religion. Now we are asking how far he can take it himself.
Let us look again at the passage from the Opus postumum. While the last sentence is brutally clear, the first three have a certain oracular quality. I take it that holiness, acceptance, truthfulness, and self-confession can each be seen as constitutive parts of the recognition of our duties—and that Kant, at least in this mood, is taking them as such. Holiness would be the acceptance of duty, which in turn requires truthfulness, which in turn (for creatures with perverted wills and who are subject to self-deception) requires self-confession. The content of “religion,” or of what we are now to take as its synonym, “conscientiousness,” would then be composed of the inferential relations holding between these concepts (and their further sub-concepts) taken together. The net effect would seem to be a paring back of Kant’s long-held definition of religion from,
“the recognition of all our duties as divine commands” to “the recognition of all our duties”
Thus, Förster’s remark about the coincidence of ethics and religion.
Now, when put in this form, what Kant is doing in the passage from the Opus postumum looks very much like the result of his encounter with Hume over the concept “event.” Kant takes Hume to have pared back the content of the concept from,
“a temporal happening according to a rule” to “a temporal happening”
On display in both cases is the activity of conceptual decomposition. The initial question is whether a certain property attaches analytically to a subject term: “God” to “religion,” “caused” to “event.” Answering this question may involve, as Beck puts it, “a discovery of the most difficult and surprising kind.”11 Kant famously came to accept Hume’s difficult and surprising discovery that we do not contradict ourselves in thinking of uncaused events. Looking back, Kant realized he had been mistaken about the sphere or inferential structure of “event.” As Kant looks back from the passage in the Opus postumum, does he think he had been mistaken about the relationship between God and religion? Taking this passage at face value, the answer is clearly, yes. Not that Kant realizes he had been wrong about whether the recognition of one’s duty requires some pro-attitude (belief, hope, postulation, etc.) toward God; his long-held definition got that part right: as we saw in chapter two, Kant is quite clear that, if we can view our duties as divine commands, then we must be able to look upon them while putting aside the notion of divine command. Rather, he had been wrong about whether religion—not the concept but the thing, the aspect of the world under discussion—in some way requires God.
The difference, then, between the two cases is that Kant thinks he can show that “cause” attaches to “temporal happening” with necessity even though it is not an analytic inference, whereas “God” has no necessary attachment to “religion.” In the former case, the connection comes by way of the possibility of experience; according to the Second Analogy that all determinable temporal events are caused is an a priori synthetic proposition. But the connection between “God” and “religion” is thoroughly empirical and synthetic. That is, “religion” can stand by itself. I take it we want to say that Kant was referring to (thinking about, writing about, directing his thoughts to) events throughout the process of decomposing and reconstructing “event,” that is, all the while he was learning from Hume that “caused” is not analytically contained in it and then discovering that, nevertheless, “cause” is contained in it with necessity. This is Kant’s anti-descriptivism in action. One moral is that reference can survive flip-flopping over this or that property. What, then, about Kant’s apparent claim in the Opus postumum that “God” plays no role in either the analytic or synthetic inferential content of “religion” and his consequent change of mind? Is he referring to religion throughout?
The answer depends on what we make of the conceptual content created by the inferential connections between holiness, acceptance, truthfulness, self-confession, and their sub-concepts. If we think this is what Kant had his eye on all along—if we think this was always, for him, the substance of a religious life—then we have no reason not to find continuity of reference. On this reading he “lays to rest” God (not to mention God as practical postulate) even as he keeps a firm referential grip on what he had all along counted as religion—even during those years when the God of the practical postulate held an exalted place at the inferential table.12 This is apparently Kant’s own self-understanding in the passage from the Opus postumum: he takes himself to be holding fast to religion while letting go of God. On the other hand, if we take Kant to have been standing with Parson Thwackum in the 1780s and 90s—meaning by religion the Christian religion, and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion, etc.—then we should conclude that in the Opus postumum he has merely changed the subject.
For my purposes more important than deciding this question is to note that expanding or contracting the sphere of the concept “religion”—modifying its inferential content—is entirely consistent with Kant’s spatial theory of concepts. The key points carry over from our discussion in chapter two of the passage at A728/B756. On Kant’s view, empirical concepts “never remain within a secure boundary.” As I like to think of it, Kant did not “stop short” at what he originally thought in the concepts “event” and “religion” (among others), but rather “advanced to experiment.” No doubt we should see Kant’s inquiries in the context of large-scale material forces and movements—capitalism, modernity, industrialization, etc.—what, with Brandom, we earlier called the “dynamics” of conceptual change. But let us imagine that, per impossibile, all such material forces withdraw leaving a world of pure, frictionless inquiry. Even so, the tension over the content of religion would remain, now driven by the underlying structure of discursivity itself, by the nature of concepts and of reason.