Abstract
In his new book, Rossi (2019) emphasizes the prominent role of enlightened religion in the political project of establishing perpetual peace. My paper discusses Rossi’s stance on the question as to whether Kant, in his later years, moved to an immanentist conception of the highest good. Kant’s own position in this regard can arguably be better described as comprehensive, according to which an immanent and a transcendent conception of the highest good are upheld as realizable side by side. Rossi’s account looks perfectly consistent with such a view. One of the reasons for such a comprehensive reading is that “immanent” and “secular” do not coincide in Kant in the first place. Seen in this comprehensive way, and while a version of the highest good ought to be realized immanently, we cannot be certain that this will indeed happen. If it does indeed happen, the immortality postulate, which Kant never abandoned, renders it rational to believe that the immanent version of the highest good is merely a step towards its transcendent realization. Affinities of Rossi’s approach to the suggestion that Kant subscribes to a political theology based on what has been called “Molinism minimally defined” will also be explored.
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Notes
More precisely speaking, according to this view, the highest (derivative) good, or at least an integral part of it, is supposed to be actualized by human agents who, insofar as they are appearances, are in space and time. The immanentists can concede that insofar as they are free beings, these human beings need to be regarded as things in themselves. However, according to the immanentist view, there is no achievable highest (derivative) good with regard to which the human agents who actualize it cannot also be regarded as appearances.
A representative of such a view is (Mariña 2000), although she does not use this label herself. My own version of a comprehensive reading – while conceding the priority of the transcendent highest good in Kant – emphasizes the importance of the social dimension of the immanent highest good and the happiness attainable in space and time.
A list of abbreviations can be found below on p. 15.
Such as Theodor Mundt, who accused Heine of a general superficiality in matters of philosophy. See Malter (1979) for a detailed discussion of Heine’s reading of Kant’s key doctrines in Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland of 1834 and important reactions to Heine. According to Malter, it is crucial to realize that Hegel and his philosophy of history rather than Kant take center stage in this text and that Heine’s take on Kant is a reaction and attempted correction of the interpretation of Kant’s importance for German intellectual and political history in their interconnection presented by Germaine de Staël in her De l’Allemagne of 1813. Seen this way, it is indeed Kant’s critique of the arguments for the existence of God which Heine regards as Kant’s major contribution to the project of a revolution in the sphere of the political. Mainly via the movement of Young Hegelianism this view has become rather influential. Heine, in line with his Hegelian convictions, assumes that there is something like an overall plot in German intellectual history aiming at the actualization of freedom in the practical sphere. Strikingly, and this is perhaps his major shortcoming, Heine does not resort to Kant’s own political writings at all, and the shared assumption by de Staël and Heine appears to be that of a close correlation between theism and conservativism on the one hand, atheism (including pantheism) and progressivism on the other. This assumption, however, is at least not a matter of conceptual necessity, and the overall nature and polarity of Kant’s political theory is a matter which needs to be investigated in its own right. Strikingly, de Staël fully endorsed Kant’s strategy of rebuilding metaphysics on the basis of practical considerations, while for Heine (1979: 89) this is the “farce” after the “tragedy” of the execution of what he, rather surprisingly, calls “deism”. Malter himself seems to advocate the widely-held view that the postulates of pure practical reason amount to a self-denial on the part of Kant. See fn. 12 below for recent attempts to challenge such a view.
“Molinism” here refers to doctrines held by Luis de Molina (1535–1600) whose Concordia (11588) became hugely influential both in philosophy and theology until well into the eighteenth century.
The mitigation of the propensity towards evil does not by itself suggest holiness, since even in this case the intellectual challenge for each agent of finding the correct moral assessment of each arising situation requiring a moral response remains.
Overall, Kant takes the assumption of an approximation towards perpetual peace to be an article of rational faith. In the Conflict (7, 85 and 88), however, Kant appears to go further in maintaining that the enthusiasm with which the French Revolution has been greeted is something like a theoretical confirmation that humankind is on a path of progress. How this connects to his doctrine of providence, which he upholds in this text (7, 83 and 93), is a difficult question. It is at any rate possible, though, that providence remains a matter of rational faith nonetheless. I shall return to the topic of rational faith below in section 4.
At least, in this manner, Kant’s puzzling apparent vacillation as to what guarantees perpetual peace after all, nature or providence, can be read coherently.
Another doctrine detectable here and made more prominent in Hegel is that of the task of philosophy rather than politics of atoning humans with their present condition in history.
This is not to suggest that Aquinas and Kant agree in their understanding of happiness.
It is worth mentioning in this context that recently something like a reassessment of the postulates of pure practical reason has been detectable in Kant scholarship, see Willaschek (2018: 270–75) and the literature mentioned there. Kant had often not even been taken seriously with regard to these postulates, as indicated above. In fact, a philosophically challenging point is at issue here, namely the question as to whether pragmatism or evidentialism in the ethics of belief is the correct position to adopt in this regard. The question is whether it can ever be rational to believe a proposition for which there is no evidence. The evidentialists deny this, while the pragmatists endorse this possibility. It needs to be stressed that a positive answer to this question by no means implies that it is ever rational to belief something against the evidence. The key issue is rather whether the void created by a (systematic) lack of evidence can be filled rationally nonetheless, e.g., as in Kant’s case, insofar as the proposition in question is concerned with necessary conditions for certain categorical obligations to hold. No doubt there has been a tacit consensus that the correct position in the ethics of belief is evidentialism, and this has played into the hands of critics of religion such as Marx and also Freud (who stresses the illusionary character of religion), even if their own standards of evidence are not beyond criticism. This consensus has been shaken recently on systematic grounds and new arguments have been suggested which support pragmatism in this regard, see Leary (2017). Moreover, it could be shown, that there was a strong pragmatist strand in the ethics of belief among Kant’s predecessors; see Gava (2019) and Chance (2019).
There are of course further important differences between Kant and Molina, such as Molina’s denial of determinism in nature, and Molina is certainly not a transcendental idealist. That said, there are also a number of thus-far unexplored further parallels with regard to specific doctrines in the philosophy of law, politics and religion, and the recently published bilingual edition of his treatise “On Justice and Law” (De iustitia et iure) will be of enormous help to explore them further. See in particular (Kaufmann and Simmermacher 2019) as well as (Alonso-Lasheras 2011) and (MacGregor 2015) for further useful information about key doctrines held by Molina in this domain. To be sure, I am not suggesting that Molina himself is always true to the implications of Molinism minimally defined for the philosophy of politics, history and religion, nor that all his doctrines in these fields are simply implications of Molinism minimally defined.
Moreover, Molinism minimally construed provides at least the outlines of a succinct reading of the passages in the Conflict discussed in fn 7 above: it is providence which provides the conditions in which humankind will spontaneously and freely actualize its moral capacities. The question of the epistemic status of these claims is of course still an issue.
For a concise overview of Molina’s multi-faceted doctrine of grace see (MacGregor 2015, 60–72).
See (Rea 2007: 345–353).
According to Pasternack (2020), help is the core notion in terms of which grace should be understood in Kant.
In fact, it may be more precise to say that Kant himself applied the principles of Molinism minimally defined in his own rational reconstruction of this Christian doctrine.
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Acknowledgments
I should like to thank Maximilian Forschner, Dennis Schulting, Ian Platt, Markus Joch and the two anonymous referees for extremely helpful comments and suggestions.
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Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Kaken Grant (No: 18 K00019).
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Ertl, W. Preparing the Ground for Kant’s Highest Good in the World. Philosophia 49, 1837–1852 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00330-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00330-w