KANT, IMMANUEL

KANT, IMMANUEL (1724–1804), German philosopher. Kant was born in Königsberg, a provincial town in East Prussia. He grew up in a religious family of relatively low social status. His father was a saddler, and both his parents were dedicated members of the Pietist movement, which stressed the interior devotion of the heart in opposition to the prevailing Lutheran practice of external observances. The spirit of Pietism pervaded not only Kant's family but also the Collegium Fridericianum, a local school, where he received his early education from 1732 to 1740.

In 1740 Kant entered the University of Königsberg, where he studied science and philosophy for six years. After graduation, he earned his living as a private tutor for a number of East Prussian families. During this period he kept up his studies and earned his master's degree at the university in 1755, which allowed him to teach as a privatdocent, a private lecturer accepted as a member of the faculty without compensation from the university. He occupied this financially precarious and academically undistinguished position for fifteen years. In 1770 he was appointed professor of logic and metaphysics.

While holding this position, Kant produced a stream of masterpieces. His best-known works are his three critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgment (1790). These three volumes expound Kant's critical idealism, or critical philosophy, which has also been known as Kantianism. Kantianism was the first phase of German Idealism, which gained fuller development in the writings of Johann Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Kant's religious ideas not only constitute essential features of his critical philosophy but also play a pivotal role in the transition from his critical idealism to the absolute idealism of his intellectual successors.

Kantianism as a Worldview

Kantianism was an attempt to reconcile British empiricism and continental rationalism. British empiricism had been developed by a succession of British and Scottish philosophers, namely, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–1776). Continental rationalism had been advocated by René Descartes (1596–1650), Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and Christian Wolff (1679–1754). During his formative years, Kant learned his philosophy from Leibnizians and Wolffians, but he later came to appreciate the importance of empiricism, especially Hume's theory of ideas.

The central point of the dispute between rationalists and empiricists was the theory of ideas. Since all our ideas are derived from sensation, the empiricists maintained, the objects of sensation are the only proper objects of knowledge. In opposition to this view, the rationalists argued that some of our ideas are not derived from sensation but are innate to reason. They further claimed that these innate ideas give us a knowledge of supersensible reality such as God. The idea of a supersensible reality, although espoused by some early empiricists, became unpopular with the later empiricists, because they considered it incompatible with empiricism. This later tendency of empiricism amounted to recognizing sensible reality, or the physical world, as the only reality. Thus the dispute that had begun with the epistemological issue concerning the origin of ideas came to have the ontological implication of admitting or not admitting any reality beyond the domain of sensation.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is a critical assessment of these two contending views. He holds that there are two kinds of ideas: those derived from sense and those innate to reason. The latter are the a priori elements of cognition; the former are its a posteriori elements. These two are equally indispensable for human knowledge. Kant is emphatic on the mutual dependence of sensibility and understanding: "Percepts without concepts are blind; concepts without percepts are empty." Although the domain of knowledge is limited to the domain of sensation, as the empiricists claimed, Kant argues, knowledge of sense objects requires the use of a priori concepts such as the concept of cause and effect. He derives twelve a priori concepts from twelve forms of judgment and calls them the categories of understanding. He uses the categories to construct a priori principles of understanding, which function as the framework for organizing the objects of sensation.

This epistemological compromise between rationalism and empiricism has the following ontological consequence: Kant maintains that the objects of sensation are not reality itself (things-in-themselves) but its appearance. He bases this claim largely on his argument that space and time are not objective entities but subjective forms of intuition, that is, the manner in which human beings are given objects of sensation. Since all objects of sensation are given through space and time, Kant holds, they cannot be objective realities. They are only appearances to us. Kant calls these appearances "phenomena" and the things-in-themselves "noumena."

Unlike phenomena, noumena are not located in space and time; nor are they given as objects of sensation. They are the supersensible realities. That the domain of knowledge is limited to the world of phenomena means that we can never know the true reality but only its appearances. That we can have no knowledge of noumena, however, does not mean that we have no ideas about them. Kant maintains that we have a priori ideas about the supersensible reality. But to have these ideas is not to know the world of noumena, because there is no way of proving their truth or falsity.

In Kant's view, knowledge is inseparable from the power of demonstrating the truth or falsity of an idea, and that power is inexorably limited to the domain of sensibility. For this reason, knowledge is limited to the world of phenomena. The rationalists have assumed that the truths of a priori ideas can be demonstrated by rational arguments alone, that is, without appealing to sensibility. But rationalist arguments divorced from the constraint of sensibility can produce only sophistical illusions and confusions, according to Kant. He gives the name "transcendental dialectic" to the pseudoscience constituted by those sophistical arguments, because they are dialectical arguments transcending the domain of sensibility.

Kant recognizes three branches of transcendental dialectic: transcendental psychology, transcendental cosmology, and transcendental theology. These three are supposed to prove the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will, and the existence of God. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant provides a systematic examination of their arguments and exposes their common error, namely, the error of employing a priori concepts beyond the domain of sensibility.

The immortality of the soul, the freedom of will, and the existence of God are three of the central dogmas in many religions. That none of them can be proved, however, should not be mistaken to mean that they can be disproved. Kant is emphatic on this point. A transcendental assertion can neither be proved nor be disproved, because sensibility is essential not only for proofs but also for disproofs. Hence the three religious dogmas can still be regarded as possible truths of the supersensible reality. As such, they can be accepted in faith.

Kant demarcates matters of faith from matters of fact. The latter are the objects of knowledge; the former are the objects of belief. The objects of knowledge are situated in the world of phenomena; the objects of faith belong to the world of noumena. The objects of faith transcend the domain of sensibility, while the objects of knowledge are immanent in it. Although theoretical reason cannot settle the question of accepting or rejecting the objects of faith, Kant says, practical reason has a way of ruling over their admissibility.

Kantianism as a Moral View

Practical reason is the rational faculty concerned with human conduct, and a critical examination of this faculty is given in his second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant recognizes two mainsprings for human conduct: the will and the inclination. The inclination is the working of our desires and feelings, which are subject to the causal laws of the phenomenal world. The will is the rational faculty for moral actions. Unless the freedom of this faculty is presupposed, Kant says, it makes no sense to talk of the moral worth of human conduct. Since freedom is impossible in the phenomenal world of causal necessity, it can be accepted only as an entity belonging to the noumenal world. Kant calls the noumenal world the domain of freedom and the phenomenal world the domain of necessity. Thus he installs the noumenal world as the practical ground for morality and the freedom of the will as the first postulate (presupposition) of practical reason.

Besides the postulate of freedom, Kant says, two other postulates are demanded by morality: the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. The immortality of the soul is required for moral perfection. Our inclination has the natural propensity to go against the moral dictates of pure reason, and our moral perfection can be achieved by transforming this natural propensity into the willing obedience to the moral law. Since this moral transformation of the soul is infinitely time-consuming, it can be accomplished only if the soul continues to live after the death of its body. For this reason, Kant says, the postulate of the immortality of the soul is dictated by the practical ideal of moral perfection.

In Kant's ethics, the ideal of moral perfection is inseparably connected with another practical ideal, the notion of the complete good (summum bonum ). Kant defines it as the harmony of moral perfection and happiness (natural good). He regards moral perfection as the absolutely necessary condition for rendering human beings worthy of happiness. In this world, however, happiness can be denied to a person morally worthy of it, while it can be given to a person morally unworthy of it. The dispensation of happiness in proportion to each person's moral worth is their harmony, that is, the ideal of the complete good. This ideal can, Kant maintains, be fulfilled only by God in the other world. This is the third and the final postulate of practical reason.

Kant's third postulate has sometimes been known as the moral proof for the existence of God, and as such it has been the object of many disputes and misunderstandings. But to call it a proof is highly misleading; a "proof" for the existence of God generally means the demonstration or assurance of his existence. In Kantianism, as we have already seen, demonstration or assurance can be given only for the objects of the phenomenal world. Therefore the reasons Kant gives for the existence of God cannot constitute a proof. It is only a postulate. Whereas a proof can give certainty or assurance, a postulate can give only possibility, a supersensible ground for hope.

Kant's notion of rational postulates is inseparable from his ideal of practical rationality. To regard the harmony of moral and natural goods as an ideal of practical reason means that the world in which this ideal is fulfilled is a rational one and, conversely, that the world in which it is not fulfilled is an irrational one. It is impossible to find out whether our world is ultimately rational or irrational in this regard. As rational beings, however, we can, for practical purposes, opt and hope for the possibility that our world is ultimately rational. If this possibility is to be true, Kant argues, there must be a God who assures the harmony of moral and natural goods for every moral being. This is all that is meant by this and other postulates of practical reason.

Kant's Conception of God and the Religious

In Kant's philosophy, God does not stand as a power that has its own laws and commands different from the moral law and its dictates. What God demands from ethical subjects is none other than what is dictated by moral reason. To do the will of God is to perform the duties of the moral imperative. There is no way to please God other than to be morally perfect. To be religious is to be moral; to be moral is to be religious. As far as human behavior is concerned, morality and religion are functionally identical, and their functional identity is expressed in Kant's statement that religion and God are internal to morality.

Kant's internalism, as he admits, goes against the traditional view that assumes an external relation between morality and religion. In general, the traditional religions portray God as a powerful being, whose will is independent of our will, whose commands can override even our moral dictates, and whose favor can be sought by special rituals and devotions. In short, the traditional religions stand on the existence of powers and values external to the powers and values of morality. Kant rejects such externalism because it is incompatible with the autonomy of practical reason.

In Kant's view, externalism is the anthropomorphic misconception of God and his relation to us, that is, the error of understanding God as someone like a powerful human being who demands our service and devotion. This misconception lies behind the religions of what Kant calls "cultus externus." These religions impose on their devotees a set of obligations or observances that consists of prayers, rituals, services, and various prohibitions. Furthermore, the gods of these religions are assumed to be pleased or displeased by the performance or nonperformance of these religious duties. Most of these religions have specially ordained experts called priests, ministers, or shamans, who have the power of officiating and facilitating the performance of religious duties.

Cultus externus, Kant insists, makes no sense to anyone who correctly understands the nature of God as the most perfect being, that is, omniscient, omnipotent, and, above all, morally perfect. It makes no sense to render any service to such a being, because he is in need of nothing and can derive no benefit from our services. Even the praise of his perfection cannot add anything to his perfection any more than flattery can to his honor. God does not need our prayers to find out what we need. Nor can he be moved by our supplication, because his mind is governed only by moral dictates. The cultus externus can fulfill none of the religious functions that it has been assumed to fulfill.

Kant uses the label "natural religion" to designate his view of religion, because it can be fully comprehended by the natural power of human reason, that is, without the aid of supernatural revelation. Kant's idea of natural religion may appear to reduce religion to morality. But he insists that natural religion retains all the essential features of traditional religions. In his view, those features are the moral attributes and functions of the supreme being, as the holy lawgiver, the benevolent ruler, and the just judge. Any other attributes of God such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence are only supplementary to his moral attributes; they are the requisite conditions for discharging his moral functions.

Kant argues that Christianity is the only moral religion, while the others are servile religions. The central function of servile religions is to curry favor from the supernatural powers; they place human beings in a servile relation to those powers. This servile relation has, Kant holds, been transformed into a moral one by Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus transformed the "old" law of Moses, the rules for external observance, into the "new" law, the rules for internal disposition. Kant finds Jesus' moral interpretation of religious life most conspicuously in his Sermon on the Mount, and he reads its concluding remark—"Therefore be perfect, as your heavenly father is!"—as an exhortation for moral perfection.

In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), Kant offers his moral interpretation of Christian dogmas. The dogma of original sin concerns our innate propensity to do evil, which is to flout the maxims of duty and to succumb to the maxims of inclination. Kant regards it as a superstition to believe that this propensity was generated by Adam's fall from grace and then passed on to his posterity. On the contrary, Kant holds that the innate propensity to go against the moral law is in the very nature of man. No doubt, original human nature is said to be good. This original goodness, however, is not incompatible with the innate propensity to do evil. The original goodness of man means the freedom to obey the moral law by disciplining and mastering inclinations. Hence, original goodness and the innate propensity to evil are two essential features of every human being.

Kant interprets the incarnation of God in Christ not as a miracle of the supernatural order but as the manifestation of a moral ideal. As moral agents, he says, all of us have the ideal of a morally perfect human being. Such an ideal, if ever realized in this world, can be called an incarnate God, because the ideal in question belongs to pure practical reason, whose dictates are one with the dictates of God. Kant calls the ideal of moral perfection the archetype of moral life. But this archetype, he insists, cannot be identified with Jesus Christ himself. For he is only an instance or example, while the archetype belongs to all of us as agents of practical reason.

The relation of archetype and example, Kant says, is misrepresented in the traditional dogma of the incarnation, which exalts Jesus as a member of the Holy Trinity. He regards the dogma of the Trinity as theoretically incomprehensible and practically unserviceable. If the Son of God is so exalted as to stand above all human temptations and struggles, he is too remote from our existence to serve as a useful model. The value of the Son of God as our practical model lies in his essential identity with all human beings, and every human being who strives to achieve moral perfection can be called a son of God, a man well-pleasing to God.

Kant interprets the kingdom of God as an ethical commonwealth, a community of moral agents each of whom treats the other as an end-in-itself by obeying the moral law. He distinguishes the ethical commonwealth from the political commonwealth by virtue of the former's freedom from coercion. Whereas the power of coercion is indispensable for the maintenance of a political commonwealth, the freedom of the will is sufficient for the administration of an ethical commonwealth. The constitution of such a harmonious community, Kant says, becomes possible only through the moral rebirth of its members, which involves the radical transformation of their hearts from the propensity to follow inclination into the willing obedience to the moral law, that is, through conversion. The same moral transformation is required for the admission to the ethical commonwealth.

Kant shows special caution in handling the claims of supernatural revelation. He rejects the claim that revelation has the authority of discovering and authenticating the supernatural truths inaccessible to human intelligence. He also rejects the view that revelation is totally gratuitous with respect to the discovery of religious truths. Although the truths of natural religion can be discovered by natural reason, revelation makes easier their discovery and propagation. Since he recognizes only the practical value of expedition, he rejects the traditional distinction between natural and revealed religion. As in Christianity, he says, a natural religion can be a revealed one.

Since natural religion belongs to the pure practical reason, Kant asserts the unity of all religions. There is only one true religion, he says, although there can be many different faiths. He distinguishes the particular ecclesiastical faiths from pure religious faith. Whereas pure faith consists of the ideals of practical reason, the particular faiths are the manifestations of those ideals through the historically instituted churches. Since the formation and development of those institutions have been influenced by historical contingencies, Kant holds, the ecclesiastical faiths are bound to show their differences. Nevertheless, he is confident that they can still display the unity of pure religious faith insofar as they are faithful to their original ideals.

Kant's Critics and His Influence

Kant's idea of natural religion provoked the charge among his contemporaries that he was a Deist. Deism was the view, prevalent among the scientific-minded intellectuals of the eighteenth century, that God does not intervene in the running of the universe because it has been placed under the working of immutable laws since its creation. Kant categorically denied the charge of being a Deist and attributed it to the misrepresentation of his position.

The misrepresentation in question was largely due to Kant's skeptical attitude toward miracles, God's interventions par excellence in the running of the world. Because miracles contravene the laws of nature, they cannot be reconciled with the use of reason. Both in theoretical and practical functions, human reason appears crippled in the presence of miracles. Furthermore, he says, miracles are not essential for the functions of true religion, because these functions can stand securely on moral beliefs alone. In fact, any demand for miracles as the authentication of religious beliefs betrays the lack of firm faith in the authority of moral commands, which are engraved upon the heart of man through reason. Because of this, Kant says, Christ rebuked the miracle-seekers: "Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe" (Jn. 4:48). In spite of these reservations about miracles, Kant categorically refused to impugn their possibility or reality.

Another charge against Kant was that he compromised his doctrine of moral autonomy by retaining the traditional doctrine of grace. Grace, for Kant, means God's help; it presupposes man's weakness, dependence, and heteronomy. The Pietists under whose influence Kant had grown up stressed the indispensability of grace and tended to take a passive attitude toward life. Kant rejects this passive attitude and praises the positive value of active efforts in moral life. Nevertheless, he admits the possibility that even our best efforts may fail to secure moral perfection. In that event, he says, we can hope that God will, in his wisdom and goodness, make up for our shortcomings.

His critics have pointed out that man is not a truly autonomous moral agent if even his best moral efforts are not enough to secure his moral perfection. They have further argued that Kant's notion of moral autonomy is also incompatible with his notion of the complete good. In their view, the intimate connection between worthiness and happiness makes morality too dependent on the idea of happiness, which is admittedly outside the control of a moral agent. Kant had guarded himself against this charge by stressing that the connection in question was a matter of belief rather than knowledge. Even if it is only a belief, his critics have maintained, it compromises the notion of moral autonomy as long as it is acted upon in the practical world.

Perhaps the most serious charge against Kant was addressed to his demarcation between phenomena and noumena. At the time he was concluding his second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, he was not terribly disturbed by this criticism. So he confidently singled out the starry heavens above and the moral law within as two objects of awe and admiration, respectively representing the world of phenomena and the world of noumena. This observation was intended to mark the end not only of the second critique but of his entire critical enterprise. For he believed that his two critiques had fulfilled his ambition of critically assessing the two worlds of phenomena and noumena.

Shortly thereafter, however, Kant became preoccupied with the question of transition and mediation between the two worlds. Although moral precepts belong to the noumenal world, they can be realized in the phenomenal world. Kant found it difficult to explain the transition from the world of precepts to the world of practice, because one was supposed to be governed by necessity and the other by freedom.

In order to resolve this problem of transition, Kant wrote his third critique, the Critique of Judgment, and introduced reflective judgment as the faculty of mediation between the two worlds. But his theory of mediation was far from convincing, and most of his intellectual heirs resolved his problem by collapsing his two worlds into one. This post-Kantian development in German idealism made it impossible to retain Kant's postulates of immortality and the other world, because there was only one world left.

The fusion of Kant's two worlds into one was the climax of the progressive secularization that had begun in the Renaissance. Kant played a pivotal role in this development. His demarcation between phenomena and noumena was a modification and retention of the medieval demarcation between the natural and the supernatural orders. Unlike the medieval demarcation, however, Kant's did not completely coincide with the demarcation between this world and the other world. Kant made the transcendent noumenal world functionally immanent for moral life, thereby initiating the descent of the transcendent reality to the immanent level. The post-Kantians completed this process of descent and converted Kant's theism into pantheism. Kant's transcendent God became their immanent force in history.

The resulting pantheism also resolved the tension in Kant's notion of human autonomy. Although he claimed autonomy and independence for moral life, he acknowledged heteronomy and dependence for happiness. He stressed this admixture of dependence and independence in his notion of the complete good and the postulate for the existence of God. But this admixture was unacceptable to his successors, because they insisted on the total autonomy of human reason. The totally autonomous human reason became indistinguishable from the immanent God, and the two-in-one came to be called the "Absolute Spirit" by Hegel. With Kant, religion and morality became functionally identical; with Hegel, God and man were given their ontological identity.

See Also

Deism; Empiricism; Free Will and Predestination; Pietism; Proofs for the Existence of God.

Bibliography

Kant's Works in English Translation

Critique of Judgement. Translated by J. C. Meredith. 1928; reprint, London, 1973.

Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Lewis White Beck. Chicago, 1949. Kant's preliminary view of this subject is given in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Lewis White Beck (Chicago, 1949).

Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York, 1929. An abridged version is available in Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, edited by Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, 1950).

Lectures on Ethics. Translated by Louis Infield. London, 1979. These lectures are not from Kant's own writings but from his students' notes.

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Translated and edited by Allen Wood and George Di Gionvanni (Cambridge, 1998).

Works on Kant's View of Morality and Religion

Beck, Lewis White. A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. Chicago, 1960.

Cassirer, Ernst. Kant's Life and Thought. Translated by James Haden. New Haven, 1981. This is perhaps the most comprehensive introduction available in English to Kant's life and philosophy. A shorter general introduction to his philosophy can be found in Stephan Körner's Kant (1955; reprint, New Haven, 1982) and in Ralph C. S. Walker's Kant (Boston, 1978).

Collins, James D. The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion. New Haven, 1967. This volume provides a good account not only of Kant's conception of religion but also of what comes before and after Kant's conception, especially Hume's and Hegel's ideas on the issue.

England, F. E. Kant's Conception of God. New York, 1929.

Green, Ronald Michael. Religious Reason: The Rational and Moral Basis of Religion. New York, 1978.

Paton, Herbert J. The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy. Chicago, 1948.

Silber, John R. "Kant's Conception of the Highest Good as Immanent and Transcendent." Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 469–492.

Silber, John R. "The Moral Good and the Natural Good in Kant's Ethics." Review of Metaphysics 36 (December 1982): 397–437.

Webb, Clement C. Kant's Philosophy of Religion. Oxford, 1926. Wood, Allen W. Kant's Moral Religion. Ithaca, N. Y., 1970.

T. K. Seung (1987 and 2005)