1923. Kant seems to me exactly right . . .

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Kant seems to me exactly right in insisting that the properly religious does not exclude, but rather includes, the properly moral—even as it also includes, as I should insist over against Kant, the properly metaphysical, i.e., truth as well as goodness. But where Kant seems to me to be wrong is in construing the  properly religious too exclusively in relation to the properly moral—not only at the expense of the properly metaphysical, but also—and more seriously—with at best an inadequate grasp of the properly existential. Kant seems to me exactly right in insisting that the properly religious does not exclude, but rather includes, the properly moral—even as it also includes, as I should insist over against Kant, the properly metaphysical, i.e., truth as well as goodness. But where Kant seems to me to be wrong is in construing the properly religious too exclusively in relation to the properly moral—not only at the expense of the properly metaphysical, but also-and more seriously—with at best an inadequate grasp of the properly existential. 

I say at best an inadequate grasp because Kant certainly does manage to distinguish clearly and sharply enough between what we are to do—our external actions—and how we are to  do it—our internal disposition. Moreover, he sometimes so speaks of the second—e.g., by referring to it as "a cast of mind," or by speaking of morally good persons as "right-thinking"­—that it might almost seem to be his way of talking about what I mean by "self­-understanding," as distinct from "life-praxis." But if this may seem to reflect at least some grasp of the properly existential, i.e., of existence as distinct from action, it is at best an inadequate grasp, seeing that he does not clearly see the difference between self-understanding and how we are to act as well as their similarity, in that both are "invisible" rather than "visible," noumenal rather than phenomenal. 

To appropriate Kant critically, then, is to insist that the properly religious-as well  as, more generally and fundamentally, the properly existential—is, in Schleiermacher's phrase, "the necessary and indispensable third." As such, it is at once distinct from and closely related to both the properly metaphysical and the properly moral. 

Withal there  are  at least two fundamental  points where Kant's philosophy, particularly his philosophy of religion, is right on. 

It is right on, first of all, in distinguishing clearly and sharply between (in my terms) the broadly physical and the broadly moral—and, correspondingly, between two principal uses of reason: theoretical (or, as Kant himself also sometimes says, and as I would prefer to say, speculative) and practical.

It is right on, secondly, in inverting "the familiar scheme of Protestant orthodoxy," with the result that "[special] revelation does not, after all, clarify our confused natural knowledge of God," but, "quite the contrary, our innate knowledge of God enables us to judge of every pretended revelation and to sort out truth and error even in Christianity itself" (Gerrish). Perhaps another way of saying this is that Kant is right on in consistently upholding the distinction between constitution and representation (or manifestation) as precisely the distinction between end and means. 

14 June 2000