The Intolerable God: Kant's Theological Journey

By Christopher J. Insole

The thought of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is often regarded as having caused a crisis for theology and religion because it sets the limits of knowledge to what can be derived from experience. In The Intolerable God Christopher Insole challenges that assumption and argues that Kant believed in God but struggled intensely with theological questions.
 
Drawing on a new wave of Kant research and texts from all periods of Kant’s thought — including some texts not previously translated — Insole recounts the drama of Kant’s intellectual and theological journey. He focuses on Kant’s lifelong concern with God, freedom, and happiness, relating these topics to Kant’s theory of knowledge and his shifting views about what metaphysics can achieve.
 
Though Kant was, in the end, unable to accept central claims of the Christian faith, Insole here shows that he earnestly wrestled with issues that are still deeply unsettling for believers and doubters alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781467445276

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The Intolerable God

Kant’s Theological Journey

Christopher J. Insole

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2016 Christopher J. Insole

All rights reserved

Published 2016 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Insole, Christopher J., author.

Title: The intolerable God : Kant’s theological journey / Christopher J. Insole.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michighan : Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016. |

Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016007367 | ISBN 9780802873057 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9781467445276 (ePub)

eISBN 9781467444804 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. — Religion.

Classification: LCC B2799.R4 I57 2016 | DDC 230.092 — dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007367

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Acknowledgments

Method of Citation

1. Introduction

2. I Am from Eternity to Eternity: God in Kant’s Early Thought

3. Whence Then Am I?:

God in Kant’s Later Thought

4. Kant’s Only Unsolvable Metaphysical Difficulty: Created Freedom

5. Creating Freedom: Kant’s Theological Solution

6. Interpreting Kant: Three Objections

7. The Dancer and the Dance: Divine Action, Human Freedom

8. Becoming Divine:

Autonomy and the Beatific Vision

Further Reading

Glossary of Terms

Index

Acknowledgments

I give thanks to Nigel Biggar, and to the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics & Public Life at the University of Oxford, for the opportunity to give the 2013 McDonald Lectures, upon which this book is based. I am grateful for feedback received after these lectures, and at the roundtable discussion that followed the completion of the lecture series, with formal responses from Terrence Irwin, Adrian Moore, and Keith Ward.

Thanks to David Dwan, Ben DeSpain, and Nathaniel Warne for comments and advice on earlier drafts of the book, and to Jon Pott, long-­time Editor in Chief at Eerdmans, for his enthusiasm for the project. I thank my parents for all their support, nurture, and encouragement of my endeavors, intellectual and otherwise.

This book is dedicated to Lisa Maria Insole, my wife, in gratitude for the surprising shared enjoyment we had in drafting the lectures that became this book.

Method of Citation

All items marked with an asterisk are part of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Numbers following listings are volume and page numbers in the standard German (Akademie) edition of Kant.

A/B Citations to the first Critique are to the A (first edition) or B (second edition) pages. Critique of Pure Reason (CPR). Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.*

APV Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). In Anthropology, History, and Education. Edited and translated by Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.* 7: 117-333.

CHH Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (1786). Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History. In Kant: Political Writings. Second Enlarged Edition. Edited by Hans Reiss. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 8: 107-23.

CJ Kritik der Urtheilskraft (1790). Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.* 5: 167-484.

Coll Moral Philosophy: Collins’ Lecture Notes (1784-85). In Lectures on Ethics. Translated by Peter Heath. Edited by J. B. Schneewind and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.*

Corr Correspondence (1749-1800). In Correspondence. 10: 7–12: 370.

CPrR Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788). Critique of Practical Reason. In Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.* 5: 3-309.

D Träme eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (1766). Dreams of a Spirit-­Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770. Translated and edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.* 2: 317-73.

DR Danziger Rationaltheologie (1784). 28: 1231-1319.

DFW Declaration concerning Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1799). In Correspondence. 12:370-71.

E Kant’s notes on his copy of the Critique of Pure Reason. In Benno Erdmann, Nachträge zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kiel: Lipsius & Ticher, 1881.

EaT Das Ende aller Dinge (1794). The End of All Things. In Religion and Rational Theology. Translated and edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.* 8: 328-39.

GW Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1786). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.* 4: 385-463.

ID De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (1770). Concerning the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World [Inaugural Dissertation]. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770. Translated and edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.* 2: 385-419.

JL Jäsche Logic. In Lectures on Logic. Translated and edited by J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.* 9: 1-150.

LPE Vorlesung über die philosophische Encylopädie. 29: 8-12.

LPed Lectures on Pedagogy (1803). In Anthropology, History, and Education. Edited and translated by Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.* 9: 437-99.

LPR Philosophische Religionslehre nach Pölitz (1783-84). Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion. In Religion and Rational Theology. Translated and edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.* 28: 993-1126.

MD Metaphysik Dohna (1792). In Lectures on Metaphysics. Translated and edited by Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.* 28: 656-90.

MetM Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797). The Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.* 6: 203-430.

MK2 Metaphysik K2 (early 1790s). 28: 709-816.

ML1 Metaphysik L1 (1790). In Lectures on Metaphysics. Translated and edited by Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.* 28: 195-301.

NE Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova delucidatio (1755). New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770. Translated and edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.* 1: 385-487.

NTV Natürliche Theologie Volckmann (1783). 28: 1131-1225.

Ob Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764-65). Notes on Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. In Notes and Fragments. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.* 2: 205-55.

OD On a Discovery whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is Sure to Be Made Superfluous by an Older One. In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.*

OIT Was heisst. Sich im Denken orientiren? (1786). What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? In Religion and Rational Theology. Translated and edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.* 8: 133-46.

OP Opus Postumum (1786-1803). Translated and edited by Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.* 21:9–22:452.

OPA Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (1763). The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770. Translated and edited by David Walford and Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.* 2: 63-163.

PP Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf (1795). Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. In Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.* 8: 341-86.

Pr Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Edited by Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Translated by Gary Hatfield, Michael Friedman, Henry Allison, and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.*

R Reflexionen (1753-1804). Reflections. In Notes and Fragments. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.* 17: 229–19: 654.

Rel Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der Bloßen Vernunft (1794). Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In Religion and Rational Theology. Translated and edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.* 6: 3-202.

TP Über der Gemeinspruch. Das mag in der Theorie Richtig sein, stimmt aber nicht für die Praxis (1793). On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice. In Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.* 8: 275-312.

UNH Allgemeine Naturalgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (1755). Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. Edited by Milton K. Munitz. Translated by W. Hastie. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. 1: 215-368.

WRP Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die Metaphysik seit Leibnitzens und Wolf’s Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat? (1793/1804). What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? In Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Translated by Henry Allison, Peter Heath, Gary Hatfield, and Michael Friedman. Edited by Henry Allison and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.*

Chapter One

Introduction

This book is written for people who have an interest in theology and who have encountered the figure of Immanuel Kant, and who want to know more about his thought and significance.

It is difficult to know more about Immanuel Kant, for a number of reasons. His texts are difficult. Reading Kant can be initially confusing and demoralizing rather than illuminating. This problem is compounded by the fact that Kant’s thought is a system with many facets. Simply reading one text in isolation can lead to a distorted impression of what is going on, even in that text itself. The literature on Kant is also difficult, as well as being vast, and rapidly expanding, with seemingly irreconcilable fundamental perspectives on Kant’s intentions, significance, and meaning. Excellent introductions to Kant’s general philosophy do exist.¹ There are also commendable introductions to Kant’s philosophy of religion.² But these treatments do not have as a central focus Kant’s lifelong concern with God, freedom, and happiness, from his earliest thought to his dying days. These themes are likely to be of the greatest interest to the theologically engaged. Furthermore, I relate these topics to Kant’s theory of knowledge, and to his shifting views about what metaphysics can achieve. In the course of doing this, I draw deeply, but with a light touch, upon a new wave of more historically sensitive, theologically open-­minded, and holistic Kant interpretation, to which I have contributed.³ These new developments in Kant scholarship have identified much more continuity between his earlier theological and metaphysical thought, and his later critical philosophy. Kant’s mature philosophy has standardly been received by theologians as attempting a straightforward refutation of the possibility of theological discourse.⁴ The picture of Kant emerging from recent scholarship is quite different, and much more textured about how Kant might relate to theology.

From years of teaching Kant to students whose main interest in Kant is theological, I am convinced that there is no single book available that really brings out what might be of central interest to students of theology, who do not have the time or inclination to dedicate years of their lives to the specialist and technical study of Kant and the secondary literature. By student of theology I mean someone who engages thoughtfully with the intellectual tradition, whether that be through a formal course of study or not. My hope is that students of theology will be delighted, surprised, and challenged by what they can learn from an engagement with Kant. Some of these lessons are more positive, with Kant remembering deep strands of the tradition, and applying them in the context of the rise of modern science. Other lessons are more negative, showing where some of the deep fault lines in modern thought really lie. These fault lines are not where one might initially have thought.

This book began its life as a series of public addresses, given as the 2013 McDonald Lectures in Theology, Ethics & Public Life at the University of Oxford. I have extensively reworked the lectures for publication as a book, making the text more appropriate for a different genre, and responding to feedback. Two important features of the lectures, though, I have retained. First of all, I do not presuppose any prior study of philosophy, or of Kant. This is not to say that the text will be easy reading for those with no philosophical or Kantian background. But I do believe it will be possible and rewarding reading, with enough repeated and clear explanations, alongside a glossary of terms, and the use of vivid images and analogies. Second, I have retained several literary devices. These literary devices come in two forms. First of all, there is my use of the notion of conceptual rooms in chapters two and three, where Kant’s background assumptions are visualized in terms of architecture, ornamentation, and artifacts. Second, chapters four to eight dramatize the unfolding of Kant’s philosophical and theological understanding in terms of Dante’s imagined journey, in the Divine Comedy, up the mountain of purgatory.

The book is ambitious in its scope and depth, tracking central features of Kant’s whole intellectual journey with respect to God, knowledge, freedom, causation, belief, and happiness. It does this by relating Kant to a range of debates and influences. Such ambition, I found, is assisted by imagery and metaphor. For example, by picturing a conceptual room, I am able to depict and specify complex, filigreed, and nuanced degrees and aspects of influence, in a way that would have taken many more thousands of words, qualifications, and hesitations: Newton can be invited into the room as a guest; statues of Plato and Aquinas can be present, but not overbearingly or anachronistically celebrated; people can be present in the room, but without their thought being exhaustively captured by every intellectual commitment that the room is intended to communicate. To take another example, I describe an imagined campfire in chapter four. This image makes it possible to picture historical thinkers sitting close to, or farther away from, a circle of committed followers, nodding at some things, but demurring from others. In ordinary descriptive prose, this would entail an unmemorable business of categorizing positions, without the necessary context to make it appropriately fascinating. But enough content can be conveyed, for our purposes, through the more palatable medium of a visualized scene. In this way, complex arguments and lines of intellectual development can be conveyed in a way that is vivid, memorable, and relatively accessible to those without specialist training, and without writing a book that is twice as long and difficult.

Phases in Kant’s intellectual development are related by imagining steps up the mountain of purgatory, where key influences at each stage of Kant’s thought are depicted by a cast of influential thinkers and provocations. The imagery of steps, I have found, avoids unhelpful reification or multiplication of phases of Kant’s thought, easily combining different strands of continuity, gradual development, and rupture, especially as I exploit the idea of a spiral, rather than a linear, ascent. In my choice of a journey metaphor running throughout the book, there is a mirroring of form and content. The narrative content of the book circles around the pressures, opportunities, eclipses, and shifts that occur across an intellectual lifetime. The literary form of a journey is intended to carry such material limpidly and gracefully. Kant’s thought unfurls across a developmental temporal arc, with deep spiritual convictions and intellectual treasures tested through crises and resolutions.

Claims that I make throughout are defended with reference to primary texts, and with some reference to my position in relation to the secondary literature. It would not be appropriate in this type of book to engage in extensive wrangling in the field of Kant studies, but nonetheless, I take care when setting out a controversial interpretation of Kant to announce this, and to explain why I think other interpretations are wrong, but also how they have come about, and how some of them have become mainstream. In the chapters themselves, I only include explicit discussion of the secondary literature where I am making a significant and controversial move. The reader needs to be so apprised in order to emerge from the book having learned not only how I interpret Kant, but also something reliable about the current state of Kant studies on key topics of relevance to theologians. More detailed suggestions for further reading, in relation to each chapter, are included at the back of the book.

In the next chapter I begin the substantive treatment of Kant, and set out a map for the argument of the book. In this introduction, I want to summarize not specific claims made by Kant, but dimensions to Kant’s thinking that might amaze, delight, illuminate, and even shock the student of theology, when reflecting on the drama of Kant’s engagement with the themes of God, freedom, and happiness. There are five strands that emerge at numerous points in the book. At times, I will draw attention to the strands, but more often, their presence will be easily felt without my drawing explicit attention to them.

(1) The tradition of philosophical theology that Kant was immersed in is known as theological rationalism, and was the dominant intellectual paradigm for thinking theologically in eighteenth-­century Germany, and thus for German Enlightenment thought. This school is now deeply unfashionable, and is barely understood or studied at all by non-­specialists. Where it is treated, it is presented as a rather arid reduction of religion to a set of formulas and principles. By engaging with Kant’s early and mature philosophy, I hope to show that whatever one thinks of it, there is a theological integrity, energy, beauty, and sincerity to theological rationalism, which has genuine and profound strains from medieval and classical theology. There is even what we might call a living and lived spirituality to it. If this is true, we should find out about it, as it restores to us a forgotten theological texture and dimension to much philosophy from the German Enlightenment.

(2) As well as being immersed in a tradition of philosophical theology, Kant’s conception of philosophy itself is rooted in a classical tradition, where philosophy is ordered not only toward the true, but also to the good, and so toward a capacious understanding of human happiness. This puts us in contact with a now largely forgotten tradition of philosophy, of under-­appreciated significance to Kant and the Enlightenment. Philosophy is conceived of, in this tradition, as a transformative way of life, which speaks sincerely, longingly even, about God and divinity, albeit eschewing the category of revelation, and, accordingly, harboring doubts about traditional Christian doctrines.

(3) Kant is acutely sensitive to different ways in which we can assent to propositions. Kant is concerned with a range of textures in our (as he puts it) holding-­for-­true. Knowledge is only one way in which we hold for true, and not even the most important way. There are other textures of belief and assent, some arising from our aspirations as finite creatures seeking transcendence. The activity of holding-­for-­true can be ordered not only to the true, but also to the good, without this making our beliefs fictional or insincere. Arising from Kant’s sensitivity to different textures of belief is his interest in the systematicity, unity, and harmony of philosophy. Kant’s system is not a dry and abstract construction responding to the abstract demands of a method. Rather, it is intended as an orientation toward a cosmos that is itself true, good, and beautiful.

(4) There is something moving about the honesty of Kant’s thought, an ethic of how and what to believe. Kant pushes constantly against his own system. He refuses to avoid painful intellectual difficulties, as well as refusing to neglect our highest aspirations.

(5) When all is said and done, we struggle to call Kant a Christian. This is not because he does not believe in God. Kant does believe in God, and his conception of God is recognizably indebted to a Christian tradition of reflection on the unconditioned. Rather, the single most astounding and disruptive challenge of Kant’s thought and legacy is in the area of how he thinks about human freedom in relation to God. The biggest challenge to traditional Christianity presented by Kant is intra-­doctrinal, and related to how we conceive of human freedom in relation to divine action. By studying Kant, we can understand how an intellectual revolution has occurred in our thinking about freedom, a revolution that is so successful that we are hardly aware that we are its children.

The book is studiedly focused on Kant’s thought about God, freedom, and happiness, in relation to the tradition of Christian theology that this aspect of his thought grew out of. The priority given to this aspect of his thought is not to be mistaken with the claim that this is the only, or even the most important, aspect of Kant’s thought, for Kant or for his legacy. Kant was concerned with many matters, among which God, freedom, and happiness are undoubtedly important, but not exclusively so. Nonetheless, these themes, above all others, as handled by Kant, will be of central importance to the theologically engaged reader, and therefore to the intended readership of this book.

1. These include, for example, Andrew Ward, Kant: The Three Critiques (London: Polity, 2006); Allen W. Wood, Kant (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2004); and Roger Scruton, Kant, Past Masters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), followed by his Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; revised 2001).

2. Lawrence R. Pasternack, Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2014); Pamela Sue Anderson and Jordan Bell, Kant and Theology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010).

3. See Christopher J. Insole, Kant and the Creation of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); "A Thomistic Reading of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Searching for the Unconditioned," Modern Theology 31.2 (2015): 284-311; "Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and Newton’s Divine Sensorium," Journal of the History of Ideas 72.3 (2011): 413-36; "Intellectualism, Relational Properties