p In Kantian doctrine there is no place for a faith replacing knowledge, filling in the knowledge gaps in a system of human orientation; in this sense Kant is an opponent of fideism. He 99 subjects to criticism all forms of faith derived from the need to reduce the indeterminateness of the surrounding world and to eliminate the sensation of uncertainty from human life. In so doing Kant—wittingly or unwittingly—entered into conflict with theology (both his contemporary and future) as well as with non-religious forms of blind faith.
p It goes without saying that Kant was a deeply religious thinker who took an uncompromizing stance toward atheism. At the same time it must be recognized without reservation that he was one of the critics and dismantlers of the religious world view. Kant demolished religion not as an opponent but as a serious and honest adherent, who had declared that religious consciousness was incapable of meeting moral demands and who had presented a passionate defence of a God, faith in whom would not have limited human freedom nor divested the individual of human dignity.
p Kant draws attention to the fact that faith, as it was revealed in the overwhelming majority of instances in history—in superstitions, in religious (confessional) movements, in blind obedience to prophets and leaders—is an irrational variant of prudence. The internal conviction of the fideist under closer examination always turns out to be void of internal independence, faith in revelation (in that someone somewhere possesses or possessed reason superseding the actual capabilities of reason). The faith of the fanatic, the holy fool or the authoritarian is excluded by both The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason: by the first because faith places its hopes in the "superior reason" of certain chosen representatives of the human race (the attempt to find in the experience of others that which in general cannot be given in experience); by the second because it provides the individual with the opportunity of fleeing from a categorical moral decision. Nevertheless Kant retained the category of “faith” in his doctrine and tried to establish a new, specifically philosophical meaning of the term, distinct, on the one hand, from me theological and on the other, from the social psychological. Kant wrote that underlying his three major works were three fundamental questions: "What am I capable of knowing?" (The Critique of Pure Reason), "What must I do?" (The Critique of Practical Reason), "On what do I dare to place my hopes?" (Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason). The third question outlines precisely the problem of faith as it was posed in Kant’s philosophy. Kant would have acted consistently if he had excluded the category of “faith” entirely from his doctrine and replaced it with the notion of “hope”.
100p The latter differs from faith in that it is never an internal inspiration preceding an action or determining a choice. When hope becomes a source of practical decisions it is either expectation or blind confidence, illegitimately replacing thoroughly relative knowledge. Hopes are forgivable to the extent that we are speaking of comforting factors, but as forces summoning forth an action they call for a wary and critical attitude.
p The three fundamental questions, with the help of which Kant subdivided the content of his philosophy bear a binding (irreversible) sequence. A necessary precondition of conscious orientation in the world is not only an honest formulation of each of these questions, but also the order in which they are posed. The problem "What must I do?" can be correctly dealt with only once we have found a convincing answer to the question "What can I know?”, for without an understanding of the limitations of true knowledge it is impossible to evaluate the independent significance of an imperative or of an absolute moral choice. A still more serious mistake (what we might call a "misdemeanor in orientation”) would be the transformation of the answer to the question "What may I hope?" into a condition prior to the resolution of the problem "What ought I to do?”, in other words to preface faith with duty.
p This is the decisive point in the Kantian (philosophical) understanding of faith. The object of faith (be it God or let us say, meaning in history) cannot be an object of calculation, a reference point to which the individual may in advance adjust the thrust of his actions. In practice the individual is wholly obliged to rely upon that consciousness of the moral law which exists in him. Faith as a condition of individual choice spoils the purity of the moral motive—Kant insisted on this categorically; if faith has a right to existence then only in the capacity of comforting mood for the individual after he has taken his decision at his own risk and responsibility.
p The demand for authentic faith arises, according to Kant, not at the moment of choice but after it has been made; then the question is posed: is there a chance for success (for confirmation in the future) for that maxim of behaviour which had been followed unflinchingly, that is to say, without consideration of success.
p The postulates of religion (faith in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul) are necessary to the Kantian subject not to become moral (they can only hinder this process) but in order to be aware of oneself as morally effective.
101p Kant himself felt that this distinction is hard to draw in a psychological sense. Faith in the existence of God and in the immortality of the soul, since they are inseparable from the sense of divine omnipotence traverse the boundaries set for them by pure practical postulation. Instead of being consoled by faith (that is to say, to use faith only as hope) the individual unwittingly transforms it into the basis for his decisions: he begins to feel himself a soldier in a holy army, the ecumenical success of which is guaranteed by providence; he is transformed into a religious ascetic, blindly believing in the inevitable favourable outcome of the struggle between good and evil, etc.
p Kant’s evaluation of the religious hopes of the just man is an ambiguous one. It is difficult to establish whether he considered these hopes mandatory or only forgivable for the individual with moral standards; whether he saw in these aspirations the source of moral tenacity or, on the other hand, a moral crutch on which people are forced to lean because of their weakness. This ambiguity stands in obvious contrast to the categorical nature of Kant’s denial of the supremacy of faith in terms of moral decision. Religion is founded upon morals rather than morals upon religion.
p The philosophy of Kant brings into focus a remarkable fact: the prudent (calculating) individual and the individual confessing faith in divine revelation, are, in substance, one and the same subject. Wisdom is transformed into superstition wherever it experiences a deficit of knowledge. It is precisely these circumstances that expose the inability of the prudent ( calculating) individual to endure his own freedom and show his irresoluteness and self-abasement which since ancient times have provided the natural soil for "divine religion”.
p The essence of Kantian philosophy of religion may be expressed in the following brief formula: God smiles upon human moral independence; he is disgusted by any demonstration of timidity, humility or cajolery. Correspondingly the true believer is only he who has no fear before God, who never slights his own dignity before Him, nor passes on his own moral decisions to God.
p Whether Kant so desired or not, this idea served to corrode existing religion like an acid. It confronted the believer with a crucial question which had faintly shimmered through many heresies in the past: To whom after all, am I addressing myself when I am seized by fear, when I hesitate, search for instruction, beg, fawn, bargain? To whom have millions of people turned in entreaty, expressed in wails of impotence?
102p If God frowns upon spiritual weakness, timidity and humility (exactly the state typical of people who believe that they are in communion with Him), then is this all to the liking of the "prince of darkness" as well? If this be so then (as Luther once presented the question to the Catholic Church) is not the city of the devil a temple in which each evinces a state of fear, shame and fawning?
p Kant himself never formulated the alternative in such bold relief. However, he did speak sufficiently precisely to the fact that all known forms of religion (including Christianity) are forms of idolatry to that extent to which they allow of human abasement, cajolery, an indulgent understanding of divine mercy, comforting lies, faith in miracles and ritual sacrifices.
p Kant placed religion and theology in opposition to the most profound contradictions of the religious consciousness. In so doing he set not only religion and theology, but also himself (as a religious thinker) before problems which yielded no solution. The central question troubling the religious conscience of Kant may be phrased as follows: Is not a belief in God a temptation along the road to individual moral independence?
p Indeed, as an all-powerful being, God could not but tempt the believer into a search for His grace.
p As an omniscient being God leads astray, encourages prayers in search of advice or guidance when the individual is in fact obliged to make his decision freely when confronted with indeterminacy.
p As the permanent creator of the world He leaves the believer hope in the miraculous transformation of any set of circumstances.
p The highest manifestation of moral strength is the stoic courage of the individual facing a situation he recognizes to be hopeless (“to struggle without hope for a successful outcome”). But the believer finds this position quite inaccessible, for he cannot avoid hoping that God is capable of allowing even that which is unbelievable—to happen. Belief removes the opportunity of rigorous behaviour and internal purity of motivation, a possibility placed directly before the non-believer.
p As mentioned above, the philosophical notion of faith, according to Kant, differs from a vulgar faith in divine revelation as hope differs from blind confidence and expectation. But God, no matter how He is depicted in a variety of religious and theological systems always has such a power over the future that one cannot just hope in Him. He dooms one to elevated expectations, to a providential optimism, in the 103 atmosphere of which authentic morality is incapable of development or even existence.
p Kant considered selflessness to be the essential feature of moral activity. But for selflessness to come to light, somewhere in the course of events the situation must arise in which a wager on the profitability and success of a venture is rendered problematic and even impossible for the participants.
p One of the basic contradictions of Kant’s philosophy may be located in the quite clear acknowledgement of the genetic tie between selflessness and the devaluation of self-interest in critical situations—juxtaposed to the assumption that morals could only emerge from and within religion (the question of the origins of ethics for Kant was identical to that of the development of Christianity from Judaism).
p But morality could not ripen within religion precisely because religion masks the desperate nature of critical situations, and guards its adherents from confrontation with the “vacuum”, with the "world without a future”. Providing insurance from despair, it also insures against a crisis of prudence.
p With all its contradictions the moral conception advanced by Kant stripped to its basis stands in closest accord with the ethics of stoicism. At first glance this may seem strange. Indeed, what could be the source of a stoicist attitude at the end of the eighteenth century, in an epoch of expectations and hopes, of pre-revolutionary animation and faith in the triumph of reason?
p The basic works of Kant in which his moral doctrine is stated (The Critique of Practical Reason and Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason) appeared in 1788 and 1793, respectively. Between these temporal signposts we find the French Revolution.
p Kant’s ethical teachings are suffused with an awareness of the tragedy of the revolution, a sensation emerging first as a premonition and then as bitter recognition of the events both taking place and completed. At the same time Kantian philosophy is not only quite removed from the pessimism which was rampant after the Jacobin terror and the days of Thermidor among those who were inspired by the hopes of the Enlightenment. It was in fact quite inimical to this pessimism. The authentic pathos of the Kantian ethic is that of the stoic personal fidelity to the Enlightenment ideals, a fidelity holding firm even as the tide of history turned to discredit these ideals. It was not the ideas of personal independence, of justice and of the dignity of the individual as such which fell into disrepute 104 but rather the hope of building a society founded upon these ideas.
p After the collapse of the revolution it was possible to retain one’s fidelity to the Enlightenment ideals only through a decisive rejection of the utopianism and the naive faith in progress with which these ideals were merged in the currents of the eighteenth century. It was precisely this point that determined Kant’s stance to the philosophical message of the Enlightenment. Kant endeavoured to demonstrate that as a revelation of reason as such these ideals are indisputable; their dictates are unalterable and mandatory for any reasoning being and cannot be erased by any social experience or by the “lessons” of history. Kant also took a decisive stance in opposition to the historicist spirit of Enlightenment ideology, against its characteristic faith in the imminent triumph of Reason. He opposed the depiction of the ideal state of society in terms of a hidden "human nature" which was “destined” to prevail over the form of community not compatible with this nature. He objected to the depiction of individual obligations in terms of "reasonable demands" and of his moral needs in terms of "authentic interests”. The list could be extended.
p But the Kantian critique of historicism was from the beginning weakened by his providentialist conception that the human community in the extremely remote future (or, most likely, beyond the confines of earthly history) would achieve, with the aid of the creator, a state of "moral Weltordnung”.
p Liberal Kantianism in the second half of the nineteenth century tried to ascribe to Kantian ethics an " uncompromizingly secular character”, regarding as of paramount importance precisely that element which was the most closely connected with his religious pattern of thought—the expectation of the kingdom of justice at the close of history. Kant’s ethics began to DC called a conception of "an infinitely distant social ideal”, placing its hopes on the temporal infinity of human existence. The “scientific” and “secular” interpretation of the Kantian moral doctrine turned out to be, in other words, a scientific and secular reinterpretation of the postulate of the immortality of the soul.
p It seems to us that quite the opposite formulation in Kant’s philosophy is of primary importance, namely, the striving (granted not carried to its conclusion) to differentiate the obligatory (that which is unconditionally binding for the individual) and that which is bound to take place in the future (a specific dimension of being).
105p In this sense the understanding of moral action exclusively as activity in the name of the future (self-limitation in the present moment solely for gain in the long range, injustice today in the name of justice in the future, the flouting of personal dignity in the interests of the future, at which point it will be respected) is, from the point of view of Kant, morality within the framework of calculation and profit. He sought an ethical conception which would reduce to a common denominator both the cynical bourgeois pragmatism which stands remote from any internal orientation upon ideals and, secondly, historicist fanaticism. This twofold critical-polemical thrust explains the uniqueness of the Kantian moral doctrine, which links anti-historicist stoical fidelity to the unconditional with an anti-bourgeois pathos of selflessness and the idea of fidelity to the law with that of the spiritual autonomy of the individual.
Here, in our view, lies the key to an understanding of the scheme of universal history inserted by Kant in the works The Idea for a Universal History, The Conjectural Beginning of Human History and a number of lesser articles. The motivation for the working out of this scheme was the philosopher’s hostility to the two characteristic manifestations of incipient bourgeois society: to the more and more cynically revealed selflessness, on the one hand, to the juridical arbitrariness which emerges under the mask of legality, serving the future, on the other hand. Both of these phenomena merged for Kant into a certain unity, and specifically into a panorama of an impersonally just legal order, molded into a tool of private interests and external expediency.
Notes