God and Kant’s Ethical Commonwealth

The Thomist 65 (2001): 67-92 GOD AND KANT'S ETHICAL COMMONWEALTH GORDON E. MICHALSON, JR. New College ofthe University ofSouth Florida Sarasota, Florida At one point in his recent history of modern moral philosophy, J.B. Schneewind refers to Immanuel Kant's "astonishing claim" that "God and we can share membership in a single moral community only if we all equally legislate the law we are to obey."1 Schneewind's remark is intended to illuminate his wider story about what he calls the Kantian "invention" of autonomy. In Schneewind's telling of this story, Kant's claim is "astonishing" because of the clear suggestion that autonomy has replaced obedience as the basis of the moral life, a transition that marks a decisive moment in the secularization of ethics in the modern period. Considered theologically, however, Schneewind's remark is simultaneously suggestive of a fundamental alteration of the traditional view of divine transcendence, an alteration implicit in the modern effort to ground morality in something other than the will of God. The vision of a moral community in which God and finite moral agents equally legislate the law probably implies that God is subject to a moral principle that can be understood apart from reference to the divine will alone. The leveling process at work in the notion of a "shared membership" in the moral community is at the same time an erosion of the distance separating heaven and earth, the transcendent and the immanent. This subterranean linkage between Kant's ideal moral community and an implicit 1 J.B. Schneewind, The Invention ofAutonomy: A History ofModem Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 512. 67 68 GORDON E. MICHALSON, JR. loss of divine transcendence is in fact one of the most powerful and least understood aspects of Kant's philosophy. The moral community in question is what Kant will ultimately refer to as the "ethical commonwealth," which is the refined version of what he had earlier referred to in the Founda.tions of the Metaphysics ofMorals as the "kingdom ofends."2 Kant defines the ethical commonwealth as a union of rational agents living under moral laws, which is to say, "laws of virtue."3 As the contrast case to a political or what Kant calls a "juridico-civil state," the ethical commonwealth depends upon self-legislation rather than on external coercion for its maintenance and regulation. The point of the distinction is amply conveyed by Kant's admonition to all who would attempt to legislate morality: "But woe to the legislator who wishes to establish through force a polity directed to ethical ends," as it "would be a contradiction ," Kant warns, "for the political commonwealth to compel its citizens to enter into an ethical commonwealth, since the very concept ofthe latter involves freedom from coercion."4 The main reason Kant's position holds such theological interest is that his notion of "freedom from coercion" includes freedom from any conception of a divine will that is not itself subject to the same legislative principle that governs all members of the ethical commonwealth. What Schneewind refers to as Kant's "astonishing claim" is in fact Kant's effort to envision a kind of moral partnership between God and humanity, a project that leaves traditional conceptions of divine transcendence in a complex transitional zone. My aim in what follows is to examine further the nature of the divine-human partnership involved in Kant's conception of the ethical commonwealth, with a view to clarifying the status of divine transcendence within his position. A primary textual clue for this clarification will be a series of important shifts in Kant's 2 Immanuel Kant, Foundations ofthe Metaphysics ofMorals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 55. Hereafter Foundations. 3 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits ofReason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Green and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 87. Hereafter Religion. 4 Ibid. GOD AND KANT'S ETHICAL COMMONWEALTH 69 thinking occurring between the Critique ofPractical Reason and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, works separated by five years. These shifts reveal the connection between the increasing importance ofthe moral community and the decreasing importance of...