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Chapter 4: Kant: Boundaries, Blind Spots, and Supplements
- University of Notre Dame Press
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4 Kant Boundaries, Blind Spots, and Supplements ’ Kant’s project of defining the relations and differences between reason and faith is as urgent now as it was at the end of the eighteenth century. What to do with Christianity, given its depleted or rapidly depleting authority in modernity, when the background conditions are religious tensions and wars, the oppressive and repressive behavior of religious institutions, continuous squabbles over a host of esoteric theological subject matters, lack of certainty as to the status of the biblical text and what constitutes an adequate or proper interpretation, and absence of assurance as to the right relation between the Bible and critical reason and as to their relative authority? Kant’s project rests on three basic assumptions. The first assumption is one that Kant shares with the philosophes, that is, that modernity is a novum. Kant’s boast in his introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (1781,1787; hereafter CPR) to the effect that his“critique of pure reason”is a“Copernican Revolution”(second preface, 22, 25) represents a particular expression of the Enlightenment’s general attitude toward Christianity, while both exploiting and inflecting a particular trope, indeed in a certain sense pulling it in a more Ptolemaic direction by dint of the anthropological or anthropocentric turn.1 87 The second, and obviously related, assumption is that the particular view of reason advanced squares with what is operationally supposed by science, indeed, legitimates it. Kant is prepared to accept the consequence that this has a negative effect on philosophical theology as traditionally practiced, especially in the German sphere of Leibniz and Wolff, which has an inadequate view of the limits of reason and an equally inadequate view of reason’s relation to faith. The third assumption is that the basic aim of critique is not the destruction of Christian thought, but its philosophical justification in which Christianity will have to pay the price of being more ascetic in its claims. Although Kant need not be taken at his word, his critical program as a whole gives good reason to believe that his aim is indeed “to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith”(CPR, 29). Most certainly, Kant is not the“all destroyer” (Allzermalmende) that Moses Mendelssohn announced him to be. On the one hand, to call him such is to reduce Kantian philosophy to the skepticism of Hume, which, as he clearly states early on in the first Critique (CPR, 32, 57), he intends to overcome. On the other, it is to confound Kant’s relatively moderate German version of the Enlightenment, which has its context—if not origin—in German Pietism,2 with the supercritical French forms, first of Voltaire and later of Diderot and d’Alembert, which never made much headway in Germany. These three assumptions define one side of the Kantian project, or, to change the metaphor, present one of its faces. The other, and complementary , side of the project, or the project’s other face, consists of what might be called Kant’s form of the “logic of supplementarity,” which is both more local and more exoteric than Derrida’s version.3 Although reason is the standard by which philosophical theology, in the first instance , and theology, in the second, are judged, reason is neither as deep nor as comprehensive as it can be, even as it remains indelibly a finite form of knowing. Happily, according to Kant, significant aspects of the insufficiency of reason can be overcome in and through an interpretation or reinterpretation of Christianity. This view is prepared for rather than exhibited in Kant’s ethical work, which involves the practical or ethical analysis of such foundational Christian beliefs as the reality of freedom, immortality, and God. As is well known, the Critique of Practical Reason suggests that while neither the freedom of the self, nor the 88 Cyril O’Regan immortality of the soul, nor the existence of God is strictly provable or demonstrable, all three must necessarily be postulated if moral action is to make sense.4 The supplementary or compensatory view is most certainly exhibited in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (hereafter Rel),5 in which Kant not only justifies key biblical symbols, but also avails of these symbols to clear up deficiencies in philosophical interpretation of the self and its fundamental orientations, deficiencies from which even his own critical philosophy is not immune.6 As Kant both licenses a hermeneutical detour and performs...