Kant and Religion by Allen Wood (review)

Half a century after his first groundbreaking study on Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Allen Wood has once again produced a singularly important work on the topic. This is a passionate book. Wood strives to look with Kant at the human condition and at what reason demands of us as we confront ultimate questions and think about the place of religion in answering them. The result is a profound and honest engagement with Kant's work, certainly one of the most important book-length treatments existing on the subject.

Contrary to those who view Kant as a secularist inimical to revealed religion, Wood presents Kant's project as "an authentically religious one, even an authentically Christian one" (182); Kant's views on religion are not unstable or contradictory, wobbling between Christian orthodoxy and Enlightenment demands. Rather, for Kant, religion is inherently symbolic. While positive religion is not rejected, its symbols must be interpreted in accordance with the demands of reason. While these symbols move beyond the religion of reason, properly grasped, they lead back to, and can develop our understanding of, the religion of reason itself.

The book is divided into eight chapters. The first, "Religion and Reason," engages the question of the nature of Kant's project in Religion, in particular with respect to the issue of the relation of rational religion (the inner circle) to positive or revealed religion (the outer circle). Chapter 2 examines the inner circle, namely, rational religion with respect to the moral argument for God's existence, namely, God as the object of hope of the morally committed individual. This is material that is mostly presupposed by Religion; it is briefly mentioned by Kant in the first preface of that work. Chapters 3–8 discuss Kant's analysis in Religion of several important fragments of revealed Christian religion in terms of Kant's second experiment, namely, looking to see whether these fragments lead back to the religion of reason. These chapters deal with radical evil (chapter 3), the change of heart (chapter 4), the Son of God (chapter 5), grace and salvation (chapter 6), the ethical community and the church (chapter 7), and freedom and conscience (chapter 8).

In general, Wood's is a deflationary account of both Kant's practical philosophy and approach to religion: for Kant, we have no knowledge of what I shall call "spooky causes." We need not consider free decisions as something that occur in a timeless, noumenal realm(64). We simply have no knowledge of how we might be free. In keeping with this deflationary account, Wood argues that Kant offers no a priori proof for the universality of radical evil, that his account is based on anthropological observations (86), and that, in the end, the idea of radical evil is mainly of use for moral discipline (89). We should assume the thesis of radical evil for the purposes of both rooting out immoral incentives within ourselves and for the sake of a hard-nosed humility about our moral disposition. Given our own opacity to ourselves and our proclivity toward self-deception, we must be endlessly on guard regarding the nature of the real incentives for our actions. Incentives such as a false sense of moral superiority over others or the mere desire to be viewed as an outstanding human being by our peers can easily masquerade for the moral incentive itself, and we may be deceiving ourselves as to what it is that really moves us. Moreover, even were it the case that our character is generally such that no extra incentives are really the ones doing the work in getting us to do the right thing, it might be the case that we are just lucky in not having been put in situations of extraordinary temptation, so that each one of us might, after all, have "a price" (Robert Walpole's thesis, 75–76, 102). We can never know if we might be able to resist all temptations; if a temptation is great...