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Foreword
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
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xi Foreword In Defense of Kant’s Religion, by Chris L. Firestone and Nathan Jacobs, joins the rather long list of commentaries on Immanuel Kant’s late text, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, as among the most challenging and illuminating, perhaps as the most challenging and illuminating. Kant’s Religion has the deserved reputation of being one of the most profound and suggestive, yet also problematic, texts in the entire Kantian corpus. It is profound in its analysis of our human moral condition. Our condition is not merely that we all do things we ought not to do, so that we are guilty of having done this wrong thing and of having done that wrong thing. Our condition is that there is something evil about ourselves; there is in us a propensity or disposition to act against the moral law. We are not committed to the moral law as our supreme incentive. We are committed to obeying the moral law only as long as doing so does not seriously interfere with what we judge to be to our personal advantage. Radical moral evil has somehow become attached to our species—by a free choice, otherwise it would not be moral evil. The fundamental question that Kant’s analysis raises for him is whether, in spite of our deplorable moral condition, there is ground for moral hope. A good many commentators, myself included, have thought we spied conundrums of various sorts in the details of Kant’s answer to that question. Others have emphasized these conundrums less than the various points at which Kant’s answer appears to be out of accord with his critical philosophy as a whole. In part 1 of their discussion, Firestone and Jacobs provide a masterful review of the secondary literature on Kant’s Religion; the review is masterful both in its coverage and in its analysis of the various positions that have been staked out pro and con the coherence of Kant’s Religion internally and with the rest of his philosophy. The question that emerges forcefully is whether it is possible to interpret the text in such a way as to save it from the barrage of charges that have been fired against it. Is Kant’s Religion a coherent text of critical philosophy? With these charges in mind, in part 2 of their discussion Firestone and Jacobs engage in a close and deep reading of Kant’s text, informed by a knowl- Foreword xii edge of the relevant parts of the philosophical climate of the day. What emerges is a Kant very different from the one we thought we knew, more metaphysical, more willing to engage in speculative theology, less dismissive of actual religion . A good many of the conundrums that commentators have thought they spied are dissolved; whether all of them are is not yet clear to me. But the position that emerges is also strange, so strange that many of us will wonder whether this could really be what Kant had in mind. The great merit of Firestone and Jacobs’s discussion is that they rub our skeptical noses in the text; over and over they point to what Kant actually said. A central feature of their interpretation is that they interpret literally what most, if not all, of us have taken to be metaphorical. I have in mind especially, though not only, their interpretation of what Kant says about humanity’s prototype . Most commentators, again I include myself, have taken Kant to be speaking metaphorically here; he did not believe that there actually is a prototype . But the authors provide what is, to my mind, conclusive evidence that Kant was not speaking metaphorically; it was his view that there really is an eternal prototype of humanity. The existence of that prototype is an essential component within his explanation of how it can be that we, who harbor radical evil, yet have ground for moral hope. Kant studies have experienced a number of jolts in recent years, stimulated by close and deep reading of all of Kant’s major texts and by knowledge of the philosophical and intellectual climate within which Kant worked. My own guess is that Firestone and Jacobs will prove to have delivered as big a jolt as anyone. After one has worked through their interpretation, it is no longer possible to read the text of Kant’s Religion in the way one did before. We won’t all immediately jump onto the bandwagon; the Kant...